The decline in the American film industry is today’s hot topic, but I think everyone’s got it wrong. The emphasis has been on America’s growing and exciting new hand-held technologies and all the products that support them like YouTube.

Undoubtedly that has much to do with it, but I think more so it has to do with the American film industry transforming itself into making money in malls from teenagers.

There’s nothing wrong about making money. And there’s nothing wrong with malls. There’s only a little wrong with teenagers.

Film-making provides the modern world with the best way to transform imagination into reality: it’s the conduit, not the transformer. It’s the best catalyst. Nothing better.

So when that focus is placed on vampire love stories the powerful conduit is twisted towards another universe, not ours. It’s no longer relevant to our reality, and in that instance, it loses almost entirely its preeminence as an art form. Its value becomes dollars and sense, little else.

Africa is stepping into this remarkable void left by the American film industry.

This week in Cannes there is a massive representation of South African films, an excellent collection of Nigerian films and especially Nigerian writers, and from my point of view, the best dose of creativity the world’s seen for some time from Kenya.

Real stories playing into real rapidly changing worlds are American films like Hugo, Midnight in Paris, Lincoln, and Avatar – among my favorite recent American movies.

But they are so few and far between.

Nairobi Half Life and The First Grader are recent Kenyan films produced on a pittance of the budget of a single episode of American Rival, create through the Grecian act of acting and the majesty of writing stories a real and lasting impact on the world.

Madagascar 3 doesn’t do that. Nor do the Terminators or apocalypses or thousands of cars flying into the Grand Canyon. And certainly not vampires.

Good films, and by that I mean films with value to society, films that contribute to art and not just livelihoods, convey moral messages in realistic characters, characters that if we can’t identify with ourselves we can through someone we know well.

And here are several important reasons Africa is displacing America in the film industry:

Of the 150 South African filmmakers attending Cannes this year with some sort of accepted entry into the festival, twelve of them were penniless before sponsorship by the South African government.

That’s right, government involvement. Government is a reflection of society; it’s usually in the forefront – good or bad – of society’s extravagances. Without government involvement many of the best films from Canada and France would never have been made.

Two: African films fuel controversy: they take a point of view and proudly so and at the peril of failure. They dare to retell history, like Lincoln did in America recently. But Lincoln is the exception. Otello Burning is the mainstay of South Africa’s brilliant film industry.

Third and most importantly, film at its best is art. Film in America is business. Shortly before he died, Roger Ebert said this better than anyone.

Africa is developing film as art. It learned how from America. But today business eats art in America. Let’s hope the other side of the world documents this carnage rather than chooses to partake.

I have several precious oil canvasses bought decades ago in Africa which have been fortunate enough to appreciate in value commensurate with the unique quality. But it’s time to move on. The best young artists in Africa are no longer taking out a canvas and mixing colors with a brush. They’re doing it digitally.

Certainly digital art includes filmmaking, which we tend here at home to separate out as an entire media in itself. But it is by no means the end-all and be-all of African digital art, which includes all varieties of media translated through digital media.

Kennyan Wangechi Mutu is renowned for her dramatic female figures. Mutu’s work has been featured in some of the finest museums and galleries in the world including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Tate Modern in London, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

Egyptian Miriam Ibrahim (one of her most famous pieces is shown at the bottom of this blog) describes her passion for digitally altering her portrait photography as one of a “deviantart.” Her often haunting portraits suggest women beset by overwhelming fears, oppressed and lost.

Saidi Ray begins and often ends with traditional acrylics but he sells the finished work not as pieces of canvas but as digital art. From Tanzania, he takes what only a few years ago would have been considered quite traditional primary color renditions of traditional subjects, like native tribes, and whisks them into modern media, a contemporary surrealism.

But of them all Kenyan Mutua Matheka epitomizes the ultimate in digital art: instagram. (His signature piece titles this blog.) His remarkably creative and powerful images are as expansive or focused as the movements of your fingers spreading on the iPad. Above all, Mutua represents what African art has become today.

