Out of Africa

Interesting how, when one looks at a map of Africa, many countries are delineated in neat straight lines. It gives the impression that apart from Kilimanjaro, Table Mountain and an insignificant range called the Atlas, the rest of Africa is as flat and featureless as a pancake. Nothing could be further from the truth of course. This was one of the very deep and ingenuous observations passed by (Sir) Bob Geldof during a business breakfast held at the Golden Sands on Wednesday and organised by HSBC and Vodafone.

Brought over by the YMCA Malta, Bob Geldof, of Band and Live Aid fame, is a world figure who makes no bones about calling a spade a spade with regard to the West's responsibility for the exploitation and consequent retardation of Africa. The "neat" way it was carved up in 1848 by the European powers is a case in point; a historical blip the terrible consequences of which Africans have to face today; a state of being which still has no logical bearing on socio-economic and traditional reality and the cause of endless bloody and unsolvable tribal wars and political unrest and instability that holds the world's richest continent in backward thraldom.

Barely 24 hours before our breakfast meeting last week, over 300 immigrants had broken out of Safi detention centre and were only just persuaded by the police not to carry on marching on Castille.

Another 266 were hauled in by the AFM, much against their will, as they wanted to proceed to Italy.

To make things very clear, nobody more than Bob Geldof wishes Africans to stay in Africa. There was no sentimentality about his exposé of the situation. While he fully sympathises with the terrible state of being, brought on by history and circumstance, his crusade is to strengthen and sustain growth in Africa in order to eradicate the fundamental reason as to why its people are leaving it. A believer in giving a man a rod and teaching him to use it as opposed to merely distributing fish, Bob Geldof' s ideas are in fact a revelation and hold the only viable solution to the illegal immigration problem that worries us all so much.

Bob Geldof explained that the situation of inherent national debt, which spelled poverty that could never be shaken off by the man on the savannah, is the prime force that fuels him to risk all to cross deserts the size of the Sahara, to pay the earth for a passage in a leaky boat to cross the capricious Mediterranean, only to land or be landed in a place like Malta or Lampedusa and kept in a hot and insalubrious detention centre till his fate is decided. Bob Geldof was scathing about what has been offered to Malta by way of aid from the EU to cope with the situation.

"€20 million is what Bill Gates makes in an hour" he added, looking meaningfully at our Minister of Foreign Affairs who was sitting next to him. Bob Geldof knows full well that continual influxes of illegal immigrants will only fan the flames of xenophobia and racism and urges little Malta, in the front line, to somehow force the EU to get real about the situation.

I happened to be in Brussels as a guest of Simon Busuttil a couple of years ago when my host was to deliver his maiden speech to the hemicycle. By the time little Malta was given its couple of minutes it was so late that most of the house had dispersed; 80 per cent of the MEPs had gone to dinner and the ones who were left were asleep. Dr Busuttil's subject was illegal immigration.

I came away with the distinct impression that Brussels is one big bureaucratic ivory tower and that Malta, for the umpteenth time in its chequered colonial history, was being treated as an unimportant outpost marooned in the middle of the Mediterranean and only just about tolerated by the great and the good for PR reasons. Dr Busuttil's excellent exposé was to have been delivered much earlier and kept being postponed for reasons beyond whoever's control!

The majority of EU countries can afford, for the moment, to be complacent about the situation. Even the ones with vast comparative enclaves of Senegalese, Moroccans or Turks have managed to absorb them and have not resorted to detention and open centres that compare to concentration camps and ghettos as we have had to do here. If immigration continues at its present pace they will soon lose their complacency and like Western Europe after 1453 will have only themselves to blame as they face the largest threat to western civilisation since the Fall of Constantinople.

Bob Geldof has no illusions about this indifference by the rich and powerful northern European states to our very pressing problems and had he to stand for election as our EU parliamentarian I wouldn't hesitate for an instant to vote for him.

It is high time for good old plain speak to get the message through. It is amazing how pitifully ignorant many of us are about the real problems that face the African continent. We still regard it as Dark Africa forgetting that it has hosted civilisations and empires that still amaze the world.

There are two types of race in Africa: the Arabian and the Negro. For many centuries the first dominated the second, till the advent of the White European in the infamous Scramble for Africa in the 19th century where, somehow, the continent was split up, using a slide rule, between France, Germany, Belgium and Great Britain.

As only decades ago these artificially delineated countries were given independence, the former masters left most of these countries in the lurch as they licked their own post-war wounds, giving into nationalism to mask a sauve qui peut attitude which, with the exception of France, has spelled disaster as in one country after another, horribly bloody and atrociously cruel civil wars broke out creating fertile ground for dictators like Idi Amin and Robert Mugabe to flourish.

Add the problems of rampant AIDS and unbridled and uncontrolled sex to this and we are faced with a continent in peril, one that despite its unbelievably rich natural resources cannot sustain itself till the problem of national debt is eradicated and the political nonsense, inherited from the bungling and interference of the Western powers that were, is sorted out.

kzt@onvol.net