Ol-ashumpai's Africa Blog

A Twist on Violence and the Media

2008-09-05T04:38:00.001-04:00

Yesterday’s Daily Graphic carries an article about a plea made by one Kwesi Amoafo-Yeboah, identified as an “independent presidential aspirant”, directed at the main political parties here and urging their followers to avert the violence he foresees in the electoral campaign. In doing so, Mr. Amoafo-Yeboah joins, well, pretty much everyone. Since my arrival in June, not a single issue of The Graphic has passed beneath my eye without containing a similar plea from some junior regional minister, some paramount chief of an obscure traditional area, some reverend, some CEO, some actor or some musician. On Mondays, there are frequently several such pleas, since the newspaper doesn’t publish on Sunday and the exhortations tend to stack up. Added to these, on a more-or-less weekly basis, are reports of Walks for a Peaceful Election, Prayer Meetings for a Peaceful Election and Concerts for a Peaceful Election. Every two weeks or so, The Graphic runs an editorial of its own, usually not only calling for peaceful elections, but also calling on Ghana’s citizens to call for peaceful elections. The pleas are repeated on the radio stations, TV broadcasts and, as I saw last week, at comedy shows. An observer could not be blamed, based on the tone of the local media, for confusing Ghana with Somalia.

This has all been patently absurd, of course; it has been completely divorced from both past and present reality. The best explanation for all of the alarmism is probably that people are spooked by the violence that followed the elections in Kenya and Zimbabwe this year. Most of the pleas cite these examples, never mentioning that in those countries, violence-plagued elections are very much the historical norm. Ghana simply does not have this kind of history, however. While its fifty years of post-independence history do contain some cases of political and ethnic conflict, the conflicts have been tied overwhelmingly to local chieftaincy disputes rather than electoral politics. Since democracy was reintroduced in the mid-1990’s, Ghana’s elections have been free, fair and peaceful. As the newspaper exhortations never fail to mention, to date Ghana has been a model for African democracy.

How long it remains so is an open question, and one that hinges largely on the behavior of the media. Mr. Amoafo-Yeboah’s plea is unique in that it follows in the wake of a bona fide case of electoral violence (which is probably why he was joined, in other articles, by the editorial board of The Graphic and something called the Bawumia Fun Club). This weekend, a scuffle at a political rally in the Northern Region resulted in a reprisal attack that killed 6 people and the torching of a fair bit of a town called Gushiegu. In addition to auguring poorly for the next three months, the attack seemed to confirm the fears that so many had aired in the media. However, did their utterances really represent foresight, or were they just self-fulfilling prophecies?

In his book, When Victims Become Killers, Mahmood Mamdani analyzes the psychology of the Rwandan genocide: what, he asks, turned thousands upon thousands of Hutu farmers, shopkeepers and clergy into genocidaires? One of the necessary ingredients, he found, was fear. The Hutu-dominated government sowed fear deep into the Hutu population; the Hutus were told stories of the Tutsi militia that lay just over the border, ready to commit all manner of atrocities to the Hutus once they had the chance. When the Tutsi guerillas advanced, and when the Hutu President’s plane was shot down, it seemed to confirm all of the worst fears that had been cultivated in the population. It was at that point that the genocide began. Throughout the Rwandan genocide, vernacular radio stoked the flames of violence by repeating claims about Tutsi plots; during the electoral violence in Kenya, Kalenjin and Kikuyu vernacular radio stations spurred attacks by reporting (false) stories about the atrocities committed by other ethnic groups. In Rwanda and Kenya, violence became acceptable as revenge, as pre-emptive protection, as the norm for behavior.

I think something similar is happening, albeit on a much smaller scale, in Ghana. All of the pleas for a peaceful election carry the subtext that the situation is desperate, that danger is afoot, that someone is plotting trouble. Though intended to instill restraint and cooperation, the real effect of these remarks is to create fear and distrust. Supporters of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) and the National Democratic Congress (NDC) accuse each other of plotting to incite violence (and now, in the wake of the clash at Gushiegu, the two parties are trading blame for the violence there). Every newspaper article about the need for peace and every radio commentator warning about the prospect of electoral violence just makes the likelihood of that violence greater.

The media needs to act more responsibly, by reminding the population of the peace that has prevailed throughout most of the country, even during past elections. It needs to place the remarks of the doomsayers into context and rebuild trust and confidence. Unfortunately, this would mark a significant departure for the vast majority of Ghanaian journalists, who seem to fanatically adhere to the philosophy espoused by Stephen Colbert (at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner a few years ago) that the media’s job is simply to accurately transcribe what is told to them. For their part, the luminaries who make these pleas for peace could better spend their time taking concrete steps to eliminate some of the structural factors that encourage electoral violence. The registration process is an ungodly mess and the firewalls designed to separate traditional authority, the bureaucracy and elected offices are woefully inadequate. Fixing these problems would help ensure peaceful elections. I fear, however, that simply airing pleas for a peaceful election will prove self-defeating.

Live from Accra...it's Saturday Night!

2008-09-01T05:39:00.000-04:00

There’s an old truism out there that you’re not really fluent in a language until you can joke and be joked to in it. There’s some logic to that; to get a joke, you must have a quickness with, and a command of, the language’s vocabulary that would elude a novice. I think it’s a principle that can be extended further, though: you’re not really fluent in any subject until you can joke about it. In my view, the AP American History exam could be replaced by a wonderful joke I heard about Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln, with the score from 1 to 5 determined by the quickness and vehemence with which the test taker laughs after hearing the punch line. It would certainly save time and trouble and, as a side benefit, would probably open the eyes of a lot of kids who have received that abstinence-only sex ed.

I bring this up because Saturday night I tested myself and went to a comedy show featuring Ghana’s leading political satirist. It was held in the National Theatre in Accra, which I guess is Ghana’s Chinese-built answer to the Kennedy Center. Its exterior, which looks like nothing so much as a gigantic ship in dry dock, is admittedly impressive in a “we shut down the country’s public schools and hospitals for 12 years to pay for this” sort of way. Inside, though, it looks like the architects used the losing design for a small liberal arts college’s auditorium. There was only a little time to linger over the bizarre modernist balconies or the terrible acoustics, however, with all of the people-watching there was to do. Because every Ghanaian newspaper article is essentially a transcript of what a politician or a politician’s flunky has said, accompanied by a blurry. underexposed photo, I was well acquainted with the words and the rough outline of the faces of the VIPs that were scattered around the hall- the kind of pundits and insiders who, if they were American, would go see the Capitol Steps at the Kennedy Center. Truly rarefied air.

Unfortunately, we all had to wait for the political comedy. The event turned out to be a kind of variety show, with reggae duos, R&B groups, and dancers. At one point, the MC said that the show was a celebration of “indigenous, African creativity”, which sent my mind racing with thoughts of Wole Soyinka, Ali Farka Toure and Cesaria Evora. I was on the wrong track, however, as the act he was introducing turned out to be a man who played the flute with his nose. Finally, though, after a pitch from a bank rep and another for Amarula liquer, the comedian KSM took the stage.

He was funny- even I thought so. He made a few jokes about religion, Indians (channeling Joe Biden, perhaps), and returned expats, but the vast majority of the segments were about the campaign leading up to December’s presidential and parliamentary elections. Granted, the jokes were of the Maureen Dowd and Saturday Night Live variety (he made fun of one presidential aspirant for being short, one for being old and sick and the third for being irrelevant); still, I was pleasantly surprised that I got them. Yet as funny as the show was, there was something unsettling about the performance. The show was called “Castle or Suicide”, referring to Osu Castle, the seat of government. Throughout, there was an undertone of fear that the intensity and competition of the campaign were in danger of spinning out of control. This was made explicit at the end of the night when KSM passionately implored the audience- a portion of which, no doubt, actually has influence over how the election is to be conducted- to ensure a peaceful campaign through December. And as the writers for Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert and SNL no doubt know as well as I do, that is just not a good, parting laugh line.

Tongue-Tied

2008-08-23T11:04:00.001-04:00

An interesting problem popped us last night as the Peer Educators and I were making preparations to perform a play about HIV in Ankwaso. “Nick,” one of them said pointing to our script, “we have to translate this from Sefwi to Twi. They don’t speak our language there.” Ankwaso, mind you, is the neighboring village, maybe 2 or 3 miles down the road.

That’s the way it goes in a polyglot country like Ghana. Sefwi is spoken by just 100,000 of Ghana’s 20 million people- imagine a small American county with its own language- and no mother tongue in the country is spoken by more than about 4 million people. I’m at the very edge of the Sefwi-speaking region; in one direction are the Wasa Twi speakers of Ankwaso. Pivot ninety degrees and keep going and you’ll hit a Fante-speaking region. These languages- and the dozen or so other languages in the Akan family- are similar to one another, but they are certainly not identical.

To enable people to talk with others in neighboring villages, the different groups of southwestern and south-central Ghana have adopted (Ashanti) Twi as a kind of lingua franca, a common language similar enough to their mother tongues that they can learn it easily. Because about half the country’s population belongs to one Akan group or another, Twi has become the dominant language in most of the country- it is the language of business and the media even in some non-Akan areas like Accra. As a result, Twi is the language that most foreigners, myself included, are taught upon arrival. The obvious disadvantage is of course that I can’t speak the language of my own village and have no idea whatsoever as to what is going on around me.

That said, learning Twi is an absolute pleasure. This is thanks mostly to Jonas Yeboah-Dankwa’s Basic Twi For Learners (Asante). I picked up the locally-published, 83-page book on impulse in Kumasi, and I cannot recommend it highly enough. Mr. Yeboah-Dankwa, who once pursued an MA (the back cover tells us) at the “University of Bloomington, Indiana”, has managed to avoid the mistakes made by so many writers of language books. Remember the unnatural, vocabulary-filled practice dialogues in high school language class (e.g. Q:“What pastimes do you enjoy in springtime? A: In springtime, a pastime I enjoy is playing baseball. Q: What pastimes do you enjoy in winter? A: In the winter, a pastime I enjoy is going skiing. What pastimes do you enjoy in winter?”)? Or the dated dialogue in those travellers’ language guides? I had a Swahili-for-travelers book that made no mention of cell phones or internet cafes, but instructed me on how to say “Sir, please lead me to the best tobacconist in town.”

Well, here is most of Mr. Yeboah-Dankwa’s dialogue in the travel and transportation section, set on one of the minibuses that are called tro-tros here. To set the scene, the driver’s mate, who touts for business and collects the fare, has just tried to overcharge the passengers, citing a rise in gasoline prices in the recently-announced government budget:

Passengers: Ho! You are a liar! You are a thief! You are a cheat!

The mate relents and charges them the old fare.

Passengers: You are ashamed.
Mate: I am not ashamed
Driver: Stop talking!
Passengers: Driver, mind your own business and let’s go.
Driver: If you do not stop talking, I won’t continue.
Passengers: Is that so? We shall see.
(All the passengers burst into laughter. The driver continues the journey to the lorry station at Kwame Nkrumah Circle).

That’s it. No instruction on how to ask where a tro-tro is going, or ask what the fare is, or anything remotely useful. Yet Mr. Yeboah-Dankwa has captured, in its essence, the Ghanaian tro-tro experience. He similarly captures the Ghanaian tomato-buying experience and the Ghanaian taxi-chartering experience. Almost always, his dialogues are punctuated by derisive laughter- and maybe that is the real lingua franca of Ghana.

A Dispatch from the Holy Ghanaian Empire

2008-08-20T05:40:00.000-04:00

It’s nearing 11:00 PM as I write this. I’m sitting in my bed, under a mosquito net and a ceiling fan which is struggling against one of the hottest nights I can remember. It is not just the heat that’s keeping me awake, though; it’s the incredibly loud yelling and clapping coming from the Community Center forty yards away.

The Community Center gets a lot of use, from meetings of the youth wings of the two major political parties, from community meetings with the chief and his elders, and from bogus-sounding medical screenings. However, I know without asking what’s going on tonight, because there’s only one draw that would get villagers, who are normally asleep by 8 PM, to stay up so late: Jesus.

It was only a matter of time before they started using the place for prayer meetings. Southern Ghana is the most emphatically Christian place I’ve ever been. I know I said the same about Kenya last year, but I was a fool; in comparison, Kenyans come off looking like a bunch of Gomorrans. Kenyan Christianity is, if not discreet, at least discrete. Sure, the airwaves are completely taken over by God, but just on Sundays. Kenyans will speak at length about their faith, but usually only when you ask them about it.

In Ghana, Christianity is everywhere, all the time, to an extent that probably would have made Jerry Falwell uncomfortable. On a 4 AM Tuesday morning bus ride, I was treated to a window-rattling radio sermon urging me to resist the temptation of fornication (thankfully, too- you know how 6-hour pre-dawn bus rides get people all hot and bothered otherwise). I think I was the only person bothered by this, though, as most Ghanaians are very much prepared to recite Biblical verse and have Biblical verse recited to them at any moment, much the way my brother and I quote lines from Will Ferrell movies to each other. I used to regret not knowing enough Twi or Sefwi to eavesdrop on people here and strike up conversation, but my trip to Accra, where English is fairly widely-spoken, cured me of that curiosity. It was as if the whole English-speaking population of the capital was in competition to see how many times they could fit “Thank God” and “God Bless” into their conversations.

