Just One Word: Resources
An anthropology professor of mine in grad school started one of our sessions with this question. "Every fight that turns in crisis, particularly in Africa, seem to come down to one single thing. What is it?" After about an hour and a half of us all trying to seem really smart by coming up with clever ideas on what that one thing might be -- particularly fancy anthropologicaly ways of saying ethnic-based hate -- he finally told us that it was this: access to resources. This was several years ago, and it seems a bit more obvious these days, but it still seems to me to be a handy way to think about crisis.
Time has a terrific story this week on Darfur that looks less at Arab/African and more at the encrouching Sahara and the dwindling of decent, arable land:
Time has a terrific story this week on Darfur that looks less at Arab/African and more at the encrouching Sahara and the dwindling of decent, arable land:
The conflict is typically characterized as genocide, waged by the Arab Janjaweed and their backers in the Sudanese government, against Darfur's black Africans. But what is often overlooked is that the roots of the conflict may have more to do with ecology than ethnicity. To live on the poor and arid soil of the Sahel--just south of the Sahara--is to be mired in an eternal fight for water, food and shelter. The few pockets of good land have been the focus of intermittent conflict for decades between nomads (who tend to be Arabs) and settled farmers (who are both Arab and African). That competition is intensifying. The Sahara is advancing steadily south, smothering soil with sand. Rainfall has been declining in the region for the past half-century, according to the National Center for Atmospheric Research. In Darfur there are too many people in a hot, poor, shrinking land, and it's not hard to start a fight in a place like that.
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