Lion: world destroyed by handful of tyrants, Africa free from corruption

First an appeal against the handful of tyrants ravaging the world, then the lunge on the paradox of African food insecurity: food 'abounds' but is rationed, 'stolen' by those who 'gorge themselves' at the expense of vulnerable economies. In the last 48 hours of his visit to Cameroon, the second leg of a tour de force among four African countries, Pope Leo reiterated two key lines in a mission that was already politically motivated and enlivened by intermittent sparks with the White House.

On 16 April, in his stop in the northern city of Bamenda, Leone highlighted his hostility to the politics of war that are rampant on a continental and global scale. The lunge was first on the most immediate scenario, that of a pivotal city in the so-called Anglophone crisis: the clash between English-speaking independentists and the central government that has held the country in check for a decade, with estimates of several thousand victims and hundreds of thousands displaced.

In the background, the lashing out could not help but also touch on Washington and the White House's various offensives against the first compatriot pope in history and the escalation of a rhetoric that had always kept a low profile in (almost) a year of debut.

On 17 April, it was the turn of two more calibrated appeals on Africa, the continent at the heart of the papal trip and agenda amid record demographic expansion and a rise in the Catholic population in contrast to the decline in the West. In a mass in Douala, in front of more than 100,000 faithful, Leo castigated the waste of food by those who "gorge themselves on those who have nothing to eat". In a further stop in Yaoundé, speaking to the university world, the focus shifted to the urgency of 'ridding Africa of the scourge of corruption' and reiterated that it is not 'material wealth' that determines the greatness of countries.

The note could also resonate in the last two stages of the mission, those scheduled from today to the 21st in an Angola already buzzing with excitement over the arrival of 'Papa Leão' and in Equatorial Guinea, which will mark the mission's final stage. Angola is one of the main producers of crude oil on an African scale and is boosting its diamond sector, but it is plagued by one of the highest rates of inequality on the continent: one of the clearest examples of the so-called resourse curse, the resource curse that crushes some of the most prosperous raw material economies on the continent with poverty and delays in development.