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“God Loves You.” An accusing finger looms out of the billboard, pointing directly at passers-by. Lord Kitchener has been press-ganged into a different kind of national service.
Zambia’s capital, Lusaka, is a tundra of low-roofed buildings and patchy roads lined with threadbare bush. It is the billboards, though, that stick in the mind. A combination of the generic and the personal, they offer everything from tempered glass to soft drinks to the chance, with the help of a professional medium, to become wealthy, get your ex back or simply take “revenge”.
This impulse for revenge, that “kind of wild justice” as Francis Bacon wrote, is doing its debased work across the region, not least among Zambia’s neighbours: Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), to the north, and Mozambique, to the east. So far, the war in eastern DRC has seen 5.8 million people displaced in a population of 7 million; 72% of people now live on less than $1.90 a day. In northern Mozambique, nearly one million people have been displaced by conflict since 2017, 80% of whom are women and children.
It’s not just a regional problem. While the world has rightly focused on Vladimir Putin’s murderous invasion of Ukraine and the war in Gaza following October 7, Africa has descended to mass violence and, in some places, near anarchy. There were 104 conflicts across the continent in 2022, the deadliest year in Africa for more than three decades. And since the Sudan civil war broke out one year ago, 8.6 million people have been forcibly displaced, and more than 15,000 confirmed killed (though the actual figure is likely to be far higher).
African leaders have long understood the gravity of the problem. Last month, Hakainde Hichilema, the president of Zambia and current chair of Southern African Development Community (SADC), last month convened a summit to discuss the SADC’s peacekeeping deployments in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) — known as SAMIDRC and Mozambique (SAMIM). SADC is a southern African regional bloc that primarily deals with economic and political cooperation, but has increasingly been forced to focus on security concerns. In recent years, violence has concentrated the minds of SADC nations, and African leaders generally: never have peacekeeping forces been more necessary, more problematic — or, according to those on the ground, more inadequate.
The SADC has already made some efforts to help DRC. Last December, it deployed a joint force to eastern DRC to fight the M23 rebel army, but it ran into difficulties. M23 is allegedly backed by Rwanda, which denies any involvement, though the UN accuses it of “direct interventions” to support the rebels. The summit concluded by reiterating SADC’s “unwavering commitment to provide both diplomatic and military support to the Government and people of the DRC”.
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SubscribeThe author claims that “wars are never ended or resolved on the battlefield”.
Actually, they are, if allowed to continue long enough.
I would refer the author to episodes such as Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow, to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to the career of Genghis Khan.
I would also suggest that without any outside intervention, or ‘international pressure’, Israel could end the war with Hamas on the battlefield too.
For better or worse, the West, which is typically the source of interventions designed to get all sides round a table, has no longer got the stomach to see wars settled on the battlefield, which is (a major reason IMO) why Africa in particular remains chronically unstable.
Had Europe’s various warring sides in centuries past been prevented by well-meaning Africans from redrawing their borders through war, and thus deciding their own histories and futures perhaps these brushfire wars and internecine blood-letting that Africa now suffers from would plague Europe.
I have no idea which of the current conflicts in Africa can be managed by well-meaning foreigners offering inducements to make peace, and which need to be allowed to burn themselves out naturally, but blanket statements that wars are never ended on the battlefield need to be called out as just plain wrong.
Your examples are fundamentally different from African violence since the conflict is tribal and triggered by battles over dwindling resources.
This is the face of climate change.
What follows will be countries in crisis with famines and starvation prompting mass migrations.
Get used to it, it’s here to stay.
Absurd. Africa is a resource-rich continent long mismanaged by people who have been given trillions in foreign aid and technology for decades. Climate has absolutely nothing to do with it. Human greed and stupidity is to blame.
Corruption is the word you are looking for, which is undoubtedly always part of the picture since it is embedded in African culture.
Resources come in many forms and are almost always at the root of tribal conflict, many of which span different boundaries to the colonial map.
If organisations truly wish to help they need to understand these aspects much better.
Africa is rapidly greening. The Sahara is shrinking. Turns out CO2 is really good for plants (shocker). Africa’s problem is corrupt, ineffective governance.
Good God, such barefaced lies are unbelievable. The Sahel is growing.
This nonsense it what stops real discussion of the problem.
It is likely that the biggest contributor to the spread of the Sahel is bad land management, over grazing and over population. Obviously corrupt politicians see global warming as an excuse to get handouts for themselves or to impose extra taxes on their people, like a carbon tax on fuel.
