JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSE TO AN EDITORIAL IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

“The century is being invented before our eyes”?Who writes this stuff?

How do you invent a century?

And surely there are few options to something’s happening than “before our eyes,” a very tired cliché.

Well, I guess it’s the same person who writes the other nonsense in this editorial, such as, Africa being the site of the greatest transformation. You want transformation, you look to China and India, not Africa.

Africa is a disaster, pretty much from top to bottom.

Authoritarian governments. Corruption. Instability. Coups. Civil wars. Crime on a frightening scale.

Superstition with some of the most deadly beliefs on the planet, including the efficacy of albino body parts for health cures or the rights of male adults to rape village girls freely or the regular practice of about 3 million female genital mutilations each year.

The unending violence of Africa undoubtedly is owing in part to its high rate of natural increase in relation to its poor economies and often poor resources. Unfavorable population/resource ratios are associated with crime and violence generally, as for example in Haiti.

African women frequently have babies at an age we regard as part of childhood.

The babies frequently get no attention or support from their fathers, who as often as not have no income in an often subsistence economy.

And that same economy has no capacity to absorb additional mouths.

The girls having the children get no education themselves.

Violent crime is found at rates exceeding any place else on earth. The rates of murder and rape are appalling and likely well understated owing to the lack of modern police and bureaucracy.

How does one set about changing that complex set of behaviors for hundreds of millions of people?

I don’t see how anyone who is not slightly delusional can write or speak of “now is Africa’s moment.”

Tens and tens of billions in aide have been poured into Africa over recent decades, and the results are what we observe today.

I suspect Africa will just grind on the way it is and has been a very long time.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY MARGARET WENTE IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

Read Graham Greene’s “The Comedians” in considering your answer to this question.

It remains a devastating examination of Haiti although written many decades ago.

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One could theorize that an entire population of ex-slaves provides a poor basis for a society.

In general, the slaves taken by traders were the ones without the wits and cunning to avoid being taken.

Of course, people discussing slavery generally forget that it was African chiefs themselves who traded their people to slavers for profit. They weren’t likely to select the most promising of youth.

Slaves were valued only for their physical abilities, strength and endurance.

I think you could fairly speculate that an unrepresentative sample of African population provided the basis for Haiti, a population then missing many of the qualities which go to building a sound society.

Two hundred years of abject failure tells all thinking people that something there is drastically wrong.

The arguments, repeated in a comment here, about past wealth seized and American occupations cannot possibly explain the human hell that Haiti is.

Immigrants came to other parts of North America, virtual peasants from Russia or Germany or Scotland, without a dime in their pockets and became successful in millions and millions of cases.

Haiti has now become the classic case of the development nightmare with a population-resource ratio inadequate ever to achieve anything. No resources and high birth rates.

There have been a small number of successful Haitians. In general, they either live in an exclusive enclave above the squalor or leave, like our Governor General.

Haiti too is an extremely racist society. People are literally graded like fruit by graduations of lightness in their skin color. This was not imposed on the society, but has arisen out of its history.

American interventions, naturally hated anywhere, have always been based in fear that huge migrations of Haitians would land on America’s shore if things became desperate enough.