i BLAME history.

Recently, there have been a stream of abductions in Niger. Very recently, two French nationals were kidnapped in Niamey, at a popular restaurant that, at the time, was probably alive with laughing, talking people and brought to the golden brown desert where they were killed by big machine guns. This specific place where their lives ended took place in a remoteness that may have brought the echo of their cries to the old library walls of Timbuktu.

Who killed these people? The media says that terrorists did it - Al-Qaeda. Every depiction brings to focus wild, reckless, crazy murderers wielding AK 47s in the cool, dusty Sahel night. Putting all our trust in the media, we see that these terrorists are fiends pitted against Good. They might as well be vampires as we know them.

But what do we know? The trusted journalists of CNN, The New York Times, Al Jazeera, all they did was put words together in a document. We weren't there that night on the Mali border where French blood was drawn. We weren't there before that night. We have never asked a "terrorist" why. Very rarely do we swim against stream. What if these "terrorists" are responding to some historical context established on more bloodshed?

Why are so many African countries bedlams rendering any combing through impossible? Why?! Why is it that such a rich, beautiful, mysterious continent, the one from which man arose - why is it so torn apart by war? Endless wars that build opaque viscous clouds of consternation that just sustain it all? I blame history. I blame the Europeans who cut their way through the vast land stripping all its treasures from African hands, exploiting the land and the people, subjecting them to the bowels, the depths of despair, the same hopelessness and helplessness that say a drug addicted sex slave would fall to after submission, submission, submission!

This historical phenomenon set up by the Berlin Conference doomed various countries of the Continent to poor development, to retardation, to the creation of hellish monotonous cycles of failure and self destruction.



The French nationals who were kidnapped in Niger had ties to the large nuclear energy company called Areva. So now things begin to make a little sense. Areva is probably a company like Walmart that exploits workers overseas, takes advantage of their cheap labor while depleting the valuable resources of this foreign country. It doesn't get any closer to slavery than that in these days of globalization, in these days of the World Wide Web spun by discrete, dexterous, poisonous predators, successful in holding humanity in these silky traps.

We will never know the entire story as to what exactly rendered countries like Niger into the poverty and AIDs stricken arena of violence it has become today. But I do know that people have been kidnapped and killed this past week. But why? Why is there a group of people that is today's "Commies", today's "Nazis", why are they in Niamey kidnapping laughing, talking people out of restaurants? Why are they the reason that I may not experience Niger after years of dreaming about Africa? History. An unfortunate succession of events brings us to 2011, a time where we cannot do what we want, a time where we are not free. I blame history as I anticipate the blurry future, as I hope, in spite of my cynicism, that the present can prove my wild conclusions wrong.