The Final Days

AFRICA

As the final day of my stay in the Democratic Republic of the Congo draws ever closer, I am filled with an unappreciative melancholy. A feeling of imminent fate fills every fiber of my being, as if there is a chapter in my life that is closing…long after the story has been read.

Mother Africa! She fills you with awe; the scent of her being rips its gut wrenching songs of sorrow through your soul, and leaves you desperately searching, for meaning within yourself. I have witnessed the worst she has to offer, but I have experienced her beauty. A beauty that cries for recognition, cries for the freedom of the slavery that is her past. A past that she is still a slave to.

Africa does not need hand-outs but she does need investment and sustainable development. I have witnessed the poverty that that fills her lands with the bloated bellies of the children that is her future. Wild-eyed and fearful of their impending fate, the children roam the fertile lands with outstretched hands, in expectation of the life giving sustenance they have become dependant on. We feed her children, but we do not feed her.

I have seen the ravaged earth, crimson with the blood of her youth who fight for causes they will never comprehend. Africa is a war. The battles fought in her jungles and on her plains, indiscriminately take the lives that is her soul.

I have experienced the killer that is malaria. But I have been fortunate to be able to afford the medication that kept me alive. Yet thousands die daily, for the simple reason… they cannot afford the medication. We have eradicated malaria from the Commores, yet Africans in power refuse the medication for their own people.

As I leave one part of Africa for another, I realize that there will always be war on this continent. War in a different form is still war. In a country where the elected leader avoids prosecution simply because those who are appointed to prosecute, have been placed in their positions by the very same leaders they are supposed to prosecute. Where police are powerless, to such an extent, that they need to hire security firms to guard the police stations. Where hijacking, rape and murder is considered to be a part of life and more is spent on pursuing those who steal from the bounty that the government has already stolen from the people. A country whose leaders commit, genocide, by refusing to acknowledge the link between HIV and AIDS.

South Africa hides behind her first world status. Her leaders constantly roam the rest of the continent in an attempt to make Africans conform to her whim. Yet, Africans within her borders are dying of crime, poverty and disease.

South Africa closes the eyes of the world, by focusing its attention outside its borders. When I return... it will be my mission to open the eyes of the world so that they may see, that South Africa is the pus filled wound that cripples the rest of the continent.

Poverty, crime and disease cannot be eradicated by simply denying its existence.
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Clubs

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please note me the link of your own personal stamp that I might add it here.