http://www.guardian.co.uk/elsewhere/journalist/story/0,7792,1569681,00.html UK GuardianWhen nature turns nasty, refugees flee a swamped city and anarchy prevails, it seems there is only one adjective that will do: Hurricane Katrina has, inevitably, been compared to an "African" tragedy.
Images of helmeted white troops rescuing hapless black people have cemented the comparison, reminding viewers of the famous image from the Mozambican floods of a white South African helicopter crew rescuing a black woman who had given birth in a tree.
Africa has become an acceptable byword for disaster. Even some African journalists such as the CNN correspondent Jeff Koinange, a Kenyan, have been unable to resist the parallel.
"It was an America that resembled a large African refugee camp," Koinange wrote recently in Kenya's Daily Nation newspaper. "This was the New Orleans I encountered in the summer of 2005. Not Niger, not Darfur, not Monrovia - New Orleans, Louisiana, the 18th state in the union."
For Africans, Katrina has not only exposed racial divides within the US; it has been a reminder of how the developed world sees their continent.
As a commentator in the same newspaper put it a few days later: "The Africa of Koinange's imagination is the continent where bad things happen without fail. If there isn't civil strife in which deranged men hack their neighbours with machetes, women with shrivelled breasts suckle their skeletal babies."
It's partly our fault, of course: journalism thrives on conflict and has little patience for reporting the small triumphs of everyday life. It would be a humdrum newspaper that wrote about enthusiastic Sudanese children attending their classes or Kenyan hospital patients receiving routine treatment.
Hollywood is also to blame. Films such as Hotel Rwanda - the story of the hotel manager who rescued Tutsis during the Rwandan genocide - avoid the complexity of Africa, offering just a tiny flicker of hope amid the darkness.
The same applies in the other direction: if Africans often think of black Americans as loud, swaggering gangsters, it is because the movies usually show them that way.
But despite these distorting mirrors, and the gulf of history and geography between them, a sense of fellow feeling endures between black Americans and Africans.
It's hardly surprising, given that the African roots of black American culture are still so evident, from staple foods such as okra, sorghum, peanuts and cornmeal to styles of prayer. Even some words in black American vernacular, such as gumbo, for okra, or goober, for peanut, are of African origin.
Imported American culture is enormously popular in Africa, where rappers' faces are emblazoned on T-shirts, and hip-hop blares from minibus taxis. And black Americans have been a powerful lobby group on behalf of both southern Sudan and Darfur, two regions where predominantly black African rebels have opposed the Arab-dominated government of Sudan.
The disaster in the US has provoked sympathy and dismay here, with newspapers paying close attention to the fact that it was predominantly the poor, black residents of New Orleans who were left behind.
In an editorial, Nigeria's This Day newspaper said: "At a deeper level, it means that even in the fabled America, the poor get left holding the short end of the stick.
"These are some of the contradictions that should spur review and soul-searching: that amid such stupendous wealth and affluence a puzzling circle is still drawn to exclude the poor."
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