Kenya Links: ●Community Center ●Care for the Earth ●African Reflections By: fr. Bert Ebben

 

WHO CARES ANYWAY?

Africa has been called the “Sleeping Giant”.  Giant, indeed!  It is made up of 54 independent nations, comprised of thousands of ethnic groups, each with its own distinct language, spirituality, tradition and art. Until quite recently, it seems, the United States was not even aware that the Giant had awoken.

Our interest in Africa is piqued only during times of crisis, and then only if that crisis appears to threaten our own selfish national interest.  Once the threat is past, it is difficult to find news about Africa in the mainstream media.  Even as I write, horrible atrocities are occurring in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Sudan, Zimbabwe, Somalia and Nigeria.  Literally millions of innocent people are being massacred, dying of hunger or of easily preventable diseases, while many millions more are fleeing their villages, desperately trying to escape the brutality of vicious, power-mad revolutionaries. 

The next flash point will certainly be Niger, one of the world’s poorest countries with probably the world’s largest deposits of uranium.  Already agents of the industrialized nations are scrambling to explore and to mine the “yellow cake”.  While corrupt government officials siphon off a high percentage of the profits, thus squandering the country’s only valuable resource, the indigenous camel-herding Tuaregs get poorer and poorer.  The perfect scenario for a violent insurgency.  With several nations like Nigeria, Sudan and the Congo suffering bloody conflicts because of their natural resources, I hear more and more impoverished Africans admitting that while mineral wealth could be a desperately needed blessing, it is, in fact, a curse.  But who in the developed countries of the West really cares anyway?

Shouldn’t we care enough to assist Africa’s hundreds of millions to reap the blessing rather than to suffer the curse?  How can collaborating with them to free themselves of fear and deprivation possibly be an inadmissible threat to our own best national interest?  If we had compassionately sought their best national interest, we would now be enjoying friends on that vast continent rather than resisting a growing number of bitter enemies. 

Africa’s present malaise began with the enforced imposition of arbitrary borders by the 19^th and 20^th century colonial powers, who carved up the continent to their advantage, haphazardly throwing various ethnic groups of people together, each with its own distinct traditional way of life. In the ‘60s and ‘70s, with the departure of the colonial occupiers, many countries suffered even greater oppression under their own cruel dictators, propped up and strengthened by a massive infusion of modern weaponry provided mainly by the U.S. and the Soviet Union. Those same weapons are being used today in the recurring internal tribal conflicts raging in at least a dozen countries on the continent.

We wrongly imagine that all Africa’s problems could be resolved if each country would simply embrace our Western democratic capitalistic system.  Do we have the franchise on democracy and therefore the right to impose our system of government on the rest of the world?  Africa is too vast, too complex, too culturally diverse for some “off the rack”, “one size fits all” brand of democracy.  A tailor-made diplomacy, which thinks it has all the answers, will only continue to spell disaster until we first begin to ask the right questions and be humble enough to hear their right answers.

Who is to blame for all this mess?  There is no shortage of villains.  While at this point in history the principal blame must be placed on the criminally inept, corrupt leadership that has held sway over nearly the entire continent for three decades of its independence, our country had contributed in so small part in colluding with these criminals….always in our own best national interest, of course!

Anyway, who cares?  We had all best care, and care very deeply, because Africa’s problems are our problems as well. In truth, our shortsighted hubris has come back to haunt us.  The present overwhelming financial, political, and moral bankruptcy of the West proves just how unfit we are to lead the way into a better day for humankind. I believe a better hope for the world lies in the possibility that the emerging nations of the East, which in many respects already possess a more human value-based culture, will strike out in a new direction toward a kind of civilization that truly civilizes.

Have we learned anything from the most glaring mistakes of our own history?  Are we humble enough to accept that, as a nation, we are more impoverished by our wealth than we are enriched by it?  Are we capable of recognizing how the power of the powerless exposes the powerlessness of the powerful?  What a paradoxical blow to our super-power delusions!

This kind of vision demands a revolution of the very heart of America….a revolution that has no victims, no bloodshed, no injustice, but only tears of repentance for our greed, our arrogance, our individualism and isolationism.  This is the revolution Jesus calls for.  It is like gentle rain on a parched field, like the warm sun on the frozen earth, like bread on the table and peace in the home.  Unless we are willing to risk this most decisive and most radical revolution of the heart, we cannot, we will not, regain the world’s respect nor perhaps even survive as a nation of free people.

Bert Ebben, O.P.

13 December 2008