African Genocides

During the 1960’s, most African countries previously held by the Europeans were released from colonial rule. The Europeans didn’t put in place any government or infrastructure before they relinquished control. This vacuum of power led to an influx of totalitarian regimes and dictatorships followed by a pandemic of poverty across the continent. Many of these dictators aligned with the Soviet Union, who further exploited Africa’s vast natural resources with no compensation given to the local people. In the past half century, some of the Soviet aligned dictators and hierarchies have been toppled in violent civil wars and replaced by democratic elections. However this new concept of African “democracy” has not brought peace and prosperity with
it. In fact, it created widespread poverty across the continent. Poverty in Africa can be defined as a condition where people cannot afford basic needs to create a minimum standard of living. The widespread deprivation that began when the Europeans relinquished control of Africa continues to this day while getting paid little to no attention to it by wealthy Westerners. Poverty has caused a profusion of considerable problems across the continent, including genocide, famine, and shorter lifespans for its population.

Worldwide, horrible genocides happen the vast majority of times in countries with weak economies.
However before one can decipher the true root cause of genocides, one must first have an understanding about what genocide is. The number of African genocides that have happened and their severity depends on the definition of genocide. The most commonly recognized definition of genocide is that of the UN. This definition rose in popularity during the 1950’s in Germany. The term “genocide” was coined by Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin just after the Holocaust during the Nuremberg Trials. After the trials in 1948, the UN formally endorsed the term genocide as a description of crimes against humanity, when The United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide 1 (CPPCG)
stated
Any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part ; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; [and] forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.2

If this definition is the final authority, only two true genocides have happened in Africa, far below the number on other continents, such as the Bosnian Genocide in Europe and the Cambodian Genocide in Asia.
However, the UN definition is highly flawed. It has been called vague and unclear by many scholars because it doesn’t include the millions of lives lost because of civil wars or governmental opposition. Noor Akbar sums it up best in his manuscript, How Should We Define Genocide?, “By making the victim group inclusive...and limiting physical elements to exclude traces of ethnocide, this definition resolves the problems inherent in the UN definition.” 1 Using a broader definition of genocide, one that includes “indiscriminate, systematic killing of one group...in time of war or peace,” 1 at least a dozen genocides have occurred across Africa, killing tens of millions.
3
Most of these genocides can trace their roots back to extreme poverty. A prime example is the Rwandan genocide, where almost a million ethnic Tutsis were systematically exterminated by the Hutu militias. In this genocide, one can see the prerequisite conditions that existed which enabled the genocide to happen. In the 1980’s, Rwanda experienced a sudden population growth with no money or infrastructure to support it. The country was frantically running out of room to maintain the agricultural production needed to feed the growing population, and there was a food shortage. Furthermore, the Tutsi clans wanted the ever-dwindling land for cattle, their traditional way of living. The Hutu clans wanted this land for farming, their conventional occupation. Moreover, the sudden population growth with no infrastructure improvements left thousands of young people out of a job and stricken with poverty. The Rwandan government, the country’s biggest employer of more than 250,000, by law had to employ Tutsis in at least 9 percent of its workforce positions. This fact, coupled with the food shortage and severe poverty, left many young people on the brink of survival. In the eyes of the Hutu militia leaders, eliminating the Tutsi would open up jobs for tens of thousands of Hutus and free land up for farming, thus ending the food shortage. In short, the Hutus would benefit economically from a genocide.4
The Rwandan massacre is just one example out of many. Genocides have occurred in Sudan, Somalia, Congo, Ethiopia, and almost a dozen more countries. 3 All of these death can trace their roots back to the crippling poverty in place that would drive one group to destroy another. Because of pre-existing ethnic tensions coupled with extreme poverty, millions of people in Africa have suffered and died due to genocide. However, these atrocities could have been prevented. It has been proven that poverty has a direct correlation with the rise of genocidal dictators and regimes. By ending poverty, millions of future lives will be saved indirectly due to the prevention of genocides.

