It’s a mystery: Africans can’t shoot Olympic arrows!

• It is puzzling that Africa doesn’t dominate archery yet no other continent uses bows and arrows for primary purposes as much.
• Zimbabwe, which is Africa’s best performer at this point at the Olympics, owes its silvers mostly to its white citizens.
• Inflation in Zimbabwe is expected to rise to 50,000,000 per cent this month.

It is still early days in the Olympics and – how shall we put it? – Africa’s performance in the Games is still “young”.

When I last checked, no African country had won a gold yet. The highest placed country from the continent was Zimbabwe, with three silvers.

Algeria had one bronze. And Togo one. Nothing surprising there, as we are still going through the sports where Africa has no pedigree – gymnastics, rowing, cycling, weight-lifting, archery, fencing, equestrian events, and so forth.

When it comes to track events, the story will change.

Kenya, Ethiopia and Morocco will clean out most of the middle- and long-distance running events, and climb into the top half of the medals tally.

The middle classes in Africa don’t produce great sportsmen and women, so most people from working and peasant backgrounds who cannot afford to participate in any sports where you need to join a club dominate sports.

So we excel in football, which young Africans master by kicking home-made fibre balls in the village square.

Excellence in running says something about our politics.

We are always running – running away from the anti-riot police; running away from thieves; women constantly running away from rapists; fleeing armed conflict or persecution and ending up as refugees in neighbouring countries and exiles in faraway lands.

And daily, people flee the poverty of the rural areas for the deceptive lights of the cities.

You would have thought we would be good at weight-lifting. Wrong. Too many people are going hungry in Africa, so, rightly, it would not have been proper to squander food on a few fellows so they can go lift weights in Beijing.

What puzzles me most is that Africa doesn’t dominate archery. Definitely, no other continent uses bows and arrows for primary purposes as much as Africa.

In many African cities, you meet hundreds of security guards armed with bows and arrows going to protect the homes of the well-off members of society.

And bows and arrows are still used as weapons in conflicts, the way they were used in other parts of the world in ancient times.

Take the post-election violence in Kenya early this year.