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Crisis in Africa

An awakening is imperative to start and successfully bring about the recovery, the dramatic situation facing our continent urgently requires.
For the vast majority Africans, men and women, young and old, farmers, intellectuals, farmers, intellectuals, factory workers, mine and plantation workers, the unemployed, emigrants and refugees, the future looks grim indeed.
Africa today is caught up in a convergence of crises in all sectors of economic, political social and cultural life. Its economies are in a shambles, and per capital agricultural production, particularly food crops, is declining. Industries, where they exist at all, are producing at well below capacity, at a time when there are severe shortages of the most basic goods and services. Communications and transportation networks have been disrupted or dismantled. The
entire social, cultural and scientific infrastructures threatened with paralysis.
One of the consequences of mal development is that the tropical forest and mountain ecosystems, as well as the continent’s vast semi-arid areas, which are subject to recurrent droughts, have been damaged; some have even been lost to future generations.
“The causes of this situation are of course to be found in the heavy effects of the slave trade and of colonial exploitation, during which the foundations of Africans’ material and sociocultural life were either destroyed or seriously damaged. But the causes also lie in Africa’s subjection to an international division of labour that generates regression and underdevelopment.”
The euphoria and optimism that marked the first years of independence have vanished. Today the governments of the postcolonial states of Africa are characterised by an almost total lack of democratic relations with the civil society. Too many government have fallen prey, to autocratic and sometimes monstrously dictatorial practices.

IFDA Dossier 54, July – August 1986

In shambles: in a great disorder
Prey: proie; victim

Questions
1)    Why is the author pessimistic about the future of the African continent? (2 pts)
2)    Is man the only cause behind the decline of agricultural production? (3pts)
3)    Do you think that underdevelopment can be caused by politics? Justify your answer with concrete examples. (4pts)
4)    What things need to be urgently done to bring the expected solution to the African continent? (5pts)
5)    Translate the first and the second paragraph of the text into French (6pts)