Last Wednesday, I took part in a panel discussion at Wake Forest University titled “The ‘F’-Word: Famine in the 21st Century,” on the current famine in the Horn of Africa.
The other two participants were Charles Kennedy and Sarah Lischer, both professors in the political science department at Wake Forest. Sarah talked about the humanitarian consequences of the current famine, most notably the refugees coming into Kenya. Charles talked about US foreign policy in the area. I learned a lot from both their presentations, given that they covered topics that I was not familiar with.
Here are the slides I used for my talk, which was titled “The Causes and Consequences of Famine.” The link opens a .pdf document. Note that this was not a research seminar, but a talk aimed at a general public.
They Had to Go There, Didn’t They?
Some of us development folks work very hard to dispel the notion that Africa is the so-called “Dark Continent,” and that not all news coming out of Africa is bad. As Binyavanga Wainaina wrote very sarcastically some time ago in Granta magazine:
Always use the word ‘Africa’ or ‘Darkness’ or ‘Safari’ in your title. Subtitles may include the words ‘Zanzibar’, ‘Masai’, ‘Zulu’, ‘Zambezi’, ‘Congo’, ‘Nile’, ‘Big’, ‘Sky’, ‘Shadow’, ‘Drum’, ‘Sun’ or ‘Bygone’. Also useful are words such as ‘Guerrillas’, ‘Timeless’, ‘Primordial’ and ‘Tribal’. Note that ‘People’ means Africans who are not black, while ‘The People’ means black Africans.
According to Wikipedia, the expression “dark continent” comes to us from the 19th century, when it was “used to describe Africa, particularly Sub-Saharan Africa. As Europeans knew little about the continent’s interior geography, map-makers would often leave this region dark.”
I was thus very surprised that the Guardian — of all newspapers in the world, perhaps the one that cares most about development — would publish the following map to illustrate the 2011 distribution of the United Nations’ human development index:
That’s right.