For many more examples from artists across the continent, click here.

There was nothing surprising in Obama’s one-month-to-go pep talk. But as I listened to it, I realized it was powered by the deep behind-the-scenes U.S. African foreign policy that has driven so much of African history in the last few years.

The routing of al-Qaeda, the pacification of Somalia, the fugitive chase of the LRA, the massaging of Rwanda hegemony, the less successful use-and-throw-away Uganda geopolitics, the deep skies of drone assassinations – it’s all a remarkable mosaic of clever and intricate U.S. policy.

And Kenya is the linchpin.

Unfortunately, the policy is driven overwhelmingly by Obama’s hunt of terrorists. That’s a fine thing to do, don’t misunderstand me, but developmental imperatives seem to get attention only when the greater objective of wiping out the terrorist prevails.

So that the “war on poverty” is far subservient to the “war on terror.” This is short-term strategy.

Kenya is fundamental to this policy. America rebuilt Kenya’s military and notably the product looks mighty good. Compared, for example, to Mali or Nigeria or Afghanistan, the Kenyan military forged enough independence and local celebrity identity that it functions better than anyone could have imagined only five years ago.

And there seems to be no dichotomy between the military and civilian authorities, as in Pakistan, for example, or Egypt. America has created a fighting arm in Kenya that is totally beholding to its brain.

That’s good, yes. And from Obama’s point of view, more importantly, it’s been effective.

Now comes the election, the ultimate validation of a non-revolutionary society, of a stable politic based on “strong institutions” and “just government.”

No country in the world today can achieve what America did in 2000: institutions so strong they prevailed even while being irrational. That’s what happened when the Supreme Court effectively – with no precedent or authority whatever – wound down the mechanisms of challenge and handed victory almost willy nilly to the man who had lost.

And the defeated graciously walked away to become a billionaire.

That standard is unattainable by any but America. But Kenya can come near enough to validate the policy that sustains that potential. If it doesn’t, Obama policy in Africa will in a blink no longer be validated. If Kenya unhinges itself by Bronx Cheering the very institution on which Obama policy is founded, then everything the U.S. has done in Africa is lost.

Somali could tear apart, again. Militias in the jungles of The Congo would rearm and reform. The Arab Spring could become Arab Hell. Terrorism would be reborn.

It sounds like an exaggeration.

Yesterday France returned to Nigeria in an elaborate ceremonial handover several confiscations of ancient Nok Arts, prized terra cotta sculptures of Nigerian empires of the 6th century. Over the last several years Yale University has begun a near complete repatriation of the Hiram Bigham artifacts the explorer took from Machu-Picchu in the early 20th century.

And while Paris remains replete with Egyptian artifacts like the obelisk acquired especially during Napoleon’s reign, France is slowly repatriating these, too.

And then comes Mali.

Without ancient artifacts from foreign lands such august institutions as the British Museum would be near meaningless. Chicago’s Field Museum would be emasculated. Taipei’s National Palace Museum would be crushed. And the Louvre – my goodness, Le Louvre, would be nothing more than a home for the Mona Lisa.

But is it right that such national treasures be housed away from the Motherland?

The treasures of Timbuktu rank right up there with the pyramids and Inca kings. In fact, many believe they are the most precious artifacts the world has.

This is because among its mosques and building relics are housed many of the world’s oldest written manuscripts. The oldest registered manuscript – at least before the current war – was dated from 1204. It included texts not just on world religion but astronomy, women’s rights, alchemy and medicine, mathematics and linguistics.

Timbuktu was a natural place for such ancient manuscripts. For several millennia before the modern age it was the crossroads of two major trade routes: the Saharan camel route with the Niger River.

But it was not until the 16th century when the area was arguably at its prime that a famous and wealthy scholar, Mohammed abu Bakr al-Wangari, established a “library” of ancient scrolls and documents. He spent the last 30 years of his life collecting these treasures, and when he died in 1594 they were inherited by his seven sons.

Collection and restoration continued for the centuries thereafter, but without a strong centralized government it was haphazard and often random. Timbuktu’s most prominent families became identified with their libraries of ancient texts.

