There is so much hardship, it’s hard to know where to start. In Africa, 2004 brought 3.1 million new HIV infections in the sub-Saharan region, border skirmishes on the borders of the Central African Republic, Ethiopia, Eritrea and Burundi and near anarchy in Somalia, Burundi and Congo-Brazzaville.

Amidst all the tribal and ethnic disputes, two stories have received moderate levels of attention in the Western media, if only because the sheer numbers involved make them impossible to ignore. The first, a harrowing killing campaign by the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda, has seen 1.8 million people displaced from their homes, while in Sudan an ethnic cleansing campaign has left 50,000 dead, 1.5 million homeless and 200,000 in refugee camps in Chad.
You could argue, as The Economist did recently, that things have improved for the continent. Precarious truces have held since the civil wars in Congo and Liberia officially ended in 2003. Peacekeeping forces have alleviated bloody struggles in Cote d’Ivoire, Angola and Sierra Leone. President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa and his Nigerian equivalent, Olusegun Obasanjo, have reached out to warring parties in Congo (among other places) in an attempt to negotiate peace deals.
Still, that doesn’t make the plight of many Africans any less wretched. Last year, James Morris, the executive director of the UN’s food programme asked, “How is it that we routinely accept a level of suffering and hopelessness that we would never accept in any other part of the world?” If it’s a hell of a question, the answer is even more disquieting. Truth is, even when news of Africa does trickle through, it’s incredibly easy to dismiss the entire continent as a place ravaged by tribal disputes, natural disasters and mismanagement.
Conveniently, the west ignores that the International Monetary Fund has imposed ‘structural adjustment programmes’ – a polite euphemism for crippling belt-tightening orders – in some of the poorest countries of the continent. Nobody feels comfortable contemplating those spiralling debts, 800 million individuals suffering from hunger or the two dollars that go into Western banks for every dollar given to Africa in aid.
Nor does anyone want to dwell on border problems that are almost entirely inherited from the colonial era. After all, in the great carve up, the British, Belgian, French, German and Italian imperialists didn’t really care whether their borders corresponded to African ethnicity or language. Indeed, tribalism was encouraged. It served Germany very well to impose rigid distinctions between the Tutsi and Hutu populations in the 1890s, a policy that impacted horrifically in Rwanda a decade ago.
The current situation in Darfur, widely acknowledged as a kind of slow-motion version of the Rwandan genocide, has provoked outrage, but the murderous campaign of ethnic cleansing being carried out by the government-backed Janjaweed is part of an already horribly familiar pattern in Sudan.
Human rights agencies are claiming that it’s genocide and calling for international aid. Realpolitik suggests that it will be a long time coming.
The Republican Party’s Christian Lobby – currently enjoying something of a renaissance – have been keen to end strife in southern Sudan. They’ve long viewed the civil war as a clear case of General Omar al-Bashir’s Islamic government persecuting and killing Christians. Now that Khartoum has signed the Naivasha document, a preliminary peace agreement, the US won’t want to jeopardise stability in the South by sending troops into Darfur. Nor is the US State Department keen on the idea of alienating a moderate Islamic government.
If things look grim in Sudan, in its own perfect neo-colonial way, Equatorial Guinea provides a portrait just as chilling. Dubbed the ‘Kuwait of Africa’ by CBS News last August since oil was discovered there ten years ago, things have been looking up for President Obiang and his immediate friends and family.
A production deal struck with petroleum giant ExxonMobil back in 1992 may not have favoured Equatorial Guinea, with the country receiving only 12% of the oil, but with most of that 12% going straight to the President, he’s not likely to complain. Besides, he’ll always look well beside the neighbours in a country where the majority live on less than a dollar a day and the malaria is the deadliest on the planet.
Complaints about human rights abuses in Equatorial Guinea – including some from America’s own ambassador – are unlikely to result in intervention as the country is expected to provide as much as 25% of America’s oil in the next decade. However, you may be pleased to hear that President Obiang found time to return to his native soil recently from his homes and Bentley collections in Paris, Washington and Los Angeles, when his family-run television channel (newspapers are banned) announced that he is now God.
Who says the odds are stacked against you in Africa?