Accra was educational in other ways, too. Throughout my time in Ghana, I’ve occasionally seen or run into Western missionaries, which always strikes me as funny. There are apparently enough of them that any white person is usually called Kwasi Bruni (“Sunday-born White Person”). What can all these missionaries do here? They are quite literally preaching to the converted. Perhaps Ghana is where they send missionaries with self-esteem issues, to buck up their confidence or something, as I can’t think of a place where they’d be more warmly received. At any rate, Accra showed me the other side of coin.

I was loitering in the neighborhood of Osu when a Ghanaian woman approached me and asked me if I had a minute to speak. I was so obviously killing time that I did not even try to lie, and it turns out she was from the Baptist church down the street and wanted to know the “exact nature of my relationship” with Jesus (“Just really good friends, thanks”). A few hours later, in a cab stuck in one of Accra’s many, many traffic jams, we were approached by a boy who came up to my window. It’s pretty common here for vendors to come up to car and bus windows proffering their wares, so I looked straight ahead and prepared to ignore him in order to convey my lack of interest. I was surprised, then, to feel a book fall into my lap. It was the New Testament. The boy announced that it was free, and when I told him that I had no need for it and tried to give it back, he thrust it towards me again. The driver said, “Go away, of course he already has a Bible.” The boy shook his head; there are enough brunis hanging around Osu for him to have known that we are more-or-less heathens. “Most of these brunis do not believe in Jesus, or even God,” the boy said with disgust. The driver looked at me, his face contorted by shock and his eyes reflecting a sense of betrayal. “No, no,” I stammered, hoping to restore peace and reward the driver for sticking up for me in the first place, “It’s just that I already have several Bibles at home. But thank you.” The boy shrugged and moved along.

Even here in the village, after one of the American volunteers declared himself agnostic, a local took it upon herself to convince him that God existed. It was a painful week of debate, like watching a Scopes Monkey Trial in which Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan had been replaced by the hosts of Crossfire, but I must admit that whether in Accra or the village, I enjoy the irony of Ghanaians targeting Americans and Europeans for their evangelizing. How long until Samoan ministers are building mission churches to save the godless New Yorkers, Ugandan Mormons start knocking on doors in San Francisco and Amazonian tribesmen begin telling European sunbathers that God wants them to cover their breasts? Papal watchers say we will probably see a Latin American or African pope in our lifetime, and why not? In religious fervor, we have nothing to teach the colonized and converted, and they have much to teach us. It may have taken a few centuries, but it’s about time they return the favor.

Trying Hard not to Title This 'A Tale of Two Cities'

2008-08-06T12:38:00.003-04:00

I just completed what I suppose is the first business trip of my life. While Ghana’s two largest cities, Accra and Kumasi, aren’t going to the land on the top of many Fodor’s readers’ lists, there are certainly worse destinations; my brother’s first trip in his new job was to Akron, Ohio. At any rate, it was instructive to see Accra and Kumasi, which, with respective populations of three million and two million, contain more than a fifth of Ghana’s population.

I was not a complete stranger to Kumasi. At two hours’ distance, it is the nearest real city, so I’ve run errands there a few times and become fond of it. It is one of the oldest cities in southern Ghana; founded as the capital of the nascent Ashanti kingdom in the late 17th century, its fortunes rose with those of the Ashanti, peaking at the turn of the 19th century, when it was the seat of power for an empire stretching from Cote d’Ivoire to Togo, from the coast to Burkina Faso. By the end of the century, though, the slave trade which funded Ashanti expansionism had been abolished, and the British had established the coastal towns- first Cape Coast, then Accra- as the center of power in Ghana. The Ashanti resisted colonial rule, but the ensuing wars saw Ashantiland placed under British administration and robbed Kumasi of much of its old architecture and city plan.

What has replaced it is a bustling, modern and very commercial city. At all hours, the traffic is jammed like a Manhattan rush hour, and the sidewalks are full of pedestrians and vendors. What is most striking, however, is the market. Kajetia is reputed to be the largest market in West Africa, and standing at the administrative tower in the middle of the madness, one could certainly believe it. It spreads out, a giant bowl in the heart of the city, covering almost 15 square hectares. It is difficult to think of something so large being too small, but it is; the 11,000 vendors in the market cover every inch of space in the market, and spill out into neighboring streets. There are plans afoot to start building up, since there is no place to build out.

From high atop the tower, Kajetia seems orderly and calm. It spreads out in neat rows of rusty, corrugated tin roofs. On the ground, however, it is a bit overwhelming. Giant wheeled carts pass through the narrow alleyways; you find your path impeded by a shipment of cow heads or a stack of cheap Chinese radios. You can find just about anything you could think of, and a fair number of things you wouldn’t think of: cowbells and percussion instruments made from auto parts, mancala boards decorated with pictures of players from the English Premiership. One vendor sells nothing but sandals made from old truck tires, another the fine leather ahenemaa sandals traditionally reserved for Akan chiefs. Do you want pre-colonial beads? There’s a row of stalls for those. A t-shirt from the African Cup of Nations soccer tournament last spring? Several hundred vendors could help you with that. Maybe a thousand vendors sell fabric, ranging from cheap imports to the finest locally-made kente and adinkra. As you work your way around the market, the smells change, too: from dry, salted fish and pig’s feet to handmade soap to freshly packaged cloves.

Yet beating under the surface of Kumasi is its old Ashanti heart. Behind walls (ironically) advertising skin bleaching cream, the National Cultural Center preserves a collection of artifacts from the reign of Osei Tutu, the first asantehene and the man who founded Kumasi and started the empire more than three hundred years ago. Across the road is a mausoleum, housing the remains of generations of Ashanti royalty, located on the grounds of Komfo Anokye Hospital, itself named after Osei Tutu’s fetish priest, who consulted the gods and called forth the golden stool. Behind the counters of many businesses, the proprietors have hung calendars and pictures of the current asantehene.

Even in Kajetia, tradition is not completely forgotten behind all of the commerce. Tucked in a corner near an old disused railroad track, the fetish section offers up the paws of giant cats, desiccated turtles, tiger skins and animal bones. All of this is used as part of the juju, the black magic and traditional healing, which after a century of Christianity, still has a foothold in Ghana. It would make Komfo Anokye proud.

Accra has an equally long, though more complicated, history. Before colonial rule, it was the seat of power for a non-Akan people called the Ga. It is still the headquarters for the Ga, but because of its importance to the nation and the overwhelming number of outsiders who have moved in over the past century, it is not a Ga city in the same way that Kumasi is an Ashanti city. Its colonial history was a strange one; in its different neighborhoods, it housed a Dutch castle, a British castle and a Danish castle. Though the British secured a monopoly over the city (and all of the Gold Coast) by the nineteenth century, Accra still feels disjointed. It is hard to comprehend that the bustle of Adabraka or James Town can exist in the same city as the leafy embassy-and-NGO-lined streets of Cantonments.

I was in Osu, once the Danish quarter, and now a rather upmarket neighborhood that houses the president (in the old castle) and attracts a lot of westerners. Like Kajetia, it offered any number of unimaginable of things for sale, though they were of a different variety: Vietnamese food, Arizona Iced Tea, root beer. I ate frequently at a food court, which served fast food chicken, pizza and burgers, but the real draw was the soft-serve ice cream. It also has a knock-off McDonald’s playground attached to it, complete with paintings of knock-off Disney characters (I suppose they’ve confused their giant American franchises). The whole neighborhood looked and felt less like the Ghana I have come to know than it did some middle-class commercial district in a Sun Belt city. Navigating its streets, I felt as disoriented as I had in the alleys of Kumasi.

Clearing the Bad Air

2008-07-26T04:56:00.001-04:00

Having signed up for a stint as the Health Coordinator for an NGO, I have no right to complain. Nonetheless, sometimes I feel like my days are devoted, in one hour increments, to all the scourges of modern Africa: a morning spent in a staff meeting on HIV/AIDS and calling a supplier about hookworm drugs, an afternoon of Yellow Fever, teenage pregnancy and overpopulation. All that’s missing, and I’m sure one day this will land on my agenda, is the horde of locusts to which I will devote exactly one hour of my time.

This week has stood in contrast to the ADD of Health Catastrophes. My attention has been devoted, almost wholly, to malaria. A group of volunteers has arrived from the US to work with us on a malaria survey and a public education campaign in Humjibre, as well as the distribution and retreatment of bed nets. For two weeks, it is Malaria Malaria Malaria here.

As well it should be, given the scope and impact it has. Malaria is caused by an infection of tiny parasites, transmitted by the bite of the female anopheles mosquito. The parasites enter the liver, then after an incubation period, spread to the bloodstream where they wreak havoc, causing problems that start with a fever and degenerate from there. What is perhaps most striking about the disease is its dual nature: it can be both banal and terrifying. To the adults of a nearby village, Suroano (“On the River Bank” in Sefwi), malaria is foremost a simple economic problem. The disease strikes them several times per year, disabling them for weeks and sending them for expensive treatment at the clinic. Here in Humjibre, virtually everyone has had malaria, and it is spoken of in much the same way we speak of the flu.

Yet malaria can be frighteningly dangerous. It preys on society’s most vulnerable: the very young, the physically weak and malnourished and, most of all, those without access to healthcare. For healthy adults, a course of pharmaceutical treatment and a week of bed rest is usually all that is needed to fight off the disease. But for babies and young children, and even adults who do not get treatment quickly, the disease can be overwhelming: the intense fever degrades the body’s organ system and can eventually disable the nervous system, causing seizures, comas and death.

Malaria is the single most important disease in the world, and except for a few years when the Plague ran wild, it always has been. Malaria has existed for as long as homo sapiens have, and it has taken its toll on us. By one estimate, fully half of all the people who have ever entered into this world have exited it because of malaria. It is a historical oddity that most of us will not only go through life without contracting malaria, but will never even meet someone who has. This is a disease that once made Washington, D.C. virtually uninhabitable, and killed more Civil War soldiers than did enemy bullets. Its footprint stretched far out of the tropics, from Europe (its name is Italian for bad air, the supposed source of the illness that would strike Rome every summer), across Asia to the United States.

Now it is has been sequestered. It exists in much of Latin America and southern Asia, but its stronghold is Africa, where the most virulent strain, plasmodium falciparum, predominates. It is here that malaria claims about 90% of its victims. The tactics of eradication- the filling in of swamps and drying of wetlands, the construction of secure homes, the improvement of sanitation and construction of closed sewers- which worked so well in Europe and the American South nearly a century ago have either never been employed or have failed here. For those with the money to afford it, chemical prophylaxis has always offered some measure of protection. Malaria, however, with its long history of interaction with humans, has become adept at outflanking these defenses. Quinine and chloroquine, two stalwarts, are nearly obsolete now, with most strains of malaria having become resistant.

Nevertheless, fifty years ago, it looked like malaria could be totally eradicated, even here: the spraying of DDT to keep mosquitoes out of homes cut sharply into the prevalence of the disease in Africa. Then, in a post-Silent Spring world, such spraying campaigns fell out of acceptability, and the disease came roaring back. In the intervening years, scientists have found anopheles that are resistant to DDT, which means spraying is no longer a silver bullet. So Africa remains, as badly afflicted by malaria as ever, a reminder of the time when we were all in malaria’s peril. The problem, however, has taken on grotesque proportions: there are regions of the continent with average annual infection rates above 100%, as many people contract it multiple times in a year.

Here we are, then, in the second century of our battle against malaria. We have returned to what worked last century, trying to reshape the environment rather than directly attacking the parasites or the mosquitoes. However, it is not with bulldozers and thousands of miles of cement that it is being reshaped. It is with simple nylon netting. If you cannot get rid of the mosquitoes- and in this environment, you cannot- you must create a barrier against them. The battle has become one of getting mosquito nets into the houses, shanties, shambas and kraals of sub-Saharan Africa and getting the residents of these homes to sleep under the nets.

The first task is difficult. Bed nets cost about $6 each, so equipping a large family with nets could cost $24, nearly a month’s pay here. The second task, however, is equally daunting. Our survey is designed not just to determine who will get the 50 new nets we plan to distribute, but will also follow up with past recipients of nets, to make sure they are using them properly. We fear they have not. Partly, this is because bed nets are uncomfortable. It is stifling to sleep under a net, and the hot, unventilated rooms that most people sleep in are stifling enough already. There is also a degree of acceptance of malaria. It has always been in the community, and so people feel a certain complacency. Finally, bed nets are not foolproof- like other methods of prevention, they only lower the risk and frequency of infection. A foot kicked out from under a net is susceptible to bites, and anyway, the nets obviously only work during the times you’re actually in bed. If, after some period of bed net usage, someone falls sick again, he is much less likely to put up with the annoyance of sleeping under the net.

