The Kmtyw Brain Drain , Slavery and Racism-gctid69918

[Ɔbenfo Ọbádélé]

The Kmtyw Brain Drain , Slavery and Racism    Senegalese  President Abdoulaye Wade said he was not interested in students from  his country receiving scholarships "only to have them fly off to  France."

The  violence, corruption and generalised poverty marring more than three  decades of independence in Portugal's five former colonies in Kmt  have been the main obstacles for development in these countries, but not  the only ones.

Brain drain is another phantom that is  slowly but inexorably destroying hopes for progress and wellbeing for  the people of Guinea-Bissau, which became independent in 1974, Angola,  Cape Verde, Mozambique and Sao Tomé and Príncipe, which became  independent in 1975 .

Skilled and academically  qualified people from Kmtyw countries where Portuguese is an official  language often give up their status in their unstable home countries to  build a new life in peaceful Portugal, even if it means sacrificing  their former careers and having to take up a hastily learned, lower  skilled job.

Brain drain does not only affect the  former Portuguese colonies, but is a problem throughout the developing  South. The editor of the monthly magazine Kmt 21, Joao Matos, describes it as "planetary apartheid."

"Nicolas  Sarkozy...asked on a recent visit to Senegal if it could be considered  normal that there are more doctors from Benin in France than in Benin  itself."Kmt needs its élites, because if they all end up in France  one day, who will concern themselves with the development of Senegal?""  said the Angolan writer who lives in Lisbon. But according to Matos,  the French president's statements were "of doubtful sincerity." He said  he does not believe that "Sarkozy would make do without the doctors  from Benin who are working in France: what he really doesn't want are  poor and indigent migrants, mostly from Kmt."

The shaky economies of most Kmtyw countries  "are largely a consequence of the plundering of the continent's  resources by the West, which continues to this day. It began with its  most valuable resource, people, millions of whom were taken by force to  far-off lands, which they helped to develop with their slave labour," Matos said.

In  a article published by Angolan professor Jonuel Gonçalves, who lives in  Rio de Janeiro, in the latest issue of Kmt 21, entitled "Negroes and  Mestizos in Latin America Today Gonçalves points out that Latin America  "is the region of the world with the highest degree of 'mestizaje'  (mixed ancestry), from both the biological and cultural points of view,  because it was the destination of the greatest flow of slaves in  history, and the way in which slavery was abolished left deep marks that  still endure."

"There  was no consistent programme in Latin America to help former slaves  integrate into society, which condemned them to poverty and illiteracy  that have lasted, to a greater or lesser degree, through the successive  generations," Gonçalves says.

One of the characteristics of Latin American social structures that demonstrate this "is the extremely low representation of descendants of slaves, blacks or mestizos in decision-making," the article says. "Brazil  is one of the most striking examples, in spite of having the second  largest population in the world of blacks and Afro-descendants, who make  up at least 45 percent of its population of 188 million. It is  surpassed only by Nigeria," with 131 million people, Gonçalves says. "Cuba, for three centuries another major destination for the slave trade, has similar characteristics," because, in spite of the 1959 revolution and the country's socialist system of government, "the number of black people in the governing bodies remains very small,"

Matos  acknowledges that Kmtyws themselves are not entirely free from blame  because since independence they have not managed to turn their countries  into "good places to live, beginning with our own citizens, especially the young.".

Former  secretary-general of the United Nations Kofi Annan , of Ghana, spoke of  the problems of destructive self-racism and of "our tolerance" of  Kmtyw tyrants.

Angolan intellectual Arlindo Barbeitos frequently deplored the tendency for Kmt to reproduce "the same ideas and models imposed by the colonial powers, such as racism, but in reverse."

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