The spread of the mini-sahel in southern Africa has been well documented and studied since the 1930s. There is little mystery about the causes lying in the way people, local people, care for their land.
Ethiopia has make great strides in protecting water catchments by banning goats from higher lying areas. Kenya’s NGOs have led the way in using trees to regreen.
Please abandon the nonsense, the issues are too important.
This is also the face of overpopulation, as adequate resources — supply — lag demand. Africa could do its people — and countries accepting its surplus as immigrants — a great favor by addressing over-procreation.
If Africa truly wants to take the lead in solving African problems, as the article’s author says, great: Let it do so. If it does not, action, and inaction, have consequences.
Addendum: After letting this percolate for a few hours, I realize my comment may seem harsh and simplistic; perhaps it is. Issues facing this continent — those that are home grown, those arising from foreign involvements and those reflecting an unhappy merger — are many and complicated. Population reduction would no doubt help considerably along the lines of supply and demand, but I appreciate that solutions — and I truly hope Africans do lead — will be multifaceted.
“If it does not, action, and inaction, have consequences.”
Like mass migration and / or Rwanda style genocide.
I am putting my money on the former – both intra and intercontinental.
Since climate change is affecting everyone, but it’s only Africa, and to some extent the Islamic parts of the Middle East where there’s chronic armed conflict, it seems fair to infer that some cultures are dealing with it rather better than others.
Personally, and I’m not a fan of ascribing all of Africa’s ills to being the fault of increasingly historically-distant colonial powers, I do very much wonder whether the drawing of borders by those powers without respect for tribal boundaries is at least one reason for the chronic instability.
If that were the case, then the borders need to be redrawn, and that really only happens through one side driving the other side out. The kind of war, in other words, that is literally genocidal.I’m not advocating for this or against it. It’s acute pain now, or chronic pain forever. Just saying that there are types of conflict that can really only end on the battlefield, and for policy-makers and policy advocates to be claiming that wars are never won on a battlefield means blinding oneself to reality in certain situations, and consequent misguided and counter-productive policies and interventions.
The idea that tribally oriented warfare in Africa is predominantly caused by climate change is the biggest load of rubbish I’ve ever heard. I expect even you know that. It’s been going on for decades since when people were warning that a new Ice Age was upon us. Battle of resources possibly, but there are not “dwindling resources” in Africa, accepting the ultimate geological sense than the Earth is finite: however we have only scratched a tiny percentage of available resources. This absurd 1960s Club of Rome stuff has been utterly discredited since the 1960s, that we will “run out” of this or that material in the short term, which completely dismisses human ingenuity and technological progress.
Also your comment is a classic example of progressive liberalism: a cynical dismissal of the opportunities for human beings to actually do anything about their many problems (as has always been the case), dressed up as a faux piety and concern, with naturally a site swipe at your “white supremacist” enemies or whoever you think they may be, saying that they must suck it all up and we must import even more of Africa’s problems into the West! What a brilliant solution that is already proving to be.
Western pacifism of the past fifty years has bottled up many conflicts with only sporadic flareups of violence showing as signs of the built up pressure. Those conflicts will have to eventually come to their conclusions. It’s going to shock a whole lot of people who believed in the End of History fantasy
Africa may need the wests help, but has constantly claimed to not want it and denounced any western interference as being akin to modern day colonialism. They thought the grass was greener by getting into bed with the Chinese and Russians, I think they’re probably about to find out the hard way that it isn’t
Africans constantly say how evil racist and colonial we are – let them sort things out themselves. The best we can do to help them is don’t give them any technology they couldn’t develop produce and understand themselves. No more western medicines, computers, aircraft parts, cars – nothing. Let Africa go back to being Africa and the population will fall to its sustainable level.
Yeah, and while you’re at it the West could stop bleeding Africa of its natural resources like oil, copper, coltan, gold, diamonds, nickel, molybdenum, helium, etc.
How are we doing that exactly?
Africa isn’t a single entity. By definition, its hundreds of conflicts tell us there are hundreds of competing visions by hundreds of different peoples across hundreds of different territories.
When authors write “Africa needs the West’s help” they always fail to identify which political factions the West is supposed to help over others. Is the West meant to help existing corrupt incumbents transgressing human rights? Or is the West supposed to mediate between murderous insurgents transgressing human rights?
