African Heads of State Need to Do More to Save Darfur

Chinua Achebe August 27, 2007.

Africa has endured a tortured history, and continues to persevere under the burden of political instability and religious, racial, and ethnic strife. Over a decade ago, nearly one million Rwandans were murdered over a three month period. Today, Rwanda struggles to come to terms with this painful history.

It is said of the Jewish Holocaust  that “the world slept and did not know.” Today, there is, perhaps, nowhere on earth where the crime of genocide is more glaring than in Darfur, Sudan. In that region, domestic bigotry in juxtaposition with foreign multinational oil interests has served to create a humanitarian emergency of epic proportion.

The world community has responded to this crisis, albeit belatedly; however, much more needs to be done to address a most tragic situation. When President Bush first declared that what was happening in Sudan was genocide, one African president left his country and traveled to America to “correct Bush” and instruct him that what was happening was rebellion against the government of Sudan! As hundreds of thousands perish in Darfur, it is African nations and their leaders, this time that have become silent spectators.

The African Union must play a far more central role in bringing about a suitable solution to the crisis in the Darfur region. By galvanizing their resources, African nations will realize the Bantu maxim - a human is human because of other humans - that represents the African communal viewpoint.

Refugee mother and child

No Madonna and Child could touch

that picture of a mother's tenderness

for a son she soon would have to forget.

The air was heavy with odours

of diarrhoea of unwashed children

with washed-out ribs and dried-up

bottoms struggling in laboured

steps behind blown empty bellies. Most

mothers there had long ceased

to care but not this one; she held

a ghost smile between her teeth

and in her eyes the ghost of a mother's

pride as she combed the rust-coloured

hair left on his skull and then -

singing in her eyes - began carefully

to part it...In another life this

must have been a little daily

act of no consequence before his

breakfast and school; now she

did it like putting flowers

on a tiny grave.

---- By Chinua Achebe Collected Poems, Anchor Books, August 2004