History – African Countries – Page 4 – education and deconstruction.com

Roses Under the Miombo Trees

The Book of the Week is “Roses Under the Miombo Trees” by Amanda Parkyn, published in 2012. This is a four-year chronicle of a family in Rhodesia in the early 1960’s. The country at the time was comprised of three territories, one of which later became the country of Malawi.

When she was in her early twenties, the author, an Englishwoman, married a Rhodesian. They, as light-skinned people, had all the creature-comforts a former British colony had to offer: tennis, golf, bridge, swimming, and yachting. However, technology in entertainment and telecommunications was behind that of the United States. Few people had television in rural areas, and telephone calls still had to be made with the help of a live operator. One of their neighbors had a tennis court made of dead anthills, that had been shaped with water and sun-dried.

The author describes their social life and how it changed as her husband was transferred to different territories in connection with his employment; the birth of their two children, her love of gardening and the job performance of the household’s dark-skinned domestic servant.

Read the book to learn the details of the ups and downs of the family’s life, in their specific time and place.

The Boy Who Harnessed The Wind

The Book of the Week is “The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind” by William Kamkwamba and Bryan Mealer, published in 2009.

This ebook is the inspiring autobiography of a boy born in 1988 in Kasungu, Malawi. He grew up on a farm where corn, tobacco and pumpkins were grown and livestock was raised. The people there believe in witchcraft, but his father believed God protected his family from it because they were Presbyterian. Nevertheless, he wrote, “Sadly, our country’s constitution doesn’t have a clause that protects us from witchcraft.” He recounted incidents in the single-digit 2000’s in which people were put on trial for witchcraft and when deemed guilty, heavily fined.

In the mid 1990’s, entertainment in the “trading center” near Kasungu consisted of “… a thatch hut with wooden benches, a small television, and a VCR” on which to watch movies. The author and his friends played a game they called “USA versus Vietnam.”

The Malawians celebrate their independence from Great Britain on July 6. Throughout his childhood, the author was a fan of the MTL Wanderers, aka the Nomads, a professional soccer club– the enemy team of the Big Bullets, in the Malawi Super League. He listened to the games on Radio One on a battery-operated radio. There was only one other radio station, Radio Two. Both were run by the government. The author wrote, “Only 2% of Malawians have electricity, and this is a huge problem.”

Read the book to learn of the extreme hardships Kamkwamba and his family faced with respect to famine and his education, and learn of his ingenuity, resourcefulness, persistence and industriousness in doing a project that was eventually noticed by people halfway around the world.

Running For My Life

The Book of the Week is “Running For My Life” by Lopez Lomong and Mark Tabb, published in 2012. This suspenseful ebook tells the extraordinary life story of a “lost boy” born in the nation that is now South Sudan.

Lomong’s childhood was cut short when he was snatched from his family at six years old, along with many other boys, by rebel soldiers fighting a years-long civil war between Muslims and Christians in that country. The recruits were called “lost boys” because they were forced into leading violent, empty lives, instead of becoming productive members of society.

Lomong, too, would have been destined to become a soldier or die of disease or starvation were it not for three older children who aided him in escaping from the captives’ camp. In the next chapter of his life, he still suffered extreme hardships, but he had a chance to play soccer, which he enjoyed, and excel at running, at which he was a natural athlete.

Read the book to learn how Lomong achieved tremendous success in various endeavors against impossible odds (considering his initial life circumstances), and what led him to set a goal to help his native people obtain what citizens of industrialized nations take for granted– clean water, health care, education and nutrition.

Long Walk to Freedom

The Book of the Week is “Long Walk to Freedom” by Nelson Mandela, published in 1994. This is Mandela’s autobiography.

The author’s father died when he was nine. The author was destined for a dreadful life of poverty under South African apartheid, were it not for a lucky break. His mother had a connection to a wealthy, powerful Xhosa chief, who raised him along with his son. They acquired a quality, British-style education.

Although he was a poor student, Mandela earned an undergraduate degree and eventually, after many years, a law degree. An attorney with whom he worked, advised him against entering politics, as this would cause him to “get in trouble with the authorities, lose all his clients, go bankrupt, break up his family and end up in jail.” Unfortunately, most of the above came to pass.

The South African government employed “divide and conquer” tactics to prevent the Whites, Africans, Indians and Coloureds from uniting and overthrowing White rule. However, there were indications that it cared about world opinion during the decades Mandela was in prison (the 1960’s into the 1990’s). The government could have summarily executed Mandela and his fellow African National Congress party members (as well as committed genocide against all dark-skinned ethnic groups), but it did not.

Instead, it held Stalinesque show trials to inevitably determine that politically active protest groups were dangerous subversives who had to be locked up. It oppressed all non-whites by restricting many aspects of their lives, including voting, employment, place of residence, local travel, curfew hours; even medical care. Mandela’s boyhood was completely absent of physicians. Black ones did not exist in his generation, and going to see a white one was unheard of.

