African scoreboard

by GWYNNE DYER

Last Tuesday, British Foreign Secretary David Lammy said: “Many have given up on Sudan, but that is wrong. It's morally wrong when we see so many civilians beheaded, infants as young as one subjected to sexual violence, more people facing famine than anywhere else in the world... We simply cannot look away.”

But Lammy was wrong. Of course we can look away. We do it all the time, especially when the disaster is happening in Africa. And by the way, ‘we' includes many if not most Africans themselves: they too feel exhausted by the seemingly endless media reports of turmoil, violence and injustice. 

Lammy was hosting an international meeting in London to mark the second anniversary of the outbreak of the Sudanese civil war, and all the usual things were said, all the standard (quite modest) pledges of money for starving Sudanese refugees made. And at the end, everybody went home in despair.

The civil war in Sudan is truly terrible, with no hope of better in sight. The death toll, mostly civilians, is estimated at 150,000 but could plausibly be anything up to half a million. Twelve million people, more than a quarter of the population, have fled from their homes, and Khartoum, the capital (which recently changed hands) looks only slightly better than Gaza.

The leaders of the two sides are cruel and cynical bandits masquerading as military officers. General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan is the commander of the Sudan Armed Forces (SAF). Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, universally known as ‘Hemedti', is the leader of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF). And the mercenaries who work for them are the scum of the earth.

The only reason for the war is the struggle between the two crooks for control of the country's resources. Hemedti has most of the gold, Burhan controls the flow of oil from South Sudan to the country's only port, Port Sudan on the Red Sea. and the sole hope for peace is a recent hint by Hemedti that they might just partition what's left of the old Sudan between them.

The African Union immediately stated that it will not allow the country to be partitioned again, but the RSF has already taken a tentative step in that direction by declaring itself a rival government across the whole country. Stay tuned for more tragedies. However....

Everything I have written here is true, and it is the sort of thing people expect to see in a report on Africa. But it is also misleading about the reality of the African continent today.

There are fifty-five countries in Africa (including a number of offshore islands), and in only two of them, Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo, are there open wars. In both cases the fighting is confined within the borders of the country, although the DRC also has the troops of at least two neighbouring countries on its territory.

There are close to a dozen ongoing insurgencies in parts of other African countries (Mozambique, Cameroon, Nigeria, Mali, Somalia, etc.), but in almost every case you would have to travel to out-of-the-way parts of the country to see any evidence of fighting above the level of mere terrorism. 

In big African cities the level of personal safety ranges from New York City in the late 1980s to London now. In most countries there is a tolerable level of crime and reasonable safety for those who take the obvious precautions.

And then there is the enduring African miracle of stable borders. Even 55 African countries are not nearly enough to provide each major ethnic and linguistic group with its own sovereign territory. You'd need at least twice as many even to accommodate every group of half a million with its own country.

So the founding doctrine of the Organisation of African Unity 62 years ago was that all the colonial borders must stay where they are. The diverse populations within each border will have to learn to live together, because the only alternative is several centuries of war to sort the surviving ethnic groups into linguistically and ethnically homogeneous nation-states.

The miracle is that it worked. Apart from the Sudan/South Sudan and Eritrea/Ethiopia splits, there have been no major changes to African borders since the end of colonial rule in the 1950s and 60s. Compare that to what happened in 20thcentury Europe, where borders changed drastically amid catastrophic wars, and you will understand what an achievement that is.

Most African countries are poor, and many are dictatorships. They face huge challenges from climate change and rapid population growth. But the glass is more than half-full.