Introduction: The Dark Heart of the World

Africa: the Dark Continent. Joseph Conrad suggested that Africa, or at any rate the Congo, was "the Heart of Darkness". My recent studies under Dr Onek Adyanga at Millersville University suggest that Africa is one of the great circulatory centers of world culture and economics. Laborers exported from Africa built the great empires of the Americas. Materials exported from Africa fueled Europe's growth, and now fuel Asia's. From Africa, paleontologists propose, we all have come, and to Africa have gone Europeans and Asians in great numbers.

Africa, perhaps more than any continent, represents the often horrendous human capacity for exploitation and destruction and the vivid hope for truth, reconciliation, and progress.

At the conclusion of last semester's graduate seminar on 20th Century Africa, I told Dr Adyanga that as my small contribution to that vivid hope, I would use the materials I prepared for the course as the basis of a blog, which you are now reading.

The situation of Africa is dire, in many ways. But Africa is not alone. As Walter Rodney argued, the development of the "developed world" required the "underdevelopment" of Africa. A similar argument might be advanced for South America and Asia. If Rodney is correct, what then can be done to undo the underdevelopment of Africa? Will the "developed" world have to be "undeveloped"?

I hope that you, my readers, will question what I have written and explore for yourself Africa, the Dark Heart of the World.