When I was in Nigeria, I asked a very important person who traveled to China very often about these trips, telling me then that "China is the future, Europe is the past". I had no impulse to defend, to defend myself, to look for arguments to refute this statement, since I was sure that I would not find any, unless I looked for impulses of belonging, which, like pride, there are of straight, legitimate ones, let's call them acceptable, and there are crooked ones that only come out of our miseries disguised as a story that should shame us, and that's why we persist in legitimizing and believing ourselves to be true all the lies of what we call ourselves a civilized world, our self-conceited world, living contentedly and vainly behind this mask, full of willful ignorance, or it may be, without more or less, in ignorance, also guilty . The history of Europe is a history of disasters and cruelty. And we don't have to take refuge, to excuse ourselves in other stories, they are all the same.

Africa has nothing to do with the National Geographic documentaries or almost always with what we are told, never with what those who are neither travelers but agency tourists with American Express in their pockets, like many NGOs that believe they are fulfilling a saving mission, when the majority only want to save themselves, living their own World Day, also at paid expenses, to come back and tell us about their generosity, their tragic and dangerous experiences , all with the same superficiality of the carnival itself.
We can say at the same time that Africa is also surely guilty of its own history. Although they don't hide from it or have any reason to, as (yes) it happens with us. What we do not know about any African country is that it colonized Belgium or Germany or any other; nor how a despicable Belgian king would ever appropriate any European "Congo", Italy or Spain, for example, to have us closer; or how a Pope, with divine permission, in front of a map, drew a line with a pencil and divided the world into two parts, without an eraser.
This, in Africa, with borders that did not exist, drawn arbitrarily with the right of force, which is no right but vileness and contempt, in straight lines. Disdain of ethnic groups and communities, of their customs, traditions and beliefs, to force them, with the pain of their lives, while they were robbed, to a new faith. Doctrine and stick and, not considered human, sold as cattle. We are all children of God, and God is on our side, and in his name we act, we are the civilizers of Africa, we are the Europeans. There are very reasonable fictions of what would have happened if Africa had not suffered European colonization, or rather, we should say enjoyed this colonization that, at least, we may confess, they did not ask for. "Europe is the past", this past. It is true that no one knows anything about the future, the future does not exist, that is why it is called the future, but the present of Africa, at least in part inescapable, comes from its certain history, and from our liar, however disguised, and embarrassing for ignominious. "China is the future" or whatever, but please Europe, don't save us anymore, no thanks, we don't want your future.
Now the world was robbing them with mercantile engineering, with other human architectures, with immeasurable corruptions. The exploitation never ends. The extreme misery of many millions of people who, curiously, given the Christian colonizing past, find peace in the faith of Islam persists without hope. More than half of the African population is Muslim. "European" Christianity has also largely failed to achieve the African future.