(I can't make a new topic, so I'm posting in this one, for reasons that will be clear very very quickly. I'm disappointed though, because I had a great thread name ready: I Miss the AIDS Down in Africa - Gonna Take Some Time To Explain Away Race for You.)
So many people wanted to hear about my time in Africa, and I want to talk about it, but I’m not really sure which angle to attack it from. You see, not only was I living there, I was a…
Peace Corps Volunteer.
Yep. The pozzed of the pozzed. Actually, it was a good experience, and it started me on the path of the shitlord by exposing me not only to Africans, but also to people so far to the left you need to pop a Truveda just to have a conversation with them. The whole thing was extremely eye opening, and I could write another entire post about international aid generally and Peace Corps specifically, but I want this one just about Africa, Africans, and the way they live.
First, a caveat. Africa is huge, and I can only speak for the little corner I was in. I was assigned to a remote village in the Sahel, basically the transition between the rainforests of central Africa and the Sahara desert, in francophone West Africa. I was in a very stable country (though we had some terrorist scares), and I would not only go back in a heartbeat, I regularly recommend that people go on vacation there. It’s a beautiful place: cheap, on the Atlantic, and open to (French speaking) foreigners. I have tons of s**t to talk about it, though, but I’ll lead with the positive.
The good:
As I mentioned in the post that spawned this one, tribal African society works for them. They’re not smart, but they have strict, specific rules that they follow and that make things sorta work. By sorta work, I mean the power is on 6-8 hours a day, there is running water sometimes, and the roads have potholes so big it’s safer to drive in the bush next to them. But in the small town/village I was in, there was basically no crime, it was very safe to walk around at night, and people got along really well with each other.
How did they achieve this? If Asians are ant-people, well adapted to SCALEd societies, Africans are the opposite. They can’t handle scale, at all. When they live in villages of 100 to 1000, though, things are “functional”. They need familial hierarchies to function, though. Blacks have no morality, they don’t feel bad for doing anything the way you or I do. Their sense of shame and moral compunction is hierarchically imposed. There were a million little niggershines going on every day, and if they got away with it, it was all good. But if an elder catches you, you’re in for a world of hurt. Literally, because all punishment is corporal. They don’t mess around with stern lectures. It’s straight to the beatings, from a young age on.
The system also puts a huge premium on family and community, and nobody there had any desire to ever leave for good. Everyone wanted to get out to get paid, but nobody wanted to emigrate permanently to France or the US. They just wanted to make money, ship it home to “support” their family, and come back to have a little empire of dirt in the bush.
They are also front-line fighters against shitlibs. They didn’t stand for that s**t, at all. If you wanted to come into their villages and build some s**t, great. If you wanted to give them lectures about how they needed to accept gays or change their ways, mobs and rocks were in your future. Luckily I worked in Agricultural development, so I mostly got to give away stuff. At the time I felt bad for the ones getting the rocks, but looking back I just laugh. Take that, striver poors!
The bad:
1. Once, a friend of another volunteer wanted to earn some money by baking bread. He got a little bit of money together and used it to buy ingredients. He built a mud stove himself, and cooked 30 loaves of “village bread” - basically misshapen, doughy baguette. He took the bread to the road, and started to sell them, until his father came by. His father said, “You have bread! The family needs bread!” and took 20 loaves for himself and the rest of the kids (this particular father had 4 wives and 8 kids per wife). Our enterprising African friend was left bankrupt. He lost his entire initial investment and never made bread again.
This is the basic story of Africa: communalism gone insane. It is completely unthinkable to refuse a demand of an elder or a family member for money or food. People hid any small money they had, because if anyone knew they had it, there would be a line around the corner asking for loans and favors, and they would be honor-bound or whatever to say yes. I told my friends over and over to say no, and each time they politely explained to me that it was impossible. The whole system is built to pull people down to the lowest common denominator.
2. Every day, I ate the same meal – a huge communal bowl of rice, with fish and some vegetables. Every day, the family I lived with spent a good amount of money (for them) to buy bitter tomatoes and okra to put in the rice, despite the fact that nobody liked bitter tomatoes or okra. I asked, why do you waste so much money on these vegetables that nobody eats? They told me, because we don’t want anyone to think we’re poor.
Africans are all about face and presentation, to the point of self-ruin. We’re talking about people for whom buying a couple vegetables has a huge impact on their bottom line, but they still do it. Saving money is basically impossible. I’m convinced that they have no conception of the future, aside from a vague idea that tomorrow will come. Cause and effect seemed to have no meaning. People who planned well, saved money and invested were not lauded or emulated, just dismissed as flukes or having received the blessing of Allah. Actually, Africans probably took to Islam like flies to s**t because in Islam, everything flows directly from God – it is a religion that gives people permission to believe that everything is out of their hands, which they believe anyway.
