The subject of homosexuality in sub-Saharan Africa deserves energetic and thoughtful examination. Kampala is not Cleveland — and certainly not London or San Francisco. The same degree of tolerance for gay and lesbian lifestyles in Berlin or Rio cannot be expected in Accra, Lusaka or Lagos. Yet the virulent anti-gay laws and official statements now routine in Africa are shameful and counter-productive. Ultimately, African governments, and their civil societies which too often behave uncivily on the subject of gay rights, must accept that gays and lesbians in Africa must be afforded a baseline of rights, dignity and equality.

Just how to promote a gay-friendly political agenda in Africa isn’t easy to know. The frontal attack on bigotry against gays in Africa, which is being led by Secretary of State Hilary Clinton, is justified but may simply embarass African leaders into further intransigence on a subject that brings them little or no praise with their domestic constituents. On the other hand, the silence of the entire private foreign-aid community — both big and small do-gooder NGOs, so vocal on traditional subjects of African deprivation and injustice — have essentially nothing to say about the perpetual abuse and (sometimes) lethal disregard experienced by gays and lesbians in Africa.

The solution is of course the emergence of home-grown gay rights movements, first within African cities and than at the national level. Such a strategy, while wise, carries enormous risks. In Kampala, a thriving cosmopolitan city where ethno-racial diversity is celebrated and women’s formal rights are frequently realized, David Kato sought to bring a small measure of attention to the routine mistreatment of homosexuals and the impossibility of rational discourse in public spaces about the reality that some Ugandan men and women, for whatever reasons, choose to same-sex partners. Kato paid with his life. And even in death, the official Ugandan establishment ignored him, leaving the task of celebrating his sacrifice to those who do not depend on Ugandan society for their sustenance.

In time, more Ugandans of intelligence and sensitivity will come to recognize that in Kato they have as much of a hero as anyone else. Until then, we have Kato’s own words to ponder.

Or read an excerpt from my introduction, which stands as a kind “manifesto” against those who appear committed to diminish and demeaning Africans in order to rouse the world’s sympathy and perhaps assistance:

My aim tonight is to present an alternative way of looking at Africa – a contrarian approach that runs counter to the usual media images of disaster, disease and mayhem. Far too often, American journalists meet only sick Africans, murderous Africans and starving Africans – or they meet sick starving Africans murdering each other. I’m bringing you a different bunch of Africans  –  brainy Africans, caring Africans, hard-working Africans, damaged but dignified Africans – Africans who, under adverse conditions, do the best they can to build and sustain a decent life. Hopefully by meeting these Africans, your image of Africa will change and in ways that my surprise you.

The journey I take you on tonight I began myself, some dozen years ago. In 2000, I sat in a shack in the capital city of Burundi, smack in the heart of Africa, smack in the middle of an undeclared civil war, huddled together with a gang of irregular soldiers and their leader, a charismatic man in his 30s who I met with the assistance of Alexis Sinduhije, the leading journalist in Burundi. I sat with these men listening to them talk about mayhem from the heart of darkness – stories about pillaging and killing their ethic enemies – listening to them describing their actions and their motives – in short, doing what a foreign correspondent in Africa is supposed to do – reporting on human suffering, the people who inflict it, and its victims.

I spent three hours in a shack with these men and at the end I didn’t understand anything about who they were, what they did, where they came from, or their world. I wasn’t even sure what they told me was true, or whether that even mattered. So at the end of my carefully arranged encounter with young killers, I sat with Alexis Sinduhije in a restaurant and I told him, I don’t want to do this. Then I asked him a question – a question I would go on to ask many other Africans in many other places  – can you show me something beautiful.

He did. And then on my own I kept looking for the beautiful in Burundi and then the beautiful in everwhere else I went in Africa. At some cost to my standing with editors at the famous publications I used to write for, I decided that far better journalism can be done by reporting on what’s working in Africa – the normal, the successful, the dignified, the beautiful  – than by reporting on the stuff that usually comprises global media coverage of Africa and Africans. I decided that journalism ought not to diminish and demean Africans under the guise of displaying sympathy for them.

African problems need not be exaggerated or invented in order to get Americans to care about Africans. At least not in my own articles.

My purpose tonight is not to suggest that Africa is without problems, or that outsiders cannot help Africans. But the near-exclusive focus on African pathologies – and the media’s absorption on what some call the “pornography of pain” – presents only part of African reality and not the most interesting or significant part either. In these photos and films, I seek to celebrate concrete, commonplace African realities – realities that invite us to understand and engage Africa and Africans more deeply – and on a far more equal basis than we achieve by approaching Africans as objects of sympathy or assistance.

