Thursday, August 13, 2015

Africa Addio

Last night I watched the Africa Addio movie after going through a bunch of hoops trying to get a copy true to the original in English as it was filmed by the Italians. This movie, filmed in 1966, has been repeatedly edited, shortened, lengthened, had the “script” written and re-written, all to fill different sorts of agendas. Once you see it, it'll all be clear. The English “original” I watched was pretty clear of all but clinical commentary, however the graphics were pretty tough for this old boy to take. Truly brutal and knowing it was free of special effects, especially rough.


My maternal grandfather was a Irish merchant seaman from 1917 till he met my granny, fell in love, and changed his profession! They had a marriage that was as beautiful as it could be and lived ''until death do you part” with true love. I think I would have been embarrassed to go a drive-in double-date with them when I was 20!

This doesn't have much to do with anything, just a pair of future lovebirds!
 
   
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

            


Grace, my grandmother, at age 17.
She looked the same at 47!            


Arthur, my granddad, at age 21 aboard ship.
He taught me 3 ways to knife-fight at age 8.
 

He had a rather large collection of 19th and early 20th century African explorers which I read, plus a almost complete collection of Robert Ruark's fiction. Ruark's fiction is like James Mitchener's, historical fiction based on true accounts and embellished with the exception of Ruark actually being present for the Mau Mau wars.

The earlier explorers brought out the incredible richness and natural beauty of Africa plus the complex and, to my mind, the very fatalistic outlook of the peoples. The very cheapness which human life, indeed all life, was held was so alien that it makes one wonder if this is something that is nurture or nature. When the European colonists were booted out in the early 60's, all hell broke out including such mass slaughter of wildlife for food (the white man brought the means) there was no possible way that the people wouldn't be totally de-sensitized. Miles and miles of boneyards, uncounted people being involved in the butchering of hippos, elephants, antelopes, etc. that had just been slaughtered in mass quantities. I'll link the movie and also give the URL, however I will re-remind you that the movie is far more than gore, it is a blight on one's soul.

The blight gets worse with the helicopter shots of mile after mile of Arabs being forced to walk to their eventual death where enormous pits were filling with corpses. THIS IS NOT A MOVIE, this is reality. Cannibalism was shown and described such as slaves being bought for food, sometimes several buyers for one slave where the various buyers would mark the “cuts” they wanted with the slave taking this treatment without a stir. Grisly. This was LIFE, not a special effects movie. When not slaughtering Europeans or Arabs, they were busy killing and eating each other. Millions disappearing down the collective maw (Mau Mau?).
 


Africa is mind-boggling huge. Just the big three, the US, China, and India make up a population of what, 3 billion? Displayed this way really gives one perspective. Population pressure does generate expansionist pressure. Remember “liebensraum”? Nice war ya got thar... Remember Japan? In this era of hydrogen weapons, even a mindless piece of warlord dung can acquire such. ...plenty of folk in the right places to provide lots of “help”. A grotesquely pitiful collection of sovereign “nations” like Africa, ignorant beyond belief, is very much like a petri dish with lots of different colonies spreading, leaving the center dead with the effluvia of its' life, encountering other colonies doing the same. ALWAYS, all the colonies die. A non-sustainable situation will not be sustained. Something will replace it. In the petri dish's place comes a scraping out and the dishwasher. In the unbelievably fecund humans' place will come what? War absolutely, but a standard world war won't fix it this time. Plague? The Second Coming? The Coming of the 12th Imam? (I give myself the giggles)

Many moons ago, a fellow known as Paul Erlich wrote a book called “The Population Bomb”. He did something incredibly stupid; he put dates to his predictions. Who's to say an “enlightened” population cannot be as high as Azimov's Trantor?

Or, then again, maybe we'll be happy we have the H-bomb.


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