If the West is only slightly perceived by some Africans to favour one side, it would add anti-Western anti-colonial fuel to the fire we’re trying to extinguish. If the West mediates a mutually agreeable gain share between existing combatents, another insurgency group will be born to fight for its own mediation and gain share. And let’s not forget the queue of Western activists ready to take to the streets and the courts to protest any decision whatsoever.
There will always be agrieved peoples both in the West and in Africa. What determines the peace is the likelihood of fighting yielding concessions. In Western Europe, North America, and Japan, after centuries of internal and external wars, powerful states have emerged with a near monopoly of force. Western Europe and Japan were literally bombed into peace. There is no prospect in these regions of military force gaining any benefits for would be aggressors.
The hard truth is wars end by the imposition of a settlement by force, internally and externally. Any other peace is just a rest between fighting, a time for new opportunists to mobilise to fight for what they think is theirs. Western Europe and Japan were forced into peace when they ended up prized possessions of the American empire. Just this week the USA spent $60bn to defend its hegemony in Europe, and indirectly that keeps the peace in Western and Central Europe. Pax America.
Africa’s violence arises precisely because there is no greater power willing or able to impose peace at any cost. Like every other continent, it will suffer continuous civil and regional wars until some sort of hegemony is established. Sadly, for a continent so large, populous, diverse, and geographically contiguous, convergence on hegemony might never come.
Very thoughtful post.
Although I agree with a lot of your comments, I think the comparison of Africa with the situation of Western Europe and Japan after the Second World War is frankly ludicrous. I do realise that the concept of an American empire is ever so fashionable among many on the Right, and some are absolutely determined that almost every question should be dragged into some intra US culture war. But with the exception of the Philippines, Puerto Rico and a few others (and even Puerto Rico is largely self-governing) the key feature of American geopolitical hegemony is precisely that it did NOT impose a formal Empire, for example on Iraq or Afghanistan.
But a formal Empire is exactly what is needed IF a hegemon wants to transmit its values and dominate the societies in the way that the British Empire sometimes managed to. But this will be 100 or 200 year project, not one for a single presidential administration. (The world is complex: governments can behave both idealistically and cynically at the same time).
Despite the hiatus of the Second World War, Western Europe and Japan both had the institutions, experience and expertise to continue being self-governing prosperous societies and achieve largely achieved this, albeit with American security guarantees and a (rather benign) military presence. Africa is in an entirely different situation for deep historical reasons.
“Africans will take care of their own problems”.
So, how’s that going?
And always with somebody else’s money and weapons / expertise.
And this at a time when we apparently can’t defend our own borders or keep Jews safe on the streets of London.
Grow up.
Glad to see some much needed writing on Africa. The conclusion it reaches is utterly wrong however. The white man needs to stay as far away from the affairs of the continent as possible. Any suggestion to the contrary is neocolonialist madness.
We gave up any right to try and drag these benighted peoples into modernity decades ago when we gave up the Burden at the instigation of our American masters. We must leave Africans to resolve their own issues if they are to become effective, self-actualised nation states instead of corrupt tribal entities. Many countries have come far in recent years, and don’t get enough credit. It isn’t 2003.
“More anarchy awaits ….”
Change one letter and this could almost start a poem by Yeats, who is seeming more and more prophetic by the day. And it’s not just in Africa.
Very insightful.
Armed conflicts are on the rise everywhere not just in Africa, although it is understandable why non-Africans like to be concerned given the troubled history of the continent.
Africans have always solved their own problems when not interfered with from outside. It is no secret that peace in the DRC is elusive because of the meddling by foreign interests over minerals that are powering the digital (and AI) revolution.
Sorry, but Africans are incapable of solving Africa’s problems. How much more time and proof do you need to see this?
Wars are ended when your enemy is defeated, the ‘negotiations’ merely tie up the loose ends.
Witness WW2 .
The West just lectures about “democracy”, it’s cynical and useless. Law and order must come first, and must be organic. Wish them the best.
You can read the same old tired stuff about white guilt from colonialism, slavery, racism, or their counterpoints, mentioned here in some of the posts, about “Africans unable to solve their own problems”, “Africans remain violent unless a greater power is willing to impose peace” (a particularly ugly sentiment, IMO), or you can listen to people like Magratte Wade, here is a link where she is being interviewed by the shockingly casually dressed Jordan Peterson: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SH63RABGK6w
Currently its a win – win for China and a not too shabby set up for the Russians too. If the countries are stable China gets the raw materials and if not sells them arms, Russia likewise but on a much smaller level. Russia also gets the bonus that war drives Africans to Benelux, Germany and Britain as refugees who are coming over on the basis they can behave as if they were still in Africa. Ironically the Chinese could do with this labour as their future demographics are dire – old and mostly male. They could also make things better for the migrants as in China you do as the Chinese do – or else. Those coming to Britain etc face a life of low wages, benefits and crime. Not values we associate with China over its long history.
