With a degree of subtlety, the argument has now been clinched. It is now no longer a moot issue. After many years of quibbling, feinting and circumlocutions, the jury has now submitted its findings to the bar of Western public opinion: Lifestyle now takes the greatest blame for the spread of HIV and AIDS in Africa. The apparently conclusive gist is: The sexual mores of sub-Saharan Africans are so lax and promiscuous that HIV will inevitably inbreed. As this view evolved and came into its own a couple of years ago, I often experience a bit of wincing when reading it. And now I still experience some uneasiness whenever I read it. In spite of oneself, one is not likely to nod and sweetly swallow this observation, seeing moral failing being added to the battery of deficiencies afflicting Africa.

It was a long time in coming, though. I now remember the first time I read about the trickly incidence of AIDS breaking out in California. It was a report in a copy of Time magazine. I was an overcurious boy of fifteen or so. There was no way I could have guessed that a disease whose nature and feature were yet to be to be maturely defined would reify into such an overwhelmingly grim and grisly Reaper, swishing his scythe so wide and with dreadfully lethal effect. At the time I read about AIDS it was supposed to be a disease peculiar to the gay community in California. Few people truly saw the routing dynamism with which the disease would spread, blind to sexual orientation and to racial coloration. Perhaps just as few people could have imagined how HIV/AIDS would make Africa its nucleus. When the Zimbabwean writer Dambudzo Marechera died of AIDS in 1987, his ‘lifestyle’ as a borderline tramp and a book-headed crusty, who slept rough on the streets of Harare, who did drugs and visited prostitutes, could easily have been blamed for how he ended up with the disease. For many Africans who cared to give a moment’s thought to AIDS at the time, it was not yet an “African problem.” It was a disease visiting itself upon those on the seamy fringe of society, an importation from ‘decadent’ West, brought by tourists and other Western visitors to an otherwise pristine continent.  

But then however it found its way into Africa, in countries like Zimbabwe where Marechera came from, and others like Uganda, Kenya, Malawi, Botswana and South Africa, HIV/AIDS was pullulating, the disease had begun its scorched-earth spread across Africa, burning wild in a lot of countries and leaving the soil on remaining spots friable and the air miasmal with the overhanging malaise of AIDS. The irruption of HIV/AIDS in Africa is one of the most aggressive of any disease in modern times. It waded into Southern Africa with great force. Before the global economic downtown took its toll on Botswana, the problem of AIDS was a blot on the otherwise fine fiscal and political health of the country. Almost a third of the population still carry the virus. And in South Africa, the incidence of AIDS and its tragedies became so high and almost biblically plaguish that the former president Thabo Mbeki had waxed pharaonic, mulishly maintaining that it was all an exaggeration, a Western conspiracy. But today years later, hundreds of South Africans are still dying of the disease daily. 

If Thabo Mbeki, who is reputed to be coolly ‘intellectual,’ would feed himself and some people such pigswill, it is no surprise that today one still sees a lot of Africans thinking along these sublimely self-deceitful lines. Only last week someone was still arguing that AIDS is a Malthusian ‘final solution’ to the African problem, that a confederacy of American doctors had cultured the virus in a laboratory in the US and had taken it to Africa to enjoy a multiple and refractory lease of life. It’s easy to see where John le Carre got the idea for The Constant Gardener. But I shall not dwell for long on the fictions of AIDS but on its devastating reality, its profoundly deleterious effect on lives, especially the lives of Africans, and how it has affected the self-image of Africa and Africans. Few people truly want to talk about the matter of self-image, particularly when this would do nothing to impact, positively, on the disease and how it is killing people. From denial and smokescreening, for some time now the African viewpoint has uptilted to implicit, if bemused, affirmation, a reluctant shy nod.  

This is not going to be an easy essay in so far as my intention is not to absolve Africa and Africans of responsibility. Generalizations are as odious as comparisons, and both will be avoided, but I am not going to fall into that self-indulgent trap of seeing Africa as the perpetual victim. In an article I wrote some time ago, I averred that I have an amateur interest in philosophy. I did not mean amateur in the sense of charlatan dabbling in philosophy, but that I am a ‘lover of philosophy,’ allowing for the tautology of being a ‘lover of love of wisdom.’ Anyway, this is no place to chaffer over Wittgensteinian ‘language game,’ nor bury myself in the catacombs of analytic philosophy, Wittgenstein’s philosophical anchorage. Philosophy has many divisions and subdivisions, but moral philosophy piques my interest more than any aspect of this often recondite discipline.

