What About Africa? Dictators And Rare Earths - A Continent Whose Only Value Is In The Ground

Africa is a continent ruled by corrupt dictatorships on all points of the compass, undeveloped, tribal, and backward.  Civil wars are common - Angola, Somalia, Yemen, Mozambique, Ethiopia, South Sudan, and most of the Sahel are fighting one war or another. Ethiopia and Eritrea have fought over the same patch of scratchy, useless land or decades. The Congo has been a bloody battleground for years ever since the Rwandan Hutus took residence in the east and fought the government for the region's valuable mineral wealth. 

If there is no civil conflict it is because dictators have ruled with an iron hand, suppressing any opposition with a combination of brute force,  sadistic secret police, and lavish financial incentives for supporters in the army and police.

Those countries like Ghana which have been notably free from both dictatorships and endemic corruption, have hardly budged from a simple agricultural society barely able to feed itself.  South Africa after apartheid - an era during which industry, commerce, and finance thrived and enabled the country to be close to the developed nations of Europe - has fallen into a crime-ridden, corrupt, tribally nasty place. 

American liberal administrations have bent over backward to find and support any sign of progress in Africa.  Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State bought the empty promises of a President of Mali that he would hold free and fair elections and poured millions of development money into the country. She was  surprised when he won with ninety-five percent of the vote, and then was toppled in a violent coup by a disaffected army, leaving the country open to insurrection, violence, and Islamization. 

The Biden Administration was no different.  Desperate to show his black constituents that he had not forgotten their homeland, he poured hundreds of millions of dollars in aid into the continent with no concern for how it was spent.  'Africans are good, honest, admirable, trustworthy people', he famously said when promoting his Foreign Aid bill, 'and we are confident that every cent of our financial support will be put to good use'. 

Not surprisingly every last cent of that largesse went into offshore bank accounts, mansions and presidential palaces, and investment in the far more lucrative drug, emerald, human trafficking trades. 

A senior official in the Biden Administration was quoted as saying:

The American black is heir to the forest's environmental wisdom, a being, thanks to his intimacy with the world around him, is more sentient, naturally intelligent, and more emotionally prosperous than anyone of European descent.  While the white kings, queens, and emperors were raping the world in a vicious attempt to colonize brown and black people, the African forest-dweller maintained his dignity and honor.  We will repay the African for his heroism.

African Big Men, Presidents-For-Life, imperial rulers all reacted with delight.  More no-strings-attached money would be coming soon, their Aruba holdings would triple, and groundbreaking for their third homes in Biarritz and Cannes would begin. 

'Basket case', said Donald Trump when approached by a Congressman worried about Africa now that USAID had disappeared and the continent would be without United States support.  The President went on to lecture the supplicant on how foreign aid had been nothing more than an entitlement to corruption. 'Just like the slums in DC', he went on. 'A bonanza, a license to spend like a drunken lottery winner in a whore house.  Not a dime from me'. 

The President's words were leaked to the press, and the Left cried foul - another example of the racist, arrogant, white supremacy of Donald Trump - but Trump was unmoved. 'Worse than a basket case', he replied. 'A dump with oil'. 

This of course enraged his opponents even more, and the moribund Black Lives Matter movement came to life.  LaShonda Evans, the only one of the organization's leaders not jailed for misuse of funds and fraud, and in hopes of revitalizing the black power resurgence took to the airwaves.  She was unbowed in her attacks on the president as a racist bigot, a white supremacist, an arrogant neo-colonialist, and a man intent on re-enslaving 'the motherlode', Africa. 

'Bullshit', said the President. 

Now, it would be unfair to say that the American president did not care about Africa.  He did, just not for those ruling the continent or the people living within it (they would have to wake up and die right, demand justice, democracy, and a free society).  He wanted what was under the ground - the trillions of dollars worth of oil, gas, minerals and rare earths that the Chinese were already cornering.  

The Chinese made deals without 'conditionalities'. Give us your neodymium and we will rebuild your ports, roads, and critical infrastructure.  No promises to reform the justice system, to encourage a free press, or open the books.  Just load up our trucks, and we'll be on our way. 

'That's how to do it', said Trump, echoing the Machiavellian approach to foreign policy that characterized his second term.  The days of moral exceptionalism were dead and gone, decisions were made on the basis of American interests, and by so doing the United States joined the Putin-Xi club, both of whom had only similar interests in mind. 

'Capitalist, war-mongering dictator!' shouted the Left; but they had gotten one thing right. Trump was indeed a resolute capitalist who favored capital over labor.  Rare earths over a population barely able to read, let alone produce.  It was no different in America where capitalists cheered the AI, robotic revolution - the final burial of the fairytale legends of Gompers, Lafollette, and Brandeis, unionists, labor organizers, rent strikers.  The world was all about investment, markets, innovation, and production - all of which could be handled without the inefficiency of human work. 

