What Africa is really like

The continent is getting more prosperous and democratic by the day

by Alex Perry / October 15, 2015 / Leave a comment

Published in November 2015 issue of Prospect Magazine

Aid is distributed in Somalia’s capital, Mogadishu. © Warsame, Omar B/ICRC

Between October 2010 and April 2012, a quarter of a million people died in a famine in Somalia. Even in the war years, no one had seen dying like it. In a few weeks in mid-2011, half a million people abandoned their homes in the south of the country and walked across the desert to Mogadishu, an exodus of hundreds of miles marked for eternity by thousands of shallow graves. In the camps the survivors erected out of brushwood and plastic bags in the war ruins of Mogadishu, hundreds were dying every day. When cholera and measles swept the camps, that number accelerated into the thousands. The living and the dead soon found themselves competing for space. Mothers would return to the graves of children they had buried the day before to find a camp had materialised on the same spot over night. By the end of the catastrophe, one in 10 of the children in southern Somalia aged five and under was dead.

Maybe you remember it? Perhaps you gave money to the aid agencies who blanketed newspaper front pages and billboards in London with pictures of starving Somalis? The campaign was one of the biggest of the last decade, raising £1.2bn in months, about £400 for each of the three million Somalis in need. That figure, however, poses a question. With all that money, how did 258,000 people still die? The answers are an excruciating testament to how badly we in the west can get Africa wrong.

The truth about famine in Africa is that it hardly eve…

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Comments

Graeme Stewart-Wilson
January 18, 2016 at 16:11
Hi Alex, Fantastic article. I'm curious how you would respond to the charge that you, as a foreigner, are also "presuming to tell Africa's story on its behalf"? How can a story with a title like "What Africa Is Really Like" be written by anyone but an African? Was this irony intentional? Best, Graeme
1. Alex Perry
  April 12, 2016 at 11:35
  Hi Graeme -- sorry to reply so late. Very good point, and in fact the book on which this article is based begins with a kind of apology: it shouldn't be me writing Africa's story; and, beyond that, foreign correspondence of the kind that gets to define Africa to the outside world, rather than Africans themselves, is a very unfortunate colonial hangover. I did look, for two years, for an African through which to tell the story of the continent, but in the end I had to conclude that the place was so huge and varied that I was the only person I had come across who had been to all the places I wanted to write about. So I'm in the book, but more as a narrative device than anything else and, as I say, with a fair amount of misgiving. The good news is that this is changing. One of the fundamental human rights that Africans are demanding be returned to them by the outside world, and big part of their reclamation of their freedom and their furious self-assertion, is the right to tell their own story. And in the number of young journalists, film-makers, novelists and activists now coming to the fore, as well as African businessmen and politicians, you can see that that's happening.

Alex Perry

Alex Perry is an author, foreign correspondent and contributing editor at Newsweek's international edition. His latest book is "The Rift: A New Africa Breaks Free"