Tuesday, August 28, 2007
Monday, August 27, 2007
Mauritania criminalizes slavery!
You heard that right - on 24 August 2007, the Mauritanian Senate passed a law criminalizing slavery. Having just finished the second season of HBO's Rome, this news report gave me an eerie sense that any moment I'd see a banner on Google news announcing Octavian Ceasar's victory at Mutina, but after a while I gave up. Anyway, here's an extract from the article:
Hooray for the half-a-million slaves in Mauritania - it must be encouraging to live in such a very progressive society. A bit of digging on the US Department of State's Human Rights Country reports for 2006 implies that slavery was really a bit of a rural area thing - however, when three-quarters of the country is desert or semi-desert and the capital (and largest city) houses less than a million people, slavery being a "rural phenomenon" suddenly seems a lot less encouraging.
So why am I picking on Mauritania this evening? Quite simply, I feel this sort of thing is symptomatic of so many of Africa's woes - stuck in the glorious age of Pan-Africanism (or in the case of Mauritania, the 1700s), Africa, by and large, has simply failed to get with the 21st century program. Sure, colonialism created a lot of very unpleasant circumstances that will take a long, long time to fix. But still, the continent lags behind the rest of the world. I can't fix an exact figure to this, but by my estimates Africa has received something like $500 billion in aid since independence, not including investment and income generated.
Personally, I think that for the bulk of African countries, much of the problem stems from a separation (and ever-growing gap) between a rich, ruling elite and an under-educated populace that spends most of its time fighting - quite often for survival. And that's only in countries where the government actually has some power over the citizenry - they don't call Joseph Kabila the Mayor of Kinshasa for nothing. But hey, who wants a smart populace anyway?
On 8 August, Mauritania’s National Assembly unanimously adopted a law criminalizing slavery, which continues to exist in Mauritania in both traditional and contemporary forms. The law, passed by the Senate on 22 August, makes slavery punishable by 5-10 years in prison. It marks the first time in Mauritanian history that slave holders have been sanctioned. (IRIN News)
Hooray for the half-a-million slaves in Mauritania - it must be encouraging to live in such a very progressive society. A bit of digging on the US Department of State's Human Rights Country reports for 2006 implies that slavery was really a bit of a rural area thing - however, when three-quarters of the country is desert or semi-desert and the capital (and largest city) houses less than a million people, slavery being a "rural phenomenon" suddenly seems a lot less encouraging.
So why am I picking on Mauritania this evening? Quite simply, I feel this sort of thing is symptomatic of so many of Africa's woes - stuck in the glorious age of Pan-Africanism (or in the case of Mauritania, the 1700s), Africa, by and large, has simply failed to get with the 21st century program. Sure, colonialism created a lot of very unpleasant circumstances that will take a long, long time to fix. But still, the continent lags behind the rest of the world. I can't fix an exact figure to this, but by my estimates Africa has received something like $500 billion in aid since independence, not including investment and income generated.
Personally, I think that for the bulk of African countries, much of the problem stems from a separation (and ever-growing gap) between a rich, ruling elite and an under-educated populace that spends most of its time fighting - quite often for survival. And that's only in countries where the government actually has some power over the citizenry - they don't call Joseph Kabila the Mayor of Kinshasa for nothing. But hey, who wants a smart populace anyway?
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