Africa is much in the news of late. The Europeans are learning that Muammar Gaddafi may have been a flamboyant nut, but he was pretty good at keeping the people to the south from heading north. Since his demise, sub-Saharan Africans have been heading north, hoping to get into Europe. The Moslem lunatics are promising to open the floodgates unless something magical happens. Hundreds are drowning in the Mediterranean and you can be sure that number will only rise.
So, just how bad is it in Africa?
I thought it would be useful to look at the key metrics for measuring the awfulness of a country. The wonder of our age is that this sort of data is at our fingertips. If you want to know something about Equatorial Guinea, for example, you don’t have to go there, which is probably a good thing given that their ruler is a cannibal. But, perhaps my good friend Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo is getting a bad rap.
There’s a lot of data so I decided to think about it in personal terms. If I were to move to Africa, I would take stock of the things important to me. When you move to a new home, you think about the schools, the neighborhood, crime, the commute to work etc. That strikes me as a sensible way of looking at Africa. After all, a whole lot of Africans want to leave for some personal reason.
The first thing to consider is the murder rate, which is a good proxy for overall crime. I can tolerate most anything, except being murdered. In the US, the murder rate is 4.7 per 100,000, but we all know the truth of those numbers. Net out the black rate and the number drops in half. Look just at whites and the rate is within the norm for a European country, which is below 2.0.
Here’s a table of murder rates for Africa:
| Country Name | Murder Rate | Country Name | Murder Rate | |
| Algeria | 0.70 | Angola | 10.00 | |
| Libya | 1.70 | Comoros | 10.00 | |
| Malawi | 1.80 | Djibouti | 10.10 | |
| Sierra Leone | 1.90 | The Gambia | 10.20 | |
| Tunisia | 2.20 | Cape Verde | 10.30 | |
| Morocco | 2.20 | Togo | 10.30 | |
| Mauritius | 2.80 | Zimbabwe | 10.60 | |
| Senegal | 2.80 | Uganda | 10.70 | |
| Liberia | 3.20 | Zambia | 10.70 | |
| São Tomé | 3.30 | Madagascar | 11.10 | |
| Egypt | 3.40 | Sudan | 11.20 | |
| Niger | 4.70 | Central African Rep | 11.80 | |
| Mauritania | 5.00 | Ethiopia | 12.00 | |
| Ghana | 6.10 | Mozambique | 12.40 | |
| Kenya | 6.40 | Republic of the Congo | 12.50 | |
| Eritrea | 7.10 | Tanzania | 12.70 | |
| Chad | 7.30 | Ivory Coast | 13.60 | |
| Mali | 7.50 | Republic of Sudan | 13.90 | |
| Cameroon | 7.60 | Namibia | 17.20 | |
| Burkina Faso | 8.00 | Botswana | 18.40 | |
| Burundi | 8.00 | Equatorial Guinea | 19.30 | |
| Somalia | 8.00 | Nigeria | 20.00 | |
| Benin | 8.40 | Rwanda | 23.10 | |
| Guinea-Bissau | 8.40 | DR of the Congo | 28.30 | |
| Guinea | 8.90 | South Africa | 31.00 | |
| Gabon | 9.10 | Swaziland | 33.80 | |
| Seychelles | 9.50 | Lesotho | 38.00 |
The numbers are from the UN so we should assume some fudging to make these countries look a little better. They also exclude war so the violent death rates is surely much higher. To give some perspective, the hardest thumping ghettos in America have a homicide rate in the 30’s.
On the other hand, New York City has a homicide rate of 4.0, below the national average. London has a rate of 1.6. Berlin is at 1.8 and Paris is at 1.0. The worst city in Europe is Amsterdam (legal weed, obviously) with a murder rate of 4.4. If you’re an African in Eritrea or Mali, north looks like a good option. It’s safer crossing the Mediterranean than crossing your own village.
The other piece to this is that these murder rates exclude war and they rely on local reporting, which is never going to be very good. Lots of people disappear every day in these countries and they never end up on official reports. That’s why I included the counties of the Maghreb in the table. Libya is certainly not the low violence utopia imagined in these UN reports.
Just looking at the violence rates, it is easy to see why the Africans are heading north. They live in hyper-violent societies. Even though the trip north is wildly dangerous, it pales in comparison to daily life in most of these places.
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But why did Gaddafi keep his would-be immigrants home? Money. He blackmailed the EU for huge sums of “aid” or else he’d turn a blind eye to those wishing to migrate north. It was a game to him, however.
“We have 50 million Muslims in Europe. There are signs that Allah will grant Islam victory in Europe – without swords, without guns, without conquests. The fifty million Muslims of Europe will turn it into a Muslim continent within a few decades.” — quote by Gaddafi from a speech given in 2006.
A place on one of those rickety boats doesn’t come cheap. It’s not the huddled masses that are coming, it’s the grifters who know the ropes. Tow them back to the 20 mile limit and leave them enough gas to make shore, or ask for advice from the Australians.
I was in Chicago during the Bush years listening to Tony Snow hold court in a hotel bar. I got bored with that and struck up a conversation with an Aussie who was at the bar. He explained their immigration policy to me. He was flabbergasted at our approach. I mentally made a note that Australia could be a refuge if things fall apart here in the US.
Could be? I am surprised that more white Americans aren’t flocking to Australia. No snow, no violent blacks or Hispanics, affordable healthcare, cool cars, soccer is in its rightful place as a minor sport, beef, no beggars or homeless annoying you and Australian chocolate ruins the American version. Beer though is on about the same level. For every white American you send, we will swap two Lebanese and throw in a Sudanese.
The other day I was talking to some members of my family about the sinking of an overstuffed rust bucket of a ship ferrying sub-saharans to a new life in Italy. Of course it is a tragedy because those people might have stayed home and maybe even nada life, whatever the murder rate is back home.
They all started with “It’s tragedy” as we are all expected to, and then I voiced a little dissent.
Our silly leaders in the west thought they were being smart and got rid of Ghaddafi (or Gadafy or Qadafi or whatever) and cleverly uncorked the genie in the bottle. Sorry, I meant the many genies in the bottle. Tens of thousands if not eventually millions of genies. So they come north, paying criminals to take them either to a watery grave or a refugee camp in Italy. Of course Italy is essentially, like a lot of southern EU countries, already broke and soon the camps will have to be moved to say Belgium or Poland or even Britain.
No reason why they shouldn’t build a refugee camp outside, say, Downing Street (Horse Guards Parade would be better, or in full view of Buck House) but I jest. Of course they won’t. Some poor traditional, pleasant British village will shortly be receiving their quota of Somalis. They can’t go to places in the north like Bradford as the resident muslims there won’t tolerate it. But the ordinary pale Brits will have to.
The tragedy is that it will go on, because word gets back that the west will pay for people to live. In time the newcomers will get annoyed because British society won’t accept them and Al-Beeb will lead the news on how shocking it is that ordinary Brits haven’t welcomed the refugees into their homes. To help, the lefty media will give one or two of them token jobs to show that being lefties they care but generally the burden will fall on the ordinary people who never voted for this, and anyway wouldn’t be allowed a say.