Africa Works

I witnessed a fascinating encounter between soldiers and scribes today at the Ghana Press Association’s attractive conference center. Soldiers complained of national security threats from media expression, while journalists countered that media coverage would be kinder if government performed better.

The biggest surprise to me in Accra, where I am visiting for the first time since 2003, is that one dollar is worth the equivalent of one Ghanaian cedi. When I changed a 50 dollar bill at the airport, I was startled to receive 50 cedis in return — not the 50,000 I expected.

After I caught my breath, I learned that not long ago the Ghana government lopped four zeroes off all of its currency notes.

The new currency makes calculations much easier — and one cedi much more valuable. But inflation has leaped and there is a natural inclination to for consumers to think things are less expensive than they really are.

Most significantly, there is a mixture of pride and bewilderment of the new equivalence of the dollar and the cedi.

Alex Russell writes in The Financial Times today about the new memoir (”On The Contrary”) published by South Africa’s Opposition leader, Tony Leon, whose minority party has scored increasingly well at the polls in recent years against the dominant African National Congress of Thabo Mbe Leon’s memoir, Russell writes, “goes to the heart of a longstanding dilemma for white opposition politicians in post-colonial Africa: should they criticize or fall into line? The tension is at the core of the book.”

Russell congratules Leon, who stepped down as Opposition leader last year, for preciently understanding Mbeki’s autocratic tendencies and the real threat of overwhelming power acquired by the ANC. With Mbeki’s term as president soon to expire, South Africans will experience a new phase in their post-apartheid society. Long marked by an admirable form of rhetorical racial harmony, South African society seems increasingly racialized. Russell blames Leon for “accentuating the racial division of South Africa’s politics.” That was inevitable because ten years ago the question was not what role whites would play in South Africa politics but whether they would play any role at all. Leon helped to establish a sustainable role for whites but he failed to establish a compelling role. Until a true opposition within the ANC emerges as an independent force, white dissidents such as Leon will always be on the defensive. Reform, not race, remains the central challenge in South Africa.

I’m just getting around to perusing Roddy Doyle’s volume of short stories, the Deportees, published in the U.S. early this year. The stories are inspired by the experiences of Nigerian immigrants to Ireland, and Doyle originally wrote all for a Dublin newspaper founded by two Nigerian journalists living in the city. Of these eight short stories, my favorite open is “Black Hoodie,” which opens with a riveting passage I can personally relate to:

“My girlfriend is Nigerian, kind of, and when we go through the shops, we’re followed all the way. We stop — the security guards stop. We go up the escalator — they’re three steps behind us, and there’s another one waiting at the top. We look at something, say a shoe, and they all look at us looking at the shoe.”

Doyle adds, in the opening passage, a telling line: “You’re never lonely [in Dublin} if you’re with a black girl …”

I must confess I am smitten by this passage because I once had a Nigerian girlfriend myself. She is now my wife. My own memoir of our marriage — Married To Africa — will be published by Scribner in January.

One of my favorite African newspapers, the feisty Nairobi Star, has a fair and balanced story today about the decision by reform prime minister Odinga to put his very own wife on a government salary of more than $6,000 U.S. dollars a month. That’s probably enough money for to run a school for a month. I know democracy in Africa has its costs, and that even countries with lots of poor people still must have appropriately-compensated government officials, but Odinga is a self-professed reformer and the leader of a movement to widen democracy in Kenya, one of the region’s most important countries. Putting his wife on the government payroll sends a bad message. He should “fire” her immediately — for the sake of his reputation.

The BBC pointed out, wisely, that perhaps Odinga’s own salary as PM should cover his wife’s costs in addition to his own. The news service
also cited the former head of the Kenyan chapter of Transparency International Gladwell Otieno as saying the payments to Odinga’s wif is fresh confirmation that Kenyan politicians are just a greedy caste, looking after themselves at the expense of poor Kenyans recovering from the effects of post-election violence.

Odinga’s wife, Ida, is receiving less money than Lucy Kibaki, whose allowances increased last year to nearly $8,000 a month.

President Mwai Kibaki and Prime Minister Raila Odinga agreed to share power in February after negotiations ended weeks of violent clashes.

