Out of Africa

By Richard Dickenson

A couple of thousand years ago the estimated two million or so people living in what is now the UK were mostly farming people. At best their short, brutish lives were mostly a matter of subsistence with mediocre yields coming from wet farmlands, unpredictable weather and primitive hand-operated tools. The expectation of life has been calculated in wildly different ways but, in general, at birth there was only a small chance of living much past the age of 35.

Gradually along came better tools, better land management, improved husbandry. Everything got gradually better, though it was not until around the 18th century that hygiene and disease treatments got seriously better. Steadily the population increased. Life expectancy grew longer and longer.

Now we have high-efficiency farming, pesticides, huge machines, organised labour and the benefits of modern science. Commensurately the population now numbers some 65 million. Sadly this means Britain can no longer feed itself and has had to find other ways of making enough money to buy what is needed from somewhere else. Up to a point that works.

Elsewhere in the world, on the other hand, malaria remains a terrible disease. Westerners incline to think of it as happening far way and not to many Europeans. That might be some sort of comfort, but I’ve treated hundreds of cases, and I’ve had it myself. Every few years yet another survey tells us how many helpless kiddies have died of the disease. Our hearts are wrung and we send what we can to the charities that address the problem. So that’s alright, too, then, yes?

Even the great Bill Gates has donated a huge chunk of his enormous fortune towards stamping out this dreadful scourge. One can only applaud the generosity.

His charity plus our lesser efforts to help saves a lot of lives. That too makes us feel better. We’ve done our good deed for the day.

But have we? The question arises because at this point we incur the Law of Unforeseen Circumstances.

The population of Ethiopia 30 years ago was around 40 million, most living at or below starvation level. Huge aid programmes flooded in. The population surged towards its current 120 million, and is still rising at over two million a year. The point is that that population now needs vastly more charity to feed it. And this at a time when disposable funds in the western world are everywhere diminishing.

Similarly, 50 years ago Somalia could not feed its population. Terrible droughts killed millions. Nowadays the droughts are rather less severe. But there are now three times the number of people to feed, thanks to outside aid.

In many places around the world situations like this are being recognised as unsustainable.

So what are we expected to do? Should we let them starve back to more natural proportions? That very idea produces a dilemma for our Judeo/Christian/Islamic ethos as well as for Hindu/Buddhist morality.

There are other complications. To start with much of the money sent never got where it was intended. It fell into the hands of the warlords, who spent it on weapons to prolong their wars. For example, Aid money prolonged the Eritrean-Ethiopian war by a decade. Alternatively, much was filched by political manipulators who used it to prop up political systems which would otherwise have collapsed.

While all this has been going on the populations still remain at or near starvation level. Which raises yet another disastrous consequence. Recent studies have shown that the mental development of undernourished children results in a lower level of educability. Pre-birth malnutrition compounded by the inadequate neonatal and subsequent living standards of the first decade of life breeds a dangerous kind of human. I was in Somalia two years ago and saw at first hand ten-year-olds being rounded up to be disarmed.

The shocking truth is that the starving wide-eyed boy-child we saved 20 years or so ago is now a low IQ, AK47-carrying, perpetually tumescent, sexually hyperactive, illiterate thug siring children whenever he can, eager to join an ocean pirate gang, and blaming the world because he is uneducated, poor and abandoned.

How much morality is there in saving a wide-eyed little Ethiopian girl from starvation today, for her to survive into a life of brutal circumcision, poverty, hunger, violence, sexual abuse and repeated adolescent pregnancies resulting in another half-dozen such wide-eyed children, with similarly jolly little lives ahead of them?

There is, of course, a good argument why we should prolong the growth of this catastrophic, dysfunctional economic, social and sexual system, but at this moment it escapes me.

Surely, now is the time for all good men to come to!