This is not to say it is impossible. In Suroano, about 1,000 of the village’s 1,500 people sleep under bed nets, which were provided by us for free. We know that they still use them because community health workers come and inspect the homes to make sure that the nets are still hung and in working order. The people report that childhood mortality has decreased, as has the number of days lost to the disease and the amount of money devoted to curing it. The cash savings have been reinvested in building the infrastructure of the village. Of course, this required not just a huge influx of cash, but also the dedication of the town, from the chief and elders on down. We’re working toward that here in Humjibre, but it’s going to be tough. It might even take more than a whole week’s attention.

Turning on the Lights in Muoho

2008-07-12T13:50:00.000-04:00

There was most of a village crowded under that tin roof, or trying to press their way in. Five hundred people, from toddlers to nanas, squeezing into a space meant for a few dozen. Dusk was falling on Muoho, and for once there was electricity in the air. Quite literally.

It was not the presence of us obrunis that attracted the villagers, though once they arrived many certainly gaped at the foreigners. It was not the Peer Educators who attracted the villagers, though once the play about good and bad marriages began, the audience was in stitches. No, what brought the crowd was a bad Nigerian movie- the same bad Nigerian movie, in fact, that I panned last week.

It did not really matter that The Staff of Odo is a bad film, with stilted dialogue and paper-thin characters; after all, it is in English, a language which only a handful of people in the crowd could really understand. The crowd came just for the spectacle of it: the boom of the speakers we had rented, the video projected across the 5’X6’ whiteboard we had brought with us from the library in Humjibre. These were new things to Muoho.

Occasionally National Geographic or something like it will publish satellite photos of the world taken during nighttime, showing where the lights have been turned on and where they have not. Europe, the US and Japan are bathed in white, and most of the rest of the world is speckled or splotchy. In general, where there are people, there are lights. Then there is Africa: a few veins of light in South Africa, a spot here or there denoting the city lights of Nairobi, Lagos or Luanda, but otherwise it is indeed the Dark Continent.

Muoho is one of those countless dark places on the map. Perhaps it was the decision of some bureaucrat in Accra or Takoradi, or the District Assembly in Bibiani or the chief in Bekwai, maybe it was the work of a contractor skimming off the top and not finishing a job, or the result of a World Bank loan that never quite came through; whatever the reason, Muoho has been bypassed by electricity. Humjibre, three miles to the east, has electricity. Bekwai, three miles to the west, has electricity. Muoho, however, is a village of gas lamps, of tinny battery-powered radios, of early bedtimes.

What this means, if you’re a small NGO with a generator and the fuel to power it, is that you have a more-or-less captive audience for your message. So we rolled up to Muoho in a creaking 14-seater van, with 18 people, two 5’ speakers, an amp, a mixing board, lights, the 5’x6’ white board we took from the library, a laptop and a projector. If we passed through an American town with this retinue and hardware, we could be mistaken for a down-on-its-luck multi-racial rock band, but down-on-their-luck multi-racial rock bands don’t get the sort of reception we did. By the time we were setting up, there were a hundred people gathered under the tin roof of the open-air meeting place. By the time we put some hiplife songs over the sound system, there were three hundred. By the time we beamed the movie from my laptop onto the board, there were five hundred, and we had to stop the film shortly thereafter to make announcements to prevent a crushing or stampede. Even when we interrupted the movie so that we could get to real purpose of our visit, the educational play, the crowd pressed in. We had them hooked.

I feared a riot when we stopped the movie for good. We had played about fifteen minutes of it, interrupted it for the Peer Educators’ drama, and then played another forty minutes. It was getting late, though, and there remained at least an hour left on the film before we found out the secret of Odo (those of us, that is, who understood enough English to know that Odo had a secret). After much hand-wringing, we decided to pull the plug. There was no riot, however; people took it in stride and stayed in place as we stopped the movie, removed the lights, packed up the speakers, lit up the darkness with the sparks of poor electrical connections being undone. Then, eighteen of us piled back into the fourteen-seater van and left Muoho to its gas lamps, its tinny battery-powered radios, its early bedtime.

Who'll Stop the Rain?

2008-06-30T13:22:00.000-04:00

Last night was supposed to be a landmark evening. It was to be the first health outreach of my tenure, a performance in the neighboring village of Mouho. The Adult Peer Educators had written and rehearsed a play about the physical and mental strain that can accompany a bad marriage, with Ozuu stealing the show as the villainous husband who refused to help his wife with food preparation or even to help her lift the load of cocoa off her head. The generator was brought from storage, lights assembled, a DJ hired. It was to be an event. Instead, I spent the evening hunched over a laptop in my house, watching a low-budget Nigerian movie called The Staff of Odo.

The film told the story of a pre-colonial king who sought to ensure that the farmland would be held communally and the aristocratic elders who consequently plotted his downfall; it could have been an allegory for Lumumba in the Congo or Allende in Chile. The scene that stuck out to me, however, came when the king was trying to anoint his son as his successor. The king was slowly dying, perhaps of poison, and needed to quickly hold the ceremony naming his son the next king, lest the stool fall into the hands of the plotters. The catch, however, was that this was rainy season. Such a ceremony, his aides assured him, could not be held during the rain. Eventually the king found a mystic who was able to assure him that it would not rain on the selected day.

I wish I had such a person here, for it was not a fuel shortage or a funeral which stopped the show last night. It was a light rain. This was not exceptional: two of my three meetings last week were rained out, as were classes, visits and meals. We are in the very heart of the long rainy season. It rains several inches most days, usually late in the afternoon, when storm squalls build across the ridge and flood over town with lightning, strong winds and the kind of rain you almost never see in North America. It is a tropical rain, which seems to fill every inch of the space between the clouds and the ground, the sort that makes you wonder if there’s enough air left between the water to keep you from suffocating. If you’re inside, under one of the metal roofs that cover most buildings here, the sound of the rain on tin first chokes out all other noise, stops conversations short, and then builds to a climax so overpowering, so terrible that you think there must be a tornado, a train and a hurricane colliding above you.

The rain last night was not like that. It was a gentle rain, like Montreal in May, New Jersey in November. It didn’t matter; Ghanaians hate rain. Or, more accurately, they hate being in the rain. Rain is actually quite welcome here. Three quarters of the people in the district make their livelihood through agriculture, the majority of them with cocoa, a crop that needs abundant rainfall. Yet, while rain is welcome, it is wildly disruptive. When it rains, school attendance suffers, church attendance suffers, work attendance suffers. Meetings are aborted, events are cancelled, and if it comes before dinner is cooked, you may go to sleep hungry.

This is the result of a man-made environment ill-suited for the rain. African life, by and large, occurs outdoors. Transport is mostly by foot, occasionally by bicycle. Shopping occurs at open-air stalls. Manufacturing occurs along the side of the road. Outdoor ovens or fire pits are as common as indoor kitchens. The heat makes closed-wall buildings unattractive, so meeting grounds and even churches are frequently open-air affairs. When the sun is shining, this makes for a lively environment. I love watching the scene from a bus window here, because you can see virtually every facet of life. Women hunch over cauldrons, vendors walk down the street with their bananas, water and crab legs on their heads, schoolchildren file by in uniform, church groups pour out in caps and gowns, singing gospel songs, people weld car parts and sand down coffins in front of their stores, sending sparks and wood shavings flying into the street. Everything from love to commerce is on display. If you ride around an American town, you will learn almost nothing about its inhabitants. If you ride around one here, you can get an (admittedly superficial) glance at almost everything.

Yet this quality which makes Ghana such a fascinating place during good weather makes it dreadfully boring when it rains. There are no heated houses to warm soaked bodies, no driers to warm soaked clothes. The paths and small dirt roads turn into muddy creeks. The idea of going outside is as unappealing to me as it is to the locals. I can sit on the porch and watch the storm roll over me, but once night falls and the rain continues on, I’m left with little choice. I retire to my poorly-lit room, wait to do battle with the mosquitoes that breed in all of this water, and pop a Nigerian movie into my computer.

Stoolish Intrigue

2008-06-23T09:07:00.000-04:00

“The seat of power”. “The sitting governor”. The Throne. The judges’ bench and the lowly Parliamentary backbenchers. The executive chair. Power is what you sit in, and this is no less the case in Ghana than in the West. The difference is that Ghanaians exalt what may be, to the Western mind, the lowliest form of sitting implement: the stool. Wobbly and backless, the province of barstool philosophers, the stool is what we carry up from the basement and dust off when we have more guests than we do seating capacity.

Not here. The stool is the essential symbol of the hereditary, divinely-willed chieftainship for many of Ghana’s peoples. The most famous of these is the Golden Stool of the Ashanti, upon which the Ashanti king, the Asantehene, sits. At the peak of Ashanti power in the nineteenth century, southern and central Ghana as well as a large swatch of Cote d’Ivoire was administered from that stool. When the British seized the Ashanti capital, Kumasi, at the turn of the last century and deposed King Prempreh I, they also sought to seize the Golden Stool. The elders had anticipated this demand, however, and had created a fake stool which they gave to the British, while hiding the real Golden Stool until the reign of Prempreh II started in the 1930’s.

The chieftainship here in town also revolves around a stool. As it so happens, a new chief was just enstooled a few weeks before I arrived. He stopped by the office the other day, dressed in traditional attire (a Ghanaian toga, essentially) and trailed by his council of elders. He made a much more majestic first impression than had the chief of Dol Dol, who I first encountered as he was wondering alone down a path through the bush, carrying an assault rifle and dressed in military fatigues. But then, this chieftainship is much more significant. Among the Maasai of Dol Dol, authority was always decentralized to peer age groups and family elders, with no strong tradition of chiefs. They were the creation of the British colonial government, and even today they are appointed by the federal government and serve at the pleasure of the District Commissioner. In much of West Africa, including most of Ghana, authority has for centuries been vested locally in village chiefs and regionally in paramount chiefs. Disputes and disagreements are still brought before the chief to be adjudicated. He is not entirely autocratic, however. He has a council of elders with whom he must consult, and though his term is theoretically a lifetime one, he is forced to abdicate if he violates traditional law or loses the support of the elders or population at large. Since colonial times, chiefs have also had competition from bureaucrats, judges and politicians who have taken over some of their functions, and there exists

From what I’ve been told, this most recent chiefly transition was not without controversy. The outgoing chief was abdicating the stool because he was living in the US and the townspeople were dissatisfied with his absentee rule (in fact, the story is that he formally abdicated to the council of elders during a ceremony which he conducted over speaker phone from Virginia). Traditionally, the chiefs inherit the stool and the finery that goes with it, and they’re obliged to add to that finery during their reign, so that each succession makes the stool more magnificent. The problem is that this particular chief had not added to the finery, and being in the US, was rather outside the reach of traditional social control which might compel him to do so. The elders had a trump card, however. The chieftainship here rotates among the four branches of a ruling clan, and the elders warned the chief that if he did not contribute to the improvement of the stool, his branch would be cut out of the rotation. The chief’s extended family here in Ghana- which had ambitions of their children getting a shot at the stool- raised hell with the chief, and miraculously the objects appeared shortly thereafter. The stool’s glory was enhanced, the ruling dynasty was maintained and authority passed from one set of cheeks to another.

A Weekend on the Ghanaian Coast; or "Accuracy no Rasta"

2008-06-18T10:50:00.000-04:00

It may seem obvious, but a visit to an old slaving fort is not the best way to start a fun beach vacation. This is, I would think, one of the main impediments to Ghana developing a conventional tourism industry- its long coastline along the Gulf of Guinea is punctuated, at regular intervals, by old slave castles. Nowhere on the coast is too far from the forts that you could justify not visiting one- it would be willful ignorance, burying your head in the sand.

So it is that Ray and I came to Cape Coast Castle. The most famous of them all, it sits above the small harbor in the old capital of the Gold Coast colony. The city of Cape Coast is an atmospheric place; the British colonists contributed much of the design and the architecture and the local inhabitants contributed much of the color and life. Its focus, however, is unquestionably the Castle. Western tourists troop there, not so much with a sense of excitement, but one of obligation, even dread.

My first thought was that the Castle was far too pretty a building for the purposes it served. A slave fort should be austere, even scary- dark stone walls, parapets and turrets, distorted gargoyles, spikes and bars. Cape Coast Castle looks like the nicest administrative building in Gibraltar or Santa Barbara. It is white walls, red tile roofs, balconies and staircases- the exterior fortifications and the cannons seem like after thoughts. It was originally built in the seventeenth century, changed hands many times, and ended up, after the close of the slave trade, as the administrative center for the colony, which perhaps explains its current benign look. Regardless, coming upon this place was a bit like finding Auschwitz set in a sun-dappled meadow, traversed by clean, babbling brooks.

