Jared Diamond by Collapse

Author:Collapse
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Published: 2006-08-11T00:59:12+00:00

PART T H R E E

M O D E R N

S O C I E T I E S

C H A P T E R

10

Malthus in Africa:

Rwanda's Genocide

A dilemma m Events in Rwanda More than ethnic hatred

Buildup in Kanama » Explosion in Kanama it Why it happened

hen my twin sons were 10 years old and again when they were 15,

my wife and I took them on family vacations to East Africa. Like

Wmany other tourists, the four of us were overwhelmed by our

firsthand experience of Africa's famous large animals, landscapes, and people. No matter how often we had already seen wildebeest moving across the

TV screen of National Geographic specials viewed in the comfort of our living rooms, we were unprepared for the sight, sound, and smell of millions of them on the Serengeti Plains, as we sat in a Land Rover surrounded by a

herd stretching from our vehicle to the horizon in all directions. Nor had

television prepared us for the immense size of Ngorongoro Crater's flat and

treeless floor, and for the steepness and height of its inner walls down which

one drives from a tourist hotel perched on the rim to reach that floor.

East Africa's people also overwhelmed us, with their friendliness,

warmth to our children, colorful clothes—and their sheer numbers. To read

in the abstract about "the population explosion" is one thing; it is quite another thing to encounter, day after day, lines of African children along the roadside, many of them about the same size and age as my sons, calling out

to passing tourist vehicles for a pencil that they could use in school. The impact of those numbers of people on the landscape is visible even along

stretches of road where the people are off doing something else. In pastures

the grass is sparse and grazed closely by herds of cattle, sheep, and goats.

One sees fresh erosion gullies, in whose bottoms run streams brown with

mud washed down from the denuded pastures.

All of those children add up to rates of human population growth in

East Africa that are among the highest in the world: recently, 4.1% per year

in Kenya, resulting in the population doubling every 17 years. That population explosion has arisen despite Africa's being the continent inhabited by

humans much longer than any other, so that one might naively have expected Africa's population to have leveled off long ago. In fact, it has been

exploding recently for many reasons: the adoption of crops native to the

New World (especially corn, beans, sweet potatoes, and manioc, alias cassava), broadening the agricultural base and increasing food production beyond that previously possible with native African crops alone; improved

hygiene, preventive medicine, vaccinations of mothers and children, antibi—

otics, and some control of malaria and other endemic African diseases; and

national unification and the fixing of national boundaries, thereby opening

to settlement some areas that were formerly no-man's lands fought over by

adjacent smaller polities.

Population problems such as those of East Africa are often referred to as

"Malthusian," because in 1798 the English economist and demographer

Thomas Malthus published a famous book in which he argued that human

population growth would tend to outrun the growth of food production.

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