Africa isn't poor, Africa is exploited
This is an interview with Ghanaian writer Ama Ata Aidoo that took place in Accra (Ghana), on January 1998.Aidoo is considered an outspoken African writer
Since we met you people 500 hundred years ago, look at
us. We've given everything, you are still taking. It's true.
I mean, where would the whole western world be without
Africa? Our cocoa, our timber, our gold, our diamonds, our platinum, our whatever.
Everything you have, is us. I am not saying it, it's a
fact. And in return for all of this, what have we got? Nothing...
Anti-personnel indoctrination against ourselves, If you
go and cook your horrible diseases like AIDS, you say it is us, you brought us tuberculosis, we didn't have this big cough until white people came here.
In exchange for Africa giving Europe 500 solid years of
our people, I mean not Europe, the western world, of our human beings, to work
you canes, to dig your gold, to take in gold itself, diamonds...I mean you
know, fish, peanuts, palm oil, everything! In exchange for that, we have got
nothing. Nothing, and you know it. Nothing! And white folks look upon us like
monkeys. It is true!
It is in your literature! Some of your best thinkers have
said this about us! have you heard of all this Germans. Lord Bertrand, people
like that, they said we don't even have the brain of animals... That is what we
have got from you people.
Interviewer : But don't you think this is over now?
Over where? Is it over? who said that AIDS came from the
green monkeys? Is it over?
Interviewer: Well if this is your impression do you think
you can ever forgive us?
It's not a question of forgiveness, I have nothing
against you. My point is that you did and you are doing it for you survival
what is necessary. We can't blame you
for that. The fact that we didn't do enough for our own survival and we still
not doing enough for survival, that is not your problem.
Everybody God has created, has a sense of survival. If we
don't develop it, we can't blame white people.
You came here because you needed these things. You took
gun powder from the Chinese. You needed them to shoot people.
I think that for me and members of my family, El Mina
castle has got a very very special significance because they tortured my
father's father, my real grandfather to death there by the colonial government.
So for me, when people like me talk about colonization,
neocolonization, it's not because one is being intellectually smart. We have
personal touches with it, I mean I cannot that this happened to my Grandfather.
Interviewer: Do you consider aid as a new form of
colonization?
Of course.
Interviewer: Why?
Why? you know, my people, the Akans, we have a proverb, it's
says that Good morning, thank it's not enough to salt anybody's food forever.
You cannot build your life on Thank you.
Which is what aids makes you know we are always
receiving.
Look, I don't care who hears, nobody anywhere in this
world is going to send you their best of anything.
Neither the experts...What I mean, you give us what you
can afford. Aid is the leftover and it cannot be enough... The world is now one
place, so there is nothing wrong if my house is in a crisis and you offered me
something. There is nothing wrong because there is interrelationship. But a whole
nation, a whole continent, cannot live forever on aid.
And I think aid in Africa, we are in danger of making
foreign aid a kind of policy, that is wrong... It humiliates our people, the
people in the villages have not asked anybody to go around begging on their
behalf.
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