In 1962, Mandela, was living “underground” during a respite from prison. With the help of friends, he found a way to travel internationally to attend political conferences. He recounted that, “…as I was boarding the plane I saw that the pilot was black. I had never seen a black pilot before, and the instant I did I had to quell my panic. How could a black man fly a plane? But a moment later I caught myself: I had fallen into the apartheid mind-set, thinking Africans were inferior and that flying was a white man’s job. I sat back in my seat, and chided myself for such thoughts.”

Mandela experienced conflicting feelings about his Xhosa-tribe origins and English upbringing. “I confess to being something of an Anglophile. When I thought of Western democracy and freedom, I thought of the British parliamentary system. Despite Britain being the home of parliamentary democracy, it was that democracy that had helped to inflict a pernicious system of iniquity on my people. While I abhorred the notion of British imperialism, I never rejected the trappings of British style and manners.”

Strength In What Remains

The Book of the Week is “Strength In What Remains” by Tracy Kidder, published 2009. This is the biography of a man named Deo who miraculously survived the genocidal violence that spilled over from Rwanda into Burundi in 1994-95.

Deo grew up in the latter nation, where his family, of the Tutsi tribe, did farming and herding in the mountains near Lake Tanganyika. In the 1970’s, the Catholic church owned and operated his one-room schoolhouse. His parents, who believed in education, could ill-afford the school tuition of one dollar. They were able to buy him a pencil but not a pen.

The Germans and later, Belgians (colonizers of Rwanda and Burundi) engendered hatred between the Hutus and Tutsi tribes. In 1995 in Burundi, a two-month killing spree led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.

During that time, Deo was attending medical school in Bujumbura, Burundi’s capital, far from his home. He found himself in a traumatic and dire situation; traumatic in that he witnessed gruesome scenes, including those of deteriorating corpses of humans and cows lining the roadside, and dire, in that there were hostile soldiers everywhere, seeking out people who looked like Tutsis, pursuant to their facial features (similar to the way Nazis sought out Jews during the Holocaust) and torturing and murdering them. Over the next decade, Deo was able to overcome his seemingly overwhelming difficulties and fulfill his dream.

Burundi’s people continued to suffer long after the violence was over. There was poor regard for human rights, especially among those injured in the tribal warfare who were indigent. (A lot of those lucky enough to survive, were rendered indigent by the tribal warfare). In the late 1990’s, hospitals had a special section for patients who could not pay their medical bills. They could not be discharged until they paid up, during which time they were given neither care nor food. Family and/or friends were expected to assist them. In addition, the bodies of deceased patients could not be released to their families unless the bills were paid.

This blogger found Deo’s story remarkable and suspenseful. However, she is giving the author the benefit of the doubt with regard to a few ambiguous passages in the book, attributing them to a bad editorial decision. The passages occur in the first half. In the middle, the author explains that over the course of two years, Deo told him his story, and “I’m sure that the account of his escape suffered here and there from memory’s usual additions and subtractions, and there was no direct way to verify a lot of it…” This warning should come at the very beginning so that native New Yorkers will not question the geographic accuracy of the following passages, referred to above:

“On a day in his sophomore year he was riding the subway home from Columbia [University] and remembered that he hadn’t talked to Claude [in Burundi] for weeks. He got off at 125th Street.” [The story says that Deo was an undergraduate, attending classes at the Morningside Heights campus, not the medical school, and at the time, he was staying with people downtown]

“He figured he needed only twenty dollars a week for subways to and from Columbia, and sometimes he could save part of that by walking from lower Manhattan to the campus up in Harlem.” [same comment as above]

“Deo pushed the grocery cart down the sidewalks of Eighty-ninth Street. There were times when he felt crushed by the height and humiliated by the splendor of the buildings in this part of New York.” [West or East 89th Street? This is an important distinction to New Yorkers.]

Casting With A Fragile Thread

The Book of the Week is “Casting With A Fragile Thread” by Wendy Kann, published in 2007. This is the engaging memoir of a native white-skinned Rhodesian. She describes the familial and financial hardships she and her two sisters faced growing up with an absent mother and a risk-taking father, in a nation undergoing radical political change. In 1980, Rhodesia came to be ruled by Robert Mugabe, a dark-skinned dictator, who allowed the country to be ravaged by his previously oppressed countrymen. Read the book to learn how the author put her difficulties behind her.

Asking for Trouble

The Book of the Week is “Asking for Trouble” by Donald Woods, published in 1981. This book’s author (miraculously) lived to tell of his experiences publishing an anti-apartheid newspaper in South Africa under apartheid in the 1960’s and 1970’s.

