The concerns of old wandering knights are no longer the concerns of industrialised Spain and Don Quixote’s windmills are gone. Were that ancient champion and his squire to amble, clanking and saddle-sore, onto the great baking plain of Iberia, they would find themselves dwarfed by a new enemy: thousands of gigantic mirrors, standing in ranks like the vanguard of the all-conquering forces of vanity. A flanking attack would seem moments away, a terrible charge out of the sun by a division of immense powder puffs.
Of course, not all powder puffs are warlike. Some are enthusiastic and British and get work as environmental reporters for CNN; and last weekend it was one of these who wandered through the mirror-field, marvelling at the green possibilities of a system that produces vast amounts of electricity by simply pointing the sun’s rays at a distant high-tech water-tower.
It was terribly hot up in that boiler; and as the reporter wheezed his way over simmering gantries, like a polony dragging itself through a Laundromat, one suddenly remembered old ditties about mad dogs and the stately melanomas of England. Temperatures at the top of the tower, the polony-puff panted as his buttocks liquefied and dribbled down his pants legs, could reach seventeen trillion degrees centigrade. Or something.
All of which explained what he said next. It had to be the heat or the glare or a sudden distracting glimpse of an ecologically sound bullfight far away, where a bull with condoms over its horns and the palm-prints of children painted on its flanks was gently poked with a rolled-up poster of Bono. Because what he said was this: ”Imagine setting up millions of mirrors across the Sahara and sending the energy north to Europe!”
One had to give him the benefit of the doubt. Presumably, had he not been trying to deal with a small supernova in his underpants, the results of having unwisely worn nylon instead of cotton that morning, he would have expressed himself more clearly and remembered the bits about paying African countries for their sun and surface area, discounting power exports to sub-Saharan countries, and so on.
But the earnest ease of his imaginings did make one wonder what sort of future awaits Africa’s poor. Middle-class malcontents have been threatening to eat the rich for years, but given that the rich tend to dictate the global menu, it seems likelier that future entrées are to be pauper purée. After all, if Europe in 2007 is already prepared to help itself to the Saharan sun, why not a few tasty indigenous nibbles 10 years from now, once the last Friesian starts mooing at the moon and the last Chinese chicken succumbs to chooky consumption?
Indeed, one has to wonder how long it will be until the shelves of European cafés creak under new, sinisterly non-specific staples such as ”black bacon” and ”Congo Cola — the Dark Condiment”. Eventually euphemism will pale into tacit consent, which, in turn, will succumb to sordid honesty: by the time McDonald’s launches its Burundi Burger and housewives are stocking up on Chad-ermelt steaks for their broods, the game will be well and truly up, and honest capitalism can press on unchecked. Feeling a little Mala-gassy? Got the Mozam-pique? Benin and out of the loo all day? Flush out your system with some Sudan Bran! Now with 10% less fat and 25% Lesotho. (Naturally smaller regions would provide more distinctive delicacies — consider Duck l’Orania, featuring white meat soaked in peach brandy and left to simmer since 1994).
Somehow, of course, Europe will make it all right to eat Africans, just as Americans have made it all right to watch Oprah. Perhaps a memorial fountain will ooze respectfully in Brussels, a bronze half-digested crouton of Cameroonian poking up through the algae, above the legend ”The Debt We Owe”. Perhaps the Live8 coven will rematerialise to sway along to a modern cover of a Lennon classic, re-released for a post-nutrition, neo-cannibalistic world: ”Imagine nothing’s leavened, it’s easy if you try, no deli below us; above, no sign of pie. Imagine this was protein, I wonder if it’s Spam; nothing to grill or fry up except casseroles of man …”
Or perhaps they’ll simply appeal to rudimentary logic revolving around the truism that you are, quite literally, what you eat.
But all is not lost: Africa has her own defences. So let us not be too stringent in our criticisms of our continent’s despots and warlords, or too despairing about her ragged transport infrastructure or her sporadic food supplies. For as long as we are neither free-range nor grain-fed, the Europeans will leave us alone.