Links Roundup 1.10.13

• For Too Long The West Has Been Blind To Africa’s True Nature. Now, We Risk Being Left Behind (The Independent)

Go to the charity’s website and you are confronted with a patronising message to “make Africa famous for its epic landscapes” before urging you to hand over your cash to “help end hunger”. This is unsurprising. The leading lights in the ever-growing aid industry are very proficient marketeers, with their data-harvesting tricks and media manipulation. Many of Oxfam’s rivals remain hooked on hoary old clichés; just look at Save the Children’s recent advertising.

But at least Oxfam’s acknowledgment is a start – a belated admission of how its sector’s sins and salvation fantasies distorted our image of Africa. There are enduring problems there, of course, as in other places, of corruption and violence, of gut-wrenching poverty and grotesque political incompetence. Many will take international action to solve. Who, after all, sells the guns, funds the despots, launders stolen assets, and prevents fair trade?

The anachronistic obsession with aid, increasingly alienating the people it is designed to benefit, has blinded Britons to the modern realities of Africa. It is not just the advance in peace and prosperity, with startling stories of declining conflict, rapid urbanisation, record falls in infant mortality, and rampant growth levels. It is also about Nigerian investors buying assets in Britain, young Europeans searching for work in Algeria and Angola, and American firms seeking technological innovations in Ghana and Kenya.

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