Reference no: EM133373866

Assignment:

Haunting Images Typecast Africa

Last summer at the height of the "Make Poverty History" campaign, British television station Channel 4 broadcast a documentary titled The Empire Pays Back, in which it estimated Britain's debt to Africans, both on the continent and in the diaspora, to be in the trillions of pounds sterling.

But it is not only the United Kingdom that owes a debt to Africa and Africans.

Almost every Western European nation and the United States, which participated in and benefited from slavery and the 19th-century scramble for African territories and its wealth, owe the continent something.

Canada, a former settler colony, is guilty by association with Britain because of the trickle-down effects. But these facts are not mentioned in the anti-poverty and development debates that rage on in five-star hotels in western cities. Instead, the haunting images, shown on prime time, of starvation, conflicts, fly-filled faces of children and AIDS, help to maintain a sense of hopelessness and dependence, which serve the purpose of wealthy states.

Taking these images at face value, it is easy to believe that Africa is the face of a dying man (or woman) who needs to be put on a drip and rushed to ER for immediate surgery by the West. It also reinforces the stereotype that Africa contributes nothing to global coffers.

But as Antoinette Ntuli, director of the South-Africa based Health Link, argues, "In order to understand Africa's relationship with the developed world, it's important to look at figures which show that far from contributing nothing to the developed economies and taking everything in return, Africa's contribution to the developed countries could be considered as its own form of development aid."

The brain drain from Africa to the West is rampant. A 1999 study by the United Nations Development Program estimates that between 1985 and 1990, Africa lost 60,000 highly skilled workers to the West. That number has increased since then.

Although a sizeable number of highly skilled Africans leave the continent for political reasons, the Western media and governments have ignored the other important reason: Western-led development initiatives, in the name of structural adjustment programs introduced by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank in the 1980s demanding that developing countries open their markets to globalization and privatize their basic utilities in order to receive aid.

They also demanded state expenditures be tightened and currencies be devalued. It led to the end of free health care, education, and the privatization of water and electricity.

Ntuli asserts that the withdrawal of resources from education and health instigated a circle of deprivation in which working conditions and salaries deteriorated, triggering an exodus of staff and further weakening services.

The cutbacks for funding for academic institutions also contributed to the massive fleeing of the crème de la crème from Africa.

According to the 2000 U.S. census, immigrants born in Africa have the highest level of educational attainment in America when compared to other immigrant groups. The census figures show that 49 per cent of African immigrants 25 years and older possess a BA or higher compared with nearly 33 per cent of Europeans, 45 per cent of Asians, 6 per cent of Central Americans and 25 per cent of South Americans.

The impact of IMF/World Bank policies has stripped Africa of its social capital and created a vacuum of skills while conveniently providing jobs for Western expatriates.

According to one estimate, a third of Africa's skilled professionals in recent decades have been replaced with expatriates at a cost of $ 4 billion U.S. a year. Ironically, elite African immigrants have been reduced to filling low-paying jobs in the West.

This exodus from Africa is not new. It started during the period of the slave trade. Slavery created enormous wealth.

"It's clear that African (slave) labour was key to plantation expansion but in terms of the dollar value, I'm not sure how to quantify it," says Joey Power, a Ryerson University professor of colonial and post-colonial African history.

In his book, Africans and The Industrial Revolution in England, Joseph E. Inikori argues that international trade was crucial to the success of the revolution, in particular trade within the Atlantic Basin (between Africa, the West Indies, and the Americas); and that Africans on both sides of the Atlantic were central to this process, "both as consumers and producers."

For example, West African palm oil was central to the production of oil for industrial lubricants and soap during the Industrial Revolution.

Ali Mazrui, a leading African scholar at New York State University of Binghamton explains in his article titled, From Slave Ship to Space Ship that, after slaves, African minerals became the next major contributor to Western economies and technology.

Uranium from the Belgian Congo was part of the original Manhattan project, which produced the first atomic bombs. Other minerals, like cobalt, became indispensable for jet engines (and recently chips for cellular phones). Africa's minerals enriched other economies rather than Africa.

Nowadays, Africans, like their counterparts in other parts of the Global South, continue to contribute to developed countries' economies by exporting raw materials and providing cheap labour. In turn, the West lowers interest rates and inflates the value of its currencies, enabling consumers to pay peanuts for goods imported from the South.

The fact that Africans helplessly look on while Africa continues to grease the wheels of Western economies says a lot about the current generation of Africans.

However, a few prominent Africans, like the scholar Mazrui, continue to demand reparations.

Will the fallen empire and countries that benefited from the spoils of slavery and colonization pay back? Maybe it's too idealistic to ask them to, but the first thing to do is to apologize to Africans and stop the continuous barbarization of Africa.

Yes, some African nations have experienced untold suffering, both self-inflicted and imposed, but the West needs to wear sackcloth and do some serious soul searching.

The least it can do is to stop behaving as if Africa is cursed and doomed to be forever a panhandler. By "receiving foreign aid," Africa is simply getting back what was stolen (and is being stolen) from her.

Kennedy Jawoko is a Ugandan third- year journalism student at Ryerson University.

Read Article Above to Answer the Following Questions:

1. Why would European and other Western nations "owe" something to Africa?

2. Why does the "Brain Drain" exist (2 reasons)?

3. What impact has this had on the population of the USA?

4. Besides slaves, what else did Africa provide to help the Industrial Revolution?

5. What role does Africa play in the global economy today? How does the West reinforce this?

6. What connection does the author make between these issues and foreign aid? Do you agree or disagree with this analysis?

7. What type of bias is present in this article? Explain.

8. Provide two opposing viewpoints.