The offending still

By Carlos Detres

Ah there it was, the Dark Continent in cartoon silhouette, black, and devoid of borders; just one big, black chunk of land lying somewhere in the Atlantic like loose sewage congealed into an island. A black figure appears like an apparatus of comedy; wearing a sarong across his mid-section, a bone pierced through his nose, and a tuft of black hair shooting straight from his black oblong skull; his beady black eyes lack intelligence, reminiscent of the ocular orbs of cold-blooded murder and destruction tucked into the sockets of a great white shark. It was a sad and ignorant portrait that was way antiquated by the ’80s when I first watched this cartoon.

The Looney Tunes cartoon was accompanied with other images on the TV. It’s cork-thin kids, flies swarming about their faces, doe-like eyes staring back into the blank, unmolested canvas of my soul. Mom would say, “Stay at the table until you’re done eating. There’s hungry kids in Africa who would love to have a meal like that.” I’d say under my breath, “Well, send it to them.” I was a sickly child, whose world was reported to him through National Geographic magazines and day-time television. I was curious about Africa. It seemed like a strange place; like the training fields for the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Characters on the news, riding around in the backs of cargo trucks, waving guns into the air. Children dying of AIDS and myriad diseases I’d never heard of. Hunger, locust seasons — just an awful place I didn’t want to visit.

Of course, with age comes wisdom, and this obvious maxim applies most acutely to Africa; this raped continent. Slave trade, diamond trade, colonialism, religious reformation, the indoctrination of tribal villages, and the de-forestation of land, which shook disease from the wilderness of the jungle and seeped into villages and cities. It’s a dark continent but not for the color of its people or unmapped, unexplored territories but for the pervasive darkness of man’s soul; echoing from millions of years of abuse as evolving humanoids, beaten by the elements until modern man is chiseled out of the rock he came from. And what nature couldn’t do, his brethren finished; nearly deleting the signature of our roots.

Then came the cartoons and the 1980s, when good ol’ Reagan denied our country sweeping education about AIDS. This is the era I grew up in, the pictures, the stories of Africa. The talking heads said AIDS had come from Africa, presumably from a monkey. The CDC attempted to join the dots of victims to Patient Zero. In 2007, a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences claimed that HIV may have spread from Africa to Haiti, entering the United States some time in 1969. AIDS was broadcast by televangelists and right wingers as a curse for frivolous and debased sexual activity, which spread to many households in America at the time — the only “education” we received. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands were dying in Africa; people who had no hope of receiving a cure from anyone other than the village medicine man.

I heard a podcast from 60 Minutes, the news magazine series. It’s the same as the show but without the video, just audio. Bob Simon was in Uganda, reporting on George W. Bush’s great cause for humanity (sounds paradoxical and suspect but I digress). Bob Simon says Bush, on behalf of America, has become a heroine for providing billions of dollars a year to help eradicate AIDS from Uganda. We’re now Uganda’s friend instead of the “world’s policeman,” according to Doctor Peter Mugyenyi, the African country’s “pioneer against against AIDS.”

Bob Simon is among children in this segment of the podcast. I can hear them laughing in what sounds like a classroom, then he says they would have perished long ago without anti-retroviral drugs, the “miracle pill”. According to another doctor, these kids will live a full, long, and normal life. I wonder about the image children in the States today will have of their African counterparts. Will it be of a prospering continent, persevering in the dust of decades’ long war and genocide? Will it be of a strong, determined people who survive the plague and famine? How will Bush’s olive branch of medical treatment affect Uganda and our relations with them when these kids grow up? It’s a hopeful image; a lasting one, too that not only affects the psychology of a generation but instills confidence and pride.

I consider the effects of globalization, and yes it’s not all good, mostly bad, but it does force upon eachother acceptance of polar cultures. World peace is a pipe dream but reversing terrible trends is a step in the right direction.