I look at the origins of the Nigerian nation-state in a new piece for Atlantic.com. What I don’t share with the readers of the Atlantic — for space reasons, chiefly — is a review of the sorry history of Britain’s efforts at design and re-design of nation-states. The partition of India, which at the outset caused massive loss of life and turmoil, for sometime seemed workable; yet today, facing a failed government in Pakistan, armed with nuclear weapons, and at odds with both its long-time patron (the U.S.) and India, would now be viewed as a travesty of geo-political engineering. Iraq was another country created and launched by Britain. Israeli-Palestine conflict, while imponderable, has roots in British policies of decolonization. In Africa, Nigeria counts as at least the equal of these decolonization cockups.

The point isn’t to hastily argue for the redrawing of the map, anywhere. But we must at least recognize that nations were constructed, and not always long ago. Having been made by humans, they can be unmade and remade by them. Nigeria could well be a good place to begin undoing the warped world that the British made.

I don’t claim to understand why Nigerians are revolting over the sudden and misguided decision by the government of Goodluck Jonathan to dramatically raise the basic price of petrol. In Nigeria, as in many African nations, government sets the price of petrol. In Nigeria, petrol prices have long been set well below market prices. At first, the subsidies to fuel were intended for the wealthy. Forty years ago, only the wealthy could afford a car, only the wealthy could even use any form of transport to travel on a regular basis. Rather than a subsidy for the poor, the freeze on fuel prices were intended to help the rich.

The strange history of fuel prices highlights the diffculties of analyzing what the protests portend. In the broadest (and ideal) sense, pegging fuel prices at market levels will promote more efficient use. That’s good in the abstract. But in the real world of Nigeria, there are two problems with raising fuel prices abruptly. First, the effect on the poor — and that’s most Nigerians — is awful. A decent government would take immediate, firm and effective steps to mitigate, if not remove, any adverse impacts of the fuel increase on poor Nigerians. No such plan or actions are in the works.

More significantly, the Nigerian government has no moral, political or pragmatic credibility. Critics rightly argue that the government could simply raise fuel prices and pocket the increase. There are enough examples of government officials stealing government funds to make such a scenario seem inevitable, not just probable.

The solution to the problem is actually easy to locate. The government of Goodluck Jonathan should declare that the refinery capacity in Nigeria — the lack of which forces the government to import petrol at market prices — should be expanded before any fuel increase occurs. The Nigerian government, in short, should function here on a “prove it to me” basis. Once petrol is being refined in Nigeria, by Nigerians, on a sustainable basis, then the fuel subsidy can be eliminated.

Even opponents of the elimination of the fuel hike know well that Nigeria, a major world producer of crude oil, ought to have the capacity to meet its own domestic needs for refined gasoline. The failure of Nigeria to meet its own needs holds up the country to ridicule. The question is not whether to remedy this failure, but how.

In implementing the fuel hike, Nigeria’s finance minsister deserves special criticism. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala is an internationally respected economic thinker, a former senior official at the World Bank and a former finance minister in Obasanjo’s important transitional government. She should know better than to impose, without conditions on the government’s own energy bureaucrats, a dramatic and sudden rise in fuel prices that do not also include some penalties and some incentives for the Nigerian government to expand its domestic refining capacity quickly and surely. How she, with her past accolades, could design a program that gives the government perverse incentives is a mystery.

Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala must explain to her own people, and the international community, why the fuel increases must come before the improvements in government services. Nigerians of all persuasions are justifiably concerned that their state apparatus has failed. They are rightly suspicious that government is a mere formality in Nigeria and that any increases in government revenues will be looted.

To be sure, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala can argue that the government of Nigeria needs the funds to restructure its domestic energy economy. While true, those funds can and should come from existing crude-oil revenues. Those funds should come out of the massive existing government expenditures which are directed towards the benefit of a few.

As the most respected member of the current Nigerian government, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala cannot pretend that Nigeria is a blank slate on which to write. Resistance by the people of Nigeria does not have long roots and the year 2012 may not bring the so-called “Nigerian sprng.” Yet even if the fuel-subsidy protests would end tommorrow — and even if the government makes good on suggestions that the increases may be rescinded or cancelled — they have already delivered an undeniable verdict: for the Nigerian government, it is winter.

