Ruminations in Honor of [African] Bush

Feisty African blog Bullets and Honey with "aid" commentary:

There is a European assumption that the world has a single narrative thread running through it: his. It allows him to come up with phrases like 'humanity expects'; the 'world wants to know'; 'international community' on which so many abuses are based. Because this narrative is secular, it often must have some idea of 'man' as god or as end-point.

[snip]

The Bible is very hip to this stuff and gives a good example in Matthews. When Jesus was in the desert fasting, the Devil came to him and tried tempting him to eat. Now you know the Devil could have hooked him up something to eat, as he did to Adam and Eve, but Jesus chooses hunger. The Devil and in our case the rights crew come in with plenty of temptations but the inner goal is of robbing you of all life. .... The European is already held captive by it, and we in the bush have been targets for the last few hundred years.

[snip]

while Africans and other folks are in it if only as a result of empire, it is mostly at the end about Europe's little conceits of itself. This becomes far clearer when you see the institutions that spring out of the humanist ideas of which you speak. Here are the UNs, the Nobel Prizes, the donor aid packages and the ceaseless hand wringings by the Geldofs. They are the flip-side of the past attempt to use military force to extend the imperial realm now being carried out by moral force. The goal, whether they are conscious of it or not, is what it was in 1895: to write themselves onto the world which they consider to be a blank slate or one with meaningless or inhuman scribblings that must be erased. The missionaries are still with us but now they are secular priests who do not even have the slight humility of having God at the head of their mission...

Found through Lost Budgie, a favorite of Kathy Shaidle, and architect of the late Save Piglet Project.