Reading the substrate
By the time a clash in the central Sahel reaches a wire service, it has already been given its name: a jihadist attack, or ethnic violence between Fulani herders and settled farmers, with the dead counted under one heading or the other. What rarely travels with the dispatch is the thing underneath it: a rainy season that arrived late or not at all, a grazing corridor quietly ploughed under for cropland, a herd pushed a hundred kilometres further south than the route it followed a decade ago, into country that was never its own. The label arrives first. The condition that produced it, if it arrives at all, arrives as background colour. Between the two sits a gap, and what falls into it. ...