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Three TV adverts this evening urging viewers to contribute to saving African children, or providing clean water or medical services. Meanwhile......yesterday's 'Financial Times' reports Africa's sub-Saharan population will double over next 30 years to two billion. Exemplified by Nigeria where population increased from 95m in 1990 to 201m in 2019. Most fertile mothers are in Niger, average seven children per family. By 2050 sub-Saharan population will be most populous area of world. Outside Africa by 2050 India will have 1.6b. China 1.4b.

Standing room only.

Africans are their own worst enemies.

To err is African, but to really f#ck things up takes a shedload of foreign aid money.

My academic daughter attended a very interesting lecture on the matter of Africa, particularly the population aspect. She implored me to watch a video of the lecture. I did so and I'm glad that I did. I hope this forum will do so too.

Characteristically, she sat in the front row of the audience, close to the aisle so that she could dash to the bar at the intermission for a G&T. The cameraman seems to like bespectacled long-haired Scandiwegian birds so she appears several times, but for me the real star of the lecture is the facts that Rosling presents.

Here are the facts, Africa very specifically, well presented in statistical form that anyone with an IQ over 100 can easily and enjoyable absorb: (those of a limited attention span may skip the first 29 minutes, but shouldn't)

Africans kicked out the 'evil' white colonialists, fecked up their countries, came back with the begging bowls, and now they've got the yellow man, far worse.

I will watch the video but have very slow internet where I am now.

I once read an interesting article about the aid money that went from (Live Aid?) or some such. If I recall correctly the general idea was as follows. a lot of the undernourished children were saved, though mentally damaged, and then grow up armed to the teeth with all sorts of nasty firearms and the cycle starts over...okay, a bit simplified, but I'll try to find the article...

I am familiar with the article, by an Irish journalist. I will find it later if it hasn't been expunged for stating the truth

http://awesternheart.blogspot.com/2008/ ... h.html?m=1



From an original article in the Independent.IE
http://www.independent.ie/opinion/colum ... 30428.html
By Kevin Myers
Thursday July 10 2008

No. It will not do. Even as we see African states refusing to take action to restore something resembling civilisation in Zimbabwe, the begging bowl for Ethiopia is being passed around to us, yet again. It is nearly 25 years since Ethiopia's (and Bob Geldof's) famous Feed The World campaign, and in that time Ethiopia's population has grown from 33.5 million to 78 million today.

So why on earth should I do anything to encourage further catastrophic demographic growth in that country? Where is the logic? There is none. To be sure, there are two things saying that logic doesn't count.

One is my conscience, and the other is the picture, yet again, of another wide-eyed child, yet again, gazing, yet again, at the camera, which yet again, captures the tragedy of . . .


Sorry. My conscience has toured this territory on foot and financially. Unlike most of you, I have been to Ethiopia; like most of you, I have stumped up the loot to charities to stop starvation there. The wide-eyed boy-child we saved, 20 years or so ago, is now a priapic, Kalashnikov-bearing hearty, siring children whenever the whim takes him.

There is, no doubt a good argument why we should prolong this predatory and dysfunctional economic, social and sexual system; but I do not know what it is. There is, on the other hand, every reason not to write a column like this.

It will win no friends, and will provoke the self-righteous wrath of, well, the self-righteous, letter-writing wrathful, a species which never fails to contaminate almost every debate in Irish life with its sneers and its moral superiority. It will also probably enrage some of the finest men in Irish life, like John O'Shea, of Goal; and the Finucane brothers, men whom I admire enormously. So be it.

But, please, please, you self-righteously wrathful, spare me mention of our own Famine, with this or that lazy analogy. There is no comparison. Within 20 years of the Famine, the Irish population was down by 30pc. Over the equivalent period, thanks to western food, the Mercedes 10-wheel truck and the Lockheed Hercules, Ethiopia's has more than doubled.

Alas, that wretched country is not alone in its madness. Somewhere, over the rainbow, lies Somalia, another fine land of violent, Kalashnikov-toting, khat-chewing, girl-circumcising, permanently tumescent layabouts.

Indeed, we now have almost an entire continent of sexually hyperactive indigents, with tens of millions of people who only survive because of help from the outside world.

This dependency has not stimulated political prudence or commonsense. Indeed, voodoo idiocy seems to be in the ascendant, with the next president of South Africa being a firm believer in the efficacy of a little tap water on the post-coital penis as a sure preventative against infection. Needless to say, poverty, hunger and societal meltdown have not prevented idiotic wars involving Tigre, Uganda, Congo, Sudan, Somalia, Eritrea etcetera.

Broad brush-strokes, to be sure. But broad brush-strokes are often the way that history paints its gaudier, if more decisive, chapters. Japan, China, Russia, Korea, Poland, Germany, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia in the 20th century have endured worse broad brush-strokes than almost any part of Africa.

They are now -- one way or another -- virtually all giving aid to or investing in Africa, whereas Africa, with its vast savannahs and its lush pastures, is giving almost nothing to anyone, apart from AIDS.

Meanwhile, Africa's peoples are outstripping their resources, and causing catastrophic ecological degradation. By 2050, the population of Ethiopia will be 177 million: The equivalent of France, Germany and Benelux today, but located on the parched and increasingly protein-free wastelands of the Great Rift Valley.

So, how much sense does it make for us actively to increase the adult population of what is already a vastly over-populated, environmentally devastated and economically dependent country?

How much morality is there in saving an Ethiopian child from starvation today, for it to survive to a life of brutal circumcision, poverty, hunger, violence and sexual abuse, resulting in another half-dozen such wide-eyed children, with comparably jolly little lives ahead of them? Of course, it might make you feel better, which is a prime reason for so much charity. But that is not good enough.

