Accepting un-equalness as a natural state within nature is the first step towards making peace with reality.
Sadly, many still prefer to wage war on reality,
From American Renaissance,
“Africa is materially more decrepit than it was when I first knew it—hungrier, poorer, less educated, more pessimistic, more corrupt, and you can’t tell the politicians from the witch doctors. Africans, less esteemed than ever, seemed to me the most lied to people on earth—manipulated by their governments, burned by foreign experts, befooled by charities, and cheated at every turn. To be an African leader was to be a thief, but evangelists stole people’s innocence, and self-serving aid agencies gave them false hope, which seemed worse. In reply, Africans dragged their feet or tried to emigrate, they begged, they pleaded, and they demanded money and gifts with a rude, weird sense of entitlement.”
Mr. Theroux does not expect things to improve. Often the only things that seemed to work were left over from European colonists. The ferry he took across Lake Victoria was built by the British in 1962; its original engines, boilers, and generators were still running.
According to Mr. Theroux, the worst part of Africa is the cities. “Whenever I arrived in an African city, I wanted to leave.” “Urban life is nasty all over the world, but it is nastiest in Africa.” “None of the African cities I had so far seen, from Cairo southward, seemed fit for human habitation.” “African cities became more awful—more desperate and dangerous as they grew larger.” “Even at their best, African cities seemed to me miserable improvised anthills, attracting the poor and the desperate from the bush and turning them into thieves and devisers of cruel scams.”
“In Egypt, every wall attracts dumpers, litterers, shitters and pissers, dogs and cats, and the noisiest children.” “The heat in Khartoum, with its sky specks of rotating hawks, left me gasping.” Khartoum was so dangerous that the American counsel general did not even live there, but flew in from Cairo during the week. Addis Ababa was “dirty and falling apart, stinking horribly of unwashed people and sick animals, every wall reeking with urine, every alley blocked with garbage,” the streets “full of loud music, car horns, diesel fumes, and pestering urchins.” Hyenas stalked the streets of Harar, Ethiopia, at night, and people howled at foreigners. Djibouti’s “oppressive heat was not relieved by the scorching breezes off the Gulf of Aden, nor was there any terrain except the landfill look of reclaimed swamp.”
“Nairobi was huge and dangerous and ugly.” There was a palpable sense of “desperation” which was “not the dark side, or a patch of urban blight, but the mood of the place itself.” He did not go out at night, for even “the wariest people were robbed.” Three FBI agents investigating the 1998 embassy bombing were robbed of their wallets and pistols and then mocked and jeered by a large crowd. Even the wild birds stole from people. Kampala was an improvement by comparison but decrepit and in decline. While there, he visited Makerere University, where he had taught, and found it a ruin—the buildings falling apart, the trees cut down, the library an empty shell.
“Mozambique,” he writes, “was not a country in decline—this part of it, anyway, could not fall any further.” Of its capital city, “It was hard to imagine how much worse a place had to be for a broken-down city like Maputo to seem like an improvement.” Even once prosperous and orderly Johannesburg was crime-ridden and increasingly ringed with teeming and angry slums. “That’s what happened in Africa: things fell apart.”
Mr. Theroux tells story after story that demonstrate the hopeless passivity of so many Africans. In the “sun-baked emptiness” of the Wagago Plains in Tanzania, he spotted a single mango tree “of modest size but leafy with dense boughs. There was a circle of shade beneath it. Within that shade were thirty people, pressed against one another to keep in the shade, watched by a miserable goat tethered in the sunshine.” He wondered why “no one in this hot, exposed place had thought to plant more mango trees for the shade they offered. It was simple enough to plant a tree.”
There is no poverty problem in Africa. That which Westerners see as the dilapidated environment there is simply the natural state of things for African peoples.
It's not good. It's not bad. It simply is.
Yes, they (the details of the circumstances) can vary from place to place, but overall the condition is endemic to the people. Not just in Africa but any place where they're clustered.
Attempting to modify that condition to meet another group's standards is like taking sun lamps to the North Pole so the Polar Bears can enjoy the subtropic temperatures that the alligators rave about....
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