For decades famine, drought, strife and cor­rup­tion have been so com­mon in parts of Africa that out­siders could, to an extent, be excused for see­ing them as nor­mal. It is well  past time on many lev­els for the com­fort­able com­pla­cen­cy of will­ful igno­rance to give way to a harsh real­i­ty; the divide between “them” and “us” has been well and tru­ly breached.

The dev­as­ta­tion and suf­fer­ing wreaked by extreme heat, storms and floods in the north­ern hemi­sphere, are twinned with sim­i­lar cat­a­stro­phes in places where most of those to whom such things are ter­ri­fy­ing­ly new, prob­a­bly can’t spell or prop­er­ly pro­nounce, nev­er mind pin­point on a map.
For starters, in the Horn of Africa; “After five con­sec­u­tive failed rainy sea­sons, flood­ing has replaced drought, killing live­stock and dam­ag­ing farm­land, fur­ther shat­ter­ing livelihoods.”
Much of the rest of the con­ti­nent is fac­ing vari­a­tions of food short­ages and cli­mate disasters.
For evil mea­sure, more than 35 “non-inter­na­tion­al armed con­flicts”, involv­ing gov­ern­ment forces and/or armed mili­tias against each oth­er are cur­rent­ly tor­ment­ing a dozen African nations.
How many peo­ple oth­er than aid work­ers and con­flict-watch­ers know that? 
Or care?
The war in Sudan, over which the U.S. and oth­ers have wrung their hands and issued dire warn­ings of con­se­quences, has reduced the cap­i­tal city Khar­toum to rub­ble akin to that in Ukraine, and forced hun­dreds of thou­sands to flee as refugees. But it com­mands min­i­mal space in news agen­das. Nor is there any avail­able evi­dence that the pro­tag­o­nists are in any way con­cerned with long-term per­son­al or polit­i­cal penalties.
Per­haps they’ve seen a recent report on how much evil the West is will­ing to for­get, which in effect means forgive.
Forty years ago the now Zim­bab­wean Pres­i­dent Emmer­son Mnan­gag­wa over­saw Oper­a­tion Guku­rahun­di (“the ear­ly rain which wash­es away the chaff before the spring rains”), a state-run ter­ror cam­paign against his country’s minor­i­ty Nde­bele peo­ple, who in main opposed the still rul­ing, Shona-dom­i­nat­ed  ZANU-PF par­ty. A North Kore­an-trained army unit killed more than 20,000 civil­ians, and accord­ing to a recent defin­i­tive study; “one can only con­clude that the num­ber of Nde­bele in the pop­u­la­tion who were vic­tims of rape and oth­er forms of sex­u­al vio­lence between 1983 and 1984 is in excess of 150,000 victims.”
Mnan­gag­wa not only still enjoys impuni­ty for his crimes, he was invit­ed to and attend­ed the coro­na­tion of King Charles III last May.                                 EVER THUS
That should sur­prise no one. Ignor­ing and tak­ing advan­tage of what ought to be con­demned in Africa, are tried and true prac­tices.When I was a fledg­ling for­eign cor­re­spon­dent roam­ing Africa in the 1970s Nige­ria, the continent’s most pop­u­lous coun­try, was a land of stag­ger­ing poten­tial. Vast reserves of oil were com­ple­ment­ed by deposits of iron ore and ura­ni­um. West­ern­ers in trop­i­cal weight suits, mop­ping sweat and wilt­ing in the humid­i­ty as they engaged in earnest con­ver­sa­tion with attaché case-car­ry­ing Nige­ri­ans, dot­ted the lob­bies of lux­u­ry hotels. “An entre­pre­neur who can’t get rich in Nige­ria in two years,” a Swedish busi­ness­man told me, “doesn’t deserve to be in business.”
State play­ers still treat Africa with  jaun­ty self-regard and unre­pen­tant greed.
India and Chi­na are tar­get­ing coun­tries where solar ener­gy and wind are obvi­ous pow­er sources,  as a ripe mar­ket for coal-fired pow­er plants.
Yevge­ny Prigozhin’s mer­ce­nary Wag­n­er group, a col­lec­tion of for­mer Russ­ian sol­diers, con­victs and for­eign nation­als, is esti­mat­ed to have some five thou­sand mem­bers sta­tioned across Africa, includ­ing in Libya and Sudan. They hold sway over vital min­er­al resources in the Cen­tral African Repub­lic. After coups in Mali and Burk­i­na Faso where Wag­n­er is on the ground, crowds waved Russ­ian flags. The group is also mov­ing into Niger, whose (cur­rent­ly) French-con­trolled mines pro­duce 5 per­cent of the world’s uranium.
On a seem­ing­ly more benign lev­el, Moscow has a new project called “Sput­nik” to teach African jour­nal­ists. Accord­ing to its direc­tor Vasi­ly Pushkov; “The idea is that the prob­lem that the jour­nal­ist in Rus­sia is fac­ing is com­plete­ly the same for each and every coun­try in the world; for each and every jour­nal­ist in the world.” Giv­en what hap­pens to jour­nal­ists who oppose Vladimir Putin, Mnan­gag­wa will find that heart­en­ing, if not inspirational.
Like cli­mate change, the prob­lems cre­at­ed by West­ern dis­missal or igno­rance of Africa’s prob­lems are com­ing home to roost, whether politi­cians and the pub­lic like it or not.
The thou­sands of  migrants risk­ing their lives to cross the Sahara Desert and then the Mediter­ranean to seek a bet­ter life in Europe, are going to grow as fast and as long as the crops and oppor­tu­ni­ties for eco­nom­ic bet­ter­ment in their home coun­tries keep shriveling.
The prover­bial expres­sion “Always some­thing new out of Africa” attrib­uted to Pliny the Elder is a slight mis­quote of Aristotle’s obser­va­tion “Africa always brings forth some­thing new.”
Its peo­ples can be for­giv­en if they turn it into some­thing along the lines of “Into Africa always things we don’t need”.

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