Let me anticipate the line of defence — “our audience isn’t interested” — and agree with it. No one has mentioned Niger to me in conversation since the coup began, and my peers are a passport-using, news-addicted crowd, in a city where the African influence is large and old.
At the same time, I can read and hear all I could ever want about: the ordeal of renting a flat; dating and its discontents; and the effect of Elon Musk on Twitter’s user-friendliness. These are, in descending order, serious themes. But in letting them clutter its view of the world outside, the intelligentsia suggests it has turned a bit small-time and a bit wet.
Now, true, middle-age is speaking. I am at that point of life where everything palls in comparison to a generation earlier. The music is goofier and the footballers are more robotic. But — and readers under 30 will just have to take my word for this — you once needed to try very hard not to end up in an argument about the Israeli-Palestinian question. The standard of the discourse was mortifyingly low-grade, but it was at least outward-facing.
Janan Ganesh is right. The military coup in Niger with the threat of wider war in West Africa is a huge story. The loss of life, destabilisation and migrant exodus will affect us all. Yet silence reigns. Why isn’t everyone talking about Niger? via @FT
— Will Hutton (@williamnhutton) August 12, 2023
https://t.co/IPOuhEtyJY
What happened? A sequence of unsuccessful wars — Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya — drained the West of the moral confidence even to discuss much poorer and weaker countries. (See how tongue-tied some rich-world greens are about “Global South” carbon emitters.) At the same time, a generation that missed out on the asset boom had to narrow its mental horizons to the domestic and the personal.
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But if the New Parochialism is understandable, that doesn’t make it affordable. The West is up against 1½ superpowers that view each region of the world as a potential front against US-led liberalism. To push back, it won’t be enough to know about China and Russia themselves (in many ways the most stable pieces of the picture). There are uncountable other moving parts that will impinge on our lives. At some point, a generation is going to have to put away, if not childish, then young adult things.
The Sahel, that luckless band of Earth stretching from Senegal to Eritrea, is nearer to Europe than America is. Maybe its slow impalement by the pincers of jihadism and secular banditry will turn out to be of no external consequence whatever. But — and this might be my west African infancy talking — it seems a subject deserving of more than eerie indifference, for our sake, not just Niger’s. It might be almost as important as the local rental market.
I used to deplore a certain kind of intrepid westerner in the tropics. I had known enough of them in journalism to sense they were simulating a lifestyle — large properties, live-in servants — that was no longer within their financial reach back home. Others, whether in the aid sector or on a year out, dabbled with “non-aligned” politics in a credulous, Graham Greene way.
Well, I take at least some of it back. Give me that voyeurism if the alternative is ever-decreasing circles of introspection. Give me Greene over another millennial novel where someone mopes into a cortado for 200 pages. (Some call it “sad girl lit”, but there are more than sufficient male exponents of this inessential craft.) It isn’t a crime that I had to root around a bit to apprise myself of events in Niger. The crime is that I would have paid no social price for my ignorance. — Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2023