Two-thirds of all people with HIV-AIDS live in sub-Saharan Africa. So the disease is, not quite but almost, an African problem. American taxpayers, through their vessel, the lame duck president George Bush, this week showed enormous generosity in extending for another five years a program called PEPFAR that essentially makes possible anti-retroviral treatment for people with full-blown AIDS. The treatment works in most cases, though as the Financial Times reported yesterday, a growing number of people — perhaps as many as 25% — have resistant strains of HIV/AIDs.

The problem of drug resistance is neither new nor insurmountable. At this week’s international conference on the disease in Mexico City, many words will be spilled on how to limit the growth of resistant strains — and extend the effectiveness of front-line drugs. These are technical issues of course. The grand policy has been set: U.S. taxpayers, and their elected representatives, have a long-term stake in African health-care policies. Rather sadly, an American who needs AIDs treatment may not receive such generosity from taxpayers; for the uninsured and uncovered in the U.S., the humane deal offered ailing and anonymous Africans is rarely available.

The New York Times published my Ping column — the twentieth in as many months, if you are counting — yesterday. The column was devoted to the unnoticed emergence of an underground Geek culture in Nairobi, Africa’s most dynamic and cosmopolitan city. Over the coming days, I’ll be tracking reaction to the piece, which looked at the interaction between African aspirations for a greater role in the digital revolution and the engagement of leading technology agents, most notably Google, which has opened a development office in Nairobi and is hiring technical people from around Africa. In this Ping, I explored some of the dynamics of trying to innovate in unlikely places. For people who care deeply about the prospects for more even development of technological changes around the planet, the question is perhaps the hardest of all the hard questions inspired by the Internet revolution. If the Net is truly a force for democratic advance, must we not have more democratic — and truly diverse — activities supported by it? I doubt I will live long enough to learn the answer. So asking — and asking again — the question must be enough.

Since I visited Kenya last month (and then again early this month), friends and strangers have asked me for my impressions about efforts to reconcile the disputing sides in the country’s post-election turmoil. I made no serious examination of this question while in Kenya, only coming across random impressions in passing. My sense is that life in Kenya is back to normal and that supporters of Kibaki and Odinga (who are both in government under a power-sharing arrangement) simply are denying their differences. My discussion with people at media houses in Nairobi supported the denial explanation. Media actors are promoting reconciliation in the abstract but they are unwilling to examine ethnic pride, mobilization and discontent. Indeed, there is essentially a regime of self-censorship in Kenyan media around the subject of ethnicity and “tribal” affiliations. That people in Kenya who identify with the Luo group (of Odinga) feel unfairly treated by people who identify with the Kikuyu identity (of Kibaki) is undeniable. Yet from reading the media, the existence of both the Luo and the Kikuyu would seem to be in great doubt.

There is much to applaud in people who can see the worst in each other and then move in, forgiving and forgetting. There ought to be more of that in the world, I suspect. Yet Kenyans, from the very start of their history as independent country some 45 years ago, have shown an outsized willingness to set aside past differences — to pretend, in short, that the past does not matter. Kenya’s first president, Kenyatta, from the very start of his new nation in December 1963, chose to set aside concerns about who did what during the violent campaigns by British colonial authorities and “Mau Mau” freedom fighters to alter political arrangements in Kenya during the 1950s. Kenyatta decided not to examine ethnic differences in his country; he chose instead to priviledge the “fiction” of Kenyan identity in hopes of turning this lie into a reality.

To some degree, Kenyatta succeeded. I was struck in Nairobi by the intense patriotism of young Kenyans with education; people of talent and good character who weren’t born even during the last years of Kenyatta’s stern rule. For these young strivers in Nairobi, their pride in nation is palpable and, actually, moving. Kenya is a destroyer of hopes as much as a creator because of the long night of poor governance under Kenyatta’s successor, Moi. Today, hopes are reviving and young Kenyans can dream of a better day without suspending either their reason or their morality.

Which brings me back to the post-election violence. The willingness of people to move on, without examining what happened only a few months, is of a piece with Kenya’s modern history, which has never received even a rough kind of reckoning, either inside Kenya or without. These closing words in Caroline Elkins disturbing book, “Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya,” could well stand as a coda on the Odinga-Kibaki rivalry — and the ethnic violence it spawned earlier this year. Elkins is writing of course about political violence in Kenya 50 years ago. Her words seem eerily relevant to the recent crisis and not only because of the obvious observation that if Kenyans can’t come to grips with the history of a half-century ago, what chance exists to reconcile less distant, more hot and painful conflicts of the moment.

