I was watching a news item on the BBC about yet more starvation in Zimbabwe. It's being at least a little reported now, which is more than can be said of the massacres in the same area - Matabeleland - twenty years ago. But, to be honest, much of Africa seems to be trying to live up to the 'basket case' rep it had a few years back. One of the great hopes, Uganda, is looking distinctly worrying with Museveni's cadre becoming unpleasantly dictatorial after all this time. In Kenya, the cops smashed up a newspaper office for daring to report that the government might be holding talks with the opposition: it was more a statement of intent than a targeted action. Zambia is also barring opposition parties, and the usual circuits of poverty, corruption, bigotry, sexism and homophobia are doing their rounds.
Then there's Zimbabwe, which is rapidly turning into the Albania of Africa, with its very own basket case at the helm. The biggest disgrace here is that Mbeki and the other so-called leaders are such chickenshits that they don't dare to go against any grain, and call a spade a spade. Mugabe is a nasty fuck, and if protecting him is what the OAU amounts to these days, then it's not the Pan-Africanism that Lumumba and Nkrumah and Garvey were fighting for.
And with all these nasty shits, I can't help feeling that in alot of the cases there's some fucking white multinational shits pulling the strings. If the population of Congo or Nigeria ever found out just how much their "leaders" were black puppets being pulled by white men, I daresay there'd be blood in the streets real quick.
And where is a Lumumba or a Nkrumah now that we really need one? Museveni and Rawlings been either a big diasppointment, or predictably dwarf-sized when measured to their predecessors. Other than them, the situation in the last twenty years, when Africa has being getting more brutally and repetetively raped than at any time since Imperialism was thrown off, and probably since long before that, has been a situation of appalling turf wars, internecine hatred, petty gangsterism and appalling genocide.
The West doesn't give a fuck - all the Live 8 platitudes and weasel-words to the contrary. The West is the rapist. Asking for some tidbits from the West's table is the same as asking for mercy from your rapist, your captor, your massa.
It's simply a continuation of slavery by other means. Berlin 1870 all over again - it's the Race for Africa. The West can look charitably pious cheaply with one face whilst gangbanging Africa for its resources and people and pray to their blue-eyed God with the other face.
The one figure in Africa that could really lay claim to be the heir of Lumumba and Nkrumah is Mandela. He's even from their generation.
And to be fair to him, he does make some radical statements, even if he's a bit keen to be seen with Bono or the Spice Girls or whathaveyou. (And, to be honest, I do sometimes have a bit of trouble understanding what the fuck he is actually saying!) But he's been safely put in a box of "Saint Nelson" now, and nobody actually listens to him anymore. He'd have to start another armed revolt to be heard, and even I wouldn't expect that of the guy.
Mandela though, is the only one around who could resist the works of the multinationals in Africa, but I don't hear diddly squit from him on that. Be clear though, it is the work of the multinational corporations, with turnovers bigger than the GDPs of the countries they dominate, who are running the show down in Africa.
The reassuring thought is that the same was - and is - true of South and Central America. And that horrific oppression through the 80's and into the 90's has produced Chavez and Morales and Marcos and Lula. Not, of course, that I would expect any of them to transform society as such - that's for people to do themselves, not rely on leaders to do it for them - but they are perhaps a symptom of some independence and a determination to fight for themselves.
A couple of times, people have talked of the winds of change in Africa. Once was Macmillan, and there was a change as the imperial powers - at least in token - relinquished their powers. The second time was in '89, '90, when the uprisings across Africa seemed to offer a new prospect, but instead only brought Charles Taylor and the Interahamwe.

There's no easy answers here. What I do know, is that as nice as it was, the expressions of concern shown last summer by the people who were listening to the Live 8 messsage, who wanted African debt cancelled, who want nice things for Africans, those concerns are irrelevant.

We in the West - our wealth and our lifestyles are based upon exploitation of people in Africa and Asia, and upon a ravaging of the environment. I can't put it any plainer.
If we want to end poverty, starvation, genocide-by-default in Africa, then we have to put a stop to our lifestyle of insane decadence.
We have to stop being slavemasters.
If we want to deal with the consequences of Climate Change, we have to stop raping our environment - which means we have to stop using energy, foodstuffs, minerals on a scale way beyond any possible need.
We have to stop being rapists.

Until the people living in the countries of the West are going to come out onto the streets and demand that their governments and their employers give them *less* luxury and *less* material possessions, then the world is gonna continue going to hell in a handbasket.
Unless the Africans and the Asians are going to teach us middle class Westerners after all...