3. A man asked me if I could give him 10 hectares of land and a diesel-electric water pump to irrigate it. This was not uncommon. The first thing people usually asked me when I told them I was an Agriculture Development person was for tractors, cars, livestock, anything. Completely shameless begging. Men in expensive silk clothes with nice black sedans would shamelessly beg for gimmiedats when they learned what I did. Anyway, I asked this particular guy what experience he had farming or gardening. He said none. I asked, then why do you want such a large scale enterprise? Why not get a small garden from the village chief and a used gas-pump to see how it goes? Maybe you’ll even earn enough money to upgrade in a year or two. He said, well, my cousin got 10 hectares and a diesel-electric pump from the government, so he was going to wait until he could get it too.
Gimmiedats are international. It’s disgusting. Every single cent of international aid is wasted on either bloodthirsty warlords, sniveling SWLP striver salaries, or gimmiedats for the underserving. In case you had any illusions, never give money to any international charity, ever. It breeds a mentality of helplessness and “mana from heaven”, not to mention an entire caste of African hustlers whose only job is to pitch their villages for various causes. The worst thing about this story? The man was completely right to not try a small scale enterprise. He’s African, they have infinite time. One day a government project will come to his village and give him his pump and his 10 hectares. He won’t do s**t with it, but he’ll proudly show off his pump and everyone in the village will respect him for his achievement of receiving some gimmiedats.
4. During the festival of Eid al-Hada, a ram must be sacrificed because blah blah who cares. After killing and stringing the ram up into a tree for butchering, a gaggle of boys (they are always around in groups of 10-50, usually begging for presents and money because idiot white people always give it to them) rushed to the dying animal with a pair of scissors, snipped off its balls, and ran away with their prize. I asked the closest mother why, she said they’re going to grill it – the balls are a prized treat for the boys. I asked, do the girls eat it too? Of course not, she said. They would get pregnant with a goat.
Africans are dumb as s**t. Basically, they never grow up. You are dealing with 200 pound children. If you go into interactions with that mindset, things go alright, but if you expect anything adult from them, you’ll be disappointed and frustrated at every turn. They believe in everything you can list – ghosts, angels, demons, curses, charms, blessings, and magic. Oh, and magic. They love it. I was party to a number of village magic battles, where charms and counter-charms were buried at people’s doorsteps, protective wards were made, and potions were snuck into tea. It’s a huge deal, and everyone pays big money (for them) to the local shamans and witch doctors to get all these magical trinkets. Yes, even in Islamic Africa, it’s just like this. African Islam is the same as South American Christianity – totally f**ked in the head. They are pagan savages first and moon-worshiping goatfuckers second. They just slap a varnish of Islam on it – the magic charm has a Koranic verse in it! – and go about their lives happily as before.
5. A volunteer once fronted enough money for the farmer he lived with to buy fertilizer. They spread it together, and the yield was recorded. In total, it was 9 fold over the year prior. Instead of taking the money back for the loan, said volunteer forced the farmer to buy fertilizer for the next year, and save it. The next year came and they used it again, and again the yield was 10 fold over the first non-fertilizer year. This time, though, the volunteer had left the country. The farmer didn’t buy any fertilizer, and instead blew through the money he earned from his crop on frivolous crap and gifts to every extended family member who cast a shadow on his door. The next year his yields returned to the original level, and everyone went on with their lives as happy as before. The end.
This is my penultimate Africa story. There’s a bit more to it – the Peace Corps showed graphs and charts of this particular case as a successful intervention. I only found out about the little coda because I specifically asked what happened the next year; they didn’t decide to share that little fact in the larger meeting. It brings together everything - the waste, the stupidity, the lack of foresight, the inability to see cause and effect, the massive importance put on frivolous crap, and the way communities tear down their best members. Here’s the takeaway: nobody who wasn’t white on that farm saw the connection between the yields, the money they were making and the fertilizer. Nobody stopped to think hey, we should buy more of this.
That’s the insanity of Africa. 200 pound children, blowing huge stacks of cash on magic charms while they grind out a subsistence livelihood on the border of the desert.
This is already super long, and I could really go on and on about this subject. There are more stories - the myths of the African family, more stories of faux-communalism, stories about crazy African religion and politics, and so on. The long and short of it, though, is this: they’re not terrible people, they just shouldn’t be anywhere near us. Africa is no s**t the Garden of Eden. It’s no mistake that the people living there are giant children. Despite tons of diseases and ferocious animals, they want for nothing. Trees growing fruit are everywhere. Every weed is edible. Before the Western-induced population bomb, I’m not even sure they even required agriculture to feed themselves. If we’re going to live a world where complete ethnic cleansing and colonization is off the table, just let them have their little paradise and leave us alone. They have absolutely nothing to offer us nor anything to gain by interaction with the west. They’re a people frozen in time from tens of thousands of years ago, and I have no trouble leaving them like that.