The real horror of the place comes below, however, in the slave dungeons. This is where the captives were held, for weeks or months, in near total darkness, awaiting the ships that were to carry them to the Americas. The thing that strikes visitors, and unsettles them when it does, is just how small the dungeons are. A thousand slaves at a time were kept in a handful of chambers the size of classrooms. This was spacious compared to what was to follow in the Middle Passage.

The tour itself is, if not light, as far from maudlin and melodramatic as you could make it. It is understated in its horror, I should say. At the end, there is even a display about the positive impacts of the slave trade. And while those of us from the West- white and black- were stony-faced the whole time, the Ghanaians were more laid back, trying to lift up the old ammunition rusting away by the cannons and letting their children run around on the ramparts. There is just one real gut-punch stop on the tour and it comes near the end. There is a doorway through which the slaves passed, on the way out of the dungeon and towards the transport ships. It is labeled The Door of No Return.

We emerged from the fort destined for days at the beach, but I was hardly in the mood for it. We traveled down the coast to the twin villages of Butre and Busua. Ghana does not receive many normal tourists, but it does do good business with the do-gooders, volunteers and NGO workers not just in Ghana, but from throughout West Africa. Busua is the center of this trade, the place to which every Peace Corps volunteer from Togo to Ouagadougou seems to turn for relaxation. It is like any other small town in Ghana, except much of it is given over to serving the whims of homesick foreigners. As such, it provides an interesting look at what we miss when we’re far from home: pancakes (there are dozens of places advertising them), Thai food and pool tables. Mostly, though, I’d guess that they miss each other, which is why they all flock to one otherwise non-descript section of coast.

That is in-season, of course, and this was decidedly out of season. Rain, clouds and wind mark this time of year, the rainy season, and keep the foreigners away. There were as many tourists in town as hotels, making it a sad, sleepy place. In one restaurant, the proprietor had to have us pay in advance so that he could afford to buy the ingredients. After the meal, he got on his knees and begged for money so that he could pay his electricity bill and have his lights restored. On the walls, the messages scrawled by past diners- “Your food is SO FETCH- Chrissy, USA”, “Wish I could live in this restaurant- Owen, PCV, Burkina Faso”- seemed, like Mayan glyphs on an old temple wall, to be legacies of a glorious, but ancient, past. The dates, however, were from just seven, eight, nine months ago.

Across the headland in Butre, I stayed in a small place on the beach which had also, incidentally, lost its electricity for some number of months. The place was owned by a Swede, but came with a number of hangers-on, mostly Rastafarians. I’ve found my tolerance for Rastas lasts about five minutes, after which every banal piece of advice (“Gotta live wit’ no worries”), every verse of a cappella reggae they sing, every utterance of “Respect!” just adds to my aggravation. I was not happy. Ray is a member of an ultimate Frisbee team, so he pulls out the disc whenever he gets the chance. We were tossing it around on the beach with one Rasta who, I suppose aiming it towards me, threw it 90 degrees in the wrong direction and into the deep ocean. After many minutes of searching, we finally found the Frisbee. The Rasta pulled me aside.
“You got to work on your pursuit, young man.”
“You have to work on your accuracy.”
“Accuracy no Rasta.”

Inheritances

2008-06-09T06:34:00.001-04:00

I’m a bit inactive at the moment- I don’t yet know enough to be much good to anyone, and so I’ve mingled with the neighbors, gone to briefings, and spent a lot of time sitting on the porch. I have a lot of time to write but very little to write about. So I’ve read. I finished up Primary Colors, which seemed much more topical when I started it Tuesday night in the departure lounge at JFK, straining my ears to listen to Obama’s speech, than it did here in Ghana (though Obama is as much a media darling here as anywhere; I learned about Mama Clinton’s decision to drop out while riding the bus Thursday, someone translating the Twi radio broadcast for me). I’ve also been reading Ryszard Kapuscinski’s The Shadow of the Sun. It is a collection of the Polish journalist’s dispatches from Africa, written between the late 1950’s and mid 1990’s, and it is the best book on Africa I’ve ever read. Thematically, his writings are not so noteworthy- they tend towards the human interest, day-in-the-life narratives that you can find many places (I’m thinking here of Nick Kristoff’s column in the Times, which probably has Kapuscinksi, at some level, as its inspiration). However, Kapuscinski is a splendid writer, and the book exists at the nexus of journalism and literature. Further, he has a wonderful analytical mind. Several times, I’ve recognized his observations and arguments, formulated decades ago, repeated- knowingly or otherwise- by contemporary political scientists and anthropologists.

The best chapters in the book deal with the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, when most of Africa gained its independence. It was a fascinating time, of hope and optimism among the native African population (to be read now, I suppose, with dramatic irony) and fear, sadness and nostalgia among the European administrative class. Many writers- Kapuscinksi, Ngugi wa’Thiongo, Chinua Achebe among them- have mined the plight of these whites for material. Those final days of the ancien regime: the master of the estate saying goodbye to his loyal, but deeply conflicted, servants; the bureaucrat aghast to find an African sitting behind his desk; old colonial service lifers meeting one last time to drink and swap stories about so-and-so at the post in Banjul back in ’37; and, invariably, bidding farewell to the family dog. Every colonial official, in literature and reportage, had a dog. Found and tamed, the dog would be passed along to the next person to inherit the post, so that the position of exchequer general in Ibadan or postmaster of Jinja would come with a house, a staff, an official car and Scooter, the collie, or Scooter would be given to a colleague who, and this was rare, did not have a dog already.

This practice has continued among Africa’s expat community. One does not have to dig deep psychologically to understand why this would be: in a land that is frequently foreign, bewildering and lonely, dogs remind us of comfortable domesticity. If you are the one to train the dog, you will have an English-understanding friend in a land where you struggle to make yourself understood in Chewa. And so it is that I’ve come to inherit Scruffy from a predecessor. I don’t know what kind of breed Scruff is, though she’s the kind of smaller dog I’m usually more tempted to kick than to adopt. I’m a bit torn on Scruff. On one hand, she’s cute and she’s very sweet to me (knowing who butters her bread) and she’s low maintenance. On the other hand, I think she’s trouble. She hates sheep, and whenever one wanders near the house she snarls and bolts after it. I’m afraid one day she’ll catch one of the lambs- afraid because lambs, unlike Scruff, are worth something here. She also hates children, hates when they come close. I think this must be because the children throw rocks at her- I’ve seen children throw small stones at chickens and lambs and adults throw them at children here, so I assume they do it to dogs- but regardless, a constant stream of terrified, crying kids running away from my house is not the impression I wanted to make. There is also the question of priorities. My left-overs go into Scruff’s bowl, not to the hungry here. I was left with instructions to take Scruff to the vet if she gets sick; this in a district where thousands of human cases of malaria go untreated. Once Ray asked if there was an obedience school we could take Scruff to, in a country where one-in-five children will never see the inside of a school. Yet here I am, taking care of Scruff. Maybe it’s partly out of obligation, but I’m sure it’s partly out of the feeling I get when Scruff ignores someone’s Sefwi commands but runs over immediately when I say “Come.” A friend, a compatriot.

I’ve inherited something else from my predecessors: a gnarly food stash. I’m about three hours from the nearest supermarket, so I had figured my culinary fate was to go native. This is not quite the punishment it would have been in Kenya, since Ghanaian food is heavy on starches, good, spicy sauces and rice dishes. Nevertheless, there are only so many ways to prepare plantains and yams, and five months of it would kill me. So, I was excited to stumble across a container of preserved food: ramen noodle packets, mac and cheese, instant mashed potatoes, instant gravy, miso soup mix, boil-in Indian food bags, powdered refried beans, even a vacuum-sealed, Southwestern-seasoned chicken breast. A lucky find, indeed, as now I won’t have to eat my other inheritance.

The On-High Road to Humjibre and Battling The Nightmare Bugs

2008-06-07T06:22:00.001-04:00

Greetings from the center of the known universe: Humjibre, Ghana. It’s Saturday morning, the people are up, the mosquitoes are napping, and the palm trees are shimmying in the breeze. Life is good.

I arrived here Thursday night. After long flights and a very short rest, my boss and I hopped on an Accra-Kumasi bus, transferred to a Kumasi-Sefwi Bekwai bus and then took a shared taxi down the surprisingly well-paved Bekwai-Humjibre road. It was an all-day affair, 10 hours of heat and tsetse flies, of snake-oil salesmen pitching their ointments and bus drivers leading us in prayer (which instills less confidence than you would think). The scenery was pleasant, but bland. The landscape seemed to alternate between densely scrubby and lightly wooded, except for the minute and a half during which we passed through what must be the smallest rainforest in the world.

This is just as well, because it allowed me focus in on one of my favorite developing world activities: sign reading. The hobby started in Cayambe, Ecuador when I passed a store called Lolita’s Children’s Clothing Bazaar, but I think Ghana is proving to be my most fertile hunting ground. The Ghanaians have taken the Kenyan business owners’ habit of plastering the interior of their businesses with religious slogans and gone a step further. Thus, you have the Choose Jesus Hair Salon, Christ the Redeemer Food Kiosk and the Christians’ Drinking Spot. All told, I’d say about one in every eight businesses has an overtly religious name. My personal favorites were the By His Will Rasta Hair-Do Salon and the Holy Virgin Photography studio (which would be engaged in something entirely different if it were located in the San Fernando Valley). There are, as everywhere, those that don’t quite conform to this piety, and I am particularly fond of the owner- whoever he is- of the Lover Boy Internet Café in Kumasi.

Having survived- physically and mentally- that journey, I am safely ensconced in Humjibre. I’ve gotten a tour of the village, seen its schools, its churches, its bars, its stores, its cocoa farms and its cocoa depots. I’ve met some of its people and some of its more spectacular insects. There was the 9-or-10” long snail, which we flung off our porch and which left a breathtaking trail of slime. There were also the insects, which I’ve never seen before or even heard of, that I can best describe as flying scorpions. Seemingly better-suited for the late Jurassic period or a particularly fevered nightmare, these almost-baseball-sized creatures are heavily-armored, equipped with a stinger and can draw blood if they fly into you (though, from what I’m told, they’re not poisonous). They seem to be attracted to the light on our porch, so after a few near-misses, my housemate Ray and I decided to shut off the light and enjoy the darkness. I think daylight will be my friend here, so I am off to enjoy it.

Ghana, Ho! As opposed to Ho, Ghana

2008-06-01T23:03:00.008-04:00

In about 48 hours, my plane to London will take off from JFK, carrying me to a connecting flight to Accra, and I'm as excited to be heading off as I am sad to be leaving McGill. I'll be spending the next five months in Ghana, a country on Africa's Gulf of Guinea. My home for the next half-year is in the western region of the country, in a village called Humjibre, located between the major city of Kumasi and the border with the Ivory Coast (the nearest city on this map is Awaso). It's a community of cocoa farmers, from the Sefwi ethnic group- distant cousins of the nearby, famous Ashanti.

My job should not be so different from what I did in Kenya. I'm working for an NGO in Humjibre as the health program coordinator. I'll be helping two groups of peer educators spread messages about disease prevention and treatment, family planning, nutrition and other health issues, and I'll also be helping to coordinate the stay and work of some short-term volunteers from North America and Europe. There are other projects and duties, but I'll talk about them as they come up.

Anyway, I don't have a whole lot to say at this point. I really just needed an excuse to post these maps while I still have an internet connection with the capacity to do so. I'll write again from the other side of the ocean.

Blogging anew, as I audition for a Poli Sci Ph.D.

2008-05-17T02:58:00.010-04:00

Well, hello again! It's sure been a while. A lot has happened since last I wrote: I started school, Kenya fell into shambles and then resurrected itself with, somehow, a more ridiculous form of government, I graduated from school. Oh, and I got a job in Ghana, which is why this blog has returned at all.You'll note the slightly tweaked title here- this is to reflect the fact that we're moving beyond the cozy, machete-ish confines of Kenya.

Before I head off to Ghana, though, I want to say a few things about Kenya, since I was sorely tempted to do so in January but figured it wouldn't get read. And I warn you, this is entirely analytical; I wish I had stories about running roadblocks of burning tires or of rescuing (and subsequently hugging in a photogenic manner) African children to spice this up, but I followed the crisis in Kenya from a couch in Pennington and a futon in Montreal. You're warned, then, that this is dry, but I promise to make it up to you when I begin taking my anti-malarials next week and start to hallucinate.

Anyway, I will say that I was a bit surprised by the amount of media coverage devoted to Kenya last winter. So often, major events in Africa slip away relatively unnoticed. A few thousand people killed in eastern Congo, a TB epidemic in South Africa, famine in Niger- these stories pop up on the margins of the BBC website, but make little dent in our consciousness. Even avid newshounds can be unaware of longstanding conflicts- has the name Casamance been uttered once on CNN during the decades-long war there? So, in this context, I was surprised to see pretty widespread coverage of the violence in Kenya. I suppose Kenya is famous enough, with its Out of Africa romance and its tourist resort relevancy, that it merits news attention.