Of course, the ANC’s shortcomings are legion. Mandela himself failed to properly respond to the spread of HIV/AIDS. Violence against women and children, while not caused by the ANC, are a scourge on South African society and should be the reduction of violence against women and children should be a primary goal of the government. Policing is appalling in the new South Africa; any government must make improving policing to be a foundation for wider social and political reforms. The government’s failure to re-distribute wealth and opportunity is a bigger problem than the corruption of its leaders. Chinese elites are thoroughly corrupt and yet poverty has dramatically fallen in China during the very period when the ANC has presided over an enormous increase in inequality in South Africa.

Certainly, the ANC’s failures are seminal, yet the party’s accomplishments are also monumental. Whites and white priviledge, while challenged in the new South Africa, have not been eradicated or even drastically reduced; the effect is to create consistency and stability in a South African economy still highly dependent on the skills of white settlers and their descendants. The foreign policy accomplishments of the ANC, notwithstanding the grievious failure to break with Zimbabwe’s tyrant, remain formidable. South Africa has emerged as a consistent voice in favor of more level playing fields in various global arenas, from trade to climate-change. And crucially, South Africa’s decision, made personally by Mandela, to destroy its arsenal of nuclear-weapons, stands as a singular victory for human values over technocratic power.

That I believe that the African National Congress deserves to lose the first and next fair and free election in South Africa does not prevent me from disagreeing with the recent reviews in The Economist (“Disappointment”), Time magazine (“How the ANC Lost its Way”) and elsewhere about the ultimate legacy of this most political of African movements. Make no mistake about decolonization in the sub-Saharan. Sekou Toure of Guinea famously declared that freedom was worth more than wealth, and Nkrumah, his Anglophone contemporary, insisted that political liberation would inevitably unlock productive economic wealth. But both knew well, and repeatedly reminded their audiences, that so long as the southern cone of Africa was a virtual plantation where white overlords dictated the terms of existence for indigenous people, then all of Africa would neither realize political freedom nor economic sustainability. Until the ANC broke the will of the Afrikaaner/apartheid regime to persist in its awful brutality, no one knew how long the rest of Africa would be held hostage to the rank evil that permeated South Africa. Perhaps the world’s gratitude towards the ANC has an expiration date; but if it does that date remains in the future.

Opponents of redrawing Africa’s map come from many perspectives, including the “progressive” desire f0r Africans do endure no more political harm. Adam Hyde, a doctoral student in international development at the London School of Economics, reminded me of the risks involved in any rejiggering of African borders in an essay of his own, which he brought to my attention this week.

Hyde argues against cutting down the size of African nations, many of which are physically large by global standards, grounding his position in a single, simple proposition: “the reality is that separation often leads to increased conflict.” Yet conflict is also spawned by maintaining the current borders of some conflict-riddled countries, such as Congo and Nigeria (to cite only a couple of obvious cases where refusal to accept the need for splitting nations into smaller parts is leading to persistent, long-term conflict).

Even worse, Hyde’s position reflects the egregious double standard that often infects the reasoning of many staunch advocates of political stagnation in Africa. Hyde is entitled to argue in favor of denying africans what the people of the former Yugoslavia have achieved.  He is entitled to tell the people of Czech and Slovakia that their achievement cannot be duplicated by any Africans. He is more than welcome to explain to the denizens of South Sudan that their new nation shall not teach the world anything new.

Analysts of African politics continue to deny Africans the chance to achieve better lives, and better institutional arrangements, based on the spurious notion that they cannot risk creating new sources of instability. Yet other people, and nations, can and do. Are not Africans normal? Are they not entitled to the same freedoms, to construct and deconstruct their political arrangements, as Europeans?

The answer is yes, yes, yes.

My declaration is by no means unqualified. Look I’m married to a Nigerian. I know secession is not a panacea. I know that in a country, such as Nigeria or the Congo, sub-national strife often reflects as well as obscures other problems. For healthy nations, big or small, many factors must come together, along side the process of “right-sizing” African nations. But because re-thinking African borders is not a panacea for what ails African politics, the legacy of political borders inherited from colonial masters need to be tolerated, indefinitely, at any cost. Dare to dream a little. In sub-Saharan Africa in the midst of an economc boom of global import, imaginative ways of thinking about the future should be encouraged.

And that includes thinking about the birth of new nations.

That’s the sub-text of a valuable article by Mark Hertsgaard on the political economy of reforestation along the Sahel-Sahara border lands. Building on the undeniable evidence of small-bore environmental success stories in Africa — of the sort I and Alex Perry of Time magazine have trumpeted over the past year to counteract the new Afro-enviro-pessimism, Hertsgaard tracks a growing movement to support strategic tree-planting on a grand scale — across the entire belly of the continent. The effort has the backing of influential African political leaders and the conditonal support of Western donors. Hertsgaard concludes, “The Great Green Wall is too good an idea to be allowed to fail.”