By the turn of the 20th Century it was estimated that more than a quarter million books, notes, drawings and other relics of the past were being lovingly preserved by literally thousands of Timbuktu’s 100,000 residents.

UNESCO became deeply involved years ago, and in 2005 a huge portion of its cultural restoration budget was dedicated to Timbuktu alone.

But because the manuscripts – the most precious treasures of all – were still legally in the hands of individual families, UNESCO cleverly over the years poured its funds into the remains of ancient mosques and mausoleums. Slowly over time these attracted manuscripts.

Still the vast majority of texts were aggressively retained and often hidden by individual families. In 2005 South Africa convinced many of them to stop burying ancient parchment in the sand whenever trouble arose, and began a library.

That extraordinary effort went up in flames as the Islamists left Timbuktu last week.

One of the most visible of the many libraries was Timbuktu’s Ahmed Baba Institute for Higher Studies and Islamic Research. When the Islamists first took over Timbuktu, the adroit director managed to convince one of the leaders of the importance of the texts to Islamic law.

Then, over the next months, he smuggled 28,000 of the most precious manuscripts out of the building. When the Islamists left, they burned what was left.

How much has been lost? Inventory is still going on, but the point is that most of these remarkable documents are still in private hands, libraries and collections of various Timbuktu families.

Is it time that such precious relics of humankind be removed to safer places? Or at the very least removed to Bamako and protected there?

We old folk simply get dizzy. Kids like dizzy. And we old folks should be very careful about criticizing this seemingly directionless enthusiasm. When the top finally stops spinning it’s going to land somewhere with a very loud thump.

Richard Engel of NBC news expressed it in a most dire fashion Sunday on Meet the Press when he said that African youth — and youth in general in the developing world — are looking away from America towards China.

He’s right. In fact I thought almost everything Engel said on Meet the Press was right, and he got clobbered by my age-peers for saying so, or just ignored. But Engel is right on. Democracy is just a tool in the basket of social organization, and right now, it’s not the most attractive one to African kids.

Imagine if you were a just cognizant self-aware Kenyan teenager when Bush invaded Iraq, your main city of Nairobi was a massive jumble of stick buildings and sewered-over roads, your school hardly had pencils and all you and your buddies could afford were pirated CDs of MnM from China.

And today your city of Nairobi has skyscrapers and 8-lane highways, thanks to the Chinese who all you had to give them was your oil; your school has computers and you have a Smartphone, thanks to the Chinese who all you have to give them was your oil; and you’ve started your own rap group that will be performing next month at the famous music festival in Zanzibar.

Thanks to spnsorship from the Chinese who are funding the electricity in Stone Town, and all the Tanzanians had to give them was their gold.

Well, before you grow old enough to analyze all this, who would you be thanking?

Engel is right. America and the west has disengaged, not intentionally not because Obama and Hillary aren’t doing infinitely better than Bush or Condoleezza, but because youth moves faster, and today, Africa is youth.

Social organization is only one thing.

Cultural organization is equally fascinating.

Eighteen-year-old Adrien Adandé of Benin is a decent enough high school student. But after turning in his history term paper and the school bell rings, he chooses rather than join his buddies in the locker room to gear up for the school’s winning soccer team, he’ll do voodoo.

“My friends tease me and call me a fetishist,” he explains. “Others keep away from me, fearing I might harm them with my amulets. But I stand by what I do. I can combine my studies and my vocation perfectly.”

We often look back at our own youth and marvel at how things have changed. Nostalgia often gets the better of us, and we pine for the past, and the past is uniformly slower, more tranquil and seemingly less demanding of our energies.

Imagine African youth, today. They aren’t even old enough yet really to look very far back, but every second backwards is like an epoch in time. The transformation is too fast for nostalgia. Cultural takes time to form.

Radio Nederlands quoted a 23-year-old Benin philosophy student who explains Adrien’s voodoo as a means for youth to anchor themselves: “With globalization [and] the expansion of the so-called revealed religions… young people have turned away from” modern culture.