That said, the coverage was almost uniformly bad. The violence was portrayed as the product of a deeply-flawed, deeply-divided society, in which the members of the different tribes had just been biding their time before they could sink their machetes or arrows into the flesh of one another. Reporters seemed to follow a template left-over from Rwanda (never-mind that their coverage of Rwanda was wrong, too), and failed to see Kenyan society as it really is. Tribal violence is rare outside of election periods, and is largely confined to cattle raiding. On a day-to-day basis, tribe appears to actually be a much less important division in Kenya than race is in the United States. There's no legacy of legal segregation of tribes, nor is there as much self-segregation as there is in the United States. Neighborhoods, even families, are rather mixed. A lot of people hold allegiances, through blood or marriage, to multiple ethnic groups. And if the Democratic campaign this spring has taught us nothing else, it's that voting along racial lines is not the sole province of dysfunctional African democracies.

The dysfunction in Kenyan democracy is the real story, however. The violence stems not from flaws in the social structure, but from flaws in the political structures. The political parties were bankrupt in their ideology and in their policies- the consequence, perhaps, of the international demand for balanced budgets and the cuts to discretionary spending as a result. The police are incapable of stopping violence even at the best of times, and the courts cannot effectively adjudicate disputes or administer justice. The Electoral Commission is not autonomous enough or strong enough to oversee a real campaign (though, I suppose, it's no more messed up than the FEC is). In short, many of the important institutions necessary for a democracy are missing in Kenya. The violence in Kenya was not the product of some ancient, tribal hatreds, it was the product of decades of failed policy and institution-building.

Alas, soon I'm off to Ghana. Apparently that country "works", with fair and safe elections and a government that occasionally improves the lives of its citizens. I'll run some roadblocks, hug some children and tell you how it goes.

Farewell to the Other

2007-08-07T04:27:00.000-04:00

Dol Dol is somewhere behind me, in the green grass, mud and inundated gullies of Mukogodo in a rainy season. Saturday was my last day there, and after another day in Nanyuki to tie up some loose ends, I’ll get to play tourist for two weeks in Nairobi and on the coast. My mom sent me an email predicting that my last days in Dol Dol would be bittersweet, and of course she was right. There’s something in human nature, I think, that leads us to romanticize a place that we’re leaving after a long time. No matter how angry or frustrated a place makes us, there will always be things which tug at our hearts, which make us wish we had a few more weeks to spend there. I imagine, even as Moses led them across the parted Red Sea, there were more than a few Israelites thinking about how much they’d miss seeing the light of late afternoon reflected off the Nile.

Of course, Dol Dol tested this theory by showing its most repulsive side as we were leaving. At our farewell party on Friday night, one of my bosses got stupendously drunk, stole 500 shillings meant to reimburse us for the party expenses, kicked, punched and beat a fellow attendee and then passed out in the street. At a soccer game Saturday afternoon, a woman got stupendously drunk, started a fight, punched a baby in the head and was then beaten very nearly to death by her own brother as dozens of people cheered him on. Even still, the theory holds.

Part of my premature nostalgia revolved around saying farewell to my friends, of which I can count quite a few. It’s not just a feeling of missing them, but of abandoning them to the intermittent boredom and insanity that marks the day-to-day life of the place. But there are other attachments: to the sunsets over the mountains, to scattering the Vervet monkeys that cluster among the cacti, to the way young women, upon seeing an elder along the road, stop and stand stock still with their heads bowed until they’re acknowledged by the elders. I don’t think I would agree to return to Dol Dol for another three months, but I’ll miss the place.

If I returned, however, I’d find it a very different place- Dol Dol has been awarded its district. It’s fitting, in a way, that the issue which exploded during my first week in Dol Dol should be resolved during my last. From what I’ve heard, I have the speaker of the Parliament to thank for the closure. A Laikipiak Maasai and a local boy, he decided it was time to give up his job- and with good reason, since the speaker doesn’t get to vote on bills or shape policy, but instead has the unenviable task of getting Kenyan parliamentarians to show up on time and follow proper procedure. He decided he wanted to be a bona fide MP, which couldn’t happen in Kikuyu-dominated Laikipia, so he lobbied quietly for months, and the result is Laikipia North, a district and constituency to be headquartered in Dol Dol. Its boundaries, in keeping with the Kenyan political tradition, were drawn to ensure the greatest possible degree of ethnic homogeneity: the Maasai, just 10% of the old Laikipia District, will represent 90% of the population of Laikipia North. Because the Laikipiak Maasai are a tiny ethnic group, with only around 20,000 people, the district will be one of Kenya’s smallest, but it will bring all the trappings and perks of district-hood to Mukogodo.

The survey for the electrical lines has been done already, and the work will start next week to bring electricity from Meru to Dol Dol. The speaker is selling his house in town to the government (at an exorbitant price) so that it can house the new District Commissioner, who is arriving sometime this month. The various ministries and district offices will probably be built along the road in from Nanyuki. That spine-shattering road is going to be leveled and paved all the way from Nanyuki to Dol Dol, and a new road will run east from Dol Dol to Meru. As a result, Dol Dol will lose what is, to my mind, its defining characteristic: its location at what is literally the end of the road. Very soon, it will find itself part of the wider world. Safaricom has already picked out where it’s going to build its new cell tower, and the internet is sure to follow the government into town.

Of course, people have been thrilled by the news. Money will flow in- Laikipia North will get its own Constituency Development Fund, a sum of money transferred from the central government to each parliamentary constituency to be used on local development projects. The new district will get its own Constituency AIDS Control Council (CACC) and District AIDS and STD Control Officer (DASCO) to throw funds around, which would have been great to have two months ago when we were scouring the division for money. The Laikipiak Maasai will now control a seat in Parliament, and it’s therefore a safe bet that national political leaders will visit the community more often and be more generous when they do.

But the community has been flooded by money before and is no richer for it. Three or four years ago, a lot of locals in Dol Dol were awarded a huge cash settlement by the British government for the pain and suffering caused by accidents involving old military ordinance left on their land. The money that each of them received reached into the hundreds of thousands of dollars and, in an area where the average annual income is much less than $1,000, could seemingly last even a wastrel of a Maasai for several lifetimes- but every last shilling of it is already gone. The victims/beneficiaries recently went on TV to claim that the British had cursed the money, but there’s a simpler explanation. The Maasai of Dol Dol have shunned cash and bank accounts as stores of value; in the local reckoning, that’s what cattle are for. Money is for spending. So when some of these men got huge sums of money, they spent it. Most of it was blown on beer and women, but some people put it to more extravagant use, chartering flights to posh lodges in Maasai Mara for lunch, Mombasa for dinner. Some of the money went to cattle, but most of those cows died during the drought. No one used it to buy businesses, build houses, or improve the local infrastructure; so far as I know, the largest investment made with the lawsuit earnings was a mid-sized truck. Nobody built a fortune with that money, and because they developed expensive tastes and addictions, most of the awardees are poorer than they were before they got the money.

So I’m not ready to celebrate for Dol Dol just yet. I don’t know if I’ll find things any better if I return- I just know it will be different. For me, and for the people of Dol Dol, it’s time to say goodbye to the Other, and hello to Kenya.

The truth about Kisumu, uncut

2007-07-28T10:07:00.000-04:00

This has been a bad year for the improbable, comforting illusions we hang onto. We had convinced ourselves that David Sedaris was a genius, capable of teasing the ridiculous out of the mundane events of true life; this year, we found out that he fabricated those events. We had convinced ourselves that NBA refs, while bad at their job, were at least doing their best to call a fair game; this year, we found out that at least one was fixing matches. So it was with trepidation that I went to Kisumu, the heart of Luoland. The Maasai find the Luo fascinating, and I’d heard some fantastic things about the Luo: that they all drive Hummers, that even the street children speak English amongst themselves, that they subsist exclusively on tilapia. They sort of sounded like American suburbanites, and I was afraid a trip to Kisumu would ruin the image in my mind of a little bit of Monmouth County along the shores of Lake Victoria. Indeed, just like David Sedaris and Tim Donaghy, the Luo let me down.

As it turned out, the Luo do fry themselves up a mean tilapia, but it’s hardly a staple (especially now that Lake Victoria is running out of fish) and they eat the same pilau, ugali, chapatti and goat stew that the rest of Kenya eats. The English skills of the Luo were similarly overstated. Most conversation is in Dholuo, a Nilotic language closely related to Nuer and Dinka. Certainly, though, you hear more English and less Swahili than you do in other cities in Kenya. The Luo think that this is because, as Nilots rather than Bantus, they find Swahili particularly difficult to learn, though this hasn’t stopped the Nilotic Maasai, Samburu and Kalenjin from picking up Swahili. Maybe a better explanation is the close historic and economic ties Luoland has to neighboring Uganda, where English predominates over Swahili. All the same, I had more difficulty communicating than I would have in, say, Keyport. Finally, I failed to see even a single Hummer during my time in Kisumu. The city does have, however, a lot of motorcycle rickshaws, bicycles with extra seats on the back for passengers, and at least one matatu with a checker-board ceiling, neon decals of hip-hop stars from the early part of this decade, and a DVD player and surround-sound system to play pirated rap videos.

There are two more distinguishing characteristics to the Luo, attributed to them by actual, published reports rather than drunk Maasai: that they are the only major tribe in Kenya not to circumcise their males, and that they are fanatically devoted to perennial presidential aspirant and bona fide Hummer driver Raila Odinga. Kisumu bucks the trend of Kenyan towns by relegating Jomo Kenyatta’s name to a secondary street and naming the main drag after Oginga Odinga, Raila’s daddy and a prominent Luo politician of days past. People love their Raila in Kisumu, and since the Luo are the second or third-largest ethnic group in Kenya, Raila rode this support to national prominence. It appears likely that Raila will win the nomination of the major opposition party to run against Kibaki in December, but few people think he’ll beat the president. It’s funny to note (just not to a Luo) that Barack Obama’s father came from a village near Kisumu, and it’s therefore likely that America will elect a Luo president before Kenya does. It’s not a perfectly fair comparison, however, because one of the main criticisms lobbed at Raila is that an uncircumcised man is unfit to govern the country, while I don’t believe that particular litmus test has been used in American politics yet, except perhaps by Lyndon Johnson.

All of that said, I really liked Kisumu. It has a relaxed feeling of slow, tropical decay, perhaps the consequence of its process of slow, tropical decay. Once a prosperous, bustling lake port, Kisumu has been decimated by three imports: sugar, water hyacinth, and HIV. The dumping of European sugar on the East African market has nearly killed off the Kenyan sugar industry, which was centered on the Luo villages surrounding Kisumu. Water hyacinth, a hydrophilic weed, was introduced a few decades into Lake Victoria, and spread rapidly to the point where it choked off ports and made shipping between Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda impossible. HIV arrived from across the lake in Uganda, and quickly found a home in polygamous and frequently promiscuous Luo society. Nyanza province, and its capital Kisumu, now have the highest infection rates in Kenya, nearly 30%. The only thing that belies this economic decay is the presence of a large and wealthy South Asian community, whose members live in large Mediterranean-style houses on the lakeshore south of the center and whip around town in silver Mercedes sedans. They do lend an exotic, Oriental feel to the city, with ornate mosques and temples dotting the city, and good Indian food on almost every menu in the city.

Also in Kisumu’s favor is its lack of tourists. Remote, far from the elephants and mountains of central Kenya, Kisumu is way off the tourist-circuit. You can tell by the quality of the nature guides. Guides tend to be very good in Kenya, frequently encyclopedic in their knowledge of plants and animals. Our guide at the Luo fishing village of Dunga, where we took a boat onto Lake Victoria to look at the big, goofy hippos, was a bit different. He quickly admitted that he didn’t have much experience with tourists, since few came to Dunga, but that would have quickly become evident anyway, as rather than provide us with information about the animals, he told us in great detail about his dreams of mating with hippos, and his lingering fears that he may be inadequate, anatomically speaking, for the task.

The next day we were in Kakamega, north of Kisumu, a land populated by the Luhya, proudly Bantu-speaking and circumcised. At the beautiful rainforest there, we were guided around and told the scientific names of all of the plants and trees, their life cycles, and how the bark of one could be used to treat malaria. The guide did not say a word about his bestial desires for the black-and-white colobus monkey. Ah, here we were. Safely back on the tourist trail.

A good day for the peanut vendor of Kericho

2007-07-23T06:43:00.000-04:00

One of the values that Kenyans like to identify in themselves is resourcefulness. And so when a bus drove off the Kericho-Kisumu road, tilted on 2 wheels, and wedged itself at a 45 degree angle into the mud of a tea-field, someone sensed a business opportunity. He dashed from town with a tray of peanuts, which he sold for 30 shillings per bag to the jumpy bus passengers milling along the side of the road. It took two hours of digging, pushing, and pulling to get the bus back on the road, so the vendor was able to sell of his whole stock. Of course, there was nothing noteworthy about this event, bus crashes and hawking being two prominent beats in the rhythm of Kenyan life, and I wouldn't have mentioned it except that I was one of the passengers.

