There is a peculiar comfort in cartography. Draw a line around a catastrophe, label it, and it becomes something one can point to on a map rather than something one must answer for. Africa, in the twenty-first century, has been organised into four such catastrophes with the tidiness of a continental league table the Great Lakes, the Horn, the Sudans, and the Sahel each running its own fixture list of massacre, displacement and denial, each independently promoted from “concern” to “crisis” to “protracted emergency” without ever being relegated back down to “peace.”
What follows is not a eulogy. Eulogies imply an ending. This is closer to a programme note, handed out before a performance that has been running, in various casts, since the turn of the millennium.
THE GREAT LAKES: THE SEQUEL NOBODY ORDERED
The Democratic Republic of Congo has achieved something few nations manage: an atrocity so persistent that the international community has run out of adjectives for it. Rwanda’s shadow across its border, Burundi’s own recurring convulsions, and the eastern Congo’s mineral wealth funding the very militias that terrorise the people sitting on top of it this is not a new plot. It is a rerun with better production values, now advertised on TikTok instead of shortwave radio. The armed groups have changed names more often than a Lagos socialite changes surnames after each marriage, but the fundamental transaction has not moved: coltan for cover fire, silence purchased in bulk by the global supply chain that ends, eventually, in the smartphone this article may well be read on.
THE HORN: PROPHECY AS ADMINISTRATIVE PROCEDURE
Ethiopia, Somalia, Eritrea and Kenya form a region where the early warning systems have functioned exactly as designed they warned, early and where the warnings were filed, as is customary, under “noted.” Tigray demonstrated that a war can be fought largely out of camera range, communications severed as deliberately as any supply line, while the world’s attention was elsewhere being urgent about something else. Somalia’s al-Shabaab remains the region’s most durable institution, having outlasted several governments, multiple African Union mission mandates, and at least three international “final push” campaigns. If longevity were a form of accountability, al-Shabaab would owe the continent an apology by now. It does not, because nobody has worked out how to serve the paperwork.
THE SUDANS: A DIVORCE THAT SOLVED NOTHING
In 2011, South Sudan was born amid genuine, unguarded hope a new state, a clean ledger. It is now a byword for how quickly a liberation movement can curdle into the thing it liberated itself from. Sudan, the parent state, has meanwhile descended into a war between two generals fighting over the right to preside over the ruins, a conflict so brutal in Darfur specifically that it has summoned back, twenty years on, the ghosts of a genocide the International Criminal Court referred to itself in 2005 and has spent the two decades since mostly failing to prosecute to any conclusion. Atrocities Watch Africa marked that anniversary this year with an assessment of the accountability gap it represents a gap into which, apparently, an entire generation can disappear while the file remains open. Twenty years is long enough for a war crime to graduate from primary school.
THE SAHEL: THE FRANCHISE EXPANSION
Cameroon, Chad, Guinea, Burkina Faso, Libya, Niger, Mali and Nigeria complete the set a belt of instability stretching coast to coast, in which jihadist insurgency, military coup, and state collapse have become interchangeable house styles. Nigeria’s own contribution to this ledger needs no embellishment from satire; the figures are damning enough unadorned. Civil society’s own tally, compiled by the Nigeria Mourns movement, recorded thousands killed and thousands more abducted in a single year, a toll driven in part by an ISWAP offensive that exposed, rather than created, the structural weaknesses already sitting inside the country’s security architecture. Mozambique’s insurgency in Cabo Delgado, though geographically adjacent rather than strictly Sahelian, keeps making the same point from a different postcode: wherever the state’s writ thins out, someone else’s writ moves in, and it is rarely an improvement.
THE COMMON DEFENDANT
Four regions, four casts of local actors, four sets of acronyms for the peacekeeping missions that arrive after the worst has already happened and one recurring defendant who never appears in the dock: the assumption, inherited whole from the colonial ledger, that African life is a cost rather than a loss. This was never a hidden premise. It was written into concession agreements, census categories, and the calm arithmetic of extraction that treated bodies as a line item alongside rubber, ivory and, later, oil. What has changed since independence is the paperwork, not the premise. The instruments are now humanitarian appeals and UN Security Council briefings rather than colonial office memoranda, but the underlying accounting how much African death the world will tolerate before it is obliged to act, and how little it will actually do once obliged has proven remarkably stable across a century of supposed moral progress.
Each of these four situations was foreseen. Analysts, local civil society, and organisations built for exactly this purpose flagged the trajectory years, sometimes decades, in advance. None was prevented. And accountability the part that is meant to close the loop, the part that says this cost someone something has been, with rare and heavily litigated exceptions, functionally unavailable. The ICC has issued warrants it cannot enforce against sitting heads of state who continue to travel the continent unbothered. Truth commissions produce reports that governments shelve with the same ceremonial reverence usually reserved for retirement gifts.
THE UNFASHIONABLE CONCLUSION
The organisation that has spent the past decade working this problem from the inside not lobbying Western capitals for salvation, but building African capacity to monitor, document and eventually prosecute atrocity within African institutions has arrived at a conclusion that ought to be obvious and somehow is not: African states are not bystanders to be rescued. They are the essential actors, and prevention that is not built through them is prevention that will not survive contact with the next crisis. A regional early-warning mechanism run from Brussels will always arrive a news cycle behind a local one embedded in the region it watches. A Malabo Protocol ratified and enforced by African states creates a court that cannot be dismissed as neo-colonial interference in the way the ICC, fairly or not, so often is.
This is not an argument against international solidarity. It is an argument against the presumption that solidarity is a substitute for sovereignty properly exercised that the continent’s protection is a favour to be extended from outside rather than a mandate to be built from within. The four theatres will not close themselves, and the world’s attention, as history has demonstrated with metronomic reliability, will move on to the next thing well before they do. The only durable answer sitting on the table is the one Africa keeps being told it cannot afford: taking custody of its own atrocity file, and finally reading the last page.
Centre for Nigeria Progress 