The Harry and Berniece Gockel International Symposium April 13 and 14, 1998 Webster Auditorium Missouri Southern State College Joplin, Missouri

The Africa I Know

By Richard W. Massa
Director, Institute of International Studies (1996-99)
Missouri Southern State College

 

Having been a child of the early 1930s in a small southeast Kansas town and in Joplin, Missouri, my earliest images of Africa came from Johnny Weismuller's Tarzan movies: jungles with lots of vines, snakes of all kinds, monkeys and chimpanzees, and occasional snarling cats. I remember thundering herds of elephants and wildebeest and sweeping savannas, and savages beyond belief.

As the decade of the '30s passed, I learned about Lake Victoria, Henry Morton Stanley and Dr. David Livingston (they looked like Spencer Tracy and Sir Cedric Hardwicke), about places such as serengeti, sahara, and Kilamanjaro, a man named Dr. Albert Schweitzer, and the stories of Egyptian pharaohs and pyramids, Cleopatra, the libraries at Alexandria. All these began to muddle the mind of a 10-year-old because all of them were also Africa.

Thus, many of my earliest images of Africa were, indeed, shaped by movies, but not only the Tarzan movies in which Africa was "the dark continent" but those in which Africa was "the biblical and historical land of Egypt" or "the romantic home of safaris and wild-game hunting" or where "the mysterious Casbah" was located or where Casablanca, "home to alienated and landless people," symbolized the new Africa. At Saturday matinees at the old Fox Theater in Joplin, I fought alongside the French Foreign Legion in defending desert outposts somewhere in northern Africa, and at the Paramount Theater I sang along with Gordon MacRae as he battled the Riffs in The Desert Song. I even tagged along with Bud Abbot and Lou Costello as they met "the mummy." There were not many African movies I did not see. The war brought more such movies and the newsreels of the early 1940s showed us battle sites in North Africa. Who could forget the tales of the Desert Fox Erwin Rommel versus British Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery? There also was the "definitive" movie about the war in North Africa, Five Graves to Cairo. By the time I was a teenager, I was, or so I thought, knowledgeable about Africa, and movies had made all that knowledge possible. Africa, after all, was scarcely touched upon in my public school education, and it was probably a religion class in college which brought me my first in-depth exposure to the continent. A world history class as a follow-up helped, but I confess: Those early images linger, and more recent images dominate.

What I know today is still not sufficient, but I have made and am making progress. I know that Africa is the second largest continent on Earth and that it contains more countries than any other. It is becoming more conclusive that the oldest known ancestors of the human being originated in Africa, that Africa was likely the home of the Garden of Eden, and that the intellectual greatness of Africa at the time of Alexander the Great, some 300 years before Christ, may have surpassed civilizations to come for a thousand years. Empires rose and fell in Africa thousands of years before the European powers began exploitation of the continent, and much pre-colonial culture remains. The continent's cultural wealth easily matches its natural attractions.

Yet the images of today's Africa that dominate my mind are of starving, dying children, of endless lines of refugees, of unending wars, of collapsed states, hijacked elections, and ethnic conflicts, all brought to me through the courtesy of news media.

"The world around Africa is fast coming together and this continent risks being the odd man out," Anthony Lake, a U.S. National Security Adviser is quoted in The Chicago Tribune as saying in summing up the world's impatience with Africa's failure to find its way in the post-Cold War. At one point in recent history, just three years ago, there was some form of conflict in 26 of the sub-Saharan Africa's 48 countries.

African countries have a population of 689 million people, roughly 13 percent of the world's total population, living on about 15 percent of the Earth. Their land, says The Chicago Tribune, is "potentially some of the world's richest, blessed with half the world's gold, most of its diamonds, 40 percent of its platinum and rich reserves of other minerals, oil, and natural gas." About half of the population is young, below the age of 15. Birth rates are extremely high, and death rates are falling as a result of improved medical care.

But Africans share only 1.3 percent of the world's actual wealth. And, according to the Central Intelligence Agency, Africa is home to two-thirds of the world's population risking starvation. The C.I.A. also says that Africa has 62 percent of the world's AIDS cases and 40 percent of its refugees.

There are more than 600 ethnic or tribal groups in Africa and only 53 countries. Boundaries of most of the nations today were created in the late 19th century by colonial rulers. Borders may sometimes follow natural features, such as rivers, but often they are nothing more than straight lines drawn on a map, splitting tribes between two nations, in some cases. The Ewe people, for example, are divided between Ghana and Togo. Creation of unity among the peoples of a nation has, as a result, been a difficult task in many cases after independence.

Africa's entire gross domestic product is smaller than that of the Netherlands, with a population of just 15 million. Most of the African nations rely on exporting raw materials such as coffee, cocoa, or oil. The prices of these products have fallen in recent years, however, while the cost of importing machinery and other manufactured goods has risen. Thus the amount that African nations can earn from their exports is often less than what they have to spend on imports. These factors, along with a growing population, and the effects of drought and war mean that the economies of many African nations are in difficulty.

Yet, my images come primarily from the news media. I recall vividly pictures of children begging for food while behind them lay children too weak to beg; they were too close to death¾ pictures brought to me by television networks who chartered planes to fly in and broadcast live their suffering.

I see Africa on newscasts only occasionally, and even less often there's a documentary about the wildlife of Africa or the tribal wars or the famines.

Recently I have been fortunate in being among recipients of in-depth reports from Tanzania by a Missouri Southern faculty member and her husband, both of whom are doing research there. Letters touch upon food, social customs, clothing, everyday life and the usual battles with bureaucracy. But in these letters, one part of Africa begins to come alive in a particular way. One can sense a positiveness.

I have read and re-read Liz Sly's insightful series, "An African Odyssey," which appeared in The Chicago Tribune in June, 1996. I recall her arrival during a cholera epidemic in Goma, Zaire, in 1994, and "There was no room at any of Goma's hotels, but luckily we had brought a tent. A small patch of grass alongside the airport terminal already was crowded with journalists' tents, and there we headed to make our home for the night.

"Then came the first of many dilemmas that would arise in covering the story. Only two spaces large enough for pitching a tent were available: One was occupied by a large rat, which showed no sign of budging and the other was adjacent to a wire fence, against which were stacked three corpses. . . .We chose the spot beside the corpses.

"When day dawned, the pointlessness of the debate became clear: There were bodies everywhere, heaped along the roadside, piled in doorways, sprawled in fields. . . .This is the real hazard of reporting stories such as Rwanda or Somalia: not the risk of malaria or stomach viruses, but in dealing with human misery on a scale that defies comprehension, let alone description in the bland, formatted style of a newspaper story. . . ."

I have recently received travel brochures which promoted the idea of taking a safari in Africa. There appear to be an increasing number of such tours. Our College will send representatives in the Spring to Senegal to conclude, we hope, an agreement for a cooperative program in international journalism. Missouri Southern faculty have traveled in parts of Africa in the past few years, but to many Americans, Africa is still an enigma. It has been "the neglected continent."

With this symposium and with related activities, we hope to shed a tiny bit of light on this continent.

Back to top of page

Back to Symposium page