Aid for Africa?

Why, after all these years, are so many countries in Africa still dependent upon Western aid? Has such aid truly helped the situation or encouraged them to let others do for them what they won't do for themselves? (As the saying goes, you can give a man a fish and he'll eat once or you can teach him how to fish and he'll eat plenty of times). Has such assistance truly served the long-term interests of Africa or merely the self-interests of burgeoning bureaucracies?

Why does the white world of the West seem more concerned for the welfare and security of Africans than do many of Africa's tyrannical leaders?

I raise this question because the West is usually despised as former colonialists and imperialists and is no longer welcome to rule with its law and order but is begged to bail African countries out once their elected leaders rip them off (bloating foreign bank accounts) and strip their countries bare by grievous mismanagement.

Productive white Israelite farmers in Zimbabwe, for example, have viciously been driven off their family farms for black squatters who do just that - squat - and the orphaned land lies fallow and the country starves, which reminds me of when a middle-aged white couple picked me up hitch-hiking in South Africa and they said, "See those fields? There might be a crop in there next year, but there won't be anything in it the following year."

The blacks see the rewards of the hard work the British and Euro-Israelites have put in and think if they steal and kill for it they'll have peace and prosperity too. Then when they just SIT on the tractor and do nothing and wonder why it isn't working....as conservative blacks sigh and decry.
 
The black Communists and black Nationalists are killing the white goose that laid the golden eggs, and many of the white liberals who helped empower them have since fled the chaos and confusion they've helped to instigate.

Yet racist Mugabe's still in power (no visits by Jesse Jackson or by an African-American coalition of outraged ministers over this reverse discrimination or threats of sanctions by the divided UN).

These are some of the points (sharpened by my own experiences and observations) travel-writer Paul Theroux makes in his work: Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town. However, it was James Michener's book on South Africa, The Covenant, that made me want to visit it.

I was blessed to spend a glorious 7 weeks in South Africa during their Summer (our Winter) Dec. 91 - Jan. '92. The scenery was just AWESOME and inspired praise to our Great Creator God
the entire time!

 For 3 weeks I stayed with colored friends in Athlone, Cape Town (who couldn't have been more gracious), a colored neighborhood where girls gathered outside to see the "white boy from America" - (I met Celeste at Kibbutz Sdot Yam); I met up with another friend (Debbie) who was my German kibbutz roommate's girlfriend at Reshafim - a white girl of English descent; and I took trains, planes, and automobiles (hitchhiked for the most part) from Johannesburg to Cape Town, South Africa, climbed Table Mountain and took a cable car back down, visited Rhodes Memorial, made my way up the spectacular Garden Route, seeing East London, Knysna, Wilderness, Durban, Zululand, Bridal Vail Falls, Berlin Falls, Lisbon Falls, Mac Mac Falls, Swaziland, Kruger National Park, God's Window, Three Rondavels, Bourke's Luck Potholes and back to Johannesburg, on to Pretoria and a pilgrimage to the Voortrekker's National Monument while en route to Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe (Rhodesia in ruins). 

I met up with an English lass on the train in Bulawayo whom I had met near George, South Africa and bunji-jumped with off the Old River Ghouritz Bridge (near Mosel Bay) weeks before while traveling back to Johannesburg.

I then went to Tel Aviv, Israel before coming to Home Sweet Home (USA).

May God bless Africa with genuine leaders who love their people - who put their people above personal ambitions and greedy temptations.