My near future looks as though it will be steering me toward Africa if all works as planned, so I’ve been reading a lot about Africa lately… News, reports, journals, travels… etc. Just to see… what people are up to, what other people experienced, what the people who live there experience… etc and I’ve come across a few stories that are definitely worth linking to and are definitely something all of you should read because you live on this planet, not just in this country, city, town, campus or house.

First an essay about the untapped resource of Africa, that resource? Of course, it’s oil. What made me shake my head real hard while I was reading this one was something that an African man says in the movie Blood Diamond …something along the lines of “We’ll be in real trouble if they ever find oil here…” as if what was happening during the civil war in Sierra Leone in the 90’s wasn’t already a hell on earth for so many people. Then what made me shake my head even harder:

None of this was a problem for ExxonMobil staff, of course, because the company had its own airport and chartered a fleet of planes making regular flights between N’Djaména and Doba.

That’s a point when you realize, these aren’t poverty stricken men and women going in to crack open some oil pipes and make a decent living - its filthy rich bastards who already make a living decent enough for 900 people, and ruin lives to get to that point. Bitter.

Next, news about drought in South Africa. As we saw from the IPCC report, this sort of news will only become more constant, and more extreme. Crops ruined. Families dying. People starving. This isn’t just some commercial on TV to make you feel bad and send some money - it’s what is actually happening, and will continue to happen without a) a massive change in life style from all of us living here in the “developed” world and b) more attention from us accompanied with some actual compassion. I don’t remember where you can go to get the numbers - but the fact of the matter is - if you life in Canada, and have a bank account with like $30 just sitting there, you’re one of the richest people in the world. Literally.

And of course, us richest people in the world have to have our diamonds. Lesotho has been sucked into the diamond mining economy. Companies are building and searching. Employing children, undoubtedly and corrupting anything that gets in its way. Keep our fingers crossed that APEC gets implemented. But of course, its not only in Lesotho that there is horrible child labour in Africa, but also in western African cocoa productions.

My mother’s a long way from here. I haven’t seen her for 10 years - since I was two years old.”

All this should have stopped by now.

In 2001, under pressure from the US Congress, the chocolate manufacturers promised to start eradicating forced child labour. They failed to meet an initial deadline of 2005, were given until 2008, and now patience is running out.

…You know, if they fail to meet their deadline, there should be a little bit more than “okay, well here is a new deadline”… Seriously, the wests inability to interfere internationally in developing nations where they actually SHOULD be interfering is competely baffling to me.