Wednesday 21 August 2002

Pic of the day: Good and correct Africans who have waited for Norwegian aid instead of eating hamburgers. (OK, nor really. It's a screenshot from Morrowind, and I summoned them for the occasion. Still, I trust you'll understand my choice of illustration soon.)

McAfrica returns!

Ah, sweet prescience. Move aside, Nostradamus old pal. There's a new kid on the block. In September 2000 I wrote: "Now in the mind of most Norwegians, a McAfrica would probably mean an empty box. The stereotype here is that Africans do very little except starve and die, with the exception of those on the Mediterranean coast, who are not real Africans but Arabs. Real Africans are easy to recognize: They are black and starving. The notion that these people actually have a culture - or rather, several cultures - and that they also have a wide range of food worth trying, that's just too much for us to swallow."

Today in the news, Norwegian aid organizations protest against McDonalds selling my second favorite hamburger, McAfrica. (Actually I liked McRoma better.) "We now expect McDonalds to share the profit from this hamburger with us." Oooh, yes, because you have trademark on the word Africa, and you have decreed that it shall now and forevermore mean hunger and misery. Right?

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Now in all fairness, 13 million people are starving in southern Africa. Or "sub-Saharan Africa" as it is often called, just to remind us that the people there are subhuman and only exist to allow us to demonstrate our godlike benevolence as we drive around in our great lorries handing out dry crackers to the starving, like Jesus feeding the multitude in the desert. Except Jesus had fish too, which some boy had brought for reasons unknown. (When I was a boy, I hated fish, and with a vengeance. I still like it less than burgers.)

Now that the 500-years flood that has wracked Germany is making its way to Hamburg, I presume that it will no longer be politically correct to call this food "hamburger" either. After all, it is not very sensitive toward the German people. And we really shouldn't eat "original American pizza" after 9/11. And in memory of the 2/3 of Norway's population that died during the Black Death, we should call black something else. My vote is for blue.

News flash, people. McAfrica burgers are not made of dead Africans. Here in Norway, they are made of homegrown Norwegian beef and other local ingredients, though the recipe is evidently blended with east African traditions. It's not like this beef would have ended up in Africa anyway. On the contrary, our failure to import beef from Africa is one of the reasons why they are starving. (Not that our beef isn't better and especially safer. We can afford quality controls that even our neighboring countries balk at.) In fact, our failure to implement reasonably free trade with the growing number of free democratic nations in Africa is a shame, and there is little glory in coming around later with dry crackers for the dying.

And while Africa isn't my favorite place to live right now, much of the continent has seen a remarkable growth. It doesn't look remarkable with our favorite measure, GNP per capita. Then again, we may have forgotten the connection between capita and capital. When "sub" countries expand their population, we regard it as yet another proof of their backwardness. They breed like bunnies, but in our godlike grace we continue to feed them, because we are born superior. Well, it certainly has its drawback, as regards standard of living. The interesting thing is that some of these countries have managed a slow rise in income per head, even though the number of heads have risen rapidly, and a large number of the population are children. That's pretty impressive, if you ask me.

But of course, we don't want to be impressed by Africans. That's why we take our camera crews away from Ethiopia when they're no longer holding out their beggar bowls, and pack up and travel to another part of the continent where there is hope of death and hunger. We feed them crackers, and they feed our ego. On the (no longer rare) occasions where there's no famine in Africa, we simply forget them. They're sure to starve again. Because Africa is a trademarked word meaning starvation. And "it's typical Norwegian to be good". (Quote Gro Harlem Brundtland, then Norwegian prime minister, now leader of World Health Organization.)