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What Am I Doing About Africa?

The drought in East Africa has led to untold suffering, writes Adrian Hilton. But what can we as individuals do, apart from wring our hands?

By Adrian Hilton

10 Jul 2011, 14:04

I don’t expect this to get many hits. It certainly won’t make the Dale & Co ‘Most Viewed’, ‘Highest Rated’ or ‘Most Commented Upon’ lists. It’s about Africa, after all. Worse still, it’s about those tedious biblical plagues of famine and drought, which seem to have cursed this continent ever since Moses challenged Pharaoh to let his people go (and doubtless before that). And even worse, it’s on a day when there’s really only one news story to fill the print pages and dominate the airwaves.

What, after all, is more sickness and mass starvation in Africa compared to a little original press corruption on our own shores? In Africa, the journalists and TV cameras only seem to circle at the eleventh hour; invariably when the story’s reached its crisis, and often when it’s too late to do much about it.

The continent of Africa has long been synonymous with chronic suffering on an intolerable scale – if it’s not famine and drought, it’s insupportable levels of poverty; if not poverty, it’s bloody civil war; if not civil war, it’s an epidemic of HIV/AIDS. It’s a place where three-year-olds weigh little more than the newborn; cattle carcases litter the desert dust; and partly-living people forage like animals, with sticks of wood to replace their hacked-off limbs. There’s scarcely a family anywhere which hasn’t been bereaved or bereft.

We’ve grown used to it; immune to it; almost sick and tired of it. We unconsciously anaesthetise ourselves to this hell on earth for fear of being confronted by our own sense of moral outrage or disturbed at the threshold of our emotional tolerance.

It’s an ‘act of God’, of course. Kenya, Somalia, Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Djibouti are enduring their worst drought in 60 years, with an estimated 10 million people desperate for the taste of water on their lips and a few grains of rice in their bellies. I’m looking at the picture above as I write this, trying to conceive what this mother must be feeling as she watches the child she bore slowly starve to death, skeletal, wrinkled, and helpless. The little head cradled by the hand that instinctively wants to feed it; the mouth open, like a starving chick, waiting for a morsel of something, anything. As the flies buzz and go, the eyes are devoid of all hope.

This mother and child eventually made it to a refugee camp, malnourished and dehydrated. The next day, vomiting and whimpering, the child died in its mother’s arms. As I try to multiply her grief and suffering by 10 million, it’s like imagining an infinite purgatory at the end of the universe: the mind can’t conceive; the eye hasn’t seen. There’s a lump in my throat and a tear wells up, and I wonder if I should carry on writing this article for fear of ridicule, scorn, or allegations of hypocrisy.

After all, what am I doing about it?