The “Market” understands. The “Market” moves faster than governments.

One of the most suddenly successful marketing and media firms in Africa is Instant Grass, which is devoted to helping vendors sell to youth. But its reports – free from its site – outdo western university Ph.D. studies on what is happening to youth, today, in the developing world.

“The rise of the Internet and mass media has also confused identity further with Western/African-American culture having a strong influence. The reaction of African youth is to create an eclectic culture that embraces both MTV and traditional practices and thinking that flits effortlessly between the two.”

Ergo, voodoo and algebra.

This is an absolutely astoundingly colorful and awesome dynamic to watch. And I truly believe the outcome will be positive. There is simply too little egocentrism in African youth, today, to result in limits to personal freedom. Dictators are gone.

But be prepared for something that isn’t necessarily the democracy of America. And there’s nothing at all wrong with that.

It isn’t uniform, of course. What’s transpiring in north Africa seems at this moment a step backwards. The misguided South African ruling party toys with national catastrophe. Central Africa is more turbulent than ever, and the entrenched and wicked leaders in Uganda and Rwanda seem hell-bent on those countries’ global isolation and backwardness.

Dr. King was the most profound proponent of radical change by and strictly by non-violence. That means his version of social change must come either within the existing system or through non-violent civil disobedience.

It is hard to imagine how Mali, Uganda or the eastern Congo will be moved forward by non-violence.

But even during Dr. King’s days civil disobedience was not without violence. Was the threatened doctors’ and nurses’ strike in Kenya to be non-violent? Technically, yes, but thousands would have died. The many various teacher strikes throughout Africa this year were all non-violent per se, but children denied their only substantial meal of the day became sick.

What I most remember of King’s turbulent last days was unbelievable violence. My most vivid memory is as a very young journalist penned under a burning El Stop in downtown Chicago while the city raged in reaction to King’s assassination.

I remember gun fire was a regular sound in my low-rent apartment in Washington, D.C. during the summer of 1968. Or the unending sirens and tear gas around my apartment in Berkeley that fall.

King is duly revered for radically changing American society with non-violence. Yet what I remember most is fire, bullets and ambulances.

Today President Obama is inaugurated for the second time. Our first African American President, some of whose relatives still reside in Kenya. The racist opposition to him remains strong. Powerful white elected representatives in Congress still engage in racial slurs and oppose him simply because he’s not white.

During his first term he battled mounting opposition to reverse his election on the grounds he wasn’t a native born American, despite his native State of Hawaii publishing nearly a million official copies of his birth certificate.

The horrible individual gun violence which has occurred in America during his first term, in cities like my native Chicago, and in horrific incidents like Sandy Hook and Aurora is due certainly in part — perhaps large part — to the growing ethnic and social divides that cleave America apart.

King’s philosophy of non-violence, like Gandhi’s and to a much lesser but significant extent Mandela’s, were not eras of no violence. There was incredible violence, and this violence — as with the sizzling El Stop that nearly fell on me — will be blazoned in our memories forever. But with time we’re able to reflect that that violence was the reaction to those heroes’ methodical, unswerving actions for a freer, fairer society.

And that the victims of that violence, whether a young student protestor clobbered by a policeman’s baton or an innocent six-year old school child gunned down by a madman embodying the evil of his society, are the heroic soldiers in a more just war than those who fire on enemies to wear medals.

Today, my President is black. My Attorney General is black. Dozens of colleagues, friends, employees and clients are yellow and orange and black, and this compared to my father’s generation would have been all but unbelievable. The world has changed for the better.

Happy Birthday, Martin! You’d have been 84, today!

My #3 Top Story of 2012 is the explosive narrative of African progress, and the #4 story is the significant exception, South Africa. To see a list of all The Top Ten, click here.

“Africa isn’t just a place for safaris or humanitarian aid. It’s also a place to make money,” says New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristoff. The well respected author then went on to site dozens of statistics showing Africa out pacing the world economically.

