I read with no small measure of disgust that the September issue of Elle is featuring diamond pendants made in the shape of African masks by DeBeers. Anyone familiar at all with the history of DeBeers, diamonds and Africa (or with the Leonardo DiCaprio movie on the subject) will find this one hard to take. Are people at Elle so stupid that they don't see the irony in DeBeers making this kind of jewelry? Apparently, yes. (Maybe reading that Jezebel article will help them wake up.)

Gerald Caplan's The Betrayal of Africa is an amazing book on sub-Sahara Africa and the impact western policies and actions have had on the region. There are 48 countries there and as Caplan writes "Treating Africa as a single entity has been a trap for many, from 19th century European imperialists to 20th and 21st century white racists to those Africans themselves who advocate a USA - United States of Africa." We do often see Africa as one place - which is as crazy as seeing Europe or North America as one place. You have to look at separate countries with separate successes and failures which western governments have each affected in different ways. Here's a snapshot at post-colonial sub-Sahara Africa from Caplan:

In 1960 as independence was burst upon Africa between the Sahara and Southern Africa, death rates for African children were the highest in the world, life expectancy the lowest. Only 16 percent of the population was literate, and in all of sub-Saharan Africa, with perhaps 200 million people at the time, there were 8,000 secondary school graduates. Just 3 percent of the student-age population attended secondary school. University-trained students were a rare breed. In the huge Congo, abruptly handed political independence by its Belgian masters in 1960, seventeen Congolese had a university degree. France, so proud of its colonial heritage, had not built a single university in all its colonies. More than three-quarters of both the senior public service and the managers of private businesses were foreigners.

That was after colonization - the way that western countries left the Africans they had claimed for so long to help. Is it any wonder that so much poverty and political and economic strife has followed independence in most of these countries? And consider this - approximately 300,000 people were killed by the 2004 tsunami but every week "...an estimated 130,000 Africans die of causes that in most cases are preventable. The four major killers of children are diarrhea, malaria, pneumonia and measles."

They get a tsunami in terms of public health every three weeks.

Caplan doesn't shy away from pointing out the destruction wrought by the so-called "Big Men of Africa" but he does point out that they were often installed and/or assisted long term by western money. The big reason for so much support of certain political leaders was the Cold War which saw the US and the USSR supporting various regimes and so-called liberation movements with their own goals in mind. There is a long list of "African Tyrants and Their Friends" in the book with such bombshells as US assistance in the murder of Patrice Lumumba, Congo's first and only democratically elected president, the US support of military dictators in Somalia and Chad, US support of a racist government in South Africa and on and on and on. It is all too easy to believe that what happens in Africa is "their fault" but as Caplan points out, that is simply not true. Foreign governments and foreign-owned companies have long had a stake in the politics of many African countries and they have done whatever they could to further their own goals, often to the detriment of the people themselves.

Jezebel has a long list of links about the crimes of DeBeers in Africa, with a recent article at ZNet on corrupt company practices in Namibia a must read. That people continue to buy diamonds from this company baffles me - you would think that knowing DeBeers fixes the price of diamonds far above what they are really worth would be enough to make anyone think twice but it doesn't. Enough Americans still want to show up their friends (and enemies and everyone else they might ever meet) to keep DeBeers fabulously successful. Those are the people who really need to read The Betrayal of Africa but I doubt they will. They don't want to know the truth; it might make them feel a little bit stupid about dumping several months worth of cash on a ring that is actually worth very little. For me it isn't about the diamonds though but the waste. Far too many people have suffered far too needlessly in dozens of countries in Africa because the West did not think care about them at all. We just took what we wanted and walked away and as a result, our mess has only continued to grow.

Other Wicked Cool Overlooked Books today:

Little Willow on Looks by Madeleine George: "This novel says a lot about school status, and it says it well. The writing is lovely, with third-person narration that gets the reader into each girl's mind but also provides the reader with omniscience - something that Meghan's invisibility provides her with, to a point, as well. What the book says about looks, popularity, and power will stay with readers because it is both true AND surmountable, and because of how it is presented."

TadMack gets political with The Hiding Place by Corrie Ten Bloom and several other books about WWII: "I was horrified that Jewish people were being targeted and made to live in ghettos -- which I thought was something like being made to live in the bad parts of Oakland. I knew Corrie and her sister, Betsie, were doing the right thing, when she and her family helped the Jews, but I was upset that they were caught and sent to a concentration camp. I didn't really "get" what that was, because the word "concentration" I thought meant to think really hard, but the things Corrie had to go through indelibly printed on my mind that Nazis were evil."