Peter Jackson column

Jul 7 2005 By Peter Jackson, The Journal

Great expectations have been raised by the G8 Summit, if not for tackling climate change, then certainly for making an impact on African poverty.

Years ago I worked for a short while in Angola and was moved by the obvious grinding poverty of so many of its people, a poverty which could not be divorced from the communist government, the civil war and the fleet of Soviet trawlers just off the coast hoovering up all their fish.

But that was just Angola, Africa is a big place with many different problems - some man-made and some natural.

But even if there are no single easy answers, some valiant attempts were made to provide them on last week's Question Time on BBC1.

Inevitably, the easy-answer-provider-in-chief was Tony Benn.

He, after hearing suggestions that corrupt African despots should take some of the blame for much of the continent's plight, declared that we should not be too self-congratulatory or condemnatory because we had oppressed the Africans, we stole their wealth, we enslaved them and we have waged plenty of our own bloody, pointless wars.

Well, speak for yourself Tony - personally, I've never done any of those things and therefore reserve the right to condemn when some septuagenarian thug orders the demolition of orphanages and the starvation of his own people.

This kind of argument, of collective culpability by a sort of historical inheritance, is all too common and is not only used by unthinking politicians who seek to lay a cheap guilt trip on us.

It is also used to justify all kinds of barbarities from Northern Ireland to the Balkans where people seek to gain advantage on the basis of crimes committed by one set of dead people against another set of dead people.

It is the kind of argument which, because it is so evidently false, can only serve to discredit the very cause it seeks to promote. It is also unnecessary.

We unquestionably have an obligation to help Africa - not because of some historical wrong, committed before we were born, but simply on the grounds of shared humanity.

More importantly, we have an obligation because of wrongs which are still being done, in the shape of unfair trade barriers and outmoded agricultural subsidies.