Why, after all these years, are so many countries in Africa still dependent upon Western aid? Has such aid truly helped the situation or encouraged them to let others do for them what they won't do for themselves? (As the saying goes, you can give a man a fish and he'll eat once or you can teach him how to fish and he'll eat plenty of times). Has such assistance truly served the long-term interests of Africa or merely the self-interests of burgeoning bureaucracies?

Why does the white world of the West seem more concerned for the welfare and security of Africans than do many of Africa's tyrannical leaders? I raise this question because the West is usually despised as former colonialists and imperialists and is no longer welcome to rule with its law and order but is begged to bail African countries out once their elected leaders rip them off (bloating foreign bank accounts) and strip their countries bare by grievous mismanagement.

Productive white farmers in Zimbabwe, for example, have viciously been driven off their family farms for black squatters who do just that - squat - and the orphaned land lies fallow and the country starves. Yet racist Mugabe's still in power (no visits by Jesse Jackson or by an African-American coalition of outraged ministers over this reverse discrimination or threats of sanctions by the divided UN).

These are some of the points (sharpened by my own experiences and observations) travel-writer Paul Theroux makes in his work: Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town.

I've been blessed to have also visited parts of Africa, having taken trains, planes, and automobiles (hitchhiked for the most part) from Johannesburg to Cape Town, South Africa, up the Garden Route to Durban, Swaziland, Kruger National Park, and back to Johannesburg, on to Pretoria and the Voortrekker's National Monument (does it still stand?) while en route to Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe (Rhodesia).

I met up with an English lass on the train in Bulawayo whom I had met near George, South Africa and bunji-jumped with off a bridge weeks before while travelling back to Johannesburg.

I then went to Tel Aviv, Israel before coming to Home Sweet Home (USA).

May God bless Africa with genuine leaders who love their people and who put their people above their personal ambitions and greedy temptations.

David Ben-Ariel, a Christian-Zionist writer and author of Beyond Babylon: Europe's Rise and Fall, shares a special focus on the Middle East, reflected in hard-hitting articles that help others improve their understanding of that troubled region. Check out Beyond Babylon.

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