Darfur and deja vu

The American's reference to the Darfur tragedy as genocide has the ring of sanctimony about it.

The recent history of Sudan is indeed nasty. The south, possessing a different culture than the dominant north and feeling that culture under threat, attempted to secede. A bloody civil war ensued with the result the country, at least for the moment, remains united. In the meantime, the government faced insurgence in the west, an area where nomads and farmers compete over the same land. The government has unleashed great brutality in suppressing the unrest.

Pondering this bit of history, I realized we had seen it before -- in the United States in the late 1800s.

But then the entire African experience of the past 50 years is a recycling of the Western European experience when the Romans abandoned their empire in the fifth century. The European powers, like the Romans 1500 years earlier, pulled out of empire suddenly, leaving the colonized peoples with little capacity to run societies. Like the Europeans, the Africans were left without administrators to manage governments, without engineers to construct buildings and roads, and with largely arbitrary borders. In both cases, strong men filled the vacuum to overwhelm and exploit the benighted masses. The Europeans sunk into the Dark Ages, half a millenium of chaos and warlords, until they could slowly begin to create a new culture for a new time.

So what's to be learned by all this? Perhaps not much except history does repeat itself after a fashion. And that we should avoid being too self-righteous about the growing pains of young nations when we have experienced the same pains ourselves and not necessarily handled them any better.

We can, at least, hope the Africans will do better than the Europeans and not take five centuries to recover. Outside assistance and good examples are available today as they were not in the Dark Ages. Modern technologies can do wonders undreamed of in those times. And now, the international community recognizes we should act to alleviate suffering even if it means interfering in national sovereignty, something no one would have even considered from the fifth century to the 19th. But Africa will not recover in a generation or two. Our job is to help in every way we can, all the time maintaining a humility born of the knowledge of our own dark days and the knowledge also that we were the emperors that enslaved, exploited and then abandoned Africans to their present state.