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Attitudes to Africa's Crisis: Historical Questions and Comparisons
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17065 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
8 / 1990 |
5,874 Words |
| Author
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Basil Davidson
Basil Davidson is a British historian who has specialized in
African history for some thirty-five years. |
Isn't Africa, after all, a primitive continent? Although stubbornly backward, great hopes of development and progress flared brilliantly when the continent shook itself free of European colonial rule, but since then, one after another, these hopes have been confounded in crisis and despair. Most of Africa today is in deep trouble. Few of its governments seem able to win the popular support required to face their problems and resolve them. Some of these governments are military or bureaucratic tyrannies feared by their people. Others are honest administrations that wrestle with adversities too baleful for their strength. Still others are popular regimes beset by externally directed banditry and armed subversion.
In this grim time the international aid agencies of the West, above all those directed or inspired from Washington, accept and have long accepted the need to come to Africa's rescue. Spending large sums of taxpayers' money, they have often worked with energy and determination, but seldom, it seems, too much good effect. Trying to find out why, these agencies have set about inspecting, criticizing, and changing the fiscal and social policies of the African governments to which their moneys go. Africa, they conclude, cannot be trusted to help itself, to develop itself, or to find and apply its own solutions.
Africa's history, as it happens, indicated the reverse. Yet this is a history hard to see in our Western world, and often harder to accept when seen. Behind the very reasonable thought that "he who pays the piper calls the tune"- for on what other principle, realistically, could the managers of the International Monetary Fund do their work? - there has lurked another of a different kind. This view is very old - at least as old as the seventeenth century - and is not so much a thought as a habit of mind, a usually unconscious residue of inherited attitudes: the attitudes, essentially, of what is now termed cultural racism. Nourished from the sediment of our history, largely since about A.D. 1650, the conviction has arisen that the black peoples, by and large, lack the capacity to know what is good for them. Other peoples, in this case the white peoples, must therefore show them.
Since about 1650? The date is approximate, like all important dates in the processes of history, but may usefully stand. For it was around 1650 that the leading powers of Western Europe with England and France overtaking Portugal embarked massively on the business of selling African captives into slavery across the Atlantic. This was a disaster for the African countries whose kings and merchants sold many of these captives. Among its
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