Africa is a lot in the media today... (weird to be writing about this from Vienna airport! on my way back from Armenia)...
I’m no expert... but it always wonder how people refer to it as like it is 1 big country... is kind of bizarre... even with the European Union nobody refer to it as 1 country... nobody puts Italy and Finland in the same bag... (even if they are all white!) So why with Africa? (because they are all black?)...
Debt relieve and fair trade are good things... should be done... but I believe that beyond... that is up to the African countries to find their own way out of were they are...
We lived in Mozambique, and even in the same country it was so much disparity... from leafy Maputo in the south, (where Shona and Shangane people live) to the forgotten Quirimbas in the North... people from one place would not be able to communicate with people from the other place... up in the Quirimbas... Portuguese did not make a lot of sense to the people I worked with... KwaZahili would have been better or even Arabic (and that is on top of the local language)...
I guess the only common factor was the coolness of most people, the best smiles ever and the most incredible light... from sunrise to blue skies, to storms, to just incredible sunsets...
Back to politics... “white” solutions have a lot to blame on the actual state of affairs there... and we still insist...
I remember talking to Joao, a guy that worked with me at the Ministry of Fisheries... I was moaning about the speed at which the president's convoy of 7 identical black Mercedes Benz drived along Avenida Mao Tse Tung (where we used to live) on his way to the airport, where he take his private plane to go somewhere... while millions of his countryman live in extreme poverty... I was questioning the need of the opulence and the 7 identical cars... (The prime minister had 5 white Mercedes!)...
So Joao asked me... so how does the NZ prime minister moves around?
I said that she drove around mostly in her own car, and that at Wellington she had 1 normal car... and that she flew on normal commercial flights along the country and outside...
But she must fly business class he said, already worried...
Well... i imagine that she does on overseas flights, but no nationally... NZ does not have business class in domestic flights... I said...
He was quite perplexed with my answers... and he said... jesus... I didn’t imagined that NZ was so poor....
What does make sense to me... did not made sense to him... and we worked together on daily basis, had simmilar education... and is not that I grow up in a full 1st world country... even if live now in one.
I like to be optimist... but I still have the feeling the developed world still trying to buy their guilt for the fuckups done during the colonial periods... as can't impose democracy... you can't impose your ideas of what “development” should be...
All people I meet, that spent time in African countries do however agree, that whatever your experience there... you may leave Africa as a whole... but the whole of Africa does not leaves you... and most of the time, those memories come out with a smile...
