Learned Helplessness

 There's a line in this report on Sudan that stuck with me.

“You put us in this mess and now you’re swooping in to take your kinfolk (the ones that matter) and leaving us behind to these two murdering psychopaths,” Dallia Mohamed Abdelmoniem, a Sudanese former journalist and commentator, said on Twitter.

Now, we've all said dumb shit on Twitter, but this is a revealing quote. Yes, absolutely, the Global North has created conditions that have hurt the Global South. However, the idea that the US/EU has created the conditions in Sudan is ridiculous. There are problems endemic to Africa that are not actually anyone's fault. Desertification of the Sahel preceded climate change, for instance. The tropics make for poor agriculture. African countries are unusually deprived of deep water ports. And on and on.

And, I fully admit that post-imperial and neo-imperial policies have been bad for Africa, as long as we understand that the Global North has poured billions into aid for Africa. PEPFAR alone will spend almost $7B this year in Africa. 

The Sudan? That's a problem created by the Sudanese. Did the rest of the world make it worse at the margins? Sure, that could be true. But ultimately this is a creation of the Sudanese - especially the two individual warlords.

But as long as the attitude is that America "put us in this mess" then the Sudanese will never be able to solve their own problems.