I really have no one to blame but myself. Sure, the driver was talking to his friend, eyes off the road, when we slowed down and drove down the ditch, but that's what Kenyan bus drivers do. No, I should have known better- the warning signs were all there. I had convinced Vivien that we should take the bus from Nakuru instead of the matatu on the grounds that the bus was safer. Of course, Kenya likes to confound reasonable thinking and logical planning. If you cut a vacation a day short to get to a meeting, you'll find the meeting has been postponed a day. If you walk a mile across town just to get a plate of your favorite pilau, you'll find that the restaurant has just run out. So of course, if you take a bus for safety reasons, it will crash. I should have known.

The second cause for concern was the pastor. He came on-board as the bus was filling up, and delivered a long sermon about the importance of prayer. Once, he told us, he had asked people on a similar bus to join him in a prayer of appreciation for God, and after being rudely turned down, the bus left Nakuru and was promptly hijacked. He asked us to bow our heads and join him. After the story we had heard, what choice did we have? The passengers all prayed, and afterward, the pastor left the bus telling us that because of our prayers, God would guarantee a safe and easy passage. As we stood, four hours later, looking at our listing bus sinking into the deep mud, someone mumbled "That pastor was really the devil in disguise." I don't know. I just think God doesn't appreciate having words put in His mouth by a two-bit bus station minister. I empathize with Him.

A new book about wizards

2007-07-19T04:30:00.000-04:00

I've been told that the newest (and last?) Harry Potter book is coming out very soon, and I figured this was as good a time as any to take up the magic literary mantle. I mean, if J.K. Rowling makes millions and millions of dollars writing about fictional wizards and witches, I ought to be able to make even more writing about the very real ones that live near me.

Of course, when I write the book, maybe I'll leave out the story about the cursed family of Kimanjo. Too sad, especially for a teenage audience. Kimanjo is a wild sort of place, in the forests west of Dol Dol, with no school but lots of leopards and lions. One family there has had a run of bad fortune over the past year that, I'm told, cannot be explained by natural circumstances. The patriarch of the family died of AIDS, and upon finding this out, his wife killed herself. One of the children died in an automobile wreck shortly thereafter. Last week, the patriarch's first wife, quite drunk, tried to cross a swollen river and was swept away to her death. All that's left of the family is two children, and the hunt is on in Kimanjo for the witch who administered the curse.

I think the story of Jackiline is cheerier. She was once married to a man, my neighbor, and quickly had a child with him. They divorced and married others, and she tried unsuccessfully to have another child with her new husband. After a few years of trying, the husband divorced the wife, on the grounds of her infertility. She married a third man, and again tried to have a child- once again, the efforts were futile and her husband divorced her. Despondent, she went to her first husband and asked him what was wrong with her. The problem, he responded, was the magical power that the men of his family have. As far back as anyone can remember, there's been something special about the men of this family. Once one of them has slept with a woman, even once, she will be unable to conceive a child with another man. Pragmatist that she is, Jackiline arrived at a solution: one weekend when the man's wife was away, she seduced him. That was eight months ago. The delivery date for her new child is sometime next month.

Then, of course, there's the case of the Akamba. At some point a few weeks back, I realized that most of the women I've found particularly beautiful, charming or interesting here have come from one tribe, the Akamba. I thought this was a little weird, because the Akamba aren't a particularly large tribe, come from the other side of the country, and are thin on the ground in this region, but I chalked this up to a quirk of personal preference, the same way one might favor Italian women to Irish women, French to Finns, Thais to Taiwanese. After talking to my friends in Dol Dol, however, I have a much better explanation: witchcraft. The Akamba- and the Akamba alone- possess powerful love potions, which they give to anyone they fancy and want to bewitch. The potion can be slipped into a drink- sometimes Akamba witches seem a lot like American fratboys- or applied topically during a handshake. I haven't caught any of these women red handed, but you know, the circumstantial evidence adds up to a strong case.

There's more I can add to the book. There's the man in town who walks backwards past a certain house because he thinks the occupant is a witch, and there's the herbal potion I took which was supposed to make me immune from cold weather but really just made me break out in hives. When it comes to the supernatural, there's always more. So somebody find me a literary agent; I think the movie rights will be big.

Buy a goat, fight HIV/AIDS

2007-07-17T04:46:00.000-04:00

After a long, dusty matatu ride from Dol Dol, I like to head to the Mt. Kenya Cyber to catch up with the world. Yesterday, when I logged on and surfed my way to the Drudge Report, I found a Financial Times article titled “UN warns it cannot afford to feed the world”, which described the World Food Program’s trouble in maintaining the amount of food it distributes. The growth of the Chinese and Indian consumer markets, as well as the world’s new interest in turning corn into electricity rather than tortillas, has meant the price of staple foods has skyrocketed in much of the world. When I got back from the internet café, I opened up the Daily Nation, which ran a large article on its third page titled “Maize farmers count blessings and cash.” It’s a good time to sell food, and a bad time to buy it. As if I needed to be told.

For all the thought I’d put into the AIDS training and mobilization, all the strategies we’d discussed for the daunting tasks of getting stubborn elders to use condoms, teaching illiterate women about antiretroviral drugs, and testing proud and promiscuous morani for HIV, most of my work revolved around the equally daunting task of feeding dozens of Maasai. In Mukogodo, you can come up with the perfect plan, the perfect project, but if you don’t provide the perfect meal, it will fail.

Such is the spirit of volunteerism here. Very, very few are the people who will do something for nothing, even if it’s for their own benefit. People attending workshops, trainings or anything like that usually expect cash payments. This is especially galling when the same people complaining yesterday about having nothing to do are asking to be paid today. The blame lies with the NGOs, including the one for which I work. They throw money around to boost the attendance and thus impress donors, and now everyone has come to see the NGOs as cash cows. It’s gotten so ridiculous that people demanded payment before they’d watch a play about HIV or be tested. Crazy. If you’re in Mukogodo, work for an NGO and see someone on fire, be prepared to pay him an “allowance” before you tell him to stop, drop and roll, or else he won’t budge.

Of course, because of our principles (by which I mean our meager budget) we did not make any cash payments. I know for a fact that we lost attendees and mobilizers because of this decision. In order to keep the rest, we had to at least feed them. And the Maasai like to eat. I’ve seen four of them eat their way through a full-sized goat in half an hour- and I mean all the way through, including the organs, the blood and the bone marrow. One of my friends explained the speed with which the Maasai eat by saying, “We used to have to compete with the hyenas.” Trying to satisfy these appetites is not the sort of thing I wanted to get caught up in, but as many, many people here told me, “No eating, no meeting”. So we bought seven goats, a huge sack of rice, 10 kilos of sugar, the state of Idaho’s quarterly potato yield, enough cooking fat to supply a La Belle Province franchise for a month and an amount of flour suitable for covering the surface of Lake Huron in chapatti. We spent lavishly, because I was told that if we fed the people “cheap rice”, they’d all quit. Even still, it wasn’t enough. Part of the problem was that someone took a fair portion of the food, especially the cookies, out of the locked office where we kept it. The bigger problem was that random people turned up to eat with trainees and mobilizers, so instead of the forty people we budgeted for, we were feeding sixty. In this anti-Hanukah, the food was designed to last eight days but only lasted five. Worst of all, we had to sell two of the goats.

This is not to suggest that the problems were only culinary in nature. The medical officers, who spoke at the training, wanted to be paid for their work, even though they were already getting a government wage to promote the health of the community. The teacher who holds the keys for the community library hall where we were to have the training refused to hand them over unless we paid her a bribe. We found an alternate venue at one of the churches, but the pastor, who was one of the trainees, refused to let us use it unless we paid 500 shillings. The problem was resolved only when we got one of the town’s Big Men to threaten the teacher into giving us the keys. I don’t think we had to pay him a bribe.

Despite all that, the project has been judged a success. The VCT counselors are seeing a lot of clients, the community is buzzing with talk of HIV, and a few leaders have emerged to plan a sustained community HIV program. I just want to be far, far away from the kitchen when that program is launched.

Celebrating Some Uhuru in Nakuru

2007-07-08T02:51:00.000-04:00

Exactly 231 years after John Hancock and company signed their John Hancocks and company, I made my own declaration of independence- "Uhuru in Nakuru!". Uhuru, in addition to being the very, very cool name of Jomo Kenyatta's son, is Swahili for "freedom", and freedom is exactly what Vivien and I needed. As much as I like Nanyuki and Dol Dol, they're the smallest, most stifling places I've ever been. We set foot in Dol Dol, and we're mobbed by our Dol Dol friends, as well as the Dol Dol drunks and the Dol Dol beggars. As soon as we get back to Nanyuki, our cell phones start ringing: someone's spotted us getting off the matatu, word has spread, and everyone we know in town is calling us. Even strangers track our movements: when I talk to someone in Nanyuki for the first time, he or she can rattle off eight or nine places I've been and what I was doing at each one. Apparently, there's no anonymity for the token white people in a small Kenyan town.

So we went someplace bigger. After seven weeks in Dol Dol and Nanyuki, Nakuru felt huge. When I walked into one of the big, modern supermarkets, my jaw actually dropped (so I guess my reintegration into North American society may be rougher than I predicted). It was nice to be someplace bustling, however, and to be in streets filled with all kinds of people: Kikuyus and Maasai, yes, but also Luhyas, Luos, Kalenjins, Somalis, South Asians and wazungu. More than that, it was nice that all of these people brought their cuisines with them to Nakuru. After seven weeks of variations on corn, beans and goat, I can't describe the pleasure with which I consumed Chinese food, real Indian food (my God, cooked in a tandoor!) and a tall, frosty milkshake.

Of course, Nakuru's fame doesn't come from its supermarkets or its cuisine. It owes its fame to the national park, Lake Nakuru, in the outskirts of town. At 15 square km, Lake Nakuru is usually home to several million flamingos. Seen from up on the Baboon Cliffs, it looks like there's a pink band running around the whole circumference of the lake, with several other agglomerations of pink in the middle marking the sites of highest crustacean density. The mud flats around the lake play host to lions, leopards, warthogs, rhinos, giraffes, gazelles, kudu, and so many zebras and buffaloes that after a few hours you wish they'd go away so you could get a better view of the other animals. Or at least I did- I have several pictures where zebras jumped in front of whatever I was trying to photograph. It was a good time despite the zebras, however. We went around with two Nakuruites who couldn't tell the difference between a buffalo and a rhino, but they made up for their lack of animal knowledge with a willingness to take their old Toyota Celica everywhere the safari Land Rovers were going: on mud tracks, across rivers, over the grass. Their ignorance of wildlife was only really a problem when Wes decided to throw banana peels at the baboons and we found ourselves surrounded by two dozen very hungry monkeys.

Nakuru also has a bit of infamy attached to it, at least by the Maasai, because of Menengai Crater. The crater, towering 1500 feet above town, is supposedly the site of a nineteenth century battle that the Laikipiak Maasai lost to another Maasai band, with hundreds of the losers tossed over the rim to the smoky bottom. The Maasai identify it as a site of evil and refuse to get near the rim. They're really missing out. The view is amazing. There's an almost sheer drop to the bottom, 1000 feet below, and as you look across the crater, 15 kilometers wide, you can see the path the lava took, the ripples it left on the crater floor. Just like the Gilani supermarket, it was a breathtaking thing to see.

Well, now I'm back in Nanyuki, and in a few hours we're off to Dol Dol. The HIV workshop starts tomorrow, and we still need to iron out the logistics. The biggest issue is that we bought seven goats for the lunches, and now we have to find someone to slaughter and butcher them. That's what it comes down when you run a workshop in Laikipia- finding someone to kill a goat. Ah, it's good to be home.

Chariots on Fire

2007-07-04T06:18:00.000-04:00

I think to date I've only tangentially mentioned matatus, which is a serious oversight on my part considering the large share of my time given over to waiting for them, riding them and recovering from riding them. Swahili, I think, for "death by suffocation", matatus for the backbone of Kenyan public transport. The vast majority are white Nissan vans with 14 seats packed together very, very tightly. They sit at a town's matatu stage waiting to fill up with 17 or 18 people, then race off. Matatus also serve as the main mode of local shipping, and because most goods sold in Dol Dol have to be brought in from Nanyuki, I usually find myself crammed among Maasai warriors, bundles of qat, vats of cooking oil and tanks of paraffin. Because the vans are in a bad condition, the roads in a worse one, and the drivers in a worse one still, matatus have a horrendous safety record. In fact, if you ranked all the means of transport on their mortality rates, matatu travel would fall right between hydrogen-filled zeppelin and riding on the back of a hungry tiger.

A few years ago, the government actually tried to reform the matatu sector. It introduced laws requiring that every passenger have his or her own seat and seatbelt, enforceable at the police checkpoints along each road, and mandated the installation of speed governors in the matatus to cap their speed at 80 km/hour. Very quickly, however, the matatu drivers discovered that the practiced use of a cigarette lighter could disable the speed governors and the practiced use of a bribe could disable the police. And so the madness continues. This weekend, I had my worst matatu experiences, which is saying something because the best you hope for when you board a matatu is that you'll survive and that you'll regain feeling in your legs within 72 hours.

