Word: continentality
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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The Great Rift Valley can be seen from space. It shears down the eastern shoulder of Africa, a vast geological gash, one of the mysteries of the continent's power. Human life began in the Rift, as if it were gleaming up through a crack in the world.
Africa has a genius for extremes, for the beginning and the end. It seems simultaneously connected to some memory of Eden and to some foretaste of apocalypse. Nowhere is day more vivid or night darker. Nowhere are forests more luxuriant. Nowhere is there a continent more miserable.
Africa -- sub-Saharan Africa, at least -- has begun to look like an immense illustration of chaos theory, although some hope is forming on the margins. Much of the continent has turned into a battleground of contending dooms: AIDS and overpopulation, poverty, starvation, illiteracy, corruption, social breakdown, vanishing resources, overcrowded cities...
In the face of political instability and disintegrating roads, airports and telephone networks, and other disincentives, investors from Europe, America and Japan are withdrawing from sub-Saharan Africa and looking elsewhere; Africans too are pulling out their money. Why risk expropriation or failure in a continent with a weakness for...
If it is to recover, Africa in the coming years will need all its mystical powers of resilience. AIDS is devastating the continent's population. It has hit as hard among the cosmopolitan, educated elite as among the villagers, a fact that threatens continuing development. If the rate of infection...