A few days ago, news broke that the troops of the Mali coup government were heavily defeated by Tuareg guerrillas on the borders of Algeria. A news item like many others in the tragic normality of the Sahel. The only new element, which brought it to the forefront of the news, was the defeat suffered on that occasion by the Russian mercenaries who were serving here in support of the government troops. An unexpected denial, of course, of the fame that accompanies these professionals of war. But beyond this surprise, the event has returned to the dramatic ranks of wars and terrorism that bloodied these countries, victims of ruthless military juntas that operate in total contempt for the most basic human rights. Thus, the episode itself has only aroused the curiosity of the news, overshadowing other equally disturbing aspects, not so much for Africa’s present – already complicated – as for the future that it allows us to glimpse on the continent’s horizon.
Russian military collaboration, with the sending of mercenaries trained to fight in any war situation, is paid dearly by the military juntas in power in the Sahel. Which have no qualms about granting, in exchange for the help of these armed militias, the exploitation of the rich local mines, which are the main asset on which these countries can count to start their own development. Thus demonstrating the aptitude to adopt a neo–colonial practice in reverse, equal and opposite to that imposed on them by colonialism of the past. Much hated, and no less dangerous. But, evidently, assimilated by political custom.
It is not only the payment of mercenary militias that conveys this impression of African leaders, if those in uniform can be called that. Ghana, a former slave trade hub that has now become a democratic presidential republic, receives about 15 million used clothes from the rest of the world every week, which it throws into huge open landfills, when it doesn’t burn in the expanses of land adjacent to the shanty towns that have sprung up here, regardless of the looming environmental catastrophe.
As reported by some news reports, clothing waste has also invaded the surrounding sea, so much so that fishermen’s nets haul up more used clothes than fish. Not having the means to provide for their proper disposal and recycling – which would turn such waste into an economic resource – Ghana is giving its territory over to indiscriminate exploitation, deriving an immediate profit that does not compensate for the environmental damage suffered, while mortgaging the future, in terms of health, of its population by exposing their existence to pollution with incalculable effects. An eloquent signal, this too, of a reverse neo–colonialism, which makes us consider legitimate a practice similar to the much deprecated one that we suffered in the past, to the point of replicating it on our own initiative. As if the waste from a distant memory, which cannot be disposed of, continued undisturbed to infiltrate the mentality of the country, similar to used clothes that emerge in tatters from the sand and the sea, inexorably polluting the earth and air.
