Africa has been one of the main topics of our research and discussions throughout the year. Most of these discussions usually in some way or another all come back to poverty. It is a general trend in much of the developed world to associate Africa with poverty, and with some justification. A large percent of Africans do live below the standard line of poverty. What caused Africa to fall so far behind the rest of the world in economic progression? European and Asian countries have exploited much of Africa for their own personal gain at the expense of the progress of African societies.
Many argue that Africa is behind the rest of the world because they all live in a desert that is void of life. This is not true at all, while the Sahara Desert is quite large, it really doesn’t take up as much of Africa as people tend to believe. The rest of which is full of wide ports and healthy forests. Therefore, some outside factor must be tampering with their progress. European sailors began landing in Africa centuries ago trying to create ports to make an easier trip to China. Throughout the years, dangerous trading relationships were formed that favored Europeans and began what would be a downward spiral for most African societies.
The exchanging of goods began to become really detrimental to African society when Europeans began to trade guns and ammunition to the Africans for items such as food and slaves. Not only were guns fueling the war engines of dangerous tensions between tribes, they were promoting the capturing and selling of slaves obtained from prisoners of war. The outflow of all these people caused entire societies to collapse. These weapons allowed corrupt warlords to come to power and run the general public into the ground for their own personal gain.
In “Things Fall Apart”, these patterns of abuse are accurately depicted through the eyes of Okonkwo, the story’s protagonist. In his village, the arrival of the “albinos” marks the beginning of bad days to come. Many people of the village are murdered in retaliation from the Whites. Later, missionaries come and start attracting converts, tearing the village apart, dividing the citizens, even families, against one another. In conjunction with what I said earlier, the whole reason the main characters life went wrong is because his gun (which was obtained through trade with the Whites) miss-fired, killing an innocent clansmen. The invasion of Whites into African societies brings about social change generally for the worst, this being evident in many of the documents being presented.
With great power comes great responsibility. This quote was not taken into mind when the Europeans wanted to gain some of the material resources of Africa for themselves. They impressed the natives with their guns and explosives, took what they wanted, and left the Africans with weaponry more powerful than they could even imagine with no instruction on how to safely use it (and it quite obviously wasn’t used for safety anyway). These guns would later be used to kill other villages for the purpose of getting slaves to trade again with the Europeans! This created a terrible cycle that ripped apart centuries of culture and tradition because the Whites realized they could exploit the tribes’ differences for their own financial interests.
This can be further seen through the documentary “Ghosts of Rwanda”. In this, not only do you see the horrible effects European weapons have on African societies with the genocide of almost 1 million people, but one can also view how European/North American countries are hesitant to intervene if they can’t directly profit somehow from the situation. The thing about this is that although this problem has European roots, it wasn’t directly caused by Europeans but rather amplified. This shows how outside actions on the African societies have much more long lasting effects than originally thought.
Also relating to this phenomenon is “Hotel Rwanda”. Although fictional, it did accurately portray the hatred and damage that could be accomplished with European weaponry. You see the main protagonists struggle to allocate help for the people and its quite obvious no other countries wanted to help even the least bit. Almost no soldiers were sent, and he saw just how unimportant Rwanda was to the rest of the world. The unfortunate thing is that the whole genocide couldn’t have started if the African slave trade wouldn’t have been initiated by the Europeans centuries prior.
It is clear that Africa’s progress in the world is being halted or even reversed by the powerful European and North American countries willing to put the lives of others behind their own personal wealth and interests. The solution to solving this problem isn’t easy, because it requires those countries with the most power to give up their edge on the playing field of world economics that they are not willing to do. It is unfortunate that things can turn out this way and cause some places in Africa to “Fall Apart”.