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Economy · Revelation
Episode #7
Reminder of the dilemma
A — You sign: cobalt will finance the living, history will pass on differently.
B — You refuse: no wealth is worth removing from a sacred wound.
If you chose A
Choosing A is accepting that immediate survival takes precedence over long memory. It is also consciously replicating this time the historical pattern: Africa delivers its resources against infrastructure decided elsewhere. You become a lucid actor of a value chain that has been extracted for centuries without restoring the essential.
If you have chosen B
Choosing B is to affirm that a people without memory is a people without compass, even nourished and cared for. It is also condemning, in the short term, thousands of families to a precariousness that memorial speeches do not relieve. You protect the dead at the risk of losing the living.
This dilemma crystallises three deep fractures revealed by the contemporary African economy.
First, the troubling continuity between the slave trade and the current extractivism. Yesterday, human bodies were exported from coastal counters; Today, cobalt is exported from the same land to fuel the batteries of a world that consumes without memory. Economic architecture has changed vocabulary — We're talking about « partnerships » and « development » — But the geography of profit remains strangely familiar. Signing this contract may mean entering into modernity; It also extends a global value chain where Africa remains a supplier of raw material and an importer of promises.
Then the question of invisible accounting. What is a memorial site worth in a balance sheet? Nothing, according to international accounting standards. And yet, its destruction has an immense cost: that of identity, of collective dignity, of the story you pass on to your children. The economic transparency so much demanded for the continent should also account for what is lost when a land is reduced to its basement.
Finally, the solitude of the African decision-maker caught in vice. On the one hand, the international community will applaud the « good governance » If you attract investment. On the other hand, the guardians of tradition will curse you if you give the memory to the bulldozer. Nobody offers you a third way — the one where exploitation would bypass the site, where profit would coexist with the sacred — because this path is more expensive, and in the triangular economy yesterday as in today's globalisation, it is always Africa that absorbs the extra cost of compromise.
Baobab does not choose between its roots and its branches. He knows that some feed others. Cutting the roots to grow the canopy is to prepare the whole tree to fall. But a tree with beautiful roots that no longer gives shade to anyone ends up as a monument that one contemplates — Far away, empty belly. True wisdom is perhaps this: to demand that those who want your cobalt also finance the preservation of your memory. Make your Baobab a tree that refuses to sacrifice one of its roots to grow.
To go further
Black Atlantic: Tragedy of the crossing, triangular economy and European architecture of the slave trade
History of a total system: violence, logistics, profits and inheritances. For three centuries, the Atlantic was the heart of...
Globalized Value Chain: When Africa Pays the Hidden Price of Others' Wealth
From the African basement to electronic landfills, backwards of a global economy Behind every product we co...
Accounting at the heart of economic transparency in Africa
The forgotten but central role of accounting In an African context marked by a growing need for transparency ...
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