Protests, power transfer, drought: What an incredible decade for Africa

A veteran East African journalist talking about the devastation of coronavirus on life and livelihoods, and the recent death of Burundi president Pierre Nkurunziza, the other day said “these last 10 years have been incredible for Africa, and indeed for the world.

“Think about it, since the independence period, which 10 years have been so dramatic?” he asked.

He had a point. In East Africa, since the death of Kenya’s president Jomo Kenyatta on August 22, 1978, no EAC president has died “peacefully” in his sleep, as it were, until Nkurunziza. Rwanda’s Juvénal Habyarimana and Burundi’s Cyprien Ntaryamira died on April 6,1994 when the airplane they were travelling in was shot over Kigali during the war. Melchior Ndadaye, Burundi’s first democratically elected president, was assassinated on October 21, 1993.

Outside the EAC, in neighbouring Ethiopia, the plucky Meles Zenawi, died in his sick bed on August 20, 2012.

The number of strongmen ousted by street protests, have also been a handful. Tunisia’s Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in January 2011, and Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak in February the same year, were run out of town by the Arab Spring.

Three years later, in October 2014, a so-called “Black Spring” swept out Burkina Faso’s Blaise Compaoré. Compaoré clung on by the tips of his fingers for some days, but when the women of Burkina Faso came out on the streets with their cooking pots and spoons, he was kaput.

In Angola, José Eduardo dos Santos, who had “been in the thing” (as Ugandans would say) for 42 years, finally slinked off in September 2017.

Similar street rumbles took out Algeria’s Abdelaziz Bouteflika on April 2, 2019, and then much closer home, nine days later, militant housewives and young men and women put paid to Omar al-Bashir’s 30-year reign.

In a world first, in the Democratic Republic of Congo in December 2018, we saw an outgoing president (Joseph Kabila), allegedly help steal an election for the opposition candidate (current President Felix Tshisekedi), leaving his own party’s man crying in his sleeve. Still, in the end, DRC witnessed its first democratic transfer of power at the polls.

We’ve seen the biggest locust invasions in 70 years in East Africa. But, oh yes, we haven’t had an interstate war.

Between July 2011 and mid-2012, a severe drought billed “the worst in 60 years", left a dry trail through Somalia, Djibouti, Ethiopia and Kenya and threatened the livelihood of 9.5 million people. However, it killed a few hundred “only”, unlike the smaller ones of previous decades that, as in the case of Ethiopia in 1983 to 1985, killed at least 1.2 million. Few things indicate how much progress has been made than that little fact.

And a record number of musicians, enough to fill a book, who best expressed our pains, tragedies, and joys, passed on these last ten years. To name a few: Miriam Makeba aka Mama Africa (November 9, 2008), the troubled Papa Wemba (April 24, 2016), the one and only Hugh Masekela (January 23, 2018), Oliver "Tuku" Mtukudzi (January 23, 2019), the inimitable Manu Dibango (March 24, 2020), Mory Kanté (May 22, 2020), Nigerian Tony Allen, considered the greatest drummer to ever live (April 30, 2020).

Yet, for all that, the music hasn’t stopped.

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