Mwandayi, Towards a new reading of the Bible in Africa – spy exegesisThe piracy of African resources
The continent of Africa is a mixed bag. It has its joys and sorrows. The
greater part of the journey which Africa has travelled is, however,
marked with tears. For so many years now Africa has not been able to
free itself from abject poverty, hunger, ethnic tensions, corrupt leader-
ship, different kinds of illnesses and all sorts of unpleasant realities.
Almost each family in Africa has lost a loved one to poverty, hunger, war
and disease. What is more worrying, however, is that most of Africa’s
problems are initiated by foreign wolves who come wearing sheep’s
skin. They come to milk Africa of its resources in the name of offering
help. The conversation of Field Ruwe with an unidentified man speaks
for itself who the real enemies of Africa are. An excerpt of the conversa-
tion reads:
You guys are as stagnant as the water in the lake. We come in with our large
boats and fish your minerals and your wildlife and leave morsels—crumbs.
That’s your staple food, crumbs. That corn-meal you eat, that’s crumbs, the
small Tilapia fish you call Kapenta is crumbs. We the Bwanas (whites) take
the cat fish. I am the Bwana and you are the Muntu. I get what I want and
you get what you deserve, crumbs. That’s what lazy people get—Zambians,
Africans, the entire Third World.^2
While the unidentified man would find problems with the lack of inno-
vativeness by Africans he failed to see that Africa’s greatest failure is due
to political circumstances over which Africans have had and continue to
have little control over. They are being remote controlled by those who
pretend to offer aid to Africa but get away with fatty pockets. While in
principle, imperialism and colonization are evils which have been fought
off from the African soil, the underground usurping of African re-
sources that is still going on shows that the evil forces of imperialism
and colonization are still with us. At least there are some grains of truth
in Robert Mugabe’s speech which he delivered at the meeting of the
African Union on 01 February 2012. He noted: “They have an economic
crisis in Europe, they have exhausted their resources [...] Africa still has
plenty. We are discovering more [...] so another recolonisation might
take place. Let us take care, all of us [...] America will need more oil,
(^2) F. Ruwe, ‘You lazy, intellectual African scum’ in New Zimbabwe, http://www.new
zimbabwe.com/opinion-7044-Lazy,+intellectual+African+scum!/opinion.aspx (acces-
sed 28/ 01/ 2012).