AFRICA

My first trip to Africa was in 1976. There, I travelled by train and river boat through Egypt, Sudan, Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda. With only a limited budget, I was obliged to enter the world of the poor.

On a train roof in Sudan, 1976

Since that first journey I have made innumerable visits to Africa and travelled in many African countries. I developed, early on, a strong scepticism towards The White Man’s deeds on the black continent, and this sceptical attitude still motivates me as a journalist. My documentary  ”One Man’s Gain” is one example. It is about the UN aid project in Sudan and portrays the way in which this aid has become a ‘milch cow’ for slick entrepreneurs, instead of being used to alleviate the suffering of the starving populace.

The problem of global poverty has, to a large extent, been erased from the political agenda, and instead become an issue for the international relief organizations.

Famine in Ethiopia. Photo: Bengt Nilsson

Many people see a solution to poverty in the transference of resources from wealthy countries to impoverished ones, a view that is based on the idea that Africa lacks resources. That, however, is not the case. The African continent has a tremendous wealth of resources, and is sparsely populated with young, able-bodied people. The poverty in Africa has political reasons. Thus, where development aid is concerned,  a fundamental re-thinking is needed. There is a stereotyped image of the poor African as an apathetic victim. ”We” should help ”them”. But that is not the reality. I am convinced that the poorer countries must find their own solutions to their own problems. Increasingly more people are now aligning themselves with this way of thinking; one of the trendsetters is the Peruvian economist, Hernando de Soto.

Read an excerpt from his book ”The Mystery of Capital” here:
http://www.policylibrary.com/desoto/index.htm

Another researcher, who is attracting more and more attention, is the Nobel laureate Amartya Sen. His possibly most important thesis is that Third World poverty is not primarily due to lack of resources, but rather the lack of legal rights. Read more about and by Amartya Sen at: www.nd.edu/~kmukhopa/cal300/calcutta/amartya.htm

Red Cross in Ethiopia. Foto: Bengt Nilsson

Links to webpages about Africa:
http://www.sudan.net/
http://www.afrol.com/afrol.htm
http://allafrica.com/
http://www.irinnews.org/
http://www.justiceafrica.org/
http://www.savannen.com
http://www.crisisweb.org