Word: droughts
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Only last month United Nations Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim returned from a tour of drought-stricken African states and declared that several of the six nations of the Sahelian strip just beneath the Sahara could literally disappear as a result of the devastation spread by a six-year dry spell. Last week, in landlocked Niger, a military coup toppled the democratic government that President Hamani Diori, 57, had conscientiously administered since he led his people to independence from France in 1960. Though the coup was largely bloodless, three people were reported killed, including Diori's wife, who was shot...
...strongman, Lieut. Colonel Seyni Kountie, 43, a former officer in the French army, publicly claimed it was the drought that did in Niger's democracy. He charged that the popularly elected government "lacked organization and initiative when confronted with the crisis." Kountie put President Diori under house arrest, dissolved the National Assembly, and banned all political activity. It was black Africa's 32nd coup...
Visitors to the area, like U.N. Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim, are visibly shaken by what they see: emaciated adults, children with distended bellies, filthy refugee camps where overcrowding has triggered epidemics of measles, influenza and cholera. Reports TIME Correspondent Lee Griggs, who has logged 7,000 miles touring the drought area: "There are experts with many years' experience in the Sahel who see no end in sight to the cycle of drought, famine and death. The Sahel's Tuareg nomads have a saying, 'When the camel collapses, the game is over.' For them, now clustered...
Starving Lions. The drought seems to be moving southward. The usually lush tropical forests of the northern Ivory Coast, Ghana, Togo and Dahomey have received so little rain that their coffee and cocoa crops are far below normal. Nigeria's peanut harvest has been cut by two-thirds. Animals as well as people are suffering. More than 3,000 elephants, lions, giraffes and buffaloes have starved to death in Cameroon's Waza National Park...
...Ethiopia, famine in Welo and Tigre provinces left nearly 100,000 dead last year; some people were so weakened that when a rainstorm struck Dese, the capital of Welo, they drowned in a couple of inches of water, unable to raise their heads from the gutter. Now the drought is expanding into other areas. In Harar province's Danakil Desert, the nomadic tribesmen are in danger of dying out as a race. Carcasses of their cattle, sheep, goats and camels litter the desert; the surviving animals are so scrawny that cows, once worth $60 in the marketplace...