Even without the speed governors, most drivers on the Dol Dol-Nanyuki route are kept under 80 km/hour by the road conditions. Because blown tires come out of the dirvers' pay (and even at low speeds, a tire punctures a quarter of the time), drivers fight their qat-addled inclination and go slow out of self-interest. Not so our driver on Friday. The brother of the MP and local a Big Man, he not only has a spare tire, he has a whole spare matatu. So, throwing caution into the wind and rain that enveloped us, he whipped the matatu around the rutted and muddy roads of Laikipia, ignoring the chorus of "Pole pole! ("Slow down!") and snapping vertebrae. The Somali woman in front of me got sick and vomited. The two people sharing my seat kept themselves busy: the momentarily pious Vivien crossed herself and mumbled Our Fathers while Joseph read aloud the Ken Saro-Wiwa story "Africa Kills Her Sun", which I thoughtfully suggested be retitled "Africa Kills Her Public Transport Passengers."

As it turned out, we did not crash and die. This was a mixed blessing, because while I cherish my time on this earth, it meant I had to take the matatu home to Dol Dol on Sunday. I was one of the 25 passengers on the 14-seater van, with a 5 year old boy and and 50 year old man sharing my lap, but even this overloaded matatu did not meet demand. When we stopped to let someone off at Jua Kali, there was a rush of prospective passengers, and the conductor had to kick and punch people to keep them off the van. At the next stop, a full-fledged melee broke out. On one side, a group of drunks attacked the driver, and someone swung a rungu, the traditional Maasai club, at his head. Just as the driver safely shut the door, another groups of drunks attacked the conductor. They tried to slam the sliding door on his face- luckily, the door on this matatu did not close, and we sped off before anyone was lynched. People have told me that the end of the month, when everyone gets paid and (consequently) very drunk, is the worst time for matatu travel, and I think there's some truth to that.

Anyway, I'm off to Nakuru for a few days. It's a big town in the middle of the Rift Valley, and part of my plan to see Kenya's four largest cities (watch out Kisumu, you're up next). It has a lot of things Nanyuki doesn't, like flamingos, movie theaters and Indian restaurants, so I'm pretty excited. And how, you ask, am I getting there? By matatu, of course.

Here's wishing you all a happy 4th of July, and a grudging happy (belated) Canada Day.

Flashing a Gender and Other Adventures in the English Language

2007-07-01T05:26:00.001-04:00

Gentlemen, let's say you're at the Agricultural Society of Kenya show, dancing in an overcrowded mess-hall built for the British airforce, the DJ interrupting every song 3 times to yell "Mo' fiyah!", and the girl you've been dancing with bats her eyelashes and asks you to flash her. What do you do?

The correct answer is that you take your cell phone out, call her number and quickly hang-up before she answers so that she gets your phone number without you getting charged. That's all she was asking you to do. This, after all, is Kenyan English, where the double entendre has yet to be discovered. The motto, repeated at every commercial break, for the leading TV station is "Turning on Kenya". I guess it's possible that re-runs of late 90's American sitcoms elicit a different response here than they do back home, but more likely, the executives at NTV have no idea what they're saying.

The evolution of words, and word use here, would delight a linguist. English is usually introduced by the church, the school, the office, or more recently, the NGO. Once the words are set free among the population, though, there's really no predicting how they'll be used.

Take the evolution of the word "gender". At some point, the youths in Dol Dol must have been educated on gender equality. This came to be abbreviated as "gender", as in "Make sure there's gender at the HIV training." However, because in this relatively misogynistic society gender equality really means inviting more women than you otherwise would, the word "gender" has come to mean "women", so "Make sure there's gender at the HIV training" can be read as "Make sure there's women at the HIV training." When Mwenda and Joseph go cruising for ladies, they say that they're "Off to find gender", and when they think they've found someone for me, they say that they want to introduce me to "a gender named Ruth".

Similarly, "mobilize" must have been introduced by NGOs, but now it's bled into everyday English. If you want to go out at night, you mobilize your friends. If you want to organize a party, you mobilize your resources. The nadir for this came when girls "mobilized" themselves to go to the bathroom together.

Other linguistic quirks come from the fact that English is the last language people learn. Because Kenyans are taught in school that the only greeting in English is "How are you?" (which follows the pattern of Swahili, Maa, and a lot of other tribal languages), if you say "Hello", you'll usually get "Fine, fine" as a response. The limited vocabulary probably accounts for the constant use of the phrase "So many" in response to quantitative questions, even ones that really require a specific numerical answer. How many times have you visited Dol Dol? So many. How many banks are there in Nanyuki? So many. How many fingers are there on your hand? So many. How many ways can a Kenyan answer such a question? Just one.

The Arrival of the White Ghosts

2007-06-26T03:46:00.000-04:00

One day I woke up in Nanyuki, went to my favorite cafe, and found 14 Swedes.

You hear a lot of fantastic stories about white people here. I've been told that there's a McGill M.A. student who's been going around Nanyuki for weeks looking for me, but no one can remember his name. One afternoon in Dol Dol, Mwenda told me "Nick, there's a beautiful Danish girl in my mother's pub. I'm going to introduce you to her," but when we walked in thirty seconds later, the pub was filled with old, drunk men. The great Dane had vanished. One of Vivien's friends is in Nanyuki, apparently, but hasn't made his presence known to anyone. In a large city, maybe these white people-as-Bigfoot stories would be understandable, but Nanyuki is a small place, and Dol Dol even smaller. If you go to the health clinic on any given morning, you're liable to run into half of Laikipia's white population. If you go to Marina Grill in the afternoon, you're liable to find the other half. You just won't find the McGill student, the beautiful Danish girl, or Vivien's friend, those white ghosts who have managed, somehow, to escape detection.

The strangest rumors we've heard, however, were about the Swedes. Apparently, my organization had made arrangements to host some Swedes. When I first arrived, I heard it would be two Swedes. Then, a few weeks later, I heard four. Then six. Then Sunday, I found the whole retinue sitting in Camcorner: 12 students, two teachers, male and female, all wearing capri pants and chain smoking Marlboros. And as strange and unfriendly as they are, it's nice to have them around for a few days.

There are few pleasures quite so sublime as feeling like an old hand in something at which you once had to work hard. And fitting in here was hard work. I just hadn't realized how far I'd come until I saw these fresh-off-the-boat Swedes, scared of street children, unable to understand even the most basic Swahili, and without a single African friend. My heart swelled with a sense of superiority, a fine enough reward for weeks of hard work and misunderstanding. Because as much as Dol Dol occasionally drives me crazy, I do now feel at home there. I have friends who are concerned if I'm not around for a few days, neighbors who come to borrow candles and invite us for tea and Scrabble, and there are several alcoholic school teachers who insist I owe them beers.

I think the Swedes are visiting Dol Dol today. I just hope they don't mess the place up too much.

The Culturally Rich and Materially Poor

2007-06-22T03:22:00.000-04:00

After a long period of idleness brought about by cancelled meetings, vanishing bosses and events like presidential visits and primary school track and field which brought the community to a standstill, we’ve spent the last two weeks doing genuine, sometimes exhausting and frequently frustrating work. It’s been great. The plan is to bring a VCT (Voluntary Counseling and Testing) to Dol Dol to raise awareness about HIV/AIDS and get people tested. It seems like everywhere else in Kenya has had one of these campaigns, but Dol Dol’s never had one and it’s a definite need.

Looking at surveys we conducted in the targeted areas, one of the most glaring things that pops out is the amount of unprotected sex that’s going on. In a place like North America, high levels of unprotected sex would imperil some individuals, but because the norm is serial monogamy, the spread of HIV would be relatively slow. Here, where the culture favors polygamy, and for the unmarried to have lots of sexual partners during the same period, the introduction of even one infected person into the web of sexual relationships would imperil the whole community in a matter of months. This underscores the importance of testing, of course, but it’s also gotten me thinking about the relationship between culture and development.

It can be seen as heresy to say that culture is restraining the Maasai’s development, because in a sense their culture is the Maasai’s greatest asset. Maasai culture is marketable and has been since the arrival of the British colonists and the anthropologists who followed them, but it continues today. The Maasai make up 1.4% of the country’s population, but inhabit a much more important place in the world’s consciousness than the Kikuyu, Luo, Luhya, Kalenjin, Akamba and the dozen other more numerous tribes which you’ll never hear about unless Kenya falls into a civil war. Down on the coast and in Nairobi, Maasai morani pose for tourists’ pictures for $1. In Nanyuki, prostitutes dress up in Maasai garb to attract the attention of potential clients. A Maasai I met from the diplomatic police corps complained that the Toronto Metropolitan Zoo had shamelessly ripped off Maasai culture in designing its exhibits. Maasai culture is big business, but very rare is the prosperous Maasai village. I can’t help but think that other elements of the culture, some of the deeply-held values and traditions, rather than the dances and jewelry and warriors slaying lions, are playing a bigger role in shaping the course of development.

When I got here and found out that the Maasai measure status and wealth by the size of their herds, not their cash holdings, I thought that was kinda cool. Then I looked around. In a bid to show their status and wealth, many Maasai have assembled mega-herds, which the land cannot sustain. The contrast is stark between the privately owned ranches, where the animal-to-land ratio is kept low and there is a thick cover of knee-high grass, and the Maasai group ranches, where the grass has been grazed into oblivion and the soil is left unprotected to be washed away by every rain. Then, of course, when a drought inevitably comes and thins out the herds, people lose a quarter or a third of their wealth, money which could have sat safely in the Barclay’s Bank in Nanyuki earning interest. But hey, that’s the culture here.

Likewise, the Maasai disdain for farming and fishing costs them dearly. Two weekends ago, work took me to a village on the east side of the division. Here the land had originally been occupied by the Maasai, but migrants from elsewhere in the country, who brought their agricultural traditions and expertise with them and knew good land when they saw it, moved in. A farmer on a small plot can make $800 or so in an average year; by contrast, a herder would have to sell about 70 goats or 20 cows, more than many herders even own, to earn that much. But the Maasai consider themselves herders, and as I said, if they sold off their herd to get some (literal) seed money, they’d risk losing status. By the same token, Laikipia’s streams are stocked with big, tasty trout that the Kikuyu and others profitably sell, but the Maasai don’t like to eat fish and don’t see the point in fishing. At the workshop, when I sat down with some fried tilapia, I was asked why I was eating snake.

The cultural norms that marry off girls at a young age, deny them education and then shackle them at home all day with domestic duties deprive the Maasai of half of their potential productive workforce. Most of the shops in Dol Dol are run by women, but all but a few are non-Maasai migrants. Because their mothers are undereducated and overworked, most children are not read to, are not nurtured, the boys sent out to play with each other and the girls put to work in the house as soon as they’re physically able. And of course, the family patterns put the community at grave risk for HIV and other STDs.

Certainly, aspects of Maasai culture can be harnessed for development. In two areas of the division, the close-knit nature of the group ranches has allowed for community-based eco-tourism projects that have brought significant income to the residents. The traditional system of age-set oversight and elder adjudication of behavior has kept order and maintained low crime rates in the absence of much formal law enforcement. And the cultural trappings of Maasai life have bound together a small group of people, spread from Mukogodo to central Tanzania, into one coherent group.

At the same time, many people here, especially of my generation, are much more adamant than I am about the fact that old values are impeding development. These Young Turks of Mukogodo at least pay lip-service to the ideas of diversifying income, empowering women, and practicing monogamy, but it remains to be seen whether they will bring change in the community, and sometimes I’m skeptical. When one of the youth groups showed me their new, collective farm, I was excited; then I learned that they had put a Kikuyu in charge of running it. So it goes.

Choosing your God in Laikipia

2007-06-17T06:13:00.000-04:00

Because it's Sunday and I'm in Nanyuki, I've been thinking about religion all day. I was woken up at 7:30 by the singing of the congregation in the skeleton of their half-finished church across the street. I turned on the TV and found every station showing Christian programing. I walked into town past a church where, all morning long, the pastor screams and screams over a microphone, and when I got into town, I found almost every business closed for the Sabbath. Kenya is, in some ways, an extraordinarily religious place. Except for the few Muslims, almost everyone will describe himself or herself as devoutly Christian. Dol Dol, with a population generously given at 2,000, has about a dozen congregations, ranging from the well established Catholic mission stocked with 3 priests and 10 nuns to home-grown Protestant groups that meet every Sunday under particularly shady trees. Every photocopy place in Nanyuki seems obligated, perhaps by some old colonial ordinance, to plaster its walls with print-outs of Christian themed jokes, poems and inspirational quotes. At the paralegal training I went to two weeks ago, every session was started with a prayer, a hymn and a sermon. After one sermon about how certain sinners (adulterers, drunkards, etc.) would be barred from heaven, the town drunk interrupted the session to ask the chaplain to define exactly what kind of drunkenness he had meant. Even the fiery female lawyer from the women's rights organization, educated in England and brought to Nanyuki to instruct the men on the importance of respecting human rights, took time out of this task to comment on the "abomination" of homosexuality and the "sham" of evolution. This left me wondering how the wealthy, probably liberal, women in Europe and North America that fund her organization would react to her words.