My assessment of how it is that we have ended up with the bulkiest burden of AIDS would be approached through the bypath of moralism, in other words morality that is shorn of the wimples and veils of religion, of homiletics, and of blame-giving. Actually, moral philosophy is not about moralizing, nor is about immoralizing, nor even amoralizing. It is often nonmoral. It is all about ethicizing. Even then how would I begin to honestly explain away the prevalence of AIDS in the continent that I originated from and avoid the submission that maybe we err a bit on the careless side, carnally speaking. Now if the arterial spread of AIDS in Africa had been via blood transfusion, it would have been easy for conspiracy spinners to shout I told you so!, even if foreigners had had nothing to do with how blood travelled from one person to another. And if it had been predominantly gay people who had the disease, then the moral policemen, the Christian soldiers and the god-proud Islamic sentinels would have gloated, These are the wages of sin. But since it is now a ‘mainstream’ disease, cutting a swathe through the population of mainly heterosexual people, it would perhaps be seen as the wages of a yet indefinable thing – or simply the wages of a mere sexual peccadillo.

Now let me declare that the word African in the title is rhetorical. There are as many Africas as there are Africans who live in the continent. Except as a talking-point there is no way one can ask whether Africans in a body are more honest, taller, or more promiscuous than others. And who exactly are the others? The other - it may just as well be a meaningless cipher-note in the sense of that tedious cliché of po-mo symposia. But I may be thinking this way because I am from Africa and that I am well aware that every human is removed from the next by bushels of deoxyribonucleic differentiae. One of the things that separate us from creatures like wasps and mosquitoes whose breeding habits have been well-studied is because sometimes our desire to mate goes beyond the mere mechanical act of breeding: There is the pleasure motive too. Some would still argue that humans are the only ‘animals’ who would have sex just for the sake of it. Although the googolplexity of the populations of countries like China and India does indicate that the Chinese and Indians may just as well be horizontally-inclined as Africans, Africans have for long been seen as rabbitily overbreeding, a notion which has for long carried with it the overtones of sexual laxity. And fancy how worse it would have been if our ancestors had written and sketched something like the Kama Sutra, if they had codified sexual pleasure - Kama - as one of the four major goals in life.

Inevitably trapped in an existential no-win situation, Africa remains a sinister premodern monolith in minds of many, a wonky monolith that props itself with diseases, wars, wholesale corruption, a shadowy monolith around which scant-clad ‘natives’ imbued with ungovernable physical impulses dance. I have been to a number of African countries and I can see that while our traditions and attitudes are similar in a number of ways, there is also a marked, even anthropological, variedness to the population. But while our social differences may be many, some of the similarities which are seen to be common to many African societies may truly be part of the problem.

Take the premise that Western tourists brought AIDS to Africa. Tourists go everywhere. Hordes of American tourists deluge Britain in their millions every year, and British tourists invade several holiday spots every season, often letting go with frightening abandon. Although I never accepted that ‘foreign’ holidaymakers were categorically responsible for bringing AIDS to Africa, those who proffered this argument seemed to overlook the fact that as hosts Africans are often generously xenophilic and grovelling. I once lived in a West African country where the steamy ferment of sex tourism is covered with the fig leaf of Islamic religion and winking disapprobation. I’ve not really been shocked by many things since I reached adolescence and my reaction to what I observed in the country only made me stitch myself up a bit inside seeing how white people often become gods and goddesses when they arrive in Africa. Boys as young as eighteen would endlessly daydream and pursue the opportunity of being made toyboys by wrinkled sixty-something retired supermarket check-out clerks from Birmingham. The battle for oldwomanly wrinkles was often fought with what the prized white granny might call ‘voodoo.’ And how the girls crawled too. There was a conceited Norwegian who believed he was a flame-haired Nordic deity of sorts because he had lost count after 250 - the digits being the girls he effortlessly conquered during his less than a half-a-dozen visits to the country. Besides being white he had some money to blow. The man believed he was retuning to Africa (Asia and South America) to continue and finish the work of Giacomo Cassanova who travelled round 18^th century Europe seducing several thousand women on the way. It was not likely that the rather chivalrous Cassanova had treated the women in Europe the way the Norwegian treated his African captives. He was pretty gross and loud.

