Africa - Land of the future's gold

Land is for everybody young and old

The place that holds a single bright future

But what happens when the future turns to torture?

Ma' Africa

What went wrong with your brains?

You kill each other into strife and no human dignity

Africa - Lets stand together

And make Africa the Land of Hope

Ma' Africa From the album 1 Giant Leap (2001)

Africa is such a place of contrast. Great natural wealth and beauty, a place where children play joyfully in the face of appalling poverty, and yet the same place where another child will point his AK47 and blow your head off. For some it holds a special mystique - but not for me I'm afraid. I see Africa as it is, a disunited continent blown by the winds of foreign intervention and an inability to mature as a culture.

The events in Zimbabwe have brought this into focus again. A nation prosperous under colonial rule and its succesors has been almost bankrupted by the regime of a man who wants to rule absolutely, a man who exploits racial envy to achieve popularity despite leading his nation into commercial disaster. Inflation at 100,000%. Seriously. New banknotes for Five Hundred Million Zimbabwean Dollars are worth fifty british pence! Events in Africa are following trends that another region once suffered, a very long time ago.

Britain was a land of celtic tribesmen when the romans arrived. It was conquered but never fully romanised. Eventually the romans had to leave our shores and told Britain to take care of itself. Within fifty years Britain descended into anarchy, under pressure from foreign incursion and would remain so for hundreds of years until the Norman Conquest. The return to prosperity took centuries too as the British became a more sophisticated mature nation.

When the colonial powers left Africa (or were ousted), the nations left behind so easily turned on themselves. It occurs to me that what we are witnessing in our lifetime is the early African Dark Ages. There may well be generations of 'strife and no human dignity' yet to come before the africans resolve their differences enough to generate the future they often wish for.

There's also something else that worries me greatly. Our own Prime Minister wanted power for a long time. He wasn't popular enough so his predecessor won the election for him, then passed power to him. Our economy is slowly grinding to a halt. Worst still, this Prime Minister refuses to go to the polls - and I suspect he won't until he really has no choice but to.

Does all this sound familiar?