'The most immoral president ever', wrote a columnist in the liberal press.  

'They got the spelling wrong', said Trump, smiling. 'That would be amoral not immoral'.  The man knew his philosophical exegesis all right, and cited his conservative, free-market, competitive, Darwinian domestic policies and his Machiavellian foreign ones.  'There's no room for morality in governance. Morality is for church'. 

Historians understood this seemingly arrogant propositions.  The American Neo-Cons, that cabal of arch-conservative advisors to George Bush insisted on American exceptionalism - that foreign policy must be based on moral principles embodied in the American constitution.  Machiavelli was just an afterthought.  The perilous times of today demanded sound moral principles and their evangelism.  Democracy was of a higher order of being and the world should know and adopt it. 

Nonsense, said Trump. 'Idiots always spoil the party'.  The whole race-gender-ethnicity, diversity-equity-inclusivity, identity charade was nothing more than inverted exceptionalism - a secular faith-based program with no historical, philosophical, or rational basis. 

America's Africa policy is a self-interested, Machiavellian one.  There is only one thing important in Africa, and that is under the ground, and while the President wishes the people of continent good luck in their fight to establish democracy, that is their affair.  As in all politics, the ruled are complicit in the deeds of the ruling. 

'What about us?', shouted LaShonda Evans rudely in her audience with the President.  'What about us black folk?' 

The President smiled, asked Ms. Evans if she would like a cup of tea, listened to her harangue, enjoying every minute of her fiery elocution ('they're good at that') and politely ushering her out the door.  

The Sounds Of Silence - A Yakkity Wife And The Key To A Happy Marriage

Henry Townsend was a patient man, a good husband, a dutiful father, and a scratch golfer - all of which he had carefully orchestrated to make his marriage work. 

The demands on his time were significant, particularly since he had a responsible job which kept him at the office after hours and on weekends.  He had been faithful, as far as most men can be, and found that
lovers simply were low value-added.  Yes, he enjoyed the company of attractive young women, but it always wasn't long before their demands became insistent - the old saw, 'When are you going to leave your wife?' was unfortunately the case.  Life was infinitely too complicated for anything but the occasional drop in the bucket, a discreet cinq-a-sept with understanding women. 

Henry's wife Joanna was a scratchy type, although he saw no particular signs of it when he was dating her at those many years ago.  She had been serene, thoughtful, and somewhat guarded in her emotions - a delightful reprieve from the tempestuous Alice who shook the rafters with her demands for attention, a spoiled child and not surprisingly a sexually hungry one, an appetite that appealed to Henry's desires for more than the serial mothering he had had at the hands of Margie, Usha, and Esther.  

The affair didn't last long - there was only so much Sturm und Drang that Henry could take - but he was sexually satisfied. He had been strummed, plucked, and played until he could manage not a note more and wanted only to read the Sunday Times alone with a good cappuccino and an almond croissant. 

Things and men being what they are, happiness has never been an affair of simple pleasures.  Henry missed the hunt, the conquest, and the delightful spoils of war, and met Joanna at the bar of the Oak Room at the Plaza one rainy September afternoon.  She was alone, sitting quietly amidst the clatter and Happy Hour cheer, but was pleased to be noticed by a youngish man with a boutonniere - a small affectation, a conversation-starter, a playful trifle that was good for starters. 

Henry found the young woman the perfect middle ground - halfway between the rapacious Alice and the string of mothers left in the queue - and before long they were an item.  They sounded like a New York Review of Books personal - SWF seeks likeminded SWM who loves morning walks in the park, reminiscing over old books, charming but self-confident, a lover of baclava and onion soup - but not enough can be said about complementarity. 

It was only much later in their marriage that she became scratchy - the usual offenses, hair in the sink, the toilet seat up, erratic left turns, etc. Henry was complaisant at first - par for the course when one gets married - but as her insistence grew and she became more quacky and impatient, the blush was off the bloom of the rose. Not quite the 'How many times have I told you to...' hectoring, but with a tone and measure he hardly recognized.  

Now, husbands have always found ways to deal with these niggling intrusions into their manhood.  Some do a 'Yes, darling' and do nothing.  Others will pee on the seat, and still others will simply capitulate in order to stop the complaints which always seem to come out high pitched and nasal.  Why do they do this? Henry wondered.  Life would be so much simpler if they simply modulated their tone, used a different register and backed off a demi-quaver on volume. 

