The forgotten Africa

The blare of vuvuzelas is everywhere, even here in Kenya where we have no real national football to talk about. The World Cup 2010 in South Africa has so stirred up and united Africans that even people who ordinarily don’t care about football — I have my fiancée Pamella in mind — wish the cup remained in the continent.

My heart and those of many Africans have been beating like drums in our chests since the World Cup kicked off for the first time ever on African soil. From our living rooms, offices and pubs we have grown hoarse cheering African teams.

At the end of one thoroughly entertaining match in the second week of the tournament, I switched my TV to an international news channel to catch up with goings-on in the world. That was when I saw them: pictures of thin, sickly babies clinging to their helpless mothers, themselves reduced to skin and bones by massive famine ravaging parts of North and West Africa. The thrill that had filled me from watching the World Cup clash evaporated.

I seemed to recall seeing a few days earlier a news release about the disaster by the Catholic global charity Caritas Internationalis. But I had forgotten about it. The story was not in local newspapers or TV — although there were reports of flooding in China and Mexico and deadly ethnic violence in Kyrgyzstan.

It appeared to me that the World Cup in South Africa was the only news that was supposed to come out of Africa until July 11. No need to mess up the historic excitement with reports of starvation, poverty, disease and other ills that have come to define Africa for the rest of the world.

Here was Africa hosting the world’s greatest sports show for the very first time; here we were, blowing our vuvuzelas, dancing and singing, “Zamina mina zangalewa! ‘Tis time for Africa!” Here was the world united in euphoria — and yet 10 million African people faced a real risk of death from starvation up north. Very few people seemed to notice or care.

I have been thinking about those bony, bleary-eyed women and their emaciated children I saw on the TV report. And the many, many more the world has not got to see. Famished people terrified they would go to sleep and never wake up. But somehow they wake up every day with an empty stomach, wander out in the burning Sahel sun and then stagger back into their huts to try to sleep again.

I wondered whether those starving people were aware that their continent was making football history; that the whole world had its eyes fixed on South Africa enjoying the beautiful game. Could the Sahelians have the breath to sing “Zamina mina zangalewa”? What does the World Cup mean to them? Nothing. Their only concern is survival.

Niger is the worst hit country, with 8 million people at risk of starvation. Chad, Mali and Burkina Faso are also facing serious food shortages since December, Caritas reported. International response has been slow despite appeals for food aid by humanitarian organisations.

Irregular rainfall, crop deficits, rising food prices (by up to 30%) and chronic poverty have all contributed to the spiralling food crisis. People are now reliant on extreme means of coping, including selling off livestock, eating wild foods, taking children out of school and abandoning their homes in search of food. These are the least of Christ’s brothers and sisters.

Drought and famine in the Sahel is nothing new. On his first visit to Africa in 1980, Pope John Paul II was so touched by the suffering in the region that he launched a solemn appeal to the world to help the people. In 1984, John Paul II’s Sahel Foundation was set up and runs projects in Burkina Faso, Cape Verde, Chad, Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, Mali, Mauritania, Niger and Senegal.

But a report about the foundation’s 25th anniversary last year said that its funds come primarily from the churches in Germany and Italy. I have never heard churches in Africa say anything about that foundation or the perennial crisis in the Sahel. Perhaps the rest of the continent is so preoccupied with its own hardships to think about the Sahel. But was it not John Paul II who said that no one is too poor to give?

The TV news report I watched described the famine afflicting 10 million Sahelians as a “slow-motion disaster”. Surely, we the people of Africa can do something about this. After all, we have shown everyone we can stage the football World Cup — and have contributed the vuvuzela to global culture!