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Bigger is Better
[ 5 minute read ]
Opinion
So Africa is bigger than we thought, huh?
Apparently the Mercator maps represent Africa as being the same size as Greenland which is in reality about fifteen times smaller. That should deter some day-sailors from trying to sail around the coast of Africa in a weekend. Africa should be taken seriously. From my perspective, I already wouldn't lie down on the ground to sleep in Africa without at least something between me and the ground; something I have done countless times in Europe. I had an officer friend in the RAF Regiment who told me about his training in Belize. Although Belize is far from Africa I think there are similarities in that my friend's story related to one of the soldiers lying down on the jungle floor and then days later finding that larvae were erupting from his arms. Whether this is a true story, now I look at it in hindsight, is highly suspect. In fact, I now realise that it is a fabrication to scare trainees to NOT lie down on jungle floors without some kind of barrier. On a training exercise they would, of course, been scratching their arms and the larvae would not be allowed to erupt before medical attention was administered. In the 'wild' when you are fleeing the enemy or creeping up on them, you can't just stand up and pop over to the medical clinic or field doctor. In any case, the point was made and no doubt well received. My officer friend did say it happened to someone else; always someone else, eh?
The move to represent the size of Africa in two dimensions, as it relates to the size of other countries was almost unanimously voted for by the UN except for one country which voted against it and six abstentions. I shan't name that country that voted against it because their National Security Agency is hot on the tails of independent thinkers, including those outside their own borders. Suffice it to say that 'size matters' and the concept of demonstrating the true size of Africa on two dimensional maps relates to the consideration of investment. There is, I presume, more opportunity for savagery in a big country than a small one. Rapacious desire has more room to develop where there is land that no-one can see from the nearest town. You know; digging a small hole in the Lake District to bury your dead pet will get noticed by the locals or the visiting walkers. Scraping off square miles of the earth's crust to look for ilmenite ore, the source material for making titanium dioxide (the whiteness of paint and toothpaste among other stuff), in Africa won't be noticed by the town dwellers hundreds of miles away. Mineral poachers only have satellites to hide from.
The potential of Africa being a good investment due to its size was the UN's focus, but this was first conceived by the African nations. All they have to do now is make sure corruption is reduced to a manageable level for outside investors to feel comfortable. My understanding is that when diamonds were first found and the locals were employed to dig, the locals stole the rare big ones and handed in the myriad small stones. If I was a treasure hunter I might not need a boat to look for Spanish gold or sunken pirate ships, I might just need to know a bit more African history and speak to the right people in small villages. Yet, surely, I am being prejudiced by snippets of information I have egregiously stitched together to form a flimsy heuristic, which rule of thumb, in the light of day, many people would call out as racism. I wouldn't argue against them. I wouldn't because the one member country in the United Nations that voted against revealing the true size of Africa wants to be shown as more important than Africa, and has in the past been shown as almost as big as Africa on Mercator maps. Jealousy I have no time for and denying an entity any approbation or validation for potential is, in my eyes, just plain wrong. But, I am not considering the new world order when trade significantly shifts from the Global North to Africa. In the development of Africa we have another potentially cheap Asian-type workforce with access to rare earths and modern technology banging on their doors.
I was lucky to be able to ask a PhD graduate about his chosen field of study. It was Romano-Britain, I think. I floated a few layman questions and eventually understood that the reason that after the Romans left Britain the locals went back to their old ways and did away with underfloor heating and building with lime, was because the Romans took with them their ability to organise and specialise in singular tasks. Entering into an agrarian society with organisation could, I suggest, potentially produce a larger entity that could be a considerable threat to the rest of the world, both economically and physically through armed combat. But what do you do? Suppress the African nations? The African?
If we consider that China has a lot of investment across the world in developing countries and other countries want to stymie China's economic takeover effort, we might need to understand that allowing the manifestation of a potential superpower continent is not necessarily in the hands of the Global North. It is organisation that is the key to the opening of an African Pandora's Box. Taking the blindfold from the eyes of the African innovators may be only a few years away if creativity outside of necessity becomes available to a wider population. Reducing poverty in Africa would, no doubt throw up some interesting and novel work-arounds in hostile environments that currently cripple improvement.
The Global North is indubitably a jealous entity which, I suspect, will be reluctant to hand over any significant control on economics and combat capability and so fairness is, I suspect, coloured by an executive decision to control growth; likewise China and India should be equally alarmed about the potential labour-force of Africa becoming organised, if it is not themselves who are the puppet-masters. Yes, I have just maligned the African and reduced them to being controllable wretches but what do you do? We saw the same in England during the Industrial Revolution when country-folk leading agrarian lifestyles 'upsticked' and handed themselves over to industrialists, future liability to debt and workhouses and even prison. While I have no reason or desire to offer African country workers as being two hundred years behind England, I do feel that a loose comparison to the plight of poor people in the past is a valid one and bears consideration. While many comfortable people bemoan the colonialism of empires past, I might metaphorically stand at their rallies with a placard that says 'See the present and look to the future.'
Perhaps though, the single UN member who voted against showing Africa as having even more potential by dint of its new perceived size is presenting a reality that the rest of the charitable world chooses to ignore simply because they want to share and be fair. Unfortunately, I feel that having an emotional force contribute to decision-making can create a manifestation that has a life of its own and will one day bite the hand of its feeder.
Just like lying down on a Belize jungle floor, any Global North entity is going to want a barrier between it and the tooth and claw of an African jungle. A jungle that is now likely to be considered more interesting than it was previously perceived as being before a new map becomes the standard.