The Riches and Poverty of Africa

THE RICHES AND POVERTY OF AFRICA


PART ONE

[The following was an email I sent to our supporters in August, 2002, after our memorable trip to visit our graduates from Scott Theological College in seven African nations – Uganda, Ethiopia, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Swaziland, Malawi, and Tanzania. After you read the whole series of four parts, I would be happy to receive your feedback.]

“For the past thirty four years we have lived and worked in Kenya with its rich beauty and natural wealth mingled with wrenching poverty of people surviving with meagre resources. During our recent opportunity of visiting seven different African countries, from Ethiopia in the north with its ancient peoples and culture, to Malawi, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Swaziland and Namibia in the south, I have done a lot of thinking and enquiring. Why does Africa have so many riches mingled with such pervasive and endemic poverty?”

“Africa is a beautiful continent which is rich in natural resources. Africa cannot take a back seat to “America the beautiful” in its diversity of natural beauty and resources. Every country we visited was unique in its splendour. The awesome lakes in the Great Rift Valley are jewels in Africa that stretch from Ethiopia in the north, through Uganda and Kenya, down into southern Africa, moving into the Indian Ocean off the coast of Mozambique. We saw the water plunging out of Lake Victoria into the tributary that flows into the Nile. It takes three months for the water to flow 4,000 miles to the Nile delta. We walked beside the longest shelf of falling water in the world where 550 million litres fall 300 feet into the gorge every minute, sending mist 1,500 feet into the air. It is awesome. In the vernacular language these falls are called, “The smoke that thunders.” David Livingstone called them the Victoria Falls. We travelled over the vast Central African Savannah grass lands where elephant grass grows fifteen feet tall and the whole of central Africa receives plentiful rainfall for all kinds of rich agriculture. We saw the tiny but beautiful monarchy of Swaziland perched on the mountains of southern Africa with mountain streams flowing everywhere. Though Namibia is a desert country with the Namib to the west along the Atlantic ocean (the oldest and driest desert in the world) and the Kalahari desert on the east sweeping into Botswana, the country is actually rich in mineral wealth. In fact all these countries have mineral wealth which is the envy of the world - tin, copper, bauxite, coal, gold, diamonds, oil and uranium.”

“But mingled with all the natural beauty and resources, I frequently became depressed by the pervasive, persistent and endemic poverty everywhere. Yes, the wealthy class is always present in these countries. When arriving in Zambia, the first place Bishop Shamapani took us was a modern shopping mall recently built by a South African company. I was dumb struck. I thought, “Has Zambia overtaken Kenya in economic development?” Inside the mall one would have thought he was in some electronic store in the modern West – wide aisles stocked with electronic goods that staggered my mind. But we soon discovered that Zambia is a very, very poor country with people subsisting on this fertile land. Yes, a rich minority but the masses in poverty. Zambia is a country with so much land occupied and developed by so few people that the Zambian government is actually inviting white, commercial farmers from Zimbabwe and South Africa to take possession of empty portions of the land and develop it. People in all the countries where we visited (except Uganda) felt that their country was economically depressed. Ethiopia is reckoned the second poorest country in Africa even though they trace their history back to King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba and even though Ethiopia became a Christian monarchy in the fourth century. Why?”

CONTINUED IN PART TWO