Clearly the average African is neither as comfortable or well off as the average American. But that’s not the point. The average African is mountains higher in comfort and well-being than his parents, and there is every indication that his children will share that euphoric experience.

This is, of course, a generalization but I feel a fair one. Including Somaliland, there are 56 countries in Africa. Perpetual doom and gloom persists in Zimbabwe and the Central African Republic. Increasingly bad news in 2012 plagued Angola, Uganda, Rwanda, Chad and Mali. So my generalization applies to the rest.

This positive view stands in marked contrast to America, where the generation to generation comparison is dismal. The graph projected out another generation or two actually has parts of Africa catching up with American median income.

The World Bank explains this succinctly as a wealth of new natural resource discoveries. Like oil and gold.

But that’s hardly the end of the story. The new-found wealth in the ground is a necessary foundation, just as rich soil was to early Americans and oil was to the 1960s Arab in the Emirates.

But on that foundation is blossoming some exciting non-natural discoveries, in high tech and alternative energy, in natural products manufacture and a score of other industries.

It was poorly reported but extraordinary this year that South Africa bailed out Europe. That’s right. South Africa paid $2 billion into a world monetary fund to help with the Greek and other European bailouts. Economically, the First World took charity from the Third World.

And Africa has no qualms about embracing the best of capitalism, thank you. Walmart was welcomed into South Africa with a warmer embrace than most mid-sized towns in the United States provide the retailer.

But after the hugs and kisses were over, Walmart submitted to a labor agreement that Americans working for Walmart would die for. Why are they able to do this in Africa, and not in America?

And “thing development” is progressing no less fast than social and “thought development.”

Consider the media, (I am). A respected global media watchdog claims that Tanzania has a freer and better media than the U.S. This is because of the worst of American media, which pulls down the overall ranking.

But the worst of American media, Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and sorts, have made mincemeat of the truth, have thrown civility to the wolves and turned making money into a first principal that cares little about the effects of its nearly sadistic approach to the public need.

In defense some of us Americans would point to many exceptional online services like Wired and Mother Jones and The Nation (and dozens more), and as you examine those “good” media you’ll find out the reason is the same as for Tanzania’s position: youth.

America is aging less than gracefully and its right-winger lying mentality is very much linked to old guys. So perhaps Africa has an intrinsic advantage, since such a large portion of its population is young relative to America’s.

Yesterday was historic for the American Congress: 78 women in The House and 20 women in the Senate. This reverses a trend begun about a decade ago where women in elected office began to decline.

But in Kenya that would be mandated at 145 in The House and 33 in the Senate! Mandated?! Yes, Kenya’s new constitution requires that a third of all elected officials be women, almost doubling in one fell swoop what it’s taken America more than 200 years to accomplish.

The new Kenyan constitution, modeled but improved on South Africa’s new constitution, is quickly becoming a model worldwide. Simple and common sense things like religion banned from schools and institutionalized affirmative action that adjusts to ethnicity and gender as society continually changes puts Kenya on a markedly higher moral plane than America.

I think above all other things socially, though, is the new African attitude towards justice. America is petrified with the concept of sharia Law, for instance if applied in the new Egypt. But Americans understand little of this and can’t even see how any set of laws can be molded to virtually any social model.

Our own Supreme Court has bent and twisted, upheld and struck down, and essentially remolded and unmolded society again and again. American laws on such things as drug possession (marijuana), abortion, gambling and even incest and slavery have gone all over the chart!

There was no direction from the “Founding Fathers” on those issues part and parcel to modern day life. And the irony is that so many Americans think otherwise, that there is some Founding Father out there guiding our every move.

The new Kenya justice will be an amalgam of Islamic sharia and British common law. Some feat, eh? But beautiful and adjusted to the realities of its new society.

But Kenya recognizes – like so much of the world, America excepted – that there is a global morality, today. That there is a worldwide foundation for such things as basic human rights.

