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09/14/2005:

"The place where bad things happen"

When 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."
guardian.co.uk