AFRICA

Monica, Ana Maria y Eduardo presented this week topic: Africa.

Africa is the world's 2^nd-largest and 2^nd most-populous continent, after Asia. It has an area of 30,221,532 km² and a population 1,001,320,281(est. 2009).

Is the 2^nd largest continent but a quarter of its territory is not suitable for habitation, because it's the the Sahara Desert.

The student's presentation highlighted the differences across the continent by exploring the main countries of Africa, such as Nigeria, Congo and Kenya. They made a great resume of the history and all the problems that has had this continent over the years.

When presenting the different countries they revelead "each countries problem or conflict" factors like the post-colonialism, diamonds, guerrillas, economical and social problems, have made this continent suffer like no other. In addition to these conflicts, Africa also has other social problems like high level of malnutrition, AIDs and many other diseases.

Nigeria is characterized in the media based upon the conflicts and violence arising between subversive groups, the state and oil companies.

South Africa is a completely different face of the continent, the host of the 2010 FIFA World Cup.

Even thought the lecture was very enlightening, I must recognize my lack of knowledge of this continent, being a person that likes to read and know about "as much as I can" I started to read whatever I found about this continent and found a great but crude article in The Time Magazine, Next I will put the passages that I liked the most or the ones that shocked me the most (in red).

Africa has a genius for extremes, for the beginning and the end. It seems simultaneously connected to some memory of Eden and to some foretaste of apocalypse. Nowhere is day more vivid or night darker. Nowhere are forests more luxuriant. Nowhere is there a continent more miserable.

Africa -- sub-Saharan Africa, at least -- has begun to look like an immense illustration of chaos theory, although some hope is forming on the margins. Much of the continent has turned into a battleground of contending dooms: AIDS and overpopulation, poverty, starvation, illiteracy, corruption, social breakdown, vanishing resources, overcrowded cities, drought, war and the homelessness of war's refugees. Africa has become the basket case of the planet, the "Third World of the Third World," a vast continent in free fall.

Zaire's President Mobutu Sese Seko has a personal fortune that has been estimated from $4 billion to $6 billion, not far below the level of the country's external debt. He has isolated himself from his people -- and from gathering political unrest -- aboard a luxury yacht that cruises the Zaire River.

If it is to recover, Africa in the coming years will need all its mystical powers of resilience. AIDS is devastating the continent's population. It has hit as hard among the cosmopolitan, educated elite as among the villagers, a fact that threatens continuing development.

If the rate of infection continues to increase, the effect could be like that of World War I upon the youth of Britain, France and Germany.

There are 160 countries on the United Nations' annual development index, a measure of comparative economic and political progress: 32 of the lowest 40 are in Africa.

The external world's interest in Africa threatens to become merely charitable -- a matter of humanitarianism, a moral test for the West. Should the wealthy nations allow Africa to drift further and further into the margins? Says Larry Diamond, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution: "I don't think we could live with ourselves, or would want to, if we sat by while millions of people of a different color are condemned to misery and death."

The continent's inner rhythms of development were shattered 400 years ago by the intrusion of Europeans, who brought in alien controls, boundaries and forms of government.

The continent remains connected to its powerful and -- to outsiders -- mysterious genius. Africa is different, still an inchoate self. There is a Europe, with its shared history, shared culture, shared economies -- all. Accomplished the hard way, over many centuries. There is not -- yet -- an Africa of defined, stable boundaries and economies, not yet a sense of shared destiny.

Jung once wrote, "Different people inhabit different centuries." Something in the African clock of development got smashed when Europe broke into the continent. And when the colonialists pulled out, they left the economic, political and cultural infrastructure reconfigured in such a way that the new countries served Europe better than they served one another. This result was not necessarily intentional but was profoundly damaging nonetheless. Robert Ruark touched on the cultural destruction in his novel Something of Value: "If you change a man's way of life, you had better have something of value with which to replace it."

It may be a long swoop from Africa's year 1500 to European-sounding formulas about "science and rationality." In 1961, with civil war erupting around him and his own assassination only days away, Patrice Lumumba, the newly independent Congo's first Prime Minister, wrote a letter to his wife in which he conjured a splendid vision: "History will one day have its say, but it will not be the history that is taught in Brussels, Paris, Washington or in the United Nations . . . Africa will write her own history, and . . . it will be a glorious and dignified history."

Perhaps, for the moment, African glory lies around a historical bend of the river, in some unseeable future.

Bibliography:

LANCE MORROW; William Dowell/Abidjan, J.F.O. McAllister/Washington and Marguerite Michaels/Nairobi. (1992 Sep 07). Africa: the Scramble for Survival. The Time Magazine. Recover April 12 2009, from www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,976401-6,00.html

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