Africa

The map of Africa will be redrawn Saturday, as South Sudan becomes an independent nation through a peace process championed by successive U.S. presidents but still beset by lingering tensions from years of war.

President George W. Bush put Sudan at the center of his foreign policy in Africa, helping broker a 2005 peace agreement that ended a conflict that had claimed more than 2 million lives. President Obama has rallied international pressure to rescue that accord as it risked unraveling.

To talk about war in Africa—in Sudan and Somalia, to name two countries now battling a horrendous drought—means talking about the weather.

Last week, the United Nations declared that the drought striking much of Africa's Horn, the knobby spit of land off the continent's east coast, is the worst on record for the past 60 years. The seasonal rains have failed for at least the third year in a row, and there's no chance that things will get better until at least 2012.

Last April, M.I.T. held a business conference on campus titled “Africa 2.0: Achieving Growth Through Innovation.” In the keynote speech, Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, managing director of the World Bank, announced to a packed room, “Africa is now the new frontier.”

The 100,000 people who are squatting on Dr. Hawa Abdi's farm in Somalia, which she has turned into one of the world's most innovative camps for displaced people, are today under assault by both weather and war.

At the camp, the nearby river has dwindled to a trickle. This year, the rains hardly arrived before they're ending.

"People are starting to eat grass," Hawa said. "All the animals are dead, now it is the humans."

After more than 100 years of abuse, the Democratic Republic of the Congo is surely the most dysfunctional country on the planet. It started the 20th century under Belgium's King Leopold II, who oversaw the deaths of millions through exploitation and disease in what was then his personal fiefdom of the Congo Free State, a tyranny made notorious by Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Independence in 1960 was accompanied by a vicious civil war and, soon after, the CIA-backed rule of Mobutu Sese Seko, one of the most kleptocratic leaders in world history.

The news coming out of Sudan grows bleaker by the hour. Prospects for peace look less likely now than at any point since the north-south civil war, Africa's longest-running conflict, ended in 2005.

As the Arab Spring soars, limps, sputters, and stalls—some societies inching toward a new civil order, some erupting in chaos, others' fates still very much up in the air—the only surprise is that anyone should be surprised by what's happening.

Sudan has rejected a call by the U.N. Security Council to withdraw its forces from the contested town of Abyei, as internal pressure mounts on South Sudan to respond to the invasion last month.

Sudanese Foreign Minister Ali Ahmed Karti, in a statement released over the weekend, said that Abyei is "Sudanese territory," referring to the border region as well as the town by the same name it seized May 21.

I have more posts to file that I wrote when I was up near Abyei and didn’t have the net connection to send. But first I want to lay out what (admittedly unsatisfying) information I have about the proximate cause of the Sudanese government’s seizure of Abyei.

Khartoum says its attack was in response to an ambush on a convoy of Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) who were withdrawing from Abyei under UN escort. Juba acknowledges there was an incident but denies that there was any intentional ambush.

"We prayed the revolution would succeed," says Magdy El Galad, the editor-in-chief of Al-Masry Al-Youm, the largest independent newspaper in Egypt. "Because if it failed, we would have been assassinated." A wry smile crosses his face. He's joking, sort of.