Columnist Martin Walker actually saw such things on a recent visit to West Africa. He relates:

“We walked through the tents, looking at feet that had swollen, like footballs, from protein deficiency, at eyelids chalk-white from anemia, at limbs so like sticks that the knee joints looked gross and deformed.”

Children the Special Victims

Children are the special prey when famine strikes. A seriously malnourished baby becomes apathetic, withdrawing into a bleak, empty world of its own. The columnist quoted above reports what he observed:

“It suddenly occurred to me that there were no children following us. In most villages in Africa, a white man strolling around bears a long train of giggling, thumb-sucking children. But here, not one child had the strength to play or to follow or even to wave away the flies that crawled on his sores.”

The severe famine-producing drought in Africa’s Sahel area produced yet another ill effect in the form of “traumatic psychological shock to the people of the Sahel,” according to one report. “When a peasant loses faith in his land, and when a nomad loses his trust in the fertility of the desert, the effect is a kind of psychological castration.”