Investigated, researched, colonised, pillaged by almost all other nations – Europeans, Asians, Americans … they all attempted to make some part of the continent a target for firstly an exciting adventure, just before sharpening their chompers and finally biting into the bowels of the local sacred earth and tearing into extremely valuable metals, coal and oil.
Comics created by writers mainly from Britain and the US right from the early 1920s gave mesmerising and fascinating accounts, to particularly youngsters in those countries, of the wilderness, the animals and mainly the “backwardness” of black people.
This idea was multiplied a few thousand times by movies and books, produced by mainly those two stalwart countries. The popularity of the books, comics and movies in other countries as well eventually completed the fully fledged painting that represented what permanently became known as “darkest Africa”.
Thousands of wars, skirmishes, battles, backstabbing, coups and dictatorships have become all too familiar occurrences and are actually now a trademark of the continent!
There hasn’t been a single square metre of African space that has been spared this ravage. Our own country, South Africa, started off in a similar fashion but, after apartheid was strangulated, promised to be completely different. It was.
Whereas other nations took, on average, a decade to disappear downhill, our blessed republic became completely dysfunctional in fewer than five years.
The recent implosion from the district of Brooklyn in Pretoria, where refugees, some from the Democratic Republic of Congo, had camped for about a year on a pavement opposite the UN High Commissioner for Refugees offices in protest against homelessness, proved to be just another tiny damp squib as another set of victims again relapsed to become prey to this monster called Africa.
The far bigger explosion for all the world to sit up, albeit just for the mandatory moment, is the war in Sudan. Another classic horror.
There’s no real point in going into why, who and how this is happening. It’s normal.
And the rest of the world – America, Britain, Europe – continue shaking their heads, sighing in disdain ... forgetting that not only are they historically culpable for firstly creating these everlasting pockets of high-pressured instability across the continent, but actually they continue to have the gall to record and popularise the theme in literature and movies.
The Ramesises,the Gordons, the Madhis, the Tarzans, the Lawrences, the El-Cids, continue to be remembered, resurrected and revived, with new actors such as India, China and Brazil also joining the party for their share and a slice of the cake.
All jolly good fellows. So say all of us.
* Ebrahim Essa, Benoni.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
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