The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #155774   Message #3670145
Posted By: Mrrzy
18-Oct-14 - 01:17 AM
Thread Name: BS: Ebola and the Missionaries
Subject: RE: BS: Ebola and the Missionaries
220, not 110. Don't send electrical things, they'll need transformers.
And the unwanted and old things are good, but new things that we would be using for icing when they can't get cake would be better.

This thread has WAY too much of privileged people trying to think for Africa. This is Africa's issue and must be addressed within African values and under African leadership.

First, Africa is not a country, but spans about a third of the globe, and includes highly developed nations and nations still basically in the stone age, so calling anything that is happening in one place on that huge continent a problem for the continent but not for the rest of the world is strange. It may have started as a Guinean problem, but it quickly became an international one, and limiting the people who can respond to people that are thousands and thousands of miles away but on the same continent is downright silly, and seems to say that all Africans are just "them" and nobody off the continent can say anything about them.

Thirdly but next, many of the people desperately trying to lead the response ARE Africans but have no resources and are being hampered by other Africans with other values, including disbelief in science or in westerners or both. Making it sound as if all Africans, let alone all Liberians or Sierra Leonians or Guineans, have the same values is downright silly, and seems to say that all Africans are "them" and so on.

Secondly but last, addressing anything like this according to "values" is absolutely the last thing that should be done, especially if people who refer to individuals from Egypt to Zambia as "Africans" with "African values" are right, given that the assumption then is that "their" values include the ideas that science is bunk and people who use it are not to be trusted and even more so if the skin of the user is paler than normal for the locals.