The French novelist, Michel Houellebecq, opens his tourism-themed novella, Lanzarote, with a declaration of how African women are the cheapest of all to be bought, to be got, the most worshipful and awestruck of the white skin. I really wanted to take umbrage when I read this, to declare a sort of stepped-down and possibly unilateral Achebe-Conrad war with Houellebecq, but what I had seen before reading the book chastened me – some arguments are simply not meant to be won. In Nigeria where there is practically no tourism, the white man is royalty, even a Lebanese, an Egyptian, even xanthomelanous Asians who shouldn’t pass as ‘white.’ From what I’ve heard the fair-skinned foreign man is a prize as well as pride catch. If you knew how unselfrespecting some of our women become, how they turn to easily consumable human jelly before a ‘white man’ then you would begin to see why Houellebecq gave himself the warrant to diss African women. Fanon discoursed this in Black Skins, White Masks. But then this is all rooted in centuries-long mists. The putative sexual extravagance of Africans. Not too long ago, history books and novels were replete with what was considered wild lustful African male – and female. I believe it is understood that in the heyday of slavery a male white slaver might see himself as the one giving favours and for obvious reasons the black girl slave would not consider herself as being raped - probably taken advantage of, or ever favoured. Without the benefit of ferine phallic pomposity conferred on African men, for centuries African women have been sexualised, objectified and hypersensualised. They have for a long while been deemed the ever-willing, complicit partaker – ‘hos,’ thanks to those hip-hop dunderheads, the self-parodying piss-taking ‘niggaz,’ who have done so much to further dehumanise black women.

The living flesh that covered the bones of Saartje Baartman – bones that were returned to South Africa in 2002 - exemplified this attitude. Saartje, aka Hottentot Venus, was a house slave to a Dutch family near Cape Town. The brother of her ‘owner’ had found the potential of her being a sideshow in exhibitions in Europe and had coaxed her into travelling with him to England to make a fortune. Saartje was robust-looking, fleshy, bosomy, and particularly steatopygous (big-bottomed). When the Dutchman brought her to England he sold her off and she became part of a freak show. Baartman was made to show her humungous buttocks all over Europe. She was sold and re-old again. She was willy-nilly prostituted, the bastardised body was commercialised in more ways than one. Overused, Baartman died prematurely. But it did not end there. After death, her somewhat sizable and elongated pudenda were sliced out, pickled, and displayed in a French Museum. The white men who slobbered over Baartman’s buttocks and labia were the ancestors of those who now go to Africa looking for the endomorphic descendants of Saartje Baartman. 

And the progeny of African men who sold Baartman to a white man two hundred years ago have never stopped conniving to cheapen African women. A recent finding showed that one out of four South African men has raped on one or more occasions, and one of the reasons this is said to be so is the overwhelmingly patriarchal nature of South African society. Boys must be boys, even when they become men they must remain thoughtless, sexually rampant boys. It is difficult to discount this alarming report when the man who is now South African president had been accused of rape. Jacob Zuma, who denied rape, said the woman in question had offered herself to him, or was showing signs of interest, and as a Zulu man, the scion of Chaka, he mustn’t let the bait slip. And when Zuma was asked whether he knew the woman was HIV positive, he said he knew but he had showered after the event to wash off the HIV bug. And we must not forget the way some South African men think they can get a surefire cure for their AIDS-wracked bodies is raping of a few days old baby. Can anything be more appalling than that?

Another patriarch and former president of Nigeria would have done the same thing as Zuma. He is as polygamous as Zuma, as proudly African, as full of pot-bellied machismo, and as uncontrollably carnal – or how might he have ended up sleeping with his son’s wife. These sort of men are not even worthy of being footmen in the political scene of any country deserving the description. But in many African countries their type are the fuglemen. Nevertheless Zuma and others like him are products of their society. I once listened to a phone-in programme on a Nigerian radio station in London. The talk was about the role of women in Nigerian society. The contribution of some men was indeed abject. They all but rubbished women. Women should not be given even the second fiddle but a ladle to eternally scoop food in the kitchen. The men spoke about ‘the African tradition,’ where women must not be heard, and even hardly seen. As if the Jewish bible was the primer where exemplars of ‘African tradition’ can be culled, they quoted liberally from the book – from the laughable, elementary story in Genesis about Eve being made from the rib-bone of Adam, to dusty Leviticus, to Paul’s misogynist decrees in his letters. If antiquated bible is what many of our people – men and women – still use as a guidebook then it is little wonder women are mistreated. 

