The sin of neutrality

Yet again, millions of civilians across the Horn of Africa are starving. The world blames the crisis on drought and climate change, which nowadays is the way we excuse these countries for environmental mismanagement. But as ever, war is really the single greatest reason why people are killed year after year in this region. And while western countries pour billions of dollars of food aid into Ethiopia, Somalia and South Sudan, the weapons flooding those states originate mainly from Russia, China, Belarus – and Ukraine.

In response to an article I recently wrote in The Spectator about why I think so few African governments condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, I have had the usual deluge of ad hominem attacks so familiar to anybody who dares to criticise African governments. Simmering beneath the surface is always the hint that one is a racist for expressing any view at all about Africa if one is a white journalist, even though I am a Kenyan citizen, born and bred in Africa. One broadside came from Nic Cheeseman, apparently a respected professor of democracy at Birmingham University, who sits on the board of Oxfam and is researching ‘the history and impact of African political thought’.

Under a blog headlined ‘Offensive Ideas’, Cheeseman calls me myopic, simplistic, blinkered, offensive and colonial. At no point does he explicitly condemn Russian atrocities in Ukraine or the militarism of Russia, or its USSR predecessor, in Africa. Instead, he talks of ‘the West’s willingness to sacrifice democracy and human rights on the altar of national security’ in Africa. He rails against European and North American powers which ‘supported a set of venal and abusive dictators’ during the Cold War.

The hook for my recent piece was the voting patterns of African states at the United Nations.