Sierra Leone: The Oswald Hanciles Column

15 September 2020
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"How to describe this moment in Africa? Not to be dramatic, but yet it is dramatic. This is the deluge; history of speeding up in the continent like a muddy river in the rainy season, swollen and turbulent, life-giving but treacherous. The old is being swept away into places without memory, creatures are being annihilated.

"Indeed, this second point, on nature, should be put front and centre and not as an apologetic footnote: the failure of Africa to protect its life forms in (what can be futuristically called) the acceleration is abject and will come to be judged so. I am thinking here of the smaller beings, untold ants and beetles, their giving mulch, butterflies and moths, birds, plants and trees - the mopane woodlands, the silvery muhoho and other indigenous hardwoods hacked down. (In Sierra Leone, we have destroyed over 90 percent of our virgin tropical rainforests; but economists are still rationalizing commercial loggers from China destroying what little remains of invaluable biodiversity).

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