Four of Kenya’s most prominent citizens have submitted to charges filed against them at the World Court in The Hague. Voluntarily they will go to The Netherlands for their trial. Now it needs to be said, of course, that these criminals (as I think they are rightly charged) would likely not do so if the Kenyan public hadn’t forced them to. And that is the majesty and beauty of the situation.

An important aside: recently convicted in the World Court, former Liberian leader Charles Taylor in pleading for leniency in his sentencing for war crimes pointed out that he was convicted of crimes no different from those of George Bush in Iraq.

The justices gave no reply.

This was not the case for our own great Justice Ginsberg who dared to speak the truth in Cairo, when she told the Egyptians that maybe the U.S. constitution wasn’t right for them.

The onslaught of criticism that followed, the incredible vitriol from the right, wasn’t just humiliating to us Americans, it was … well, barbaric. It was truly like German Goths grumbling over Roman progressives. Ginsberg is of course right, and fortunately she rather than Senator Kruz is what Egyptians will and are considering for their own new, progressive societies.

But alas, it’s not all good news for Africa. Africa’s behemoth is South Africa. Its economy is multiples of the rest of the entire continent combined. Its history is as complex and fascinating as our own. And hardly 20 years ago it reformed itself into one of the most progressive, moral societies on earth.

But now, things don’t look so good.

Residual racism and neo-apartheidism are sprouting across its non-black societies. I don’t think this is because it was always destined to be so, that there was some kind of intransigent ethic among whites that would eventually surface again, like an old whale on its last sound.

Rather, it’s because the current president has made it so. Jacob Zuma is a joke.

He’s vain, and easily set off by criticism. He’s so wrapped up in himself, he’s let the country wander leaderless. He’s patently ignored the courts, acted like a banana republic dictator and all the while the country spiraled downwards.

Many local experts, white and black and left and right, are beginning to see him not so much a central actor separate from the times, but rather the embodiment of something greater:

The implosion of the ANC, the freedom fighter party that won the battle against apartheid and whose marshal was Nelson Mandela.

I think this is true, and that’s why this is my fourth most important story of 2012. Yet it’s with hope that I also see Zuma coming to an end sooner than the constitution would mandate, and of the ANC moving restlessly to get its act together. It may, however, be too late.

So the year ends on an incredibly positive note for the continent as a whole, but a seriously cautionary one for its grand marshal.

My daughter is a teacher in the Brooklyn, and as I heard the news Friday I was viscerally distressed in a way I’m not when reporting deaths in Africa. Why?

The explanation is terror. That word has come to assume new meanings in my lifetime, but essentially it means a feeling of intense fear without explanation. Humans don’t like unexplained things, and especially unexplained fear.

When we as Americans read of the murdered African children we feel no terror. First, it is far away, not just geographically but psychically. It’s in a place that we believe is less civilized, much poorer and less capable of protecting itself, and often Americans believe organized by corrupt governments.

The implication is that such horrific events are to be expected in Africa.

But not in Newtown, Connecticut. It’s only 45 miles from New York. It’s an affluent community with layers of security. Its leaders and politicians are all nice, upstanding people, working for the better good.

So it makes no sense in Newtown. We think it makes sense in Baragoi, Kenya, or Otitie, Nigeria but not in Newtown. And even if it didn’t make sense in Africa, Africa’s too far away to matter to us.

What matters to us, is us.

And it’s precisely our definition of “us” that goes to the heart of the matter. Americans so far don’t want to define “us” as much larger than a small community of their own family or neighbors. So they certainly can’t extend the “us” to Africa.

That inability to expand the definition of “us” is partially the cause of the Newtown tragedy and even of the tragedies elsewhere in the world and as far away as Africa.

No sane, decent person anywhere in the world would continence the violence in Newtown or Otitie. And there are fair and just ways to prevent such violence. But prevention in even its mildest form and no matter for what purpose – even prevention from buying bacteria infected food from a grocery store – is only possible when individuals give up some of their own rights.

And that’s where America is so far behind the rest of the world, even Africa. We are so obsessed with individual rights and so terrified that some authority will force us to do something we don’t want to, that we are steadfastly reluctant to sacrifice for the better good of the community.

