For far too long, Africa has been an afterthought in world affairs, yet it is the birthplace of the human race, and home to over 1.2 billion people, second only behind Asia with 4.4 billion. The continent as a whole (and many of its individual nations) has always held so much potential and shown flashes of realizing that potential mixed far too often with backsliding and disappointment due to corruption, war, poverty, and disease.
For centuries Africa has been looked upon by the West as a place to get natural resources of all kinds, including the slave trade, and as a result it bears the scars of this parasitic interest to this day in many ways, not the least of which is in the form of haphazard borders decided upon by ignorant and arrogant European colonial powers.
Once the colonial era ended and the Cold War began, African countries were looked upon purely as pawns in the big game, only of interest to the extent to which they were useful or a threat to the other side, but for the most part left to their own devices to figure out really hard things like how to self-govern, how to catch up to the modern world economy of the 20th century with little to no infrastructure or manufacturing.
The results have been a mixed bag of military dictatorships, wars, genocides, fledgling democracies, endemic corruption, massive debts needing restructuring or cancellation, etc.. The bottom line is that the plight of Africa only shows up on the world stage when it inconveniences the West into action of some sort (debt relief, intervention in genocides, terrorist incidents affecting our citizens or business interests, potential pandemics like AIDS or Ebola, etc).
America can never have enough allies, in any corner of the world, and it is in our long term best interests to help as many countries of the continent of Africa to realize their full potential as nations as quickly as possible.
We must re-offer the hand of friendship and support, not while holding a blank check, but rather conditional help dependent on their making democratic progress, social justice progress, sustained and serious anti-corruption efforts, and peaceful relations with their neighbors.
If they are doing those things, then we need to meet them halfway and offer any assistance we can to improve their education systems, infrastructure systems, health systems, and stimulate their economies.
We also need to do everything we can to help support the success of the Continental Free Trade Agreement (CFTA). Africa has a $400 trillion dollar economy as a whole and while most countries there do not have a lot of manufactured goods to trade with each other, eliminating as many barriers to get trade and economic prosperity jump started is an important step in the right direction.
A Word About Genocides—For as long as the United Nations has been in existence, every time there has been a genocide or ethnic cleansing or whatever euphemism you want to call it, the world has stood idly by and refused to call it genocide because once they do, they are obligated under UN rules to intervene and stop it and no one has the courage and moral fortitude to do so, including the United States of America. That must end right now.
Literally millions of innocent human beings from Bosnia, Burma, Rwanda, Burundi, Sudan, and many other places have been slaughtered in the last 75 years simply because the world’s leading countries failed to act. I know that Stalin said that “1 death is tragic but a million is a statistic”, and maybe the average person doesn’t really grasp or think about or care about such numbers but to me they are unspeakably horrific and in the long view of history they will be one of the things our global society of the 20th and 21st century are judged upon.
Furthermore, I probably should have covered it in the Middle East, but for decades now any country that is an ally of Turkey has not wanted to anger it by ‘calling a spade a spade’ what its predecessor the Ottoman Empire did to the Armenian people beginning in 1915, but I will. It was genocide plain and simple. 1.5 million Armenians were killed and/or died during forced deportation death marches into the Syrian Desert.
We lose any chance as a nation at basic credibility on the world stage if we cannot bring ourselves to accept and acknowledge basic facts, even if it inconveniences or upsets countries that have traditionally been our allies. If allies cannot talk frankly with each other, then what is the point of being allies?
Perry Waag 