East Africa lurches from disaster to disaster

After weeks of heavy rain and flooding, East Africa has just experienced days of horrific disasters as rivers burst their banks and dams burst. Hundreds of people were swept to their deaths and thousands were displaced as the waters submerged homes, closed roads and damaged crops and a range of other infrastructure.

In Kenya and Tanzania, the death toll is around 200 in each country, and Kenya had to cancel the reopening of schools at the last minute. It was undoubtedly the biggest impact of El Niño rains on the country in more than 25 years, and the Kenya Meteorological Department (KMD) warned that the worst could yet come. By the beginning of the week, nearly 200,000 people had been displaced.

Local and international media reports, and the admittedly wonderful and gripping coverage on social media, would suggest that the floods are the worst disaster ever experienced in these countries. Not exactly… yet.

In the drought that hit Kenya last year, which was not the worst by any measure, there were reports of at least 173 deaths and 550,000 people displaced, while more than four million needed emergency food aid. More than 2.6 million livestock deaths were attributed to it. On the contrary, around 5,000 head of cattle have been lost so far.

The drought, which lasted almost a year, from 2022 to the end of 2023 and had a devastating effect throughout the Horn of Africa, probably did not receive as much coverage in the mainstream media in that year as the El Niño massacre. Until now he had done it in fifteen days.

One reason is that the images are simply more dramatic and we are not as accustomed to seeing them as those of drought destruction. The bony, exhausted people who lie under the shade of trees, with the skeletons of their dead cows and goats strewn nearby during droughts, have nothing to do with the high-speed waters that topple cars, leaving canyons where they once stood. the roads, iconic buildings underwater with only their roofs visible, scenes. of boats ferrying people to leafy suburbs and muscular men lifting curvy African women across flooded streets.

However, the most fundamental thing is that people have the feeling that something has changed. We could be reaching a threshold where rains and floods are deadlier than droughts. With that, all the familiar references we use to make sense of and explain the ravages of droughts fly out the window.

Droughts displaced people much like wars do. Some die at home while the rest pack their belongings and head to a camp run by the United Nations or large humanitarian organizations such as Doctors Without Borders, ActionAid or the International Committee of the Red Cross, all in their khaki jackets or with labels. and hats, where they will be sheltered in tents, fed and medically treated. The weakest will die along the way, abandoned to the elements on the side of the road or, again, picked up and buried by a humanitarian agency or volunteers.

In these crises, the old familiar patterns of power in society, and the accessories that accompany them, are reproduced. It’s no coincidence that some of the most common items people carry on their heads or on their bikes are mattresses and cooking pots.

These are the most practical and essential items in the camps, yes, but since the patriarchs and matriarchs are the ones who will use the mattress, and the authority to determine who eats and how much derives from who cooks and owns the pot, these also function as a means of maintaining hierarchical order and authority.

The floods are barbaric and disrupt all this. They leave us mattresses or pans to carry, and the patriarch’s bicycle does not serve as a boat. While droughts and wars eventually bring people together at some point, floods disperse them. The usual crisis line of the man leading his family, followed by his wife, a child tied to his back and the little ones walking beside him, is not possible in the water.

Cows do not die in the nearby fields or along the road. They are dragged to the next district and possibly even across the border into the next country. The church, school or local administration grounds that served as first shelters are no longer available, inundated by water.

We also do not have organizations, civil or state, that know how to manage this El Niño crisis yet, apart from the Kenya Red Cross, which is learning quickly. Politicians can’t arrive in big four-wheel-drive Toyotas or land in helicopters to tell displaced people tall tales that help is on the way.

But above all, the old tradition of important men and women pointing to food caravans headed to the drought-stricken may not be fulfilled this time (remember, politicians even pointed to motorcycles carrying vaccines against Covid-19 in 2021). They need to discover new tricks.

Pointing out that times have changed, famine porn has given way to El Niño/flood porn. But we also have a lot of flood memes. That gives hope. We are more likely to find creative solutions to our watery crisis when we start with the joy of memes.

Onyango-Obbo is a journalist, writer and curator of the “Wall of Great Africans”. @cobbo3