09.13.2005
I have always wondered what a man like Paul Biya, France's Cameroun puppet, who enjoys spending so much of his time in Switzerland and other parts of Europe thinks about after he takes a shit and flushes, confidently knowing that his shit will actually go down. I wonder what he thinks about when he's sure that flipping the switch will turn the lights on in his sumptuous suite in the various European hotels he fancies so much. I say this because the vast majority of people like him, Africans, who inhabit the country he's been the titular president of for over 22 years do not have a toilet to flush, or the confidence that if they flip the switch, the lights will turn on. For many of Biya's countrymen who have these amenities, it is always a gamble when they flush or flip.
For over 500 years, at the bottom of an economic system that has created massive amounts of wealth for humanity, has been the unrewarded toil of the African, first as slaves, then as the colonized. People like Biya make up that pedigree of Africans that Charles de Gaulle called chiefs and notables, who in French-occupied Africa are cultivated and held personally responsible for power. They date back to the chiefs and notables who willingly sold fellow Africans into slavery, putting them as free labor for the creation of the wealth the west flaunts today. It really elicits pity more than anything else that people like Biya continue to allow themselves to be used for the perpetual fleecing of their fellow African and their homelnad in this day and age.