“To this day [Elkins writes] there has never been any form of official reconciliation in Kenya. There are no monuments for Mau Mau, children are not taught about this part of their nation’s past in school, few speak about it in the privacy of their own homes, and, with the exception of the relatives of the Hola massacre victims, there has never been any kind of financial consideration given to those who lost family members in the camps and villages, or property to the local loyalists [to the British]. Some men and women lost the use of their limbs, others their minds, as a result of years spent behind the wire…. But they too have insisted that bygones remain bygones.”

Is this the Kenyan way?

Mourn the death of the campaign for an AIDS vaccine but also cheer it. The push for a “silver bullet,” however human an impulse, reflected as much an overwhelming arrogance on the part of scientists as the inherent difficulty of engineering a preemptive technological response to a protean disease.

The field of vision should be clearer now. Pragmatic and relentless behavioral and societal adaptations are the best (and most humanistic) responses to the persistence of new cases of HIV/AIDS. As Helen Epstein wrote last year in her brilliant polemic on the disease, “The Invisible Cure,” the most effective responses in Africa — where the disease remains an enormous public-health issue — are animated by mass-based social mobilizations. In Uganda, where social mobilization has perhaps gone the furthest on matter of AIDS, the results have been impressive.

After 20 years of discussing the possibility of an AIDS vaccine, the time has come to pause and let the social mobilizers hold sway in the field of prevention, unburdened by the “noise” of well-meaning technocrats holding out the hope of a swift and easy intervention, unfettered by concerns about social organization and culture. In fighting AIDS, as in much else, social values and political mobilization, is decisive. The failure of the vaccine movement provides a convenient opportunity to remember the limits of technological innovation and the perils of engineering arrogance.

To be thrown on the social and cultural, however, is not to escape the awful dimensions of HIV/AIDS. On my visit early this month to a community of farmers in eastern Uganda, I was humbled by the capacity of human beings — alone and in their chosen groups — to deny, dissemble and even self-destruct in the face of lethal threats. In the foothills of beautiful Mount Elgon, the leaders of a community I’ve come to know and respect have fallen prey to new cases of HIV/AIDS. These men and women only fitfully sought treatment, and their “prevention strategies” remain flawed.

The hollow promise of an AIDS vaccine had never reached this Ugandan village. In the homes of the stricken, there are no technocratic delusions, only evidence of flawed humanity.

The impasse in Zimbabwe is unfolding under the glare of global media. The big outlets — the CNNs, the BBCs and the world’s major newspapers — are all looking for a dramatic resolution to Africa’s latest leadership drama. An aged Robert Mugabe, one a liberator of a long-oppressed people, today stands discredited around the world, having wrecked his legacy and the lives of millions of people. He refuses to leave office, insists on maintaining power by any means. His hold power stems not merely from the imposition of harsh rule; he also exploits powerful psychological symbols, which are newly described by my friend Daniel Morris in the Globe & Mail of Toronto.

That Mugabe deserves to be replaced by his chief domestic opponent is without doubt. More likely, he will be replaced by a leader of the military junta that actually runs Zimbabwe. Mugabe is too old and feeble to hold his shattered state together, even in its current dismal form. The Zimbabwean regime depends on a cabal of Mugabe loyalists operating in the shadows. One of them is likely, before long, to seize power, declare Mugabe history — and appeal for recognition and assistance from the international community.
Zimbabwe’s next strong man will do what others in African have long done: say they need time to stage legitimate elections. Perhaps they will need 18 months or even two years to prepare the way for real democracy in Zimbabwe. Faced with a Hobson’s Choice, the international community will go along, satisfied that at least Mugabe is off the stage.

The aid money will pour into Harare, so will the tecnical experts. Improvements in the material life of the people will come quickly, though more educated Zimbabweans — those few who remain — will leave the country. Then about a year from now, the regime’s leader will declare that he is decided, after much anguished reflection, that he will stand as a candidate for president in the “free and fair” elections to come. The international community will moan and groan, diplomats will say they’ve been cheated, the opposition will cry foul. But after a week or two, the decision will come to be accepted.
Is this Mugabism without Mugabe? Is this Zimbabwe’s future? To go from one dictator to another?