The more guys like Nic Kristof ejaculate vacuous columns like this about HIV infection in the Dark Continent, the more Westerners will fall asleep and just roll their eyes at the African AIDS crisis. Poverty, desperation, hopelessness, etc. etc., these are the fuels that fire the African AIDS crisis, right???
Let me tell you a different story….
Take a tribal agricultural society centered around local big men who are rooted in kinship networks. Make it pre-literate and lacking traditions of centralized statecraft & bureaucracy
Add: weapons, modern ideas stripped away from organically generated context & grounding + world religions that clash with local values rhetorically but offer a lot of pleasing pap and some tangible goods (medicine, education, etc.)
Mix & scramble and walk away from the frying pan while the concoction sizzles & pops
And voila, you get the social chaos and chronological mis-match (21st century technology + 2nd century northern European polities) that is Africa! Poverty? All the reports I see indicate that AIDS spreads with economic opportunity (truckers) and concentrates in the rising metropolises that drive the engines of capitalism. Desperation? The enterprising husbands who keep a coterie of girlfriends aren’t desperate. Hopelessness? Africa is exporting preachers to the First World-it is a God-intoxicated continent, with some of the attendent religious violence associated starting to erupt. These people have plenty of religious hope, fat lot of good it does them in this world.
Let’s stop this jack-shit-stream of simple and cliche answers. We aren’t going to export to Africa our material goods (affluence), self-esteem (satisfaction) and healthy mutual funds (hope for the future) any time soon. Toward the aim of blocking some of the shit-stream that’s been flowing out of the mainstream media, I guess I’m going to have to make an effort to be more original, and start producing more posts not triggered by dangerously retarded columnists.
Wish me luck.
Update: For all the superbrights that read this blog (yes, that’s most of you) here are a few of my sources on why I think Africa is the way it is….
Race & Culture by Thomas Sowell
Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond
Africa: Biography of a Continent by John Reader
Wealth and Poverty of Nations by David Landes
The Debt: What America Owes Blacks by Randall Robinson
More on Africa-what little I know-below….
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