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."
THE FOUR THEATRES: A GUIDE TO AFRICA’S ATROCITY CIRCUIT By Lawson Akhigbe