And it has a horrible corollary. When a handful of men in turbans blow up the World Trade Center, our response is to blow up two entire countries wholesale with their civilizations in a vengeful response. We can’t parse the hundreds of millions of individuals who are “foreign” into the myriad levels of good and bad.

Osama is Afghanistan is Iraq. It’s all one thing: We have to think of society as groups of “us”es with no variation within.

Gun control is an obvious partial solution to America’s epidemic of mass murders. By the way, that’s the same partial solution for stopping African carnage. Since most of the world’s weapons are manufactured in Russia and the U.S., it’s a rather simple coalition.

But gun control – much more than protection against bacterial infected salmon – requires an expanded definition of “us.” Sadly, I just don’t think my America is mature enough yet for that.

I hope I’m wrong. But I know until we can achieve such a small step for ourselves, the chance of our participation in assisting the world order as a whole is next to nil.

The half-day sightseeing trip in Nairobi promises to visit an orphanage and school, a bead factor and a typical Kibera house before the piece de resistance: the biogas center: “a fantastic view over Kibera and picture-point. You can see that also human waste is not wasted here.”

This is disgusting. Tourism at its worst and most exploitive, revealing the basest inclinations of ourselves and reenforcing ridiculous notions that poverty doesn’t exist at home.

Kibera is the largest of Nairobi’s 7 or 8 slums, which slip around the city in endless tin and fumes. Not even the Kenyan government census can estimate the size, but the best guesses I’ve seen put the slums at several million people compared to the residents in the city at around 3½ million. The slums are a dissimulating fraction of greater Nairobi and would be an incessant inferno in the developed world.

But in Africa they maintain an unusual tranquility. To be sure crime is endemic (see the film, Nairobi Half Life) and ethnic feuds that plague Kenya from top to bottom can produce particularly vicious moments here, but unlike slums in the developed world there is no boiling cauldron of the poor ready to murder the rich.

Nairobi slums are often stepping stones from poverty, completely unlike the imprisonment of slums in the developed world. Emigrants from impoverished rural areas without proper education or training live for a few years in the slums and develop the minimal skills needed to work in the modern world.

Then they move up and out. Not yet has Kibera fashioned a whole class of people forever imprisoned like the old Harlem or Cabrini Green in the U.S., or the Cape Verde barreos of Lisbon. Kibera will indeed become another Cabrini Green if something isn’t done this generation. But for the moment, the slums are relatively too young to have become a blighted institution.

Nevertheless, they look the same. And the nuance I argue above is not something that can be seen on a short visit. But slum tourists don’t come looking for hope.

What do they come looking for? Why does a tourist pay to come here?

I’ve asked myself the same question time and again. It’s identical with the wish to “see a village.” That quoted remark, of course, is an euphemism for seeing dirty bomas with mud huts and animal excrement. Fortunately, by the way, such villages are rare to find, anymore, at least along East Africa’s normal tourist circuit. What has replaced them are sedentary replications intended to make money from tourists.

Why do tourists pay to see them, even though they are clearly not authentic?

Even though outstanding African economic growth and potential is in fact a topic often found on the pages of the Wall Street Journal, I still hear from parents, “I want my children to see the way the other side lives.” Or “I think it’s important we see how fortunate we are.”

You don’t have to come to Africa to “see how the other side lives.” In some places like southwest Wisconsin near where I live, or the Ozarks or Appalachia, or the residual slums of our urban cities, real poverty and its resultant despair and destruction is no less than Kibera’s.

America’s “Kiberas” are not as widespread or large as Kenya’s, that’s true. But this is not a fortune of chance. It’s the result of a human civilization that wants to give everyone a modicum of happiness, that cherishes human rights.

That’s what America was mostly about, and it’s now what the world is mostly about. Kibera’s existence is our failing, just as Cabrini Green was and Appalachia still is.

Poverty is so complicated that it easily befuddles, and I think that’s part of the tourists’ desire to see Kibera or “a village.” They want to simplify the complicated. They don’t want to see poverty as something relative, but clearly defined and for sure, Kibera is.