It is the sort of men who spoke on the radio programme who would visit Nigeria and return to tell tales of how many ‘girls’ they had, how many they had at a time, how easy it was to have them. A fifty-year old man, who has a wife and family here, but always has business to do in Lagos and Abuja, a veritable climber who likes to be seen with governors, senators others of the pack of disreputable politicians, never stops nattering about what he is doing in Nigeria whenever he visits. The only thing I will repeat here is his offer: Perhaps to prove that he has an army of ready (paid) groupies at his disposal, he offered to give me a free run of his house in Abuja, whenever I visited Nigeria, and even if he was not in Nigeria he would make certain to arrange, from London, whatever number of girls I wanted to wait upon me hand and foot and whatnot. I turned down the offer and I tried to argue with the man that there is more to ‘girls’ and women in Nigeria than the sort he was always going on about. I told him I knew of a young woman of twenty-five who was still virginal, but he laughed in my face and said somebody must have lied about something.

Are the majority of young women in Nigeria as morally tainted as the man had put it? Who can really say? We all know stuff happens. Who sends those texts to phones peddling undergraduette escort services? Who sees the university as the opportunity to play the sophisticated hustler? But then, conversely, who gets a buzz from using money to accumulate and dispose of women like playthings? Who sees an election and an appointment to a high - and even low - office as the licence to fuck as if his life depends on it?  

In modern scholarship, the sexual lives of Africans are less explored than those of wasps and mosquitoes. Few western scholars would want to deeply investigate what Africans do with their spare time. And few Africans would follow that line. Even as modernity and global fluidity gain upon everyone, including Africans, we still take a lot of pride in seeing Africa as a rather rootsy conservative society always fighting shy of Western immorality. When Freud wrote his books about the role of sexuality in the understanding of neurosis, Africa and Africans were farthest from his mind. Nor were other earlier Western sexologists like Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Havelock Ellis, and latter ones like William H Masters and the normative Alfred Kinsey, thinking of Africa in their significant works. (Although I gathered more about Kinsey from TC Boyle’s The Inner Circle, if anything the film Kinsey: Let’s Talk About Sex is worth watching). Foucault’s swansong, the three-volume History of Sexuality is a study of Western attitudes to sex. And is any African ever going to give himself the challenge of History of Sexuality with an African slant? Probably not too soon. We have been short on sexologists, our purchase on and treatment of the subject of psychosexuality has been pretty laggardly indeed. Although the streets of Lagos is saturated with pirated x-rated DVDS, displayed for all to see, even for younger children who should not be exposed too soon to such material, there is a tendency to see any serious treatment of sex as a flirtation with raunch. Not long ago I wrote an article on homosexuality among Africans. While my approach may have been spirited and probably vivid, the responses were hysterical, certain gods of internet wars had cried havoc and had let loose their angry inner dogs. Too much fuss about nothing, if you ask me. Now the pulp novel is out of print, Dillibe Onyeama’s Sex is a Niggers’ Game swirls in the outer limits of the subliterary vortex occupied by frank risqué confessional tales by Western writers like Henry Miller and Anais Nin. I wonder what the born-again Christians in Nigeria would think about Onyeama today. We seem not to have grasped the fact that an unexamined lifestyle would only lay itself open to unspoken risks, and to hypocrisies.

So are we less sexual because we are more tight-lipped about the act of intimacy and its many social-scientific ramifications? It is unfortunate that the prevalence of AIDS (beyond the banality of a child being born every minute) seems to answer the question implicitly. We all know that we have our own variants of ‘one-night-stand’ but the difference between the sexual goings-on in the West and what we do in Nigeria, for instance, is the degree of openness. Western observers have long fought shy of putting the card of promiscuity on the table - at least not face-up - as the main spreader of HIV/AIDS in Africa. But now perhaps knowing that few Africans would cogently challenge the thesis, they are speaking with louder voices, writing with greater surety, that keeping ‘multiple-partners’ - or ‘networking’ as they reported it is called in Nigeria - is a major contributor to the propagation of the disease in Africa. The vox-pop bombshell that a considerable percentage of South African men are rapists will not help either.