Only silence on the way men like Daniel Gertler, Mark Thatcher, Beny Steinmetz and others like France, USA, UK along with their local warlords and dictators have been, and continue to, underwrite genocide in Africa while bleeding the country dry of natural resources for centuries. So now Russia and China are the culprits. At least they built infrastructure, and Russia hosts millions of refugees fleeing the predation and bombs of the United States. Economic capture by the IMF and WB haven’t helped out much either. Leaving out 80% of the history in Africa to endorse B.S. Gimme a break.
Africa could be great – but Africans choose for it not to be anything other than a malange of failed States.
It’s very interesting that the west is not doing what it normally does which is help regardless whether it’s asked to or not
The white western saviour is strong with this author. The predictable are then triggered in these comments to spout their trolling.
Africa really does need to sort itself out. Corruption is what western and eastern handouts facilitate. Just stop.
Take roads. EU aid involves handouts that are supposed to create road making skills, of course it goes to the politicians. No road. China brings in all its own people so at least a road gets built. But that is it, no maintenance.
This unrest is very worrying. Mozambique is next door to South Africa and the SA army cannot feed its own troops. Everything is stolen. Think a more incompetent version of the inept Nigerian forces. They at least hone their skills against civilians in the odd coup.
This article does a good service by identifying specific actors and their roles. It is tempting to generalize about Africa’s problems but the solutions will probably have to be narrowly targeted. Some governments seem hopelessly corrupt, but it would be good to know which ones are not.
It seems a little delusional to imagine that countries like the UK are in any way well placed to ‘help’ Africa. The reality is that the UK is looking more and more like Africa every year: a corrupt, self serving political elite (schooled in the very same institutions as many African leaders); crumbling infrastructure (schools falling down…); environmental degradation (rivers awash with sewage) and, above all, exploding inequality of wealth and opportunity (food banks, landlordism, inherited wealth as the only guarantee of a decent standard of living). Labour and the Tories being little more than two cheeks on the same bottom make our democracy look somewhat redundant. If this continues the UK will soon be on the same level as Nigeria.
Klive, well stated. One only has to look at our institutions eg “House of Lords”, an un-elected body, filled with party crony’s. They sit their for LIFE. Very Feudal in essence. Landlordism – Total. No reform on that will happen as most of the politicians are renting property out. No chance of them changing any laws. Great impartiality. Just Shamless and a absolute shameful cabal
Correction – it crossed the brink decades ago. Its own fault lines deepened both by outsider meddling and neglect led to wars then and now – coupled with loss of western influence. Enter China and Russia. Time for catch-up TV?
“Change and leadership must come from within Africa”, “Africa will take care of its own problems”. Beyond the cliches there are too many countries that coukd, or haven’t, for reasons that are as much endogenous, and often wholly inexcusable, as exogenous. Pointless and unjustified coups, delayed reforms and elections, pacts to stay in power by force backed by mercenaries and new autocracies. Many of the lessons have been rolled over from earlier decades. But The West is no longer soley culpable and Gulf States/China/Russia are quite prepared to back and sustain a new generation of corrupt and military leaders. “Africa” will not sort itself out until Agrican leaders stop messing around and immerating Afeicans as well.
This article is almost the quintessence of well-meaning but ineffectual liberalism, rimming with contradiction. “Africa must solve its own own problems” – but the West must also, natch, help no doubt by wasting yet more resources on this ill fortuned continent. Africa was certainly cynically carved up without any regard to the inhabitants and their customs in the 1890s, but it was just as cynically abandoned with no effective capability of ruling itself – as modern (artificial) states – in the 1960s, because of the demands of tiny group of self-interested political elites, and of course Western bien pensant liberals. The results have, mostly, been cataclysmic.
As we see from country after country democracy simply is not going to become rooted in Africa, in what are still overwhelmingly tribally-oriented societies. Even the smallest countries have dozens of languages.
It’s clearly a terrible situation for them but the fact is that the west is in crisis and hardly in a position to assist anyone.