He - men in general - could care less whether the seat is up or down.  Most look at it as target practice - peeing through the opening to see how accurate you can be.  A few misses off center? No big deal, it will dry; and as far as her facial powder spilled around the faucets? No problem there either.  A little sluice of water will do the trick. 

Some men when faced with long hair or makeup on the sink, bring it up with their wives, showing that two can play that game; but again, true to form, their wives turn it right around and use it as yet another excuse to hammer them for their absent bathroom etiquette. 

Most women, especially in the feminist era, want recognition, respect, and consideration from men.  They want to be validated as individuals, valuable in their own right, and seek no less.  Savvy men always give the impression of listening, but it is always in one ear, out the other.  They are less interested in what a woman has to say or who she is than will she sleep with them. 

Therefore, the one tried and true method to stop the carping, hectoring demands is not only to ignore them, but to ignore the woman who says them.  A stony silence, a moody indifference, a barely concealed hostility, a strongly conveyed sense of irrelevance.  'You never express your feelings', they say, and that is exactly what the strategic husband wants to hear.  In his immured silence, he is not only agreeing with her - it's none of your business - but giving the message that she, all of her, is a trifling business in the first place. 

It works.  Women will always come around given enough time.  They will revert - that after all is their nature - and the peaceful interlude is worth the effort.  This, despite Henry's reluctance to treat the woman he was still fond of with such dismissiveness and indifference, was the proven way to resolve the issues; and within a few weeks, she was quiet on the toilet seat and the hairs in the sink, and had graciously and generously treated him as she once had. 

However, in the mind of many women, Henry's behavior would be considered borderline misogyny relying as it did on old stereotypes and male patriarchy; but marriage is a battleground after all, and all the territorialism, self-defensiveness, aggression, and drive to dominate - the heart and soul of human nature - is as predominant in marriage as in any other social engagement.  Or to put it simply in yet another old saw, 'All's fair in love and war'. 

In many cases, men do not have the patience to stonewall, and just say 'Fuck it, I'm out of here' not divorce necessarily but Saturday mornings with Lisa from Accounting or a 'golf weekend' with her on the beach at Rehoboth. That will get the message across loud and clear, but risks are there.  The savvy husband has to know just how far he can push the truth so that the wool will remain over his wife's eyes.

'I hope it doesn't come to that', Henry mused during one of their good periods, preparing for his wife's inevitable recidivism, and decided for the time being to stay the course of the cold shoulder. 

Theirs, surprisingly enough, was a good marriage.  While not exactly George and Martha in Albee's play Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? a couple who flay each other to the marrow to rediscover whatever it was that drew them together, Henry and Joanna played out the drama in the same way but with far less blood and guts.  'Marriage is the crucible of maturity', Albee wrote.  Without its confines where the bare facts of human nature are raw and exposed, we will never grow up. 

So be it.  The Townsends soldiered on to a ripe old age, a time when nothing mattered other than their own demise, so they kept their distance but did so conveniently and without upsetting each other. 

What more can one ask?  We seem to need each other in some kind of arrangement, so singlehood has never been an option. 'Gird for battle', should be included in the marriage ceremony as well as 'In sickness and in health'. 

The Diversity of Lethal Arrows, Trophy Heads, And Monkey Stew - When A Paleolithic Tribe Meets High White Civilization

Anson Ward was a professor in the Anthropology Department at a highly-regarded Midwest University, tenured at the young age of thirty-five thanks to his field work among the Jivaro, an Amazonian tribe on the far eastern reaches of the Amazon River, author of a series of articles on 'Ayahuasca - Soul Vine Shaman', an audio-video recording of a curandero, a spiritual messenger of The Goddess of Death, seen by all who take the drug.

 

Because of his familiarity with isolated, primitive Amazonian tribes, he was invited to participate in the meetings with members of the Xixtecs who had never before been contacted.  He had learned the language of the Jivaros and the Xotyls, both thought to be members of the same linguistic family, so even if he spoke broken, fragmentary Xixtec, it would be a valuable first step to bringing the tribe into the modern world. 

'Imagine', he said to his wife as he prepared to head off to Brazil, 'a tribe that has never seen the white man'. 

Anson smiled at her demurral, but undeterred felt inestimably lucky to be one of the first to contact the Xixtec, perhaps the last living descendants of Paleolithic man.  He was privileged to be able to open the insular, primitive, forest world of the Amazonian Indian to the modern day. 

There had been protests in front of the National Geographic building in downtown Washington to protest the exploitation of the Amazon - the forests, the biodiversity, and most of all the heirs to a simpler more pure, more authentically human way of life than our polluted, defiled, and corrupt America.

