Since the first Portuguese caravel banked eastward from the Azores toward the Gold Coast in the fifteenth century, Africa has been fetishized by both Americans and Europeans as a virgin princess ripe for the taking -- and re-taking. As recently as 1977, historian Bernard Porter characterized, without irony, the early European explorers' encounters with Africa as "having caressed her coasts but not yet penetrated her interior."
Though diamonds still excite the most headlines about the political and environmental degradation of Africa, a new atlas, as The Independent reports, illuminates the toll the most recent four decades of exploitation have taken on the continent.
"Nature Laid Waste: The Destruction of Africa," The Independent, June 11, 2008:
It was long shrouded in mystery, called "the Dark Continent" by Europeans in awe of its massive size and impenetrable depths. Then its wondrous natural riches were revealed to the world. Now a third image of Africa and its environment is being laid before us - one of destruction on a vast and disturbing scale. Using "before and after" satellite photos, taken in all 53 countries, UN geographers have constructed an African atlas of environmental change over the past four decades - the vast majority of it for the worse. In nearly 400 pages of dramatic pictures, disappearing forests, shrinking lakes, vanishing glaciers and degraded landscapes are brought together for the first time, providing a deeply disturbing portfolio of devastation.
The atlas, compiled by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) at the request of African environment ministers, and launched yesterday simultaneously in Johannesburg and London, underlines how extensively development choices, population growth, regional conflicts and climate change are impacting on the natural world and the nature-based assets of the continent....
Published in 1885, the same year in which Otto von Bismarck's Berlin Conference inaugurated the colonial "Scramble for Africa," King Solomon's Mines, by Sir Henry Rider Haggard, spawned the genre of "Lost World" literature, a tradition vigorously maintained from Edgar Rice Burroughs to Michael Crichton to Indiana Jones. Though the novel was a result of a piddling wager -- Haggard's brother had bet £1 that Sir Henry couldn't write a novel half as good as Stevenson's Treasure Island -- it quickly became the year's best seller and printers had trouble producing enough copies for circulation. As the first British novel set fully in Africa, the novel exploited the Victorian public's increasing awareness and fascination with the "Dark Continent." The nineteenth century had seen the exploration of (and excavation of treasures from) the Valley of the Kings in Egypt, Great Zimbabwe, and Assyria. In 1899, the enthusiasm for "lost" worlds and peoples would inspire Rudyard Kipling to famously postulate on the "White Man's Burden"; that same year, Joseph Conrad would plumb the metaphorical soul of these lost worlds -- and of their conquerors -- in Heart of Darkness.
• King Solomon's Mines, by H. R. Haggard, 1885.
"See!" he repeated hoarsely, holding the lamp over the open chest. We looked, and for a moment could make nothing out, on account of a silvery sheen that dazzled us. When our eyes grew used to it we saw that the chest was three parts full of uncut diamonds, most of them of considerable size. Stooping, I picked some up. Yes, there was no doubt of it, there was the unmistakable soapy feel about them.
I fairly gasped as I dropped them.
"We are the richest men in the whole world," I said. "Monte Christo was a fool to us."
"We shall flood the market with diamonds," said Good.
"Got to get them there first," suggested Sir Henry.
We stood still with pale faces and stared at each other, the lantern in the middle and the glimmering gems below, as though we were conspirators about to commit a crime, instead of being, as we thought, the most fortunate men on earth.
"Hee! Hee! Hee!" cackled old Gagool behind us, as she flitted about like a vampire bat. "There are the bright stones ye love, white men, as many as ye will; take them, run them through your fingers, eat of them, hee! hee; drink of them, ha! ha!"
At that moment there was something so ridiculous to my mind I the idea of eating and drinking diamonds, that I began to laugh outrageously, an example which the others followed, without knowing why. There we stood and shrieked with laughter over the gems that were ours, which had been found for us thousands of years ago by the patient delvers in the great hole yonder, and stored for us by Solomon's long-dead overseer, whose name, perchance, was written in the characters stamped on the faded wax that yet adhered to the lids of the chests....We had got them: there before us were millions of pounds' worth of diamonds, and thousands of pounds' worth of gold and ivory only waiting to be taken away.
Suddenly the fit passed off, and we stopped laughing.
"Open the other chests, white men," croaked Gagool, "there are surely more therein. Take your fill, white lords! Ha! Ha! take your fill."
Thus adjured, we set to work to pull up the stone lids on the other two, first--not without a feeling of sacrilege--breaking the seals that fastened them.
Hoorah! They were full too, full to the brim....
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