Desmond Tutu on the West and its right to criticize Africa:
The West should in general, he warns, beware of preaching about corrupt
African dictators. “You could say the same about Europe. You get a Churchill
and then there’s a long wait . . . What gives me a great deal of hope for
Africa is looking at the history of Europe. Very recently you had two world
wars, you had the Holocaust, you had dictatorships in Spain, Portugal and
Greece. There was a time when Italy was changing governments like you change
pairs of socks. There was the Soviet Union, Stalin’s gulags. You forget that
you really made a mess of things. It was a Western country that was the
first and only country to use weapons of mass destruction. [Africa] is not
on a level with Western people.
Tutu is not only wrong, he is dead wrong. I cannot believe that it is still possible to use the old foolish excuse of Africans and Africa being different to shelter them from criticisms (both legitimate and illegitimate) as if they would deadly wound them, as if they are so lost in the heart of darkness that strangers ought to just shut, accept or respect differences even when they are atrocities and unacceptable.
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