After years of demeaning and degrading the prospects for Africa’s future on the basis of gloomy environmental forecasts, the refreshing conversion of Hertsgaard, an influential writer on climate change, marks another milestone on Africa’s transformation into a “normal” region. No longer, at least in the hyperbolic arena of environmental calamity, can Africa be written off as a hopeless case. Rather, there’s a growing appreciation that the same kind of everyday tactics of adaptation that, say, Americans must adopt in the years ahead, Africans can and will adopt — and to everyone’s advantage.

My tailor, like many tailors in Africa, fancied himself foremost as a designer, and a rather fine one. He did have a flair for integrating retro-hippe styles with the enduring colors and fabrics appreciated in the coastal belt running from Dakar to Lome. Often, he made outfits for me from scratch: top-and-down, drawstrings, from intricately-pattern waxed cotton or sometimes “political suits” made of plainer fabric and useful to wear to meetings with government officials or local businessmen. He also made unusual shirts and sleeveless tunics that could be worn to Labadi beach and came with matching drawstrings.

I can’t say that everything my tailor created worked, but I always appreciated his self-confidence. He knew his vision and he presented his clothing without fear or apology. That he made every single outfit in his shop with his own sewing machine and hands lent a certain gravitas to him.

He often talked about becoming a fashion designer, but he had no sense of scale. He didn’t have a single employee, and he often went to the market himself to buy fabrics. At my request, he’d usually accompany me on such trips, and I might treat him to lunch as compensation. But the notion of manufacturing clothes was beuond him. He made clothes from his mind’s eye – and for humans he knew, touched, heard.

Fashion in West Africa is a poor man’s glamour in which I eagerly participated because, even by the standards of local elites, I was poor. The cost of looking good, while not trivial, could well be afforded by anyone with the some sort of regular employment.

That’s still true, but with machine-made clothes flooding Africa now – mainly new garments from China and India but also used clothes from charities in America and Europe – the fidelity to local tailors is declining. Mine soldiers on, living off the legacy of a long reputation for quality and service. But many tailors have surrendered to market forces they neither understand nor approve of. Most of them, bereft of great design ideas, face a race with anonymous and distant machines – a race they’re losing.

There are exceptions, designers who because of education or priviledge or sheer determination, have risen to achieve international recognition – and this despite the existence of an African factory system that could produce small batches of high-quality clothing. In her original and much-needed new book, Helen Jennings, a fashion journalist, has documented and profiled leaders in “New African Fashion,” as she titles her book. The results are captivating — and amply demonstrate that African design, while not spawning yet a fashion industry of any scale or scope, is at least gaining a global audience of sophisticates.

African clothing designers remain vulnerable to the predations of European, American and even Asian designers who seize on exotic motifs in African fashion and present them, drained of meaning and often in fragmented ways, to their own distant tribes. But increasingly, the fruits of uniquely-talented African designers cannot be stolen wholesale. At least not without the risk of global approbation.

And that’s an improvement, a sign that in fashion, as in some much else, the normal and functional in African life is taking center stage.

The new African prosperity is welcome, but political dysfunction persists. The announcement that Joseph Kabila is again the presidential victor in a Congolese election is a grim reminder that no manner of economic growth can soften the blows of pathological politics.

International observers are calling Kabila’s election “disputed,” in part because Kinshasa, the heart of the Congo and one of Africa’s most vibrant and largest cities, is home to legions of Kabila’s opponents. As to how Kabila could win the election without Kinshasa there is only one explanation. He stole it.

In the weeks ahead, the Congolese will decide whether Kabila can persist in his misrule in peace. If strife does break out, the Congo’s many international supporters will regret that they did not insist that Kabila retire from politics as a price for continued aid to the country. Having come to power after his father, a coup leaders, was assasinated, Kabila has few ties to his own country, and his performance as president — as measured by his success in improving government services and reducing violence in the troubled Eastern region — has been abysmal.

There is no reason to believe that Kabila will do any better this time around. He should and let new leaders, with strong support, take their chance at leading this vast country with so troubled a past.

Of course, Kabila’s voluntary departure is a fantasy. Even as Africa’s economy grows at an Asian-like pace, the region’s politics too-0ften defies logic and practicality. The Congo isn’t the only country where dictatorial rulers rely on elections to provide “cover” for their Hobbsian rule.

Perhaps now that the international community is starting to grasp that Africa’s problem isn’t poverty — but rather how to fairly distribute the wealth being generated by its endowments and its people — there will be a new focus on promoting a genuine revolution in African democracy.