Africa Rising 21st Century

               Elections play a significant part in the establishment and maintenance of representative democracy worldwide, but all too often, the entirety of the process of elections is neglected, which can result in electoral disasters that undermine the confidence that is necessary for democracy to be sustained.   Donors and international institutions seem to think if they make a great effort for one election, then not much else is required for continuing elections because the job of correcting errors is done once and for all.   This is yet another example of the cultural misunderstanding that undermines U.S. and other Western efforts to support democracy and economic development in Africa.             Not only don’t Westerners realize that the African social and political environments aren’t the same as in North America, Europe or Australia, but government officials don’t even see the flaws in their own systems that are picked up by Africans who seek power at any cost like som

            From the 16 th through the 19 th century, the economic policy known as mercantilism promoted colonialism and imperialism throughout the world, using tariffs and subsidies to maximize developed country exports and minimize its imports.   Consequently, it promoted government regulation of a nation's economy for the purpose of augmenting state power at the expense of rival national powers.   This is what motivated the so-called Scramble for Africa in the late 19 th century.   However, mercantilism’s greatest evil was its expansion of the millennia-old practice of slavery through the Transatlantic Slave Trade.   It is estimated that 12 million Africans lost their freedom through being kidnapped into this horrific practice.             It is called triangular trade because it involved three legs: first, European manufactured goods were exported to Africa to purchase slaves, who in the second leg, were transported across the Atlantic Ocean – first to the Caribbean before

  There has been a lot of discussion about the African Diaspora and its importance in U.S.-Africa trade and general relations. However, just counting the Diasporans in the United States and relating them to Africa misses the breadth of the spread of Africa’s descendants across the world, especially here in the Western Hemisphere, since Africa’s children live in just about every continent on Earth, except perhaps Antarctica.             The question in discerning Diasporans is how you classify mixed-race individuals. In the United States, it has been federal law for nearly two centuries that one drop of Black blood makes one Black. If that is the case, then Brazil has more African descendants than any country not on the African continent at 55,900,000, followed by the United States with 46,350,467. Canada has 1,198,540. It would be expected that the former colonial nations would have large Diaspora populations, and they do. France has 3,800,000; the United Kingdom has 2,497,373; Italy