Page 7 - Volume 1_Go home mzungu Go Home_merged with links

Introduction

“Go home m’zungu, Go Home!”

Almost every m'zungu I meet on my travels talks about Africa as though it’s a single blob
on the map. It’s not, it’s a continent with 54 countries. Each African country has its own

story, its own circumstances.

Whatever news story about Africa people saw last becomes an image that they

associate with anywhere in Africa. Corruption, Famine, War. And yet if you pick any country

in the world and draw a circle around the adjoining 50 or so countries, you will see within
that circle all the negative things people associate with Africa. And sometimes much

worse. (Africans don't have a habit of invading each other’s countries!)

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International Aid to Africa is kicked about by politicians wedded to this ism or that. These

politicians are elected by people who, for the most part, are uninformed. Africa will

become increasingly important and it will be impossible to ignore this. In Commerce (where

soon 1 in 5 of the world’s workforce will be African), in World Affairs (where Africa represents 54 out of less
than a total of 200 countries on world organisations such as the United Nations) and in other ways, Africa

will have a much bigger impact on people’s lives than we are used to.

International Aid can become a cornerstone of a much more mutually beneficial

relationship for the UK. It can and should be seen as part of an overall strategy to make the
UK the 'preferred trading partner' for African countries.

If we are to achieve this, we need to help as wide an audience as possible to gain a
much more realistic understanding of Africa. And especially ‘How we got here’. It’s only

then that some of the answers as to the best way forward can be agreed upon by both the

politicians and the people who will elect them.

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