We Should Stop Exploiting Africa — And Start Caring – The American Spectator

Amidst the silly cat videos and the tedious political cartoons, one occasionally stumbles across an internet image of stunning insight. Such is the case with an image of Greta Thunberg and an African child, which has been making the rounds for some time. The image juxtaposes two photographs. The top picture shows an angry-faced Greta — do we ever see her smiling? — with a balloon caption saying, “You have stolen my dreams and my childhood!” The lower image shows an emaciated black child digging into hard ground, whose caption reads, “Getting that cobalt for your electric car as fast as I can, Greta.”

Other commentators have focused on what this image says about the moral obtuseness of much of the climate change activism in the United States and the EU. The horrors inflicted on African children in these mines have been exhaustively documented; anyone who pretends that this is not a problem is either willfully ignorant or intellectually dishonest. But this is typical of climate change activists, prisoners of a mindset that conflates some legitimate concerns — for which there are practical solutions — with dystopian fantasies, the fever dreams of “social justice” tyranny.

I’ve been concerned about the environment since before Greta Thunberg was born. For that matter, my interest in environmental issues dates back to a time before her parents were born. Sadly, somewhere along the way, informed concern has given way to mindless virtue signaling. Even more sadly, this mindless virtue signaling has now become a driving force in U.S. and EU economic policy. If current political trends continue, Greta and all of her ilk will have their electric cars by 2035, even if it means immobilizing most of the rest of the North American and European populations.

The West Is Exploiting Africa

As irritating as our climate fanatics have become, I’m less interested in their incessant vaporing than in the condition of the other child in the picture, the one whose childhood is actually being stolen. The numbers are appalling. A Wilson Center analysis from 2021 indicated that “of the 255,000 Congolese mining cobalt, 40,000 are children, some as young as six years.”

I don’t often look to NPR for coverage that might raise questions about our mad rush to electric vehicles, but a Feb. 1, 2023, story made the point in no uncertain terms. In an interview with Siddharth Kara, author of Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers our Lives, conditions in the Congolese cobalt mining areas are described as “subhuman, grinding, degrading.” The mine workers live as slaves in all but name, in conditions that invite comparison to the chattel slavery we thought had been abolished, or, at worst, to the Nazi concentration camps. (And I cannot recommend Cobalt Red strongly enough — it really deserves the accolade “a must-read.”)

I first became interested in Africa as a teenager, some 60 years ago. The initial interest, I’m afraid, was pretty superficial, fueled by the Nile adventure stories of Alan Moorehead and the novels of Rider Haggard, Wilbur Smith, and Stuart Cloete, not exactly the best foundation for a sensitive appreciation of the continent and its people. But a thoughtful high school teacher introduced me to Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country, which broadened my outlook considerably. In college, I discovered Chinua Achebe and delved more thoughtfully into African history. Even as I pursued a career focused elsewhere, it remained a background interest.

With the freedom of retirement, however, I’ve renewed my interest, trying once again to see Africa more broadly, trying to look squarely at both the good and the bad. Sadly, the bad tends to present itself more vividly and insistently than the good. In a previous American Spectator essay, I wrote about the persecution of Christians in Nigeria. I could equally well have written of similar persecution in other sub-Saharan conflict regions. In another essay, I discussed Russia’s Wagner Group, which, prior to the war in Ukraine, had become both notorious and wealthy as thugs in the service of various African tyrants. The breakdown of order in the northeast Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) served as a backdrop for my novel, Letter of Reprisal. In the novel, I only scratched the surface of a monumental problem, one in which rival warlords prey upon thousands of innocent farmers and workers, including those adults and children slaving in the cobalt mines, oftentimes with Chinese complicity. (READ MORE from James H. McGee: Where Do Wagner, Prigozhin, Putin Go From Here?)

The attendant chaos and violence provide the framework for this brutal exploitation, even as foreign interests provide economic incentives. The statistics are appalling. As of June 7, the Council on Foreign Relations’ Global Conflict Tracker noted that conflict in the eastern portion of the DRC has claimed approximately 6 million lives since 1996. That’s a figure worth repeating — 6 million lives. The same source notes that Chinese companies now control most of the cobalt (and other precious mineral mines) in the region and that, while the Congolese army has utterly failed to bring protection to the citizens of the region, it has focused on protecting these Chinese-owned assets. The U.N. and other peacekeepers in the region have been notably incapable of dealing with the various militias and terror groups that prey upon the region.

Scarcely a month ago, ISIS-connected militants, operating out of bases in a Congolese national park, murdered some four dozen school children in a school in Uganda, entering dormitories, hacking with machetes, throwing bombs, and setting fires. The U.N. secretary-general condemned the act, Western news outlets covered it superficially for a day or two, and then it disappeared from view. Instead, most recent coverage of Uganda has centered on its strict laws against homosexuality. President Joe Biden made a very strong statement condemning the latest and harshest of these laws; if he had anything to say about the attack on the school, I’ve yet to find it.

And this, in a nutshell, is where we find ourselves. If Africa matters to us, it’s not because of the hopes and dreams of the Africans but rather as a place where we can project our own cultural values and serve our own interests. Africa has grave problems, to be sure, and Africans deserve our considered support in addressing them. But instead, we seem to have exchanged the old colonialism for a new variety, captured in the image of Greta and the child laborer.

Centuries ago, we dressed colonialism in talk of a civilizing mission and spoke condescendingly of the “white man’s burden.” Now we lecture the Africans about the superiority of our moral values and our progressive religious beliefs, and we justify our complicity in rapacious resource exploitation by telling them that we are saving them from the imminent hell on earth of climate change. It’s no wonder that the Chinese have made the inroads that they have. However brutal the underlying premises of their economic transactionalism, it doesn’t come dressed in the pretense of virtuous superiority.

Chaos and Violence Are Not the Whole Picture

Perhaps it’s time we stepped back, parked our prejudices and preconceptions, and made a concerted effort to see Africa as a whole, respecting the good that can be found across the continent while making a genuine effort to understand the bad. I’ve laid out some of the bad; now let’s turn to considering some of the good.

We might start by recognizing that the quality of life in many African countries has been steadily improving over the last several decades. Admittedly, our metrics for quality of life are often confounded by African circumstances and by our tendency to impose our values on measurements of progress.

For example, quality-of-life discussions surrounding the largest and most “Westernized” African cities frequently focus on “livability” issues that have a greater impact on the Western expatriate community in these cities than on the locals. Cautioning a well-to-do Westerner that his expensive luxury SUV might invite unwanted criminal attention is scarcely a measurement of quality-of-life improvements for Africans. Nor should our increasingly obsessive focus on African’s less-than-enthusiastic embrace of LGBTQ+ within their communities be regarded as dispositive. But if we are willing to look more broadly and to set aside our cultural prejudices, we can find much that confounds our conventional images of African “backwardness.”

Consider Botswana, one of the fastest-growing economies in the world and one in which economic progress increasingly elevates the living conditions of the entire population, not just a fortunate few. Much the same might be said of Namibia. In both of these cases, while economic progress still benefits from historical patterns of resource…