Too many of Africa’s nation-states, both north and south of the Sahara, remain convulsed by combatants, infiltrated by insurgents, and damaged deeply either by the self-inflicted wounds of civil conflict or attacked from within by Islamists supported from without and loyal to externally propagated ideologies. In their founding years, independent northern and southern Africa harbored conflicts that tore new nations apart. In contemporary times some of those civil wars linger, joined as they have been since the dawning of the new century by newly spawned fundamentalist revolutionaries and by reactionaries who regard constituted authority and modern political instrumentalities as illegitimate, even haram—“forbidden.” Although there are fewer civil conflict deaths per year than there were in the 1980s and 1990s, there are many more episodes of terror, and fatalities, than there were in those times. And the seemingly intractable nature of some of the conflicts and many of the campaigns against terror give the impression that sections of Africa—Egypt and the Sinai; Algeria, Libya, and the Sahel; the Horn of Africa and Kenya; Nigeria and its northeastern neighbors; and the Democratic Republic of Congo—are today immured in warfare that will not easily end.
Health services for women, children and adolescents in conflict affected settings: experience from North and South Kivu, Democratic Republic of Congo