Tag Archives: africa

Idea: A Trans-African Waterway

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Perhaps more than any other Pan-African political or economic unification, I would think that a canal network linking the Congo, Zambezi and (maybe) Nile Rivers would be the biggest economic coup for the African continent.

Inland canals are perhaps one of the biggest reasons for the ridiculous amount of power of the United States. The Eastern portion of the United States is technically an island surrounded by ocean and sea on one side, rivers and canals on the other.

So linking the Congo to the Zambezi would essentially make southern Africa an island separate from the rest of the continent. Same for eastern Africa from Egypt to northern Mozambique if the Congo is linked to the Nile.

But if it is ever built, I have questions:

  • what inland cities would grow from this waterway? (DR Congo has quite a few inland port cities)
  • what environmental impact would likely happen?
  • how much traffic would it divert from the Suez Canal, or around the Cape of Good Hope, for those ships which want to cross into the Indian from the Atlantic?
  • how would this impact agriculture?
  • how would this impact mining?
  • how would this impact hydroelectric power, especially with Kariba Dam?

I’ve found some articles on the subject:

I’ve also had fantasy/scifi ideas about what Africa would look like with more islands (and maybe archipelagos) like East and Southeast Asia. Maybe this is the closest that we can possibly get to that idea.

For the Southern portion, I would call it “SADC Island”, after the Southern African Development Community, of which all the countries touching the – Angola, DR Congo, Zambia

Marvel Studios’ Black Panther – Official Trailer

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When Will it Be Safe for Black LGBT Folk to Travel to Africa or the Caribbean?

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Sometime back I remember a Twitter post asking “why is it that only countries with White people are passing same-sex marriage into law?” That question was from a gay racist.

That question has bothered me ever since.

If one were to think of homo sapiens along skin color lines, most of the progress we’ve seen on LGBT rights have taken place in countries which are predominately White and Christian, with the two exceptions of South Africa (predominately Black and Christian) and Israel (predominately White and Jewish).

It is rather difficult to live as an openly-LGBT person in most of Africa or in the Caribbean. Sodomy laws abound in these parts, as do highly-patriarchal Abrahamic religions and superstitious beliefs about sex and STDs.

Someday, I’d like to go to a Barbados which doesn’t have sodomy laws and welcomes LGBT African-American tourists to their annual Season of Emancipation. Someday I’d like to go as an openly-gay man to Trinidad and Tobago for Carnival. Someday I’d like to go to the Bahamas without fear for Junkanoo.

Someday, if I am married, I’d like to visit Elmina Castle with my husband and look out of the “door of no return” without fear of violence from folks nearby, but with tears in our eyes. I’d like for us to experience the sights and sounds of Lagos together without homophobic mob violence lurking around us. I’d like for us to go to Kuchu Pride in Kampala in a time when none of the attendees need to wear rainbow masks.

Id like to visit a Mr. Gay Africa contest in Windhoek or a drag show in Harare. I’d go to Soweto Pride in a time when Black lesbians feel much more safe and are not being targeted for corrective rape and murder by cishet men.

This vision of a more queer-welcoming African civilization is something I hope will become a reality in my lifetime.

 

Racism Against African Immigrants in Australia

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Good morning.

I’m reading about another African diaspora community in Australia which is being jolted by news of a store sign in Melbourne saying “no 14-18yo blacks or dogs allowed”. Most of the comments under articles about this sign either excuse the sign or shift the blame on Black teens.

The African-descended communities in Australia are entirely voluntary immigrants, mostly from Africa and some from the Americas. Generational slavery’s traumas (as manifested in the Americas) play far less of a role here in the lower economic strata of Afro-Australians, since chattel slavery in Australia did not involve Africans.

But these “black teens” who are turning to gangs like Apex in Melbourne are mostly of Somali and South Sudanese descent – two nationalities deeply impacted by decades of war, poverty and illiteracy in their homelands. Those factors are often a major predictor for the lack of financial or educational empowerment among many immigrant communities.

A leader of the Apex gang – interviewed here by the Daily Mail Australia – mentions some of the additional misfortunes which drive these teens to seek the comfort of drugs and gang relationships. Chief among them are family breakups, school bullying and chronic joblessness.

A similar cyclical recipe for a rise in gang affiliation can be found in any other immigrant community under similar circumstances anywhere in the world, whether it’s Chicago, Paris, Toronto or Miami.

Unfortunately, its a lot more difficult for Black mediocrity to get a pass in a predominately White European-descended, high-income developed society like Australia, even if chattel slavery is not a factor in how any living Australian citizen gained that nationality. Nothing less than “model minority behavior” is expected of non-White, non-Christian immigrants: skilled, educated, white-collar professional.

And it’s hard to exemplify that behavior when you’re a young person from a war-torn, impoverished, malnourished country like South Sudan.

Factoid: Barbados Has Quite the Calendar

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#Barbados celebrates an entire annual “Season of Emancipation” running from April 14 to August 23:

  • the anniversary of the Bussa’s rebellion, a major slave rebellion in 1816, April 14
  • National Heroes Day, April 28;
  • Crop Over festival, which includes May, June and the first week of August
  • Africa Day, May 25
  • Day of National Significance, which commemorates the Labour
  • Rebellion of 1937, July 26
  • Emancipation Day, August 1
  • birthday of Marcus Garvey, August 17
  • International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and its Abolition, August 23

 

The Afrocentric Education Crisis

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I was looking for Afrocentric education in charter and private schools and found this article:

Exact numbers are hard to come by, but those working within the field say African-centered schools peaked at around 400 in 1999, and have been on the decline ever since. When charter schools first emerged in the 1990s, some private school leaders decided to convert their African-centered institutions into charters, sacrificing their independent status in exchange for the increased financial stability that comes from receiving state and federal dollars.

