Aliopacto

I have mixed with a lot of Nigerians and he is not entirely wrong, but he is not entirely right either. There are stupid people everywhere in the world. Just as a fact we Nigerians are really one of the most easily corruptible people, Africa is officially the most corrupt continent come on. Face facts.

Also:

I have lived in Nigeria for e really good chunk of my life so I know what I am saying.

Have been beaten up a few times for no reason other than to take money off me. Had several of my friends robbed. Thieves have , no joke , come in through the roof of my home to rob me.

My right eye will never be the same since getting hit by a pistol butt.

I have been Followed by people in cars coming home from friends house.

My parents have been threatened, my car broken into several times when out for dinner.

So please do not start glamorising Nigeria or saying ha has not been to other parts of Nigeria. I have friends in the North whom I pray for every day in my heart, and I am the least religious person I know. When the riots and killings started I wanted to fly up there knock some sense into my best friend out and take him back to his parents house.

Hey Fayi, thanks for the comment. I think that women sleeping with men in exchange for something - meat, security, money - is as old as sex itself. But I'm curious why you find the article so offensive, or why the notion of Africa-as-a-prison is so unpleasant to you.

When I was developing this analogy (seriously, I've been in prison and I've been in Africa for much of my life and it is an analogy, a tool for explaining some otherwise very confusing aspects of Africa, it is not a literal description!) I spoke to many many people. My African friends were 99% happy with the analogy, saying it felt right. I discussed this for weeks, literally, with several dozens of people across Ghana and Togo, where I was traveling. I recorded those interviews, with unemployed youths, prostitutes, old men drinking alcohol, bar keepers, white beggars from Mauritania, many students, chiefs and businessmen.

Europeans, both in Africa and in Europe, were mostly shocked. Some new visitors to Africa found the model useful, to help them be calm, without becoming either patronising, racist, or over-empathic. And some Africans, especially those who travelled easily or had grown up in Europe, found it an offensive characterization.

duuuuuuuuude..
what in the world are you talking about.
You say africa is a prison (i know you were hypothetically speaking) but that is so inaccurate, actually its plain nonsense.
You are quite ignorant on many levels and it offends me.

I have been to europe and i am a nigerian in nigeria and believe me, what you have written is so full of shit (am sorry i cant be civil, you've written so much nonesense)

You are probably a prisoner in your own world. Am so sure you are not content with your current situation and are trying to better yourself.

Anyway before i totally rain insults on you, i will cut it short, your article is garbage and inaccurate. Next time you are in Lagos (which does not represent the whole of Nigeria, try mix with other types of Nigerians, i only wonder what it says about you when all the people you mix with are as you described, find some class). And lastly dumbass, "Gold digger" is an english word, so women sleeping with men in exchange for money and gifts actually started with your side of the world. Get Educated!

At first I bridled at this idea, that

"You cannot, except at a high cost, make permanent friends with Africans in Africa. The cost is a heavy dependency that expresses itself in every phone call, every email. The prisoner cannot treat a free person as an equal. As a foreigner you have the capacity to free your African friends. That is, to organize visas for them, invitations, sponsorships, and eventually, permanent residence in Europe via marriage or subterfuge, followed by years or decades of support, encouragement, and help. Either you act, and that will change your life in ways you did not plan, or you do not act, and then your friendship is meaningless."

But in fact that is quite right, it is not far wrong. The African continent for those who cannot leave it has come to be experienced more and more as a form of detention camp, an open prison from which it is becoming almost impossible to escape. This is an indictment of our global system of gulags and occupied spaces stamped 'it's mine/ours/not yours'. Apartheid is truly global. This is what globalization meant!

I prefer it when you write about Africa. Some of the short stories are really heavy, heavy. God! This was enjoyable, somehow, because you clearly enjoyed speaking from a position of security! Also admiringly of those whose lives are unfree… making a virtue of necessity is no virtue, if we consider…?! Thanks for this

Unexpectedly, Africans do not for the most part either feel sorry for themselves, or angry at foreigners. In my experience they have an extraordinary capacity for resistance, for positiveness, for finding pleasure and joy even in the most difficult of circumstances.

It is this capacity which the astute visitor can try to learn, and perhaps take back home.