Science The African Thinking
posted by on August 19 at 11:08 AM
Reading this report made my eyebrows go up:
LUSAKA, Zambia — Zambian President Levy Mwanawasa, who broke the African tradition of silence and solidarity among leaders to denounce neighboring Zimbabwe’s economic ruin, died in a French military hospital Tuesday. He was 59.Mwanawasa had suffered a stroke and collapsed at an African Union summit in Egypt in June, which cost Zimbabweans the voice of one of their few champions on the continent.
The mind that is African can see no accident in the sudden stroke and death of an open opponent of Robert Mugabe. The whole strange business points to one understanding: Mwanawasa’s muti (medicine) is not as powerful as Mugabe’s.
Seems like French military muti isn't so hot, either.
WOW!! So all the nations have to do is make sure they have a socialist witch doctor with bigger mojo to get power! Why didn't anyone think of this before? Hey Bill Gates and Bono, you're wasting your time!! Roll on down to Nawlins, find the baddest-ass voduan you can, and get his ass on a plane to the Zim, stat!
If this is how people actually think, then no wonder the whole thing is fucked. Gah.
Interesting thing, watching Bande a Parte (Band of Outsiders) last night at SIFF Cinema, at one point they're reading to each other the news, before planning the robbery.
And one of the news items - this is in 1962 - is about Hutus killing hundreds of thousands of Tutsis for ethnic violence reasons.
Cutting their legs off.
Wow. Makes me even more cynical, considering what they did 40 years later.
Good thing I'm an optimist, and even one of my friends, Laura, who just came back from a year setting up TB clinics in Africa, didn't seem down on it.
Stuff happens.
@2,
You have it backwards. If things weren't so fucked up, people in Zimbabwe wouldn't be so keen on turning to superstition. Good times in any country and culture tend to see people turning away from that shit.
Superstitious backwards culture is screwed.
right, all us white people know everything.
Well, it's hard to preach when our two possible future leaders are meeting in a big superstitious tent to talk about world affairs just to prove that they are more superstitious then the other guy and the one guy trying to say that he isn't superstitious to the A-god but really to the Y-god, even though they are allegedly the same god, either A or Y.
That run-on sentence would have killed my 9th grade English teacher.
Will, you don't need to be an optimist. We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families is great book about Rwanda. Africans can take care of their problems. No doubt that corruption and lack or education are horribly stifling, but assistance from China and the West is hardly the solution.
The mind that is African is specious.
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