Jill Rees: Welcome Press

Thanks Sarkosi for the intelligent comments intended to to form positive relations with African countries on his recent fact finding trip:

‘The trouble with Africa is that the African has not taken part in history. The African farmer who, for thousands of years, has lived with the seasons, where his idea of life is to be in harmony with nature, only understands the eternal beginning of the rhythm of time in perpetual repetition of the sames actions and the same words. In his understanding, where everything starts from scratch each day, there is no place for the human adventure or for the idea of progress.’

This against a background where US and European companies are buying and controlling the largest productions in the African nations under threat of making them an enemy as with Iraq. Oil, minerals and cotton already controlled by Westerners who don’t encourage a local workforce but bring in their own staff and take the profits out of Africa. The Minister for Agriculture of Mali M. Modibo Traore has protested in vain at the forced introduction of GM crops, which in the UK we refuse to countenance, which will certainly bankrupt the small farmers and which they say are not resistant to the diseases and pests in that area anyway. As happened in the Mid West in the thirties, the farmers will be forced off the land into acute poverty and famine and whoever owns the banks will take their land. And we will again be presented in the West with images of the poor starving African, who can’t even feed himself. The Minister says: ‘We are protesting against the introduction of GM crops in Mali with every democratic means at our disposal, but we know that we will not succeed.’

The first thing to change is the outmoded impressions in the West of life in Africa. Who is the biggest enemy of Africa? We are, my friend.

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