World Ark Magazine - November/December 2008 - (Page 12)

I was sitting on the plane to Uganda with a Belgian carpet salesman next to me. He leaned over and asked where I was going. I told him Kampala. “Ah,” he said, “Africa!” He shook his head like he’d never heard anything so sad. “You see the way they kill each other?” “Um, yeah,” I said, not sure what else to say. “They blame us! And, okay, we did some not-so-good things. But it’s been a long time, and they’re still killing each other!” “Why do you think that is?” I asked. He shrugged. “Do you have a better explanation than it’s a little…” He chose his words carefully. “…a little in their system?” I sat back in my seat. Actually, I didn’t have a better explanation. At least not the simple one everyone seems to grasp for when Africa comes up. Something about that word and that place unleashes the inner anthropologist in every Westerner. It becomes a Rorschach test in which we see the worst of humanity: Death. Misery. Despair. to try to sort through some of these questions as best I could and, if not find answers, at least find the questions. When I woke up, it was a bright day in Kampala, and the hills were full of green and sunshine. Late the night before, I had checked in to a cheap travelers hotel on the outskirts of town. I chose to come to Uganda because this small, landlocked country, constantly tiptoeing on the edge of unrest, typifies the suffering brought on by recent wars. After I’d caught a little sleep, I locked my room, walked to the road and hailed a motorcycle taxi. The driver raced through the cool morning air, winding around cars and buses and bicycles, before dropping me at the town center in front of a bookstore. The shop was well-stocked, and I found several good titles on conflict in the region. One, War in Pre-Colonial Eastern Africa by Richard Reid, warned that war is “staggeringly complex” and cautioned against generalizing. Reid lambasted “rabid European stereotypes” about primitive, unthinking violence in Africa. Precolonial African wars, according to Reid, were Conflict on the African continent took a new turn in the late 1800s with the Scramble for Africa, the race by European powers to cut the continent into pieces like a giant cake. Yet while Africa has its problems, there are also huge swaths of the continent not at war, where cows are being tended, kids are going to school, songs are being sung and things are just normal. But we seldom hear about those places. There are many reasons for this, including media coverage, old stereotypes and plain lack of contact. But there’s also the fact that in 2006, half of the world’s high-intensity conflicts were in Africa. And according to a 2007 Oxfam report, the continent lost about $18 billion a year to these conflicts since 1990. And for what? The questions linger long after the wars are finished. Why did 5.4 million people die in the Congo? Why 800,000 in the Rwandan genocide? Why did 50,000 people die and another 10,000 have their hands, arms, legs, noses or ears cut off during the recent horrors of Sierra Leone? I’m not sure an explanation can be summed up during a conversation with a stranger on an overseas flight. Yet there are factors. There are trends. There are grievances. There are motives. It is a confusing mix, but I was going to Uganda anything but mindless and irrational. They were motivated by economics, militaristic cultures and notions of identity. “Access to raw materials and to the benefits associated with trade, and the reconfiguration of class and social hierarchy [drove] much nineteenth century violence, and they continue to the present day in only slightly modified forms,” he wrote. In other words, the forces that drove Africa’s early wars are the same forces that still drive wars around the world. Conflict on the African continent took a new turn in the late 1800s with the Scramble for Africa, the race by European powers to cut the continent into pieces like a giant cake. I checked out of the store and found a little café where I sat down to have some sweet, milky tea, take some notes and look at another book, African Guerrillas, about the wars in Africa since 1990. It divides African rebellions into four kinds: liberation insurgencies (for independence from a foreign power), separatist insurgencies (to break 12 November/December 2008 | WORLD ARK www.heifer.org http://www.heifer.org

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of World Ark Magazine - November/December 2008

World Ark Magazine - November/December 2008 Contents Letters For the Record The Good Life Asked and Answered Finding Peace in Africa Sierra Leone on the Mend The Roma: A People Apart Mixed Media Heifer Bulletin Heifer Spirit Calendar First Person

World Ark Magazine - November/December 2008

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