We can answer this by making a well-known comparison. The most democratic country in Africa according to data is Mauritius. Formerly a French colony, and known in the language as Maurice, the country did not fare well under colonialism just like all other colonized countries. After independence, Mauritius slowly gained back freedoms that were limited back then and sadly are limited in most other countries in the region today as well. Mauritius’s ruling party is a centre-left party that endorsed positions such as affordable healthcare and education, which can be seen in the great deal of reduction in illiteracy of the country, as well as prevalent issues in the region such as infant mortality. Devastatingly, a fellow African country, Angola, did not have the same fate after independence. Today, Angola is ruled by pseudo-“democratic” president, whose family horde the entire country’s wealth, making them some of the most lavishly inhabited families, while Angola has one of the highest infant mortality rates on earth - having healthy and living children grow up in Angola is more than just a challenge due to their future life, the beginning on its own is barely a start.
Hopefully all countries and societies may one day have free and prosperous democracies and children may never die over corruption.
True. Smog is fog combined with other pollutants like smoke than can be from automobiles or cars.
Hope this helps.
1. lifeless
2. evaporation
3. seeps into
4. surface, pycnocline, deep
5. food web
6. photic
The second assumption is that there is something exceptional about Africa, that while other continents and peoples have got or are getting richer, Africans, for reasons we can think but no longer speak in polite company, choose to remain in poverty. Our capacity to see Africa as divergent lets us off the hook so we don’t have to understand our own complicity in the challenges various African countries face today. It also means we rarely rage as we should against the actions of the corporations and governments that profit from instability, corruption or even inexperience (African negotiators at the climate talks have historically been disadvantaged by their lack of experience and the expectation among western negotiators that they should be grateful with whatever they get).
If there is, then, no innate propensity for corruption, violence or poverty in Africa, then the narratives that fuel the stereotypes need questioning. One possible explanation comes from the Nigerian author Chinua Achebe, who said: “The west seems to suffer deep anxieties about the precariousness of its civilisation and to have a need for constant reassurance by comparison with Africa.” Perhaps it’s not Africa that needs saving, but us.
