Africa: the continent that screams and the world that does not listen

Africa suspended between hunger, famine, and forgotten wars

by Cristina Di Silvio and Maurizio Colangelo

Abstract

In 2025, Africa is screaming amid hunger, wars, and drought while the world seems to look away. Behind every statistic, there is a child walking miles for a sip of water, a mother reducing her children’s meals, a family forced to flee.

This text recounts the continent’s real tragedy: global indifference is a luxury we can no longer afford.

When you touch the stars, remember that someone beneath you is dying of hunger

says an African proverb.

In 2025, Africa faces one of the worst humanitarian crises of recent decades: civil wars, collapsing economies, climate change, cuts to international aid. It is enough to trace, even just in one’s mind, the line stretching across the continent from west to east, from the Sahel to the Horn of Africa, to grasp the magnitude of the drama.

Each point along that line tells a story of survival: days spent searching for water, food that is never enough, homes abandoned in the night, a tomorrow as uncertain as the horizon after a sandstorm. Hunger is not a set of statistics: it is the face of millions suspended between waiting and survival.

A tragedy that tramples the principles enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Article 25 guarantees every person the right to food, water, and a dignified life.
Yet in villages across Mali, families spend entire days hunting for drinkable water, while in Niger crops destroyed by drought have erased months of sustenance.

The same applies to African children: the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child affirms the right to proper nutrition, health, and access to safe water. Every child who walks miles to drink in Sudan’s refugee camps is living proof of a concrete, intolerable violation.

Compounding everything is the climate crisis: ruined harvests in Burkina Faso, desertification in the Sahel, dried-up rivers in the Horn of Africa. International agreements and commitments, from the UNFCCC to the Sustainable Development Goals, tremble while reality demands urgency. Every delay is a political failure, but above all, a human one.

And then there are the silent conflicts. In eastern Sudan, central Mali, northern Niger, and western Burkina Faso, the sound of weapons has accompanied daily life for years. Families flee and flee again, as though flight were their only home.

The Geneva Conventions mandate the protection of civilians and assistance to vulnerable populations, yet they often remain empty words on paper.

When hunger becomes a weapon of war, as in isolated villages in Darfur, the situation verges on what the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court defines as a crime against humanity: the intentional use of starvation against civilians.

Within this reality, suffering is not an abstract concept: it is immediate. It is the child who finds no drinking water in a Tigray refugee camp. It is the mother who breaks bread into ever smaller pieces in the Sahel. It is the farmer in Niger who watches his land turn barren. It is an entire generation watching its future dissolve.

Albert Camus wrote that

indifference is one of the subtlest forms of cruelty.

Today, faced with a screaming Africa, the world risks responding with precisely that silent cruelty. But it is not too late: recognizing this tragedy means acknowledging a global wound, a test of our human conscience.

And it is here that the continent’s tragedy meets the personal, everyday tragedy of those who have looked Africa in the eyes.

For Magistrate Colangelo, adoptive father of a boy from Burkina Faso, that scream lives in his heart every day, every minute, every time he sees images of malnourished children. When he and his wife traveled to Africa in 2012, and only a few months later he nearly died from an extremely rare illness, they felt a terror mixed with joy: the fear of not being worthy of the immense gift that God had placed in their hands.

There, in a small clinic, their child sat on a narrow bed: he weighed only a few kilograms despite being nearly eight years old. His eyes were bright and frightened, like theirs, yet they also held a spark of trust, the hope that one day the wound of abandonment could be healed.

Witnessing such extreme poverty, those children who had nothing, not even something to eat, and yet smiled with a purity capable of breaking your chest wide open, is a sight that never leaves you. They wished they could bring them all home.

Even today, those children surround you with gentle touches, offering a lesson in love greater than any word. Leaving the orphanage was a searing pain: in their faces remained hope, sweetness, dignity in a world that seemed to have denied them.

Raising their son has been, and always will be, like caring for a fragile little bird: pure sensitivity, disarming love, emotions that overwhelm you. And in that journey, you understand that the power of love overcomes any obstacle.

Here in the West, we often complain about trivialities: a minor inconvenience, a missing comfort. But if even one of these people spent a single day in that Africa that screams for help, their perspective would change. They would learn that action, concrete, personal, economic, human, is the only possible response. The authors chose adoption and support for orphanages. A drop in the water, yes, but every drop creates a ripple.

The West must understand that life is one and that we cannot stand idle while a continent sinks into misery. The voices of the Magistrate and the doctor are united: those children, born in countries where life is worth less simply because wealth and well-being are lacking, have the right to a real, true life “no ifs and no buts”.

In the silence of Africa’s suffering, our humanity must resound: respect for human life in its highest form. Saving Africa is not an act of generosity: it is a moral, cultural, spiritual duty. If each of us did our part, abandoning selfishness and constant complaints, the world would be different. There would be less violence, more dignity, more future.

Because Africa is not just a vast continent. It is a living, pulsating world, an arc of colors and transformations. It is the silent judge observing the inertia of the West.

It is our cultural and spiritual mother and father. It is our soul. And wherever we live, wherever we go, Africa will always remain the truest mirror of our conscience.