Acting White: Dad, Why Is Africa Always Last?

Now my kids have never said this to me, but it would not be unreasonable, considering what we hear and see about the continent, from every media outlet and periodical around every corner. I certainly wondered this growing up. Just recently, the United Nations Development Programme came out (here) with their annual rankings of the best countries to call home, and, as usual, Africa contains nearly all the bottom spots of the list, based on life expectancy, literacy, school enrollment, and gross domestic product (GDP).

So the question is, why is Africa lagging compared to everybody else? Is it because black people are poor leaders and followers, or is it because capitalist/colonialist whites came in and messed everything up? Well I say it is neither. The fact is that Africa was shackled about the wrists and ankles from the start, long before whites ever returned to exploit their birthplace. The last millennium (1,000 years) of brain-drain of the continent has left if without the legions of problem-solvers needed to pull out of the power-dive which holds it on the bottom.

Let’s face it, when we look at Africa we are looking at the only continent that sits almost entirely within the globe’s tropical/non-temperate zone, minus a central place for large scale food production, or agricultural raw materials, including domesticate-able animals. Then add in malaria, perhaps the oldest and most killing disease that has ever existed (p.falciparum), and we see that Africa is, and has been for all of humanity’s time, the world’s number one locale to be ‘from’. This status has lead nearly every African ever born, with an IQ above 85 (their post-brain-drain mean), to use those brain cells to get out and never look back.

So Africans, from the beginning of time before, after, and during the slave trade, have been leaving the continent for good reason, having nothing to do with blackness or whiteness, but rather that it is just too difficult to make the geography do more than barely sustain life. Sure, we can return with the protection and comfort of technology, but that expensive technology was created elsewhere, and most of us could not go there without it and expect to survive.

The story of why Africa is where it remains is really that simple. The hard question is what to do about this, if anything. Exactly, how do we help this place and people? I’m not sure. But I am sure that immigration was invented there, and from the beginning of time it has been about the search for a better place. For humanity, of a thousand years ago, it was a necessity to leave Africa to find places that could better sustain life, and this is no different today. But what we must also not ignore is that the plight of Africa is not a failure of the people, then or now, but rather the place.

James C. Collier

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