DI SPATC H E S| PANDEMIC IN AFRICA
Quelling Africa’s apocalypse
T Robert I. Rotberg
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he horsemen of the apocalypse are galloping through Africa. There is abundant war, in Burkina Faso, the Central African Republic, Cameroon, Chad, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Libya, Mali, Mozambique, Niger, Nigeria and Somalia. There is pestilence and plague, with locusts swarming across northeastern and eastern Africa and the coronavirus, with its dangerous variants, wreaking havoc everywhere. Famine follows war, pest ilence and plague. And then there is death, which
accompanies war, famine, pestilence and — hardly least — the COVID-19 plague or pandemic. For the latter there is as yet no end in sight. Additionally, and a desperate and disastrous accompaniment to this generation’s apocalypse, is an economic collapse that immiserates Africans and makes their impoverishment ever more calamitous. Africa, especially the 49 countries south of the Sahara that are less fully linked to the Middle East than the Maghrebi states of Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria and SPRING 2021 | APR-MAY-JUN
DISCOTT
A billboard at the end of Long Street in South Africa’s Cape Town encourages people to stay home during the lockdown period.