Today, however, many Afrocentric charter schools are being shut down for poor academic performance and financial mismanagement.“The [charter] rules and regulations get worse and worse every year,” says Thompson, who opened up an Afrocentric charter in 1999—Roots Public Charter School—but didn’t close down her private school, as many others did. “First they lead you on and tell you can just do your thing. But that was a come-on, and every year they’ve got more bureaucratic red tape.”

Source: The Afrocentric Education Crisis

Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon Buries the Queer Folk

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So, Nnedi Okorafor’s “Lagoon” was a good read. Extraterrestrials coming onto the beaches of Lagos, blending in with fantasy creatures and superpowers of West African legend, human characters carving their own pathways in a changing Nigeria.

The one sticking point I have with the novel is the tragic fate of LGBT and gender-nonconforming characters in the novel. If you’ve read it, you know who and what I’m talking about.

I don’t know if anyone has brought it up yet with Ms Okorafor. But basically, ALL of the Nigerian LGBT characters met tragic fates or disappeared for some inexplicable reason at some point in the novel. The cross-dresser Jacobs, the LGBT activists Rome and Seven of the Black Nexus, every gender-nonconforming character.

Yes, Jacobs was unfortunately tied up with trigger-happy 419-scamming types like Moziz, but his entire experience in the novel feels like he played no further role than a dream deferred, a tragic sideshow who would needlessly die at the hands of his homophobic colleague Moziz in order to justify Moziz’s brutal death by extraterrestrial intervention. And the Black Nexus LGBT organization disappears as quickly as it appears.

If there was anything more that I wished from this novel in finishing it, I wish that queer African folks could survive and play a larger role in the unfolding drama.

I think Ms Okorafor made an unfortunate choice in burying her queer folk in the rubble of homophobia rather than letting them see the new day in Nigeria.

African history hypothesis: When better ships made it easier for European states like Portugal, Spain and the Netherlands to navigate their way to the Moluccas in the 1400s-1500s, it was the end of an era when caravan trade routes allowed for kingdoms in both the Sahel and Eurasia to attain prominence in trade while being in the desert or mountains.

Africa, by way of geographically being “in the way” between Europe and Asia, went from being a thoroughfare of trade to being a stumbling block to skip over. The Trans-Saharan and Silk Road routes were both made redundant.

If southern Africa were broken up into archipelagos of islands (a la Indonesia or the West Indies), would those African islands have thrived more from trade in the longer run?

Why I didn’t watch #MarcheRepublicaine today

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France is a former colonial power which fought a bitter war against nationalists in Algeria. Most Muslims in France are from Algeria, North Africa and most former French colonies in Africa. Most Afro-French Muslims live in poor “suburbs” on the outskirts of cities like Paris.

France has long played a role in destabilizing and propping up dictatorships in their former African colonies/client states. Chronic racism against Africans and Arabs within France + a paternalistic, antidemocratic attitude abroad = radicalization.

The paternalistic and violent history of UK, France and US in Sunni Muslim Arab, African states gives us our current world. Let’s talk about “freedom of speech” when we begin to listen to speech of those who come from politically-broken peoples. Until then, is masturbatory, self-congratulatory, opportunistic, jingoistic nonsense from a country that hasn’t addressed its violently-bigoted history.

The bodies of innocent dead are not yet cold while the defense of historically-racist French “way of life” is ratcheted upward for the world. Attacks like that on and their attackers are useless, wasteful and bloody expressions of ethnic derangement. But that derangement has a long history and does not comes from a deep, dark vacuum.

If we’re so concerned about threats to the French, or European, or U.S. or Canadian “way of life” by way of violent, rhetorically-explosive Sunni Muslim protests against cartoons of Muhammad of Quraysh, then why is it that we Westerners station militaries in, and bomb the shit out of, predominately-Muslim countries? If we’re so concerned about threats to our freedoms, why is it that we’re so glad to invest militarily in conflicts in these regions? If the French people are so concerned about safety and civil peace, why does France go out of its way to maintain corrupt post-colonial relationships with dictatorships and support violent interventions in order to keep post-colonial borders largely intact?

Why is it that we practically invest into the undoing of former colonies as well as, by indirect way of when citizens of these post-colonial states migrate to countries like France, our own undoing?

Why can’t we in the West practice abroad what we preach at home?

We don’t have to have hypocrites in leadership or violently-hypocritical foreign policies. We can enforce our own absolute neutrality in foreign policy and let the chips fall as they may. We can stop investing militarily in post-colonial conflicts. France can end its “Francafrique” relationship with terrible governments on the African continent. We can stop being so invested in the instability of nations, which could result in troubled migrants being invested in their home countries and stable governances there.

But that would take us taking the thumb out of our assholes, stop pitying about our “decline”, rethinking our status quo and treating Black and Brown lives with more dignity, wouldn’t it?