What Africa needs now

Kenya: The Prime Minister has committed Britain to a struggle against the ‘existential threat’ of terrorism in Africa that he says will take ‘years, even decades’ of patience, intelligence and toughness. Well, there’s some truth in what he says, but not in the implication that this is a new threat to Africa — nor that our response should be a military one.

In a way this same struggle was happening when the young Winston Churchill was covering Kitchener’s war against fanatical Muslim, Mahdist forces in the Sudan in 1898. ‘Year after year, we see the figures of the odd and bizarre potentates… It is like a pantomime scene at Drury Lane,’ wrote the young Winston in his memoir of the battle for Omdurman. ‘For a space their names are on the wires of the world and the tongues of men… And then the audience clap their hands, amused yet impatient, and the potentates and their trains pass on, some to exile, some to prison, some to death…’ The Victorians had the Mad Mullah and the Khalifa.