After hearing an article on the relative safety of travel to South Africa these days, I decided to have a look at the news in Africa to see exactly what’s going on over there. Well, other than the Zimbabwe government cracking down on the media, a pineapple strike in Ivory Coast, outlawed strikes in Nigeria based around rising gas prices, and the murder of Asian farmers in Tanzania, it seems that Africa is extremely unstable. Maybe South Africa is safe but that surprises me greatly.

One of the more disturbing news stories I came across was the 30 dead coltan miners in the Congo. I assume there are mining accidents all the time, but this one troubles me because the ore being mined, coltan, is used in everyone’s cell phones. Imagine the world demand for this ore and imagine the poverty that all this global money is being thrown into and there’s no surprise at the turmoil it creates.

The mining of coltan not only threatens the people and institutions of the Congo, but it greatly affects the sensitive wildlife of the area as well. The gorillas and other fauna of the surrounding jungle have had their habitat decimated already. The encroachment of the human population destabilizes not only their resources to stay alive but also their social foundations as entire generations of gorillas can be displaced and therefore doomed to death by a single coltan mining operation.

Add to this situation the existence of a “turf”-based warlord system in the region and the battles being fought over veins of coltan can quickly become near civil wars that rage for weeks. This warlord system also siphons off most of the profit from the coltan trade to line the pockets of politicians and soldiers loyal only to the money they can be paid to be silent or violent, respectively. What this siphoning of money also means is that the local people who may be doing all the work in the mines see little, if any, benefit of the dangerous work.

A lot of this situation can be likened to politics of the diamond trade that have been well-documented and despised for the better part of 2 centuries. Just as in the coltan trade, high-demand and monopolies create high prices that engender an atmosphere of corruption and violence.

In both cases, the question comes down to “Whose fault is this?” Should we blame the local people and warlords who simply are trying to make money to survive the only way they might know how? Should we blame the local governments who turn a blind-eye to the violence and dangerous work conditions in favor of levying huge taxes in an effort to stabilize their faltering countries’ economy? Are the cell phone manufacturers to blame because they purchase a product that is known to have been harvested and refined in less than ideal conditions and which is most likely tainted by blood and violence?

In truth, I believe the answer goes much farther back. The existence of a de facto colonialism that simply will not go away creates the atmosphere where survival at all costs is all that many people in Africa know. The disease that haunts Africa is perhaps a lack of self-esteem, a disbelief in their ability to rise above the crushing blows that have been dealt them in the past. Even if the people of the world don’t call the Congo a colony, we perpetuate that ideal by ignoring the turmoil our convenience creates. We did it when we destroyed eons of African culture in an effort to “civilize” the African people. We did it when we forced generations of Africans into slavery all over the Western Hemisphere. We do it when we rape the natural resources of countries who believe their only worldly asset is what they can sell.