South Africa’s then-leader allowed Woods’ newspaper to remain in existence only to maintain the public relations charade, that the country allowed free speech on the subject of its treatment of certain of its citizens. Nevertheless, Woods lived under threat of death all the time, from his numerous enemies. His family was also in danger. He described one incident in which his children naively tried on T-shirts that had come in the mail from what appeared to be a politically friendly source. The shirts contained the acidic chemical ninhydrin, which burned their skin.

Read the book to learn what dire action Woods eventually had to take to save his own life.

The Jack Bank

The Book of the Week is “The Jack Bank, A Memoir of A South African Childhood” by Glen Retief, published in 2011. This autobiography focuses on the author’s realizing his gay identity in a specific generation– as a white South African male in the last years of apartheid. While coming of age, he struggled with not only apartheid, but with “authoritarianism, patriarchy and cycles of violence.”

The author explains that his family was English, rather than Afrikaner. The latter people were militant in nature. He illustrates this point by recounting his experiences at nine and ten years old, of playing war games with his Afrikaner friend, and looking up to his friend’s father, a police officer, as a role model.

At twelve, he was sent to boarding school. As a freshman, he was subjected to extremely brutal bullying. Later, as an upperclassman, he himself did the bullying. He would have undergone this pattern again– in “military basic training, and then the whites-only conscript force… to control forty million black South Africans;” however, Nelson Mandela’s political activities finally succeeded at the tail end of the 1980’s. Prior to that, Retief witnessed examples of the pattern again and again, at university and later in his black boyfriend’s violent, rundown neighborhood.

Read the book to learn more details of what growing up was like under South African apartheid, and what the author did to find his place in the world.

The Shadow of the Sun

The Book of the Week is “The Shadow of the Sun” by Ryszard Kapuscinski, originally published in 1998, translated by Klara Glowczewska. This book details the personal observations of a Polish journalist who traveled to various African countries from the late 1950’s through the late 1990’s.

He noted that in 1958 in Ghana, when it came to private citizens’ interaction with their federal government, there was no bureaucracy. If they had a comment or question, they simply personally visited the relevant minister, such as the Minister of Education and Information, and reported their issues. Children started school as young as three. The two types of schools were missionary-run and state-run, but the state still held ultimate power over both, and there was a nationwide curriculum.

The continent of Africa has had its inhabitants and resources exploited for centuries. Colonization gave rise to exportation of slaves, the creation of infrastructure on the land, the importation of weapons, medical advances against tropical diseases and dispersal of goods around the world.

The author remarked that in Dar es Salaam, Tanganyika (now Tanzania), his “prestigious white status” decreased after he contracted cerebral malaria and then tuberculosis.

There is a common pattern to the way Africa’s military leaders have acquired the maximum resources they possibly can. Once they’ve stolen all they can get from their citizens and made enemies along the way, their next trick is to negotiate a peace treaty and schedule elections. This charade fools the World Bank into lending the leaders money.

The endings of numerous dictatorships have followed a common pattern, too. The new guard attempted to coerce the old leader into revealing his private bank account number. However, the stereotype, which also may be true, is that he engaged in arms and drug sales, and put his money in foreign accounts so that he could draw upon funds when he went into exile.

Because Nigeria is a large nation, in January 1966, the rebels had to invade all five of its regional capitals, taking over the airport, radio station, telephone exchange and post office in each. The sending of outgoing telegrams was banned.

Through the decades, Ethiopia’s governments went from feudal-aristocratic to Marxist-Leninist to federal-democratic.

In 1989, the torture of Liberian dictator Samuel Doe was videotaped and shown continuously in bars and on the wealthy’s VCR’s.

On the whole, Africans are quite superstitious. They believe in witch doctors, herbalists, fortune tellers, exorcists, amulets, talismans, divining rods and magical medicines. The author was assisted in taking advantage of this to deter further frequent burglaries of his residence, by hanging white rooster feathers on his door. “Witches are capable of vengeance, persecution, spreading disease, inflicting pain, sowing death.”

Inhabitants of the Sahara desert regions are paralyzed by drought. The drought in Ethiopia in 1975 closed all establishments, including schools, and caused a lot of deaths in the villages.

African children under 15 accounted for more than half the population in 2001. They have participated in all aspects of adult life in recent decades– fighting in armies, living in refugee camps, toiling on farms, purchasing and selling goods and fetching water for their families.

Very often, lack of repair and maintenance of infrastructure makes for major eyesores on the African landscape. In the 1990’s, the war-damaged Robertsfield airport in Liberia , the largest airport in Africa, was closed, abandoned and left to deteriorate.

The author wrote this book of his African experiences because “The kind of history known in Europe as scholarly and objective can never arise here, because the African past has no documents or records,” only oral stories, passed on from one generation to the next. Time is described as “long ago” “very long ago” and “so long ago that no one remembers.”