Sorious Samora is a UK-based Sierra Leonean filmmaker. Some Africans have dismissed him as pandering to his white television paymasters because his documentaries do not often show Africa and Africans in positive light. But the thing about Samora’s documentaries is that they are usually no less truthful for being bitter and straight-spoken. A couple of weeks ago, his documentary about how young black boys – some whose parents were immigrant Africans - are turning rape into subcultural high-fashion, winning street-cred from the number of girls they have ravished. And again the reason the London youths are said to be committing this crime is no different from the reason Jacob Zuma had given in South Africa. Boys will be boys. Well, while it is hard to accept as a black person that we may have lost our moorings somewhere in the great tide of human evolution, there are issues that are worth looking into. Are we still psychodynamically protesting against slavery (and colonisation) and the violation of the African selfhood that came with it? Are we living in the warp of time, unable to deal with an invasive, if regulated, Western ways? Are we playing the catch-up game, and doing it very badly in the bargain? For instance when England and most of the Western world were experimenting with free sex, drugs and general cultural psychedelia in the 1960s, we were busy grappling with post-independence ups-and-downs in Africa. As a matter of fact just as the West celebrated what is now regarded in their cultural lexicon as Summer of Love in 1967, Nigeria had just imploded and begun to levy a civil war against itself. 

I shouldn’t slip into trivialising an issue as serious as the spread of HIV/AIDS. But how does one tackle the matter? Even some of the best moral philosophers and sexologists would have a hard time of it putting a finger where the solution lies. If a man refuses to listen to simple reason and decides to sow his oats wildly without giving thought to the consequences, there is really nothing anyone can do about it. But it is only unfortunate that he will not just sow wild oats he will also sow diseases and deadly viruses. It might be his funeral, but it would be others’ too. It’s not easy to play Pope, the Roman Catholic Heavy Father who went to Africa to pontificate to people to forswear the use of condoms and only go for abstention. The apparently cheap shot that is trained at the Pope appears to be sensible nevertheless. The argument is: Apparently the Pope had conquered desire many decades ago, so how would he know anything about abstention in people who know desire only too well. This indeed is a problem not of theology but of moral philosophy. This sort of lopsided linearity is the basis on which most religions are built on anyway: Do as I say, although what I say I may never have done or will ever do. It is like the celibate male-supremacist Apostle Paul giving practical lessons on marriage.

Anyway, if it comes to a push and I am asked to offer advice, I’ll just say: Be sensible - in spite of the Pope, condoms may be good for you. But I will never tell anyone how to live their lives, just as I shall not have any say on how they die their deaths. And is HIV/AIDS flourishing in Africa because of undisciplined sexual behaviour? One should be very careful answering a categorical yes or no to this. There is such an old saw as nipping something in the bud. The germ of the current relatively high incidence of the disease in Africa is easily locatable in the early to late 1980s when people and governments in Africa took a cavalier stance towards the disease, refusing to do what people and governments were doing in the West: TV and radio adverts, billboarding and  educative campaigns. The truth is, not only Africans are at it. The rate of teenage pregnancy in England here may be an indication that other people are not being too careful. But we must understand that it was the parents of teenagers who are being careless today who had listened to the AIDS-campaign message some two decades ago and had taken it to heart. Even today, the percentage of those who use condoms in the West is relatively high. We know about pregnant teenagers in Britain because this is a society that graphs its everyday life and unconsciously pursues a utilitarian utopia of the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people.

As to African self-image concerning AIDS, here is how it goes. Malaria is the troublesome bogey in my life, mosquitoes are as disturbing to me as Hitchcockian birds. Now that I’ll be visiting Nigeria this month, I went to see a nurse to write a prescription for malarial prophylactic. I knew she would go through the routine of asking when last I got jabs for any number of diseases. She reeled it off, glancing at a small card before her. Typhoid? Hepatitis? I told her firmly that it was not likely that I would be catch yellow fever where I was going. All through the catechism, I tried to catch a glimpse of the card in front of her from which she read out the names of the maladies. I discovered that the diseases were labelled High Risk and Low Risk. Malaria and Typhoid were High Risk, written in blood red. With my knowledge of how dangerously fatal malaria can be, I imagined it was even more than high risk. Something else was high risk, but the nurse had skated over it. HIV/AIDS. I didn’t know when Nigeria became a high risk area for HIV. I guess it is a case of if it sounds like Africa then it is Africa, and in the eyes of many no country typifies Africa better than Nigeria. The nurse never breathed a word about HIV/AIDS, perhaps she had guessed how schoolmarmy it would sound to say anything at all about the disease.

