The land area of Africa is almost 4 times as big as the continental United States. 11.7 million square miles vs. 3.1 million square miles. People have been living in Africa a hundred times longer than they have been living in the Americas - 2 1/2 million years vs. 25,000. Africa is the mother country. This is where monkeys came down out of the trees and leaned how to walk and how to talk and started growing a big brain. We all know what that led to.
These days it’s the poor kid on the block. After colonization and apartheid and corrupt rulers one after the other and civil wars, it’s crippled and lost its sense of confidence. Confidence matters, some kind of pride or tradition is necessary for success whether you’re an NBA baller shooting 3’s with a hand in your face or a country struggling to develop its potential.
The potential of Africa is immense. And it’s needed by the world community. We need to hear from the mother country. We need some guidance and inspiration. Besides all the resources that continent holds, it also holds an ancient wisdom and an ancient way of knowing.
The Bushmen of southern Africa are probably the last remnant of the original people who used to live on this continent. These people have subsisted on hunting and gathering for millennia and still survive in and around the Kalahari desert. Their natural wisdom and connection with the land is fabled. They still live in an animist world where spirits inhabit trees and elands and rocks. Must be an exciting lifestyle living in the desert where no one else would, or could; living amongst the spirits.
And it’s no small trick bringing home an eland with your hunter’s skill and the end of your poison tipped spear. It’s no joke finding water in a drought, scraping away the sand from a damp place on the ground and siphoning water from a seep below the surface with a hollow grass stem. Knowing your world like a friend and an adversary is a way of life we have forgotten. We live with comforts and conveniences that we pay for with our time and money so that our actual leisure moments are reduced by the pursuit of it. For the ancient ones of Africa there was no bifurcation of life into the leisure and the working moments. The concepts of good and bad had only fundamental meaning not specific to everything like we do today.
It’s a huge continent and home to many nations. It has a magnificent deserts and some of the largest tropical forests in the world. It’s our homeland, it’s where we came from. I just have this crazy feeling that when Africa comes online it’s going to be a whole new world for the better.