Masters of their fate
From David Mayger
Sir: As a long-term admirer of Aidan Hartley’s work — particularly his recent Zanzibar Chest — I was surprised and disappointed when he attributed the source of Somalia’s woes to ‘Britain and the West’ (Wildlife, 27 August). He is completely off base in saying that the problem is that ‘the world has allowed Somalia to remain in anarchy since 1991’. What would he have us do? Land troops to overthrow the tyrants? At the last look, half of my countrymen and most of yours are trying to put as much daylight as possible between them and our current foreign deployment. Or perhaps the United Nations should step up to it — that august body which couldn’t manage the oil-forfood programme in Iraq and found no genocide in Darfur. If the Somalis as a whole really wanted something different for their country, they would have done something about it by now.
Mr Hartley loves Africa as a native son, and his pain in what he sees there is palpable. Alas, what he also sees is Africans running Africa the way they want to, much as you see Americans running America as we want to. Both sights can be very disheartening.
David Mayger Alexandria, Virginia, USA
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