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AFRI CA
shepherd's crook in one hand, and a lance in the other to defend
himself against leopards and lions.
What this demonstrates is that neo-capitalism is advancing
in
Africa with the speed, the impetus and the impetuousness of a fire
attacking a very dry or oily substance. The hotel, in Accra, for example,
is only one of many similar hotels that have appeared almost everywhere
on the black continent, from the Atlantic Ocean to the Indian Ocean.
Next to the hotels, a quantity of buildings have sprung up in the
modem sections of the African cities which testify to the interests of
European and American capital in Africa: proud, gloomy and icy
banking centers with those black polished marbles and granites of a
thick gray texture that one sees in Zurich, London, New York, Frankfurt;
small pocket skyscrapers of glass and metal with lines of brass name–
plates on which one reads various writing ending with the magic initials:
Ltd; great department stores with immense windows, escalators, and
salesgirls dressed in uniform as they are in the ten-cent stores of
New York.
We are by now a long way from the old colonialism with its decadent
bungalows, its Victorian hotels, its slave-like bars, its dusty shops and,
in short, all its picturesqueness in the Conrad style. Neo-capitalism,
in
no way intimidated by malaria, by the tze-tze fly, by the humid heat
and the dry heat, by the mud of the rains and the dust at the height
of summer, by the backwardness and primitiveness of the population,
and the lack of streets and of cities, strengthened
by
its past victories
in mechanical and pharmaceutical fields, today feels itself capable of
absorbing Africa much more rapidly and effectively than it could over–
populated Asia and lethargic South America. In addition, the interests
of neo-capitalism in Africa are justified not only by the market in
hand-made goods and by the presence of the most diverse mineral
riches, but also by its rivalry with communism and by the need
to
establish itself quickly in order to frustrate, with an industrial revolution,
every possibility of a political revolution.
But others, with all the statistics at their disposal, would know how
to describe more precisely than I what the neo-capitalist invasion of
Africa is today in facts and figures. What interests me are all those
things which the economists can not ignore, or rather those aspects
of the invasion which are more irrational but, by no means, less
important. And in the meantime, there is no doubt that while the red
star of communism shines over Asia, over Africa, at least for the
present, the white star of neo-capitalism glitters. In other terms, there
seem to be reasons of an historic, ethnic, psychological and aesthetic
