There is a great fallacy, a lie perpetuated through history and around the globe: that Africa is poor.

Africa is presented as poor, because it doesn’t have any of this strange folding stuff called money. It has plenty of everything else, it is what capitalists and prospectors call resource rich.

Indeed, it is the most perfect place to grow our tea, coffee, cocoa… vegetables, fruit, flowers… and harvest our rubber, hardwood… oil… jewels, minerals… It’s enough to destabilise governments for!

We then offer them some of this folding stuff and they fall back into line. And lie and cheat and steal all the way from the top down, so this paltry representation of real value never gets anywhere near those who work the land or were driven off it. Yet because the dispossessed were duped with the concepts of land ownership and hierarchical authority (and violence), they feel disempowered and they too have fallen under the spell of this strange stuff called money.

Africa has never been poor. It has a history and wealth of diversity unequalled. And further, if we are to believe our anthropologists and geneticists, the very birthplace of humanity. Surprising then, is it not, that while in Western Europe and North America we’ve decimated the forests, worn out the soil, polluted the rivers and water tables and exhausted the mines, Africa remains, to the large part, thriving and fruitful. A godsend to Western governments with stomachs to fill, corporations with consumers to satisfy and banks with interest to manufacture.

Africa’s Western educated, financed, supported, armed leaders remain happy to perpetuate this myth, too ignorant or seduced to wish any change in perception: preferring the enormous power and the largely unsupervised bankroll. Corruption further suits Western interests: favouring personal/tribal associates, backhanders, etc. creating resentment, division, tension and potential conflict.

Manufacturing and maintaining divisions is a tactic that dates back two and a half millennia. More recent however is the lucrative and thriving arms industry, the UK’s only remaining indigenous industry, which reaps the benefit of internal repression and maintaining fictitious borders – while banks, merchants and Western governments profit from the extraordinary value such power hungry individuals place on violence, and how little value they place on basic foodstuffs.

Again, we find this strange folding stuff valuing the most useless and dangerous commodities with enormous worth, although they have no practical purpose, while basic nourishment, God’s gifts and harvesting, are valued as virtually worthless (one should however note, upon reaching Western supermarkets their value will have multiplied many, many times).

So we find the impossible situation, where the richest place on earth is labelled poorest, continues to haemorrhage genuine wealth, while being kept enslaved and divided through arbitrary concepts and artificial boundaries, turning tribe against tribe and hoodwinking the people with the lie of money.