Please permit me this final digression. Now that I am going home for a visit, I have, on the spur of the moment, just accepted my friend’s offer to go to Abuja and marinade myself, sheathless, in a cocktail of feminine juices. As he had promised, from London here he would - like a kind of Bond Baddie - smart-control the gift of a gaggle, a bevy, a harem. I even implored him to make it a moveable feast, that in every city and town I visit, I would not mind being cushioned, pillowed and pampered by a waiting harem. La Dolce Vita. 

Robot  # 1 | 07.07.2009 09:22

With a degree of subtlety, the argument has now been clinched. It is now no longer a moot issue.The jury has now submitted its findings to the bar of Western public opinion: Lifestyle now takes the greatest blame for the spread of HIV/AIDS in Africa. The apparently conclusive gist is:The sexual mores of sub-Saharan Africans is so lax and promiscuous that HIV will inevitably inbreed. ...Read the full article.

Silent 1  # 2 | 08.07.2009 10:56

Typically engaging. Though, not so sure how much the essay resembles its title, and if it unfolds into the relevance it could be. But my real quarrel with this piece has to be that, the inferences/conclusions it pushes us to, are not completely borne-out by the evidences or/and ilustrations presented. Firstly, seeming to equate the high rate of HIV/AIDS simply to high sexual activity instead of, say, to high incidence of risky sexual behaviour just doesn't balance out. Secondly, most of the examples of high sexual activity and the few of high-risk sexual behaviour can be put down to factors other than the natural insatiable sexual fixation of the African, factors like: illiteracy, poverty and religion. Sex is now pretty much the only way manhood can be proved around here. Then again, I have a feeling that, were we to hit African, American and European streets with the question: How many sex partners have you had or do you have? the statistic will be heavier on the European and American sides. Not only are African women crazy about white men, we all -- men, women, children, nation and continent -- are crazy about white.

Ph3y  # 3 | 08.07.2009 11:26

Not only are African women crazy about white men, we all -- men, women, children, nation and continent -- are crazy about white. Please speak for your self.......Maybe you are .............

omaks  # 4 | 08.07.2009 11:35

=Silent 1;369966> Not only are African women crazy about white men, we all -- men, women, children, nation and continent -- are crazy about white. Yes, just as ph3y said speak for yourself. What's there to be crazy about anyway, many of them are dirty, badly behaved and UGLY too. Remember son, BLACK IS BEAUTIFUL.

RoyalPalm  # 5 | 08.07.2009 12:54

I tend to believe this trend is designed to proveke responses Culture, Tradition, Language Even that we talk about intimacy, what is there to be crazy about, would you suggest circumcision first or would you volunteer to wa... a beg wake up! If you had mentioned socio - economic inferiority complex reasons maybe just maybe . but even so crazy about........... It could be mutual craziness for each other genuinely don't get me wrong o! Let us not tilt the balance too much to one side my friend. Let us stop Stereotyping universal emotions / feelings

Silent 1  # 6 | 09.07.2009 10:09

Culture, Tradition, Language Even that we talk about intimacy, what is there to be crazy about, would you suggest circumcision first or would you volunteer to wa... a beg wake up! If you had mentioned socio - economic inferiority complex reasons maybe just maybe . but even so crazy about........... It could be mutual craziness for each other genuinely don't get me wrong o! Let us not tilt the balance too much to one side my friend. Let us stop Stereotyping universal emotions / feelings Yes, just as ph3y said speak for yourself. What's there to be crazy about anyway, many of them are dirty, badly behaved and UGLY too. Remember son, BLACK IS BEAUTIFUL. Please speak for your self.......Maybe you are ............. How I hate to say this. But, you all have at best mis-read me ...... or? And, this underscores our knack for impulsiveness. Indeed I am beginning to suspect that some folks log-on, skip the article, head straight to the comments and post on that basis. The article alludes to how "awestruck" African women are of the white skin. I counter and stretch this notion by including "we" (an obvious generalization -- made logical by history and the present), the "nation" (which even makes the "we" more applicaple), etc. Yes, we, quite often are awestruck by the White man's capabilities, discipline, organisation, etc. Yet, I see White skinned "Engineers" learn on-the-job, helped along, trianed by Black skinned Nigerian "Mechanics". Why do they keep their jobs?........their skin color! Go around Africa and you'ld find Whites thrive and privileged for mostly reason of skin color. So, run along with your righteous indignation, ignorance and impulsiveness.