But there is the same, absolutely identical misery, disease and angst in the unemployed, castaway homeless veteran on the streets of New York as any child walking the mud paths of Kibera.

Kibera, or the imagined dirty African village, or the homeless veteran need not exist. In a world where you and I assumed our basic human responsibility to our neighbor, there would be no Kibera.

So I believe the single-most important reason tourists want to “experience poverty” in Africa is to believe the same identical thing doesn’t exist at home. Or isn’t as bad. Or isn’t as extensive.

If one child is poor; if one veteran is homeless, it’s wrong.

And finally — possibly even worse — the delusional tourist wants to find a smiling child who is dying, so that they can believe that poor is OK, that homeless can also be happy, that death smiles.

It’s OK to live in a multi-million dollar mansion and it’s OK to dab yourself with Chanel. But it’s not OK to live a world that allows Kiberas to exist. Kibera’s existence is our fault; the collective fault of an unjust world order. The children of Kibera can just as easily be the children of Trenton.

It’s not OK to go through life with the fantasy that Africa is besmirched and cursed and that Kiberas exist only in Nairobi and Shaker Heights exist only in Cleveland.

And it’s not OK to think that poor is OK, anywhere. There is no happiness in being poor or homeless, whether in Kibera or 49th Street.

Don’t come to Africa to validate your own fantasies.

“God is good,” says Forbes magazine, “especially if you’re a Nigerian pastor.”

Two with special attachments to Texas and other blind congregations that vote against their medicare benefits, hate blacks and throw the last bits of money they have at these jokers, are David Oyedepo and Chris Oyakhilome.

They’ve most recently been ensnared in a loud African debate over why so many pastors own private jets.

Forbes estimates Oyedepo’s worth at $150 million and Oyakhilome’s at $30-50 million. Oyakhilome actually has a greater presence in the U.S. than Oyedepo and it totally befuddles me that people will write him checks.

Oyakhilome runs Christ Embassy. There are a number of affiliate churches in the U.S., many in Texas and almost all of them in the south, and many directed to American youth on college campuses.

“Oyakhilome’s diversified interests include newspapers, magazines, a local television station, a record label, satellite TV, hotels and extensive real estate. His Loveworld TV Network is the first Christian network to broadcast from Africa to the rest of the world on a 24 hour basis,“ Forbes revealed.

His regular “rivals” throughout America’s south garner millions and millions.

He recently plead no-contest to a $35 million money laundering scheme that siphoned cash from his network of churches into foreign bank accounts. The individual stories are beyond laughable. It’s absolutely incredulous that people believe him.

Take the most recent $5000 “disappearance” of church cash which he tries to pin on another jet-setting millionaire Nigerian pastor, Chris Okotie. (Forbes says Okotie’s estimated worth approaches $10 million. Guess that’s not enough.)

One American Christ Embassy church member “lamented” that these factitious warring evangelical pastors are “soiling our image.”

Why do so many people, in Africa and in the U.S., supports these crooks?

The question is really not so different from why do these same people vote against their own self-interest, deny that Obama was born in the U.S., disbelieve global warming and think evolution is a plot by bad men to deny the existence of god.

So it’s a fun exercise in exasperation, but there’s little to do about it. It isn’t as if these guys aren’t exposed. They’re exposed in all sorts of publications, and not just headliners in Forbes. The good Nigerian press is constantly on them.

But the attempt to unmask them is the very stuff they use to build their support. There is such distrust in the world of our given institutions, like government and the media, that clever artisans can twist allegations into alleged lies and be believed.

So I suppose in the end we are responsible. We’re responsible for allowing our established institutions to degrade to this point, and to having neglected social education to the point that good people are unable to see the obvious fraud for themselves.

I think Africans are awakening compared to Texans, though, and it may be why so many of them are redirecting their efforts here, out of Africa.

Why are Africans awakening and the citizens of Houston aren’t?

Send me your answers. Make them brief.