I think this notion of violence, poverty, and other issues in Africa as "unchanging" (reinforced by notion of primitiveness and "tribe") or inherent is very prevalent and very problematic because it takes agency away from Africans to change their own future. It also allows the West to ignore issues in Africa, many of which the West itself had a role in causing, because it concludes that these problems are inevitable and due to something inherently wrong with African societies. The West reasons that it ought not involve itself in what it casts as a lost cause.

This puts explicitly a point that occurred to me while reading this article: African "tribes," as the term is often used, assume a separation that does not allow room for intermarriage and mixed identities or those who identify more with their nation than their ethnic origin. I think the example of an American called Syzmanski not speaking Polish captures this point well.

This is an interesting point. It reminds me of a similar phenomenon in the European colonization of Latin America and North America: the pitting of enemy groups against each other and of those who were under rule against their rulers as a manipulative play to destabilize the regions so that the Europeans could then assert their will. What made me think of this in particular is the reference to an "escape from local colonial overlords."

I have always found this strange that colonialism is only considered European. We talked about this notion in my Middle Eastern-focused ID1 regarding the notion of Pan-Arabism and how Arabs had conducted expansive colonialism throughout much of the region just as the Europeans had, such that in some places Arab culture might be as foreign and as imposed from the outside as European culture.

I find this reference to "establishing your liberalism" very interesting. It reminds me of Steve Biko's insistence that the paternalistic white "liberals," who suggested that they would liberate the black Africans of South Africa as opposed to the black Africans themselves, were just as detrimental to the anti-apartheid movement and development of Black Consciousness than the avowed racists and advocates of apartheid.

While in this case it was a spouse and not a mother, this reference makes me think of Agathe Habyarimana, wife of Hutu president Juvenal Habyarimana, who was very influential in the carrying out of the Rwandan genocide. Isolated instances of tragedy like the Rwandan genocide are often overemphasized and falsely used to characterize the whole continent of Africa as violent, war-stricken, or corrupt when in fact this is far from the truth.