Extreme poverty has had another primary effect, famine. Across Africa, the poorest nations have the least amount of food available and the most malnourished population. Poverty and inextricably intertwined. This fact is further proven by a World Hunger Project report:
Poverty, food prices and hunger are inextricably linked. Poverty causes hunger. Not every poor person is hungry, but almost all hungry people are poor. Millions live with hunger and malnourishment because they simply cannot afford to buy enough food, cannot afford nutritious foods or cannot afford the farming supplies they need to grow enough good food of their own. Hunger can be viewed as a dimension of extreme poverty. It is often called the most severe and critical manifestation of poverty. 5

The disproportionate levels of poverty in Africa coincide with its extreme levels of hunger as compared to other continents. According to the Borgen Project, an organization dedicated to solving poverty in Africa:
Approximately one in three people living in sub-Saharan Africa are undernourished. The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations estimated that 239 million people (around 30 percent of the population) in sub-Saharan Africa were hungry in 2010. This is the highest percentage of any region in the world. In addition, the U.N. Millennium Project reported that over 40 percent of all Africans are unable to regularly obtain sufficient food. 6
Furthermore, nutritional deficiency is one of the leading causes of malnourishment and death in Africa. With a large percentage of the African population receiving insufficient nourishment, the whole continent is suffering. Africa and its leaders have the heavy burden of feeding its population. Thus, these African leaders cannot build up their economies or infrastructure if they have to worry about the literal survival and subsistence of their people. Poverty-induced famines slow down countries’ productivity and weaken their economies, leading to further poverty and more famine. It creates a vicious cycle. Moreover, in Africa, poverty directly affects food production and transportation. African nations lack the infrastructure needed to support adequate food production such as warehouses, highways, and irrigation. Furthermore, in many African countries, people cannot afford nutritious food to keep their families healthy. These factors combine to form an African food deficit, resulting in untold human suffering and death. The problem is best summarized in a report by the World Food Programme, which states:
People living in poverty cannot afford nutritious food for themselves and their families. This makes them weaker and less able to earn the money that would help them escape poverty and hunger. This is not just a day-to-day problem: when children are chronically malnourished, or ‘stunted’, it can affect their future income, condemning them to a life of poverty and hunger. In developing countries, farmers often cannot afford seeds, so they cannot plant the crops that would provide for their families. They may have to cultivate crops without the tools and fertilizers they need. Others have no land or water or education. In short, the poor are hungry and their hunger traps them in poverty.7

However, this problem is preventable. The world produces enough food to feed all of its inhabitants. In wealthy Western countries, forty percent of food ends up as waste in landfills. Our current foreign aid system isn’t properly equipped or well funded enough to transport any of our surplus food to Africa. Often times, donor countries grant foreign aid more for political reasons than for the true development of the recipient nation. Sometimes, the aid doesn’t even reach the general population, as evidenced in Somalia, where corrupt dictators and warlords took control of the foreign aid food supply as bargaining tools and a source of revenue. By reforming the broken foreign aid system, by making sure the aid doesn’t get taken over by warlords, and by generally increasing the wealth of poor African countries, millions of lives could be saved from starvation and famine.

Poverty also contributes to a number of factors that, when combined, limit the life expectancy of Africa’s population overall. A primary example is healthcare. Because of underfunded medical systems due to poverty, every five minutes in Africa, almost 20 children under the age of five die of pneumonia. Every year due to poor medical care, 500,000 mothers die in childbirth and five million children do not reach their fifth birthday.8 Education is also affected by this poverty pandemic. Poor schooling traps people into poverty and gives them no way to escape it, further lowering their life expectancy. The Royal Economic Society of Britain summarizes it as such:
Unequal societies have a large share of population in which parents have no schooling, their children have a lower life expectancy and, therefore, there are few incentives to invest in education, a situation that perpetuates one generation after another. Life expectancy is determined in part by the educational level of the parents. This creates a vicious cycle: Parents with poor education will give birth to children with low life expectancy. Low life expectancy means that parents won’t invest in their children’s schooling.When these children grow up and become parents themselves, their children will have a low life expectancy (as their parents will be poorly educated). So children born into poor families will never break out of the low education, low life expectancy trap into which they are born. 9

Research has consistently proven that because of the many problems it manifests itself into, poverty causes poorer African countries have a lower life expectancy of almost 20 years than the rest of the world. These numbers support the fact that many African people simply cannot afford the vital necessities for living a long life.

Africa’s poverty problem reaches far beyond its borders. In a global economy, Africa’s inability to contribute to world markets hurts everyone. It must be acknowledged that severe, crippling poverty has led to the rise of murderous dictators that have committed horrible genocides, limited Africa's ability to produce and transport enough food for its people, and generally shrunk the life expectancy of Africa’s population. To turn a blind eye to this problem goes against basic human decency. Other countries and continents, especially the West, must recognize the undermining problem of poverty in Africa and must proactively work to solve it as soon as possible. History will either remember this era as the time civilization turned its backs on suffering human beings, or it will be remembered as the time a dying continent was brought back to life.