Across Africa's broad chest, from Senegal to Ethiopia, the worst drought of the century continues to cut a 4,000-mile swath of devastation. After six years of light rainfall, nearly one-third of the 51 million people who live in this band from the Atlantic to the Red Sea are threatened by starvation. Not even a good rainfall this season can end the tragedy, so wasted is the land and so slight the prospect of a bountiful harvest. Worst hit are Ethiopia and the six nations of the arid Sahel (Mali, Mauritania, Senegal, Upper Volta, Niger and Chad).
Sahel's principal rivers, the Senegal and the Niger, have fallen to their lowest levels since the start of the century. Lake Chad has evaporated to one-third its normal size and has actually separated into four parts. The fishing village of Bol, once a lakeside settlement, today looks out on a vast wasteland of parched scrubgrass stretching 18 miles to the water. The lake's fish catch has been halved, creating a protein deficiency that aggravates an already short supply of grains. In northern Chad, nomads are eating boiled tree bark and roots.
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 in refugee camps and having seen their camels die of starvation, the game is all but over."
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.
In 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, now go for $3. "Everywhere there are Danakil graves," cabled Griggs, "small mounds covered with rocks to prevent hungry hyenas from digging up and devouring the bodies. Some Danakil dead have been found with dirt in their stomachs, evidence that they have tried to lick the ground for moisture. Only the vultures are fat."