Africa's Forever Wars

Africa's Forever Wars
Here is a good attempt by the NY Times E. Africa Bureau Chief to explain the current state of rebel warfare in Africa. Regrettably, the author omits the primary cause for the violence and suffering - crushing, debilitating, mind-numbing poverty. His inclusion of Kenya's 2008 violence as an example of non-ideological bandr...ity misses the real cause - raw, greedy politics, not bush level banditry. Also, his view of Somalia as having a "deeply ingrained culture of war profiteering", though true as a recent development, misses the more important fact that Somalis, with their clan-based society and pastoral ecology, are and have never been a "fit" for the Western concept of a nation-state that the Europeans imposed on Africa in the 1800s. Otherwise there is much of value in this article as long as it is remembered that banditry has a root cause, poverty, not some implied false notion of greed, insanity or moral failings of Africa's peoples.