CSotD: It’s cost that’s hurting us, not the price
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The western media has had plenty of cartoons about the price of oil, but at Cartoon Movement today, Kenyan cartoonist Victor Ndula comments on its cost, not in terms of reindeer and polar bears, but from an African perspective.
I'm certainly aware of the price at the pump — I recently spent $62 for a fillup and am very glad I don't have to drive very far very often — and I'm also concerned about the Arctic, both in terms of possible spills and, to a much greater extent, in terms of global warming. These are all issues that demand our concern.
But the western media has virtually ignored the politics of oil in West Africa, where the kleptocracies have allied with the oil companies to create a system that is essentially an extension of colonialism: There is little environmental oversight, so that the leakage and pollution that is possible in the Arctic is a widespread, unaddressed reality in Africa, and, while the profits for this extraction go to Africans rather than to European colonial masters, they go to a small elite rather than to the greater population of the nations whose oil is fueling our need for fossil fuel.
Victor Ndulu was born in 1976. About that time, my then-wife and I had a conversation with my grandfather, who had risen from working underground to help pay for college to a large desk in the executive tower of a major American steel corporation.
We were at a point where we were finally able to make a little more money than we needed simply to get by, and we asked him what he would do with it, if he were in our place.
"Spend it," he said, and warned of hard times ahead.
You have to understand that, while he came from a generation that valued self-reliance and he had little patience with the idea that people were owed much beyond common charity, he was not a crusader against socialism and certainly didn't see communists under his bed.
In fact, in a different conversation, he observed that, if the steel companies had spent as much money cleaning themselves up as they spent lobbying against environmental laws, places like Pittsburgh and Gary would be paradises.
In this case, he had traveled to South America and to Africa to evaluate various potential sources of raw materials, not just iron ore but minerals like chrome and molybdenum required for making steel, and he said to us that western companies had set up a system in which they obtained these raw materials with no concern for the Third World peoples whose resources they were.
Again, he was no political softie, and he was certainly not going to use a political code-word like "exploit," but he wasn't afraid of the word "fair," and he said it simply was not fair that we had created a comfortable, developed world for ourselves that was so separate from the world of, as he put it, "all the little brown people" who were not able to benefit from the resources of their own homelands. And it was clear that he meant that phrase not in a racial but in a geopolitical sense.
"One of these days," the old man said, "those little brown people are going to ask, 'Where's mine?'"
He died in 1978, and he was 85 then, so it's pointless to wish he were still around to comment on how his prophecy has played out.
Besides, that's why we have people like Victor Ndula, who is of an age, and a heritage, to make more important observations than, "See? I told you!"
The question is being asked, and it's not being asked in a subservient, "Please, sir, can I have more?" tone. The question "Where's mine?" is central to our times and it demands, not requests, an answer.
There is a fallacy in political arguments of "This is more pressing, therefore that can't be important." This is meant to bat the ball around and prevent any one aspect of an issue from getting any serious consideration at all, and reduces rebuttal to, "Well, you may be worred about Aspect A, but what about Aspect B?"
The fact is, first of all, there is no reason we can't be simultaneously concerned with the environmental impact of consumption and the envrionmental impact of extraction, which are clearly interlocked, nor is it necessary to choose between caring about polar bears and caring about the people of West Africa and of Libya, as well as those in places like Venezuela and Vietnam and Saudi Arabia and Iraq.
What I do think is important is that voices of concern be heard from all those places, from the United States and other consumer nations, and from Africa and other provider regions.
And II think it's important that it be expressed in broader terms than just this problem here and that problem there, and that people begin to see how the anger of "the little brown people" is playing out in other ways, and that we in the west have to recognize and respect them, not as "little brown people" but as full players on the global stage.
Beyond the political catch-phrases, fair is fair.
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