Cecil GutzmoreIN 1973 Ayi Kwei Armah published one of the most uncompromisingly nationalist of African novels, Two Thousand Seasons. He names the principal enemies of African people as the destroyers/predators from the sea (Christian Europeans) and the destroyers/predators from the desert (Islamists/Arabs). The novel captures the effects of two monstrous systems of slavery as well as of colonialism and imperialism in the systematic under-development of Africa. Now intellectual former celebrant of creolite can speak with venomous accuracy of "Africa, in all her contemporary catastrophe."
I don't personally know of any creative work by an African at home or abroad that addresses the destructive actuality and possibility of the Euro-American moment in world history, Modernity: the last five centuries of peoples with technologies in headlong rush from that balance with nature that characterised all previous ages of humanity on earth.
Six relevant things engaged me.
First: that flood in Mozambique last year: its waters, rising some 30 feet, covering almost the whole vast country and threatening to return this year. Secondly: this year, the continents of Australia, Europe and North America experienced major floods. No pyaang-pyaang something: di real ting. Last week it was the raging Mississippi threatening to breach expensive defences.
Third: an expert on BBC World in the wee hours solemnly intoning, "We face an iceless future." He was speaking of the virtual disappearance of the polar ice-caps.
Fourth: That so Archie Bunkerish President George W. Bush leading the United States' charge away from its previous half-hearted commitment to the Kyoto Environmental Protocol, the purpose of which was (too late?) to address the causes of Global Warming.
Fifth: Bush's Vice President, the almost literally heartless Dick Cheney (a man whose coldness frightened even staunch Colin "overwhelming force and then some" Powell) announcing the new US energy policy. Telling the world: "Conservation is not the basis of a sound energy policy." That the demand for energy in California has expanded five times faster than supply, leading to a crisis involving sharply rising energy prices and power cuts. That as California goes so will the rest of the good old USA. And so his new, sounder, US energy policy will henceforth involve: (a) A massive increase in domestic fossil fuel production; (b) That one source will necessarily be the exploitation of the Alaskan national nature reserves and; (c) That nuclear energy will once more be fast-tracked after some two decades on the back-burner following Three Mile Island, and Chernobyl and after we learned that they cooked the books on the economics of nuclear energy production.
Sixth: George W. again declaring a national priority (a la JFK getting an American to the Moon) the establishment of Reagan's US global missile shield (Star Wars). The problem is not that it doesn't yet/may never work, or that everyone else is against it but that no one is asking about the effects of detonation of nuclear bombs in near space. Criminal even as a conception.
Even "between sleeping and waking " and however " early in the morning" I could not help grasping the menace to humanity and little me entailed in the above. Jehovah himself has been elbowed aside by this Euro-Modern drive to dominate everything. Never mind Noah of old and Big G's promise, declared in the rainbow sign: No More Water The Fire Next Time. Cancel/Rewind/Abort/Scrap. Nature/God is giving 21st century man signs aplenty. Signs that contradict not just Capleton but Himself: "It's not the Fire but the Water this/next time."
The Fireman must think again. Unless, of course, even one of those nuclear power stations that are about to be rekindled obliges him and does a Chernobyl, goes one better than Three Mile Island right here in our hemisphere.
Can American capitalism and its political representatives be too stupid or venal or profit-worshipping or uncaring to have grasped that Western technology's assault on the single delicate ecosystem that is earth, on the earth as a single biosphere has already gone not a step but a quantum leap too far?
Those unfriendly fluorocarbons have already virtually taken out the ozone layer. Earth's forests have been consumed by commercial loggers, cattle farmers and poor people driven to the very margins of existence. The tundra are not now so much frozen as water-logged. And it is an established fact that Africa is experiencing the most severe drought ever (the flip-side of flooding).
It's not as if Euro-America's own advanced mathematics, with its talk of chaos and fractals, has not equipped them to grasp the reality of interconnectedness. So why are they doing it to our world? Dem tink dem can escape dis ya judgemant? That international space stations and the promise of their interplanetary travelling spacecraft offer them escape routes? Can it be that wintering in Aspen, in Mustique or on their yachts the present/coming catastrophe will not affect them.
They have half a point: "The poor suffer first and worst." First and worst certainly but ah no wi wan. Hence the pressure on Jeb Bush by the rich and well heeled of low-lying Florida to rein-in little George W. The mighty Mississippi menaces some rotten-rich US citizens; the North Sea threatens to overwhelm that, magical-when-viewed-at-night, Thames Barrier.
It is not just Africans actually drowning in the dust of desertification in those once important and romantic Sahel cities. It's not just the poor of our Caribbean and South Sea islands that are menaced. The truth is that there is no real way of protecting against the effects of the worship of European technology, especially of the speedy, allegedly liberating, travel offered by the petrol/diesel-driven internal combustion engine. Who knows what role in earth's ecology of all of that hot oil and gas in the bowels of the earth actually had? Yet much of it was extracted and burnt in less than 100 years. Our knowledge of the ecological role of the forests is not saving the remnants. But, above all, who knows how the trillions of gallons of water now released from its icy polar tombs will return?
If the movement of a butterfly's wing can cause a far-off storm, what will the waters of departed icecaps do? What is certain is that it will return with unimaginable unpredictability: as massive tidal waves and monumental rains leading to floods that make that in Mozambique look like a ripple on a boating lake. And yet the US, with some 4 per cent of the world's population and responsible for 20 per cent of earth's harmful gas emissions, is planning to base an allegedly sound energy policy on the madness of its exponential increase.
Cecil Gutzmore is a research student and lecturer at the University of the West Indies. E-mail: gutzmorecr@hotmail.com
