The following passage is a factually correct statement.

In the 21st century, there was a war called a "world war" that claimed the highest death toll of any war after the 2nd World War. It encompassed 9 nations and about 25 warring factions and it lasted for almost 6 years. Around 4 million people, mostly civilians, died during this half-decade.

And, the last passage was not a statement about the future.

This certainly seems to be a World War most of us will have missed.

If you're irritated now, don't worry. It irrated me, too. I didn't hear about the "African World War" until I had returned from the Congo. In fact, I had to read about it before I realised what I had missed. You read the news and then, once in a while, you think you never have.

These 4 million people obviously were not soldiers but mostly civilians. And they also did not die from the direct effects of the war. They starved to death, died from diseases or epidemics. They died from a shortage of supply of the basic conditions for life, that is.

Tracing the roots of the conflicht is a difficult thing to do. One of them, however, lies in the Rwandan conflict most of us do remember. And that's an easier one to understand.

First, there was you and me, drinking more coffee than ever before in the Starbucks' and Balzac's of Europe and the States and most other industrialized countries on the planet. That increased the consumption of coffee worldwide and, since coffee buying and reselling is in the hands of a few large monopolies, prices didn't go up but down.

Next came a worsening economic situation in Rwanda. The falling coffee prices led to a slump in incomes for the working population in turn leading to growing political unrest, interracial hatred and, somewhat later, open civil war. The rest, as we may say, is history.

Of course there were and remain to be many reasons for war in Africa. But how we Europeans live and continue to live will play an even greater part in the future of the continent. Yes, even in such small things as drinking coffee, we do make a difference.

So, if you're irritated now, don't worry. There's an easy thing you can do to do your part that there won't be a second Rwanda. If I'm not mistaken, the price difference between conventional and fairly traded coffee is somewhere between 50 cents and 1 Euro. It will be fair to say that, if more people bought fairtrade coffee, tea, orange juice, green beans or any other product coming mostly from the former colonial states, the next African World War may well be preventable.

And the lady selling coffee and tea, among other goods, somewhere inside the suburbs of Kinshasa, and who smiled at me so lovingly when I approached her for a picture during my last stay in the RD Congo, may keep on selling her products for quite a while longer.