Anson did not object - he was a believer in free speech although he thought the protestors were barking up the wrong tree - keeping primitive tribes captive within their backwardness was immoral, no more than animals in a zoo, specimens in a laboratory, stuffed and smiling on dioramas in the Museum of Natural History. 

 

'You have a responsibility to keep them as they are', said a colleague.  Diversity if it means anything at all rejects the notion of integration, the loss of individual identity, the submersion of race, gender, and ethnicity within the whole, she said; but Anson knew differently.  There are no Neanderthals walking around today. 

Despite the progressive cast, character, and cadre of his department - of the entire university in fact - Anson saw himself differently. Persepolis, Athens, and Rome would soon be as owned as much by the Xixtec as by the farmers of Chillicothe.  No longer would they be worshipping trees, rocks, and thunder.

First contact was like the first click on AI - an unimaginable, impossible, unthinkable world available in an instant. Like the equations of Newton, Galileo, Einstein, and Planck. 

There was no moral supposition more immoral than diversity - classifying people by their race, gender, and ethnicity.  Identity was a matter of individual enterprise, the expression of individual prowess, the emergence of genius out of strands of DNA. The Xixtec may have bones through their noses, anteater blood smeared in tribal signs on their faces, stone axes and bamboo spears; but they were also potential Newtons.  Keeping them penned in prescribed historical boxes is sadistically ignorant. 

In one way, the diversity cadre had a point but never admitted it, Anson observed.  One look at the Xixtec was a frontal view of human nature - aggressive, territorial, self-interested, defensive, and without consideration, compassion, or welcome. That was what must be chronicled before they disappeared and became worldly like the rest of us.  Let the diversity crew chew on their barbarity, their cannibalism, their animal rutting, their ignorant idolatry and their lack of any higher order - man at his most basic, a state from which he has never evolved. 

One would have thought that anyone pursuing a career in anthropology would be a champion of diversity.  What did the discipline show if not the marvelous plurality of human society and the need to preserve it? Yet Anson was not of this ilk, and his interests were not in the obvious - headdresses, dances around the fire, smoked piranha, and the tales of griots and shamans - but in fundamentals, the rock bottom, ineluctable similarity among all human beings. 

When he entered the village of the Xixtec and saw heads impaled on bamboo spikes, the bodies of tribal victims hanging from banyan trees, and monkey-and-viper stew simmering over a fire, he was not interested in comparison - how did cultural expressions differ or were sewn together in a universal cultural quilt - but how human nature was inexplicably and incontrovertibly the same.

As Kurtz, the character in Josef Conrad's Heart of Darkness says in his final words, 'The horror....the horror...' recognizing the inescapable barbarity in all of us, not just in the cannibalistic headhunters of the Congo, Anson Ward came to the same conclusion. 

There was a big difference between Conrad and Ward, however  The former saw horror in the realization of man's barbarity, the latter saw only inevitability, the perennial expression of a survivalist human culture. 

Out of both respect for diversity and a patronizing dismissal of what they considered subhuman throwbacks living on Brazilian territory, the government let the severed heads be. There would be no investigation or prosecution.  These savages were animals so let them live like wild dogs. 

First contact has always been problematic - diversity and preservation vs modernization - but the resolution has always been foreordained - 'How can you keep 'em down on the farm once they have seen Gay Paree?. Given a few weeks, every last Xixtec would be wearing tee-shirts and jeans, drinking pina coladas, and eating churrasco.  There is no such thing as cultural purity - the gentle music of the forest - but only blood and skulls. 

American progressives have tried to raise the black man to the top of the human pyramid.  A sentient man of the forest, attuned to the environment, giftee with native intelligence and creativity, he has only remained on the lower rungs of society because of white oppression. 

Nothing of the sort, of course, and the black man remains on the lowest rung because of inadaptability - the inability to transform jungle primitivism into modern competitive advantage.  Only now in the ghetto he acts out tribal warfare, the same head-slicing savagery as the Xixtec, and will remain naked and exposed until the moon turns blue. 

It took a lot of doing to first meet the Xixtec, much of their scampering back into the forest and climbing to the top limbs of the highest trees, salvos of poison arrows shot the explorers' way, a lot of hoopla and grimaces, but the age-old tricks worked.  They couldn't resist the mirrors, costume jewelry, and shiny trinkets left for them.  Once hooked by trifles, their hesitancy disappeared, and the path to civilization soon followed. 

'You are the barbarian', shouted one of Anson's colleagues on his return, 'the worst example of white privilege and supremacy that can be imagined'; but Anson was used to this idleness, and as a true missionary felt that he had weathered the storm of apostasy and did the right thing.