For self-serving generosity has been one of the curses of Africa. It has sustained political systems which would otherwise have collapsed.

It prolonged the Eritrean-Ethiopian war by nearly a decade. It is inspiring Bill Gates' programme to rid the continent of malaria, when, in the almost complete absence of personal self-discipline, that disease is one of the most efficacious forms of population-control now operating.

If his programme is successful, tens of millions of children who would otherwise have died in infancy will survive to adulthood, he boasts. Oh good: then what?I know. Let them all come here. Yes, that's an idea.

kmyers@independent.ie

Well, somebody had to say it....

"So, how much sense does it make for us actively to increase the adult population of what is already a vastly over-populated, environmentally devastated and economically dependent country?"

What a **** eejit!

The reality is that improving education and health and nutrition decreases the population growth. Not the other way around.

Here's a statistical explanation of how it actually works. It's the opposite of what the ejjit says.

I'm afraid you misunderstand the mindset of the rural African. I'm being diplomatic in expressing it this way.

I would think that if the parents producing children had to face and overcome the challenges of rearing, feeding, and educating them without aid, the population increases would naturally subside, as they have in the Western world.

Not too long ago I read a treatise about how well-meaning food aid to Africa had the undesired effect of decimating the livelihoods of local farmers whose produce could not compete with the free food being unloaded at the docks.

The bottom line, I think, is that the best course is to let free markets work. That method is proven to generate prosperity, control population, and offers the best prospect for a higher standard of living.

Africa possesses abundant resources, arable land, and much more. It should be the breadbasket for Europe at great profit. Alas, as Zimbabwe has demonstrated, human failure often interferes with natural human progression. All things considered, I think the best strategy to improve the lot of Africans over time would just be to leave it alone - no aid, no interference - just let nature take its course. Sooner or later they'll figure it out just like the Western world did.

My estimate is that the real progression in the west started with the ending of tribal loyalties.
There's an article on that here:
https://hbdchick.wordpress.com/2011/04/ ... an-tribes/
Basically, the Catholic Church banning marriages between cousins, and arranged marriages, were the main reasons. The Black Death probably helped. Neither had the intention of destroying tribalism.

Africa, and most of Asia for that matter, is still completely in the grip of tribalism.

Straightline national boundaries, drawn on maps of mostly unsurveyed territory by Europeans who hadn't got a **** clue about the societies they had conquered are a major source of the "tribal" problems of the 20th and 21st centuries in Africa.

Lines of Latitude and of Longitude are a lousy match to the patchwork of human geography. Those lines build societal problems into the very core of these artificial "nations". To blame those problems on tribalism shows a lack of understanding of any of those societies.

The Brits did a better job of that side of things within India during the Raj times. They (Battenberg, mostly) made an utter arse of organising Independence for what used to be "India". They made the same mistake as had already been made in Africa. They simply drew lines on maps without any understanding of the peoples involved.

And if you think we reflective types have abolished tribalism, you really need to visit Scotland. Glescae, when there's an "old firm" game on would teach you a thing or two about tribalism. And that's before we get into the Clan thing. Until a few years ago, there was a sign on the door of the pub in Glen Coe which said: "No dogs. No Campbells".

One wonders what the state of Africa and what boundaries it would have had colonializing never occurred. As an American, I'm grateful to the Brits who gave us rule of law, contracts, ethics, a successful cultural framework and so much more. They also gave that to their African colonies, and the ones that retained it the most are today's best African nations. To date, in all of history, the best nations to live in, and the most successful, have British underpinnings.

Except I blame the colonising poms for introducing to the natives the culture of neck ties, taxes, and bureaucratic red tape. As an e.g. Malaysia & Singapore.

At least everyone drives on the left.

Undried Plum wrote: ↑

Thu Jun 20, 2019 9:44 pm

Straightline national boundaries, drawn on maps of mostly unsurveyed territory by Europeans who hadn't got a **** clue about the societies they had conquered are a major source of the "tribal" problems of the 20th and 21st centuries in Africa.

Lines of Latitude and of Longitude are a lousy match to the patchwork of human geography. Those lines build societal problems into the very core of these artificial "nations". To blame those problems on tribalism shows a lack of understanding of any of those societies.

The Brits did a better job of that side of things within India during the Raj times. They (Battenberg, mostly) made an utter arse of organising Independence for what used to be "India". They made the same mistake as had already been made in Africa. They simply drew lines on maps without any understanding of the peoples involved.

And if you think we reflective types have abolished tribalism, you really need to visit Scotland. Glescae, when there's an "old firm" game on would teach you a thing or two about tribalism. And that's before we get into the Clan thing. Until a few years ago, there was a sign on the door of the pub in Glen Coe which said: "No dogs. No Campbells".

Absolute crap. You think that the genocide in Rwanda was caused by lines on a map? Just one terrible example of the tribalism that infects the continent. You could put the lines wherever you wanted to, or have no lines at all. The tribalism would still exist and that is a major part of why Africa, which should be a major economic force in the world, is a basket case.

My point is that straight lines on a map which ignores human geography is a recipe for social disaster. It can too easily trigger civil wars and inter"national" wars. It causes inter-ethnic collisions which can so easily turn very nasty.

Human beings are incredibly territorial critters.

UP is correct but only to a minor degree. It is the African mentality, tribalism, despotism, corruption, scant regard for life, lack of education and love of violence that are the underlying problems.

Lines in the sand are a catalyst.

Just misread that as “American mentality “