Snubbing Africa

 A couple days ago, the UN General Assembly voted to replace the Mercator projection on global maps with a new visualization of the world that depicts the relative sizes of the various continents more accurately. 

The United States was the only government on earth to vote against the new map. 

Why? Because Trump is wedded to the delusion that Greenland is bigger than it is, because of his colonial designs on the Danish territory? 

Or simply because the new projection more accurately shows the magnitude of countries in Africa—and this administration will take any chance it gets to convey its contempt for that continent and its peoples? 

I get that adopting a new map may feel like a token or empty gesture. On its own it's not likely to do much to achieve global justice or advance Africa's development goals.

But it takes precisely as long—if not longer—to vote against this measure as for it, so saving time is no valid excuse for the U.S. government to oppose it. 

The only reason therefore seems to be this administration's compulsive anti-Blackness and anti-African bias. 

As the U.S. Mission to the UN explained their vote, the updated map "cannot be separated from the much larger and more radical ideological project it belongs to," which in their view involves "reparations and 'cognitive justice.'"

In other words, anything that reflects positively on Africa—even if it be something as unquestionably true and fact-based as the relative size of Africa's landmass relative to other continents—is, in this administration's view, too "woke" to be tolerated. 

It would seem that any project, no matter how benign, to advance the rights and dignity of people of African descent is, in this administration's view, DEI radicalism and "reparations" and must be opposed. 

I don't think there's a better word for this attitude on their part than racism. This administration has made our once proudly democratic and pluralistic government into the sole white nationalist ethno-state on the global stage—as reflected in the fact that not a single other nation joined our vote against this measure. 

Of course, it's not like this administration completely ignores Africa. They have in fact maintained a very active interventionist policy on the continent. They have bombed Somalia repeatedly. They sent troops to Nigeria and killed people on Christmas Day in that country last year. 

They have also worked with despotic authoritarian regimes in war-torn African countries to set up a series of prison camps to receive third country nationals deported from the U.S.—a new gulag archipelago for our time. 

This administration clearly sees Africa as good enough to bomb and terrorize and convert into a continent-wide prison. 

Just not good enough to be visualized on a map as being as physically large as it really is. 

Nothing could be more short-sighted than to write off Africa in this way. The continent happens to have the fastest growing population on Earth. Africa was the continent we all came from as human beings; and it is in many ways our future too. 

This administration should heed Anatole France's warning, then. As one of his characters observes in the great dialogue on colonialism he penned in The White Stone: 

"Where is the prophet who will venture to tell the 200,000,000 African blacks that their posterity will never enjoy wealth and peace on the lakes and great rivers? [...] Can you safely prophesy to one-third of humanity a state of perpetual ignominy?" (Roche trans.)

Surely no one has a right to do so—that was France's point. This administration has no right to condemn one of the world's largest landmasses and fastest-growing human communities to "a state of perpetual ignominy." 

Of course, this administration appears to be doing all it can to reduce the relative size and growth rate of Africa's population. 

Not only have they repeatedly bombed people on the continent, they also retain close business ties to the UAE, even as it bankrolls one of the most genocidal parties to the catastrophic Sudanese civil war. 

In one of their first acts in office, recall that the administration also halted all food and medical aid to the African continent and the rest of the world's poor. (Since then, one of the worst outbreaks of Ebola has struck the continent.)

The administration's war of aggression in Iran has also been driving up food and fuel prices globally, forcing many impoverished families in Africa into further destitution and malnutrition. 

If Africa's population is still indeed among the fastest growing on Earth, it is no thanks to this administration. 

As Anatole France's character goes on: "Are you then going to say to the African[s...] for ever shall explorers unload their rifles on you, and smoke you out in your kraals; the wonderful Christian soldier will enjoy in his bravery the amusement of hacking your women to pieces; the gay and festive sailor from the befogged seas shall for all time kick in the bellies of your little children[?]"

Writers at the turn of the twentieth century had no difficulty perceiving that the European colonists were essentially waging a campaign of extermination and genocide against Africa. Mark Twain wrote about this with acid sarcasm and despair in Following the Equator; France saw it clearly in The White Stone. 

It would seem now that the Trump administration—who have in many ways openly hearkened back to the previous age of white imperialism—are deliberately trying to repeat this history. 

This administration talks about a supposed "white genocide" in South Africa; while all the time it is carrying out a "Black genocide" against the inhabitants of a whole continent. 

Perhaps the administration will protest that they are, in many cases, killing people more through inaction than overt measures. 

European colonial administrators often made the same excuses in the 19th century, as Sven Lindqvist has shown. After first dispossessing people of their land and herding them into camps, European governments then protested that the "natives" subjected to this treatment had a mysterious and inexplicable tendency to just curl up and perish. How was it the white man's responsibility to stop it? 

We're not killing them—the argument goes—so much as first taking the means of life and then letting them die.

"Thou shalt not kill; but needst not strive/ Officiously to keep alive," as Arthur Hugh Clough once satirized this complacent attitude toward the poor on the part of the Victorian ruling class. 

This is the same argument many apologists for the administration use today to defend the aid cuts (except without Clough's sarcasm). 

As Nicholas Kristof wrote earlier this summer, documenting the deaths caused by the US AID aid cuts: "Some prominent conservatives leaped to the defense of Musk, saying in effect: Why is it our job to save the lives of children in South Sudan?" 

In other words, to quote the Scripture: Am I my brother's keeper? 

Given that there is still a dreadful Ebola outbreak in the Congo right now that risks escaping containment in the continent, it seems worth calling to mind Thomas Carlyle's sermon on that particular text: 

A poor Irish Widow, her husband having died in one of the Lanes of Edinburgh, went forth with her three children, bare of all resource, to solicit help from the Charitable Establishments of that City. At this Charitable Establishment and then at that she was refused; referred from one to the other, helped by none;— till she had exhausted them all; till her strength and heart failed her: she sank down in typhus-fever; died, and infected her Lane with fever, so that 'seventeen other persons' died of fever there in consequence. The humane Physician asks thereupon, as with a heart too full for speaking, Would it not have been economy to help this poor Widow? She took typhus-fever, and killed seventeen of you!—Very curious. The forlorn Irish Widow applies to her fellow-creatures, as if saying, "Behold I am sinking, bare of help: ye must help me! I am your sister, bone of your bone; one God made us: ye must help me!" They answer, "No; impossible: thou art no sister of ours." But she proves her sisterhood; her typhus-fever kills them: they actually were her brothers, though denying it! Had man ever to go lower for a proof?

Indeed, this administration has sought at every turn to write off Africa and its roughly 1.6 billion people as fit for nothing but bombing and prisons—to condemn, as France put it, a vast percentage of humankind to "perpetual ignominy." 

What are they to us? this administration seems to demand; we barely even share a species with them? Are they even human? 

The Ebola outbreak—which many experts now believe really was exacerbated by and eluded early detection due to US aid cuts—is proving our human siblinghood inescapably.

Indeed, as Carlyle asks, has humankind ever had to go lower for a proof?