I
don’t normally have a theme to my reading, but this year I did. During the first three months of the year I
was awaiting my notification regarding whether I would receive the Fulbright
and be moving to Africa, so I began reading about the place that would
hopefully become my new home. After I
received my Fulbright notification in early March I started reading even more
about Africa, and particularly tourism on the continent, in order to prepare me
for my teaching and research here. And
of course, once I got here, the theme continued.
I’ve
obviously learned a lot living here in Africa, but I’ve learned even more from
reading, and subsequently asking questions. Here are what I consider the most interesting
things about Africa which I learned from books over the past twelve months:
· Less
than 20% of the people in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) have access to electricity.
· Since
1950 Nigeria has pumped more than $400 billion of oil- enough to cancel all of
SSA’s debt- but 80% of that money goes to less than 1% of the Nigerian
population. Apparently those people don’t know what to do
with their money as one-tenth (1/10) of all champagne in the world is consumed
in Lagos by the oil tycoons.
· Luanda,
Angola is the most expensive city in the world (the average hotel sells for
$600/night) but more than 70% of the nation lives below the poverty line.
· Taking
a lesson from Stalin who said, “It’s not who votes that counts, it’s who counts
the votes,” President Obiang of Equatorial Guinea had ballots pre-printed with
his name on it during the last election.
Soldiers “supervised” voting and he amassed a victory with 97% of the
votes.
· Eighty
percent (80%) of coltan is found in the Democratic Republic of Congo. In 2000 the price of coltan spiked tenfold to
$365 a pound due to the launch of the Sony Playstation 2 game console.
· Most
of the pirates off the coast of Somalia are former fishermen whose livelihoods
were destroyed due to illegal fishing and the dumping of toxic waste by foreign
fishing vessels.
· Forty
percent (40%) of the countries in Africa are landlocked, meaning that to ship
from South Africa to Zimbabwe costs as much as to ship from South Africa to
China.
· In
the mid-1970s Lesotho was so poor that one of its primary exports was human
blood to South African hospitals.
· For
the first six months of 2002 Madagascar had two presidents because the defeated
incumbent refused to step down after ruling the country for 20 years.
· The
Congo Free State (1885-1908) was the personal property of King Leopold II, King
of Belgium who wanted the ivory, minerals and rubber from the region. Nearly 10 million people, or 20% of the population,
were killed for failing to meet the required rubber quotas. The rubber extracted from Congo went to
produce car tires in the U.S. and Europe and condoms, which was credited with
the drop in the European birth rate.
I
brought another 32 books about Africa with me from the U.S. when I came here
that I still have yet to read. I’m not
sure whether I can get all those finished in the next five months, but I
certainly plan to try.
Here are a few of the books I read during 2013:
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