My hopes for Africa

As we speed southwards along the potholed road near Lake Malawi’s shores, I tell my colleague Helen that overpopulation in Africa is just a myth. On either side of the road is an unbroken procession of women carrying firewood on their heads, of barefoot children, of poor men on bicycles, avenues of huts, suicidal goats, blighted crops and dusty lands rising towards distant, once–forested hills. Malawi had four million people at independence from Britain in 1964 and today it’s five times that number. It may look like a land that has eaten itself – but it’s going to be all right, I say.

When the British hunter Harald Swayne set off inland from the coast of Somaliland in the Horn of Africa in 1887, within sight of the sea he shot his first tusker elephant. Every-where he trekked, Swayne found an abundance of lions, rhinos, oryx, kudu, antelope and wild asses.