How to Write about Africa (2019)
I was born there. I spent the first eleven years of my life there. I&#x27;m white, and got sick of all the &quot;You don&#x27;t <i>look</i> like you came from Africa!&quot; jokes, at about age twelve.<p>And no, I&#x27;ve never been in South Africa. I hear that it&#x27;s beautiful.<p>The people I knew were awesome, but there&#x27;s a <i>lot</i> of <i>serious</i> cultural trauma, in many of the varied peoples of Africa. Some of it was caused&#x2F;exacerbated by colonialism, and some of it is far older than The Great White Hunter.<p>It&#x27;s important to note that there are <i>vast</i> cultural and societal differences between various African nations and tribes.<p>Come to think of it...the same can be said about Americans. Put a New York pizza joint owner from Brooklyn, next to a Louisiana shrimper, and tell me they&#x27;re the same.<p>Africa has <i>enormous</i> natural resources. Unfortunately, access to these resources has been one of the things that colonialism messed up. They can&#x27;t own the stuff that comes up out of the ground.<p>Unstable governments have been an endemic problem (See &quot;colonialism,&quot; above). Poverty is an issue, but it isn&#x27;t necessarily worse than in many other places on earth (but it is pretty damn bad, if you are used to the US version of &quot;poverty&quot;). Poverty does tend to breed the kinds of people that turn into nightmare dictators, though.<p>A lot of the issues that people think &quot;only happen in Africa&quot; also happen in other parts of the world. What happened in the Balkans was every bit as bad as some of the awful tribal conflicts that we&#x27;ve seen from Africa.<p>I desperately want Africa to come into its own. That will take a heck of a lot of things that I&#x27;m not qualified to prescribe.<p><i>[EDIT]: I removed one line that probably set some teeth on edge. Upon reflection, it&#x27;s not necessary to the narrative.</i>