Out Of Africa

Remember learning about those historical days of having to go around the Cape of Good Hope to get from one ocean to another. Shipping interests were transportation concerns about the risk of having to go out of your way to do business. Long, drawn-out voyages around Africa were as dangerous then as a disabled luxury liner drifting toward Somalia is now.

So, when four fiber-optic data cables, activated in 2009, are discovered mysteriously severed this year, history repeats itself. Telecom companies are now having to re-route their data around, you guessed it, the Cape of Good Hope.

While the investigation into how the four undersea cables were damaged proceeds, we're left with Good Hope for Africa. European "clippers" have given Africa quite a haircut called exploitation. In fact, the term "Cape" is an indicator of a colonization still prominently established in South Africa. Likewise, Cape Town is still considered a tavern stop between the Atlantic and Indian seas.   

Uniquely, the twin crosses that Africa has had to bear at the hands of Portuguese and Dutch settlers, followed by an English occupation, point towards Whittle Rock in what is called False Bay. No better symbol captures the irritating pebble (Whittle Rock) in the sandal of Africans or the deceitful incursion (False Bay) made to secure the use of their resources.

Like the story, "The Giving Tree", Africa has been ravished by friend and foe alike. It has hardly thought to exact remuneration or revenge for all that has been taken from it. Despoiled and cut off from its people and means of production, Africa has been left to wither on the vine of global enterprise. Its fate left precarious in the Garden of Good and Evil, seeds of derision continue to germinate.

But I hear drums calling us out of Africa. I see dancing to ritual deliverance, if not retribution, from the leeches that want blood along with rights of ownership. The demoralizing data that spans a continent is severe and severed from its historical record. I call on cartographers, along with telecom companies, to do some re-routing. For the only Good Hope for Africa is out of Africa, since there's no getting around having to go around it.