Under this veneer of Christian piousness, the people of Laikipia maintain a lot of old traditions and beliefs. While Christians back home point to the Bible as requiring chastity and monogomous marriage, here polygamy, adultery, and general sexual promiscuity are still very much the norm, and it's not at all unusual to find a Christian with 3 wives and twice that many girlfriends. In general, the Maasai don't seem to like the proscriptions of Christianity; the Catholic church is particularly popular among young people because it's more tolerant of drunkenness than the Protestant ones. Nor have the Maasai given up their old spirituality. The stories they tell of their origins owe a lot more to Maasai creation myths than to Genesis. Many people still go to soothsayers and spiritual healers. One of the most educated men in town, a former schoolteacher and community leader, told me that a mystic attributed his illness to a curse placed on him by a woman he had spurned, so now he's biding his time until he can go to Samburu to confront her. Mukogodoans who are really sick go to a village called Wamba. About half go to the huge, Catholic-run hospital there. The other half go to the house of the most famous witch doctor in northern Kenyan, located across town.

Given the Maasai's conscious effort to preserve their cultural traditions, it's not surprising that some of the Maasai spirituality lives on. What needs explanation is the thorough adoption of at least nominal Christianity, and I think the right explanation is a secular one. The Maasai have converted for very practical reasons: education, food, money, etc. Most education grants and food aid come through the churches, and most NGOs active in the region are at least theoretically faith-based. All of the churches say that they give aid based on need, not the recipients' beliefs, but it certainly helps if you know the priest, minister or reverend. Even the small congregations take up collections, some of which go to aid members in need, and sermons tend to stress financial gain. It seems, however, that the churches with the most resources get the largest flocks. Long before the government stepped in, it was these churches that provided the region its infrastructure. The missionaries are now reaping the rewards, in the form of large flocks, for decades of hard work making themselves the source of largesse in the community. I just wonder if they've really won the battle for all of those souls.

The "Mungiki Menace", again

2007-06-10T06:06:00.000-04:00

I didn't really intend to write today, but I got a few emails from people concerned over the news about all of the violence in Kenya (and they all cited the BBC, so I guess American TV has dropped the ball on this one), so I thought it would be good to let everyone know how things stand and reassure you of my safety. Things are undeniably bad down the road in parts of Nairobi and Central Province. The Mungiki beheaded a local official and three of his family members and neighbors last week in a district called Muranga'a and killed two police officers in Mathare, a Nairobi slum with 500,000 inhabitants. The police cracked down, killing a few people in Muranga'a and sealing off Mathare before going door to door and killing 33 people. Most of the dead were shot in the back of the head, and it's become clear that of the 40 or so people who have been killed in total, only a few were Mungiki. Life can be astoundingly cheap here/

I, however, am not in one of the problem areas, and for once Rift Valley Province is untouched by violence. Nanyuki is a diverse town, and while the majority of the population is Kikuyu and there are a few Mungiki in town, things are peaceful here. In mid-May, the Mungiki distributed leaflets in Nanyuki, and most other cities with a large Kikuyu population, inciting the youth to let Kibaki know that he was letting down his tribe. The youth here don't seem to have responded. Someone I know, a friend of a friend, was arrested this week and beat up by the police for having dreadlocks, since the Mungiki used to wear dreads before the group was outlawed and went underground, but it's pretty safe to say he's not a sect member. Everything else I've heard is second-hand, but I've heard plenty. The Mungiki have become an obsession here, with the newscasts invariably leading with the latest Mungiki news and the newspapers devoting the first three or four pages to Mungiki stories, with one of the papers running a multi-paged section titled "The Mungiki Menace" every day. The stories come in two varieties and are irresistable. The newest stories are first-person tales of police brutality in Mathare, but the most common story is still an expose about the initiation rituals of the Mungiki, with some unnamed source discussing how he was made to drink human blood and swear an oath to abstain from alcohol, drugs and sex with non-sect members. The exception to the anonymity of sources is one MP, Kihara Mwangi, who claimed that he witnessed 10 other Kikuyu MPs, including some members of the Cabinet, be administered Mungiki oaths. The assumption is that Kihara is now a dead-man-walking. We'll see.

I, on the other hand, am safe. The Mungiki have targeted matatu drivers, police and local administrators whom they see as uncooperative, and I do not fall into those categories. For that matter, I've never been to the Nairobi and Central Province shantytowns where Mungiki operates and the police go trawling for suspects. Dol Dol, where I spend most of my time, has a majority Maasai population and is completely safe from everything but elephants. So while the news stories are cause for concern, they're not a cause for concern on my behalf.

Elephants, Real and Metaphorical

2007-06-07T10:43:00.000-04:00

Watching from the dirt track to Arjijo, I saw them start to move. First one, then a second, then a third, the big gray boulders started to roll down to the valley below. One turned in profile, exposing a long, white curved tusk. I had finally seen elephants, not in a game reserve or a ranch, but on my morning commute. I was heading to Arjijo to interview neophyte farmers and bee-keepers on their organizational needs- one of which, it turned out, was protection from elephants- but the entire time I was working there, I was thinking about the elephants I might run into on the way back.

Animals, for the most part, don’t much interest me anymore. Donkeys, sheep and cows graze on my front yard, camels stampede down my road, monkeys scamper around the trees between the house and town, gazelles and antelope are almost as common as deer are back home, and I was greeted on arrival to Dol Dol by two herds of zebras and another of giraffes. It’s easy to get used to them all. Elephants are different, though, even to the Maasai. As best I can tell, elephants are the one animal that they fear. The Maasai view is that elephants have it out for humans, since humans alone can kill elephants, and the smell of a human can therefore drive an elephant into a killing frenzy. Having talked to enough Maasai, all of whom seem to have a brush-with-elephant-caused-death story, I’ve begun to believe it. I scan the landscape for damage inflicted by elephants on trees, fences and sheds. I listen when David tells me that if I run into an elephant, I should disrobe so that it will be fooled into attacking my clothes. I take a keen interest when Joseph and Mwenda debate whether a minibus driver should reverse or accelerate in the face of a charging elephant. I sit up and notice when the news reports that a poll worker in the district was trampled by an elephant while walking back from a local primary election. Mostly, though, I forget what my science teacher taught me about elephants being docile herbivores. If these people who laugh at lions, hyenas and cobras fear elephants, then so will I.

Now I’m in Nanyuki, where the only thing that can trample me is a matatu, but I’m still dealing with a sort of elephant: Maasai elders. Big, ornery and powerful, these men are just as dangerous as the animals the youths compare them to. I’m at a workshop for training paralegals with representatives from all over Mukogodo, and about half of them are testy older men. They spend half the time yelling at each other about old political disputes and spend the other half of the time yelling at feminists. You see, the workshop is being run by a women’s rights NGO based in Nairobi, which sent up some fiery female lawyers to try to talk some sense into these men, men who could teach the Taliban a few things about misogyny. It’s been an interesting clash of ideas. Maasai men in their forties and older womanize prodigiously but usually have two or three wives by now. They typically marry a generation or two below themselves, and last year someone’s 8 year-old wife was taken away by the authorities and placed in a Nanyuki orphanage. The vast majority of men beat their wives and Maa even has a specific word- kitala- for the refuge a woman takes with her relatives after she’s been beaten by her husband and before the elders convince her to return home with him. By the time they’re beaten by their husbands, though, women are used to their treatment and put up little fight. As children, they were pulled out of primary school, circumcised, and sold off to their husbands for 7 cows (9 if they’re impregnated before marriage). There’s even a kind of purdah, a segregation of sexes. Maasai tradition states that Morani, the warrior age set, cannot eat meat that has been seen by women, so an entire generation of men isolates itself from women three times a day, going off to roast goats in the bush. If you walk down the street in Dol Dol, you almost exclusively see men lounging around, as the women are all at home doing work. They collect water and firewood, cook, clean, and milk the cows. Except for the boys and young teenagers who herd the cattle, males usually drink and chew qat. One of the many Maasai taboos prevents men from entering the kitchen after they’re circumcised, so there are rules against them sharing domestic duties. The good news is that Maasai men of my generation are a lot less, or less blatantly, misogynist than their fathers are. But those old elephants are still around, and are running the show for now.

I really don’t want to sign off with a NOW screed, so I’ll give you some good news. My quest for Kenyan celebrity was not, as I feared, derailed when I was evicted from the VIP section. Yesterday, I was flipping through the TV, and saw a segment on the Swahili news about Kibaki’s visit to Dol Dol (if only I spoke Swahili, I could tell you why there was a 10 minute segment on national TV about a week-old presidential visit). About three minutes in, there’s a shot of the crowd, and plainly visible is a mzungu looking quite dashing in a red shirt. It was a much better way of getting on TV than being trampled by an elephant.

Robert, the President, and a Plumber

2007-06-05T10:37:00.000-04:00

Let me tell you about Robert. I met him on my very first day in Nanyuki when he tried to sell me a Swedish-English dictionary, but it was only in the pub in Dol Dol, when he proclaimed his love of reggae and its stars “Bob Marley, Chuck Norris, etc.” that I really warmed to him. In a village with more than its share of eccentrics, Robert, with qat on his lips, beer on his breath, and Winnie the Pooh on his sweatshirt, stands out. It is something of a Dol Dol tradition for him to be locked up for causing a disturbance at community events, and I find his ability to disrupt every event, year after year, a sign of admirable endurance. He has much more energy than you’d expect of a man of his 40 or so years. While most of his contemporaries lounge in the shade, he ambles down the street, hugging his friends and greeting them in Maa, English and five words of what may possibly be Italian. When the Ph.D student here launched an anti-littering program, Robert was the first to join, picking up trash from the ground and sticking it in bushes, berating schoolchildren who made the mistake of dropping garbage within his field of vision, and yelling the program’s name at passers-by. When I got back from Nanyuki last Monday, however, I was worried about him.

It’s just that he was so excited for the president’s visit: “Everyone here is scared of the Big Men, but not me! I’m going to talk to them! The Ministry of Humanity and Justice gives me that right.” For three days, he spoke of nothing but the evils of littering and the rights granted to him by the Ministry of Humanity and Justice. The problem for Robert is that Kenya doesn’t have a Ministry of Humanity and Justice, it has a Ministry of Justice, and that Ministry of Justice takes an interest in people like Robert, especially when it concerns the president. I was really relieved, then, to see Robert alive, though being dragged into a police Land Cruiser, after he tried to deliver a pamphlet on the evils of littering to President Kibaki’s podium.

Robert’s ability to avoid being shot was a lone bright moment in an otherwise dark day for Dol Dol. To start with, Kibaki was late. He was supposed to arrive in March; this was rescheduled to Tuesday, then 11:30 on Wednesday, then 1:30. He didn’t actually arrive until 5, and by then many people who had arrived early in the morning had to leave to bring the herds in before dark. They didn’t miss much. Oh, the local dance groups were good and the song lyrics inspired (“President, please give us a district/ And we will support you”), but the groups had been practicing all over town for two weeks and I now hum that song in my sleep. The real disappointment, however, was Kibaki himself. The local MP introduced him by reminding the Maasai that, as good children, they should be obedient and grateful. Kibaki took to the podium, and finding his prepared remarks rather than Robert’s anti-littering literature, proceeded to instruct the audience to stop selling their young daughters off as brides and to start paying taxes. That’s fine advice, but if you’re going to play the fatherly role in Kenya, you’re expected to bring gifts. This was Kibaki’s failing: no district, no land rights, no electricity. All he brought was $40,000 for the girls’ high school and $10,000 for the boys’. Insult was added to injury as the rumor that Kibaki’s people had slaughtered 30 cows and 75 goats proved to be false, and the crowd went home disappointed, tired and hungry. The feelings soon coalesced into anger, even rage, but in the days that followed this too passed and people began to speculate about what Raila Odinga, the opposition frontrunner, will offer when he visits later this year.

For me, it was also a day of dashed hopes, especially my desire for Kenyan celebrity. An hour before Kibaki arrived, as I was winding my way through the crowd, I was pulled away by one of the boy scouts who doubled as crowd control at the event. Apparently I was being taken to the V.I.P. seating tent, which faces the crowd. That I got this special treatment only because I was one of five white people in a crowd of a thousand bothered me little and I tucked my shirt in as I approached the tent, preparing for my star turn. However, the V.I.P. section was already filled with various dignitaries, ranchers and women in large hats, so the boy scout went to consult with his boss. A moment later, to my dismay, I was being led to a seat 6 feet away from the podium behind which Kibaki would be standing (and which Robert had been trying to use as a library of anti-littering tips). This was too close. In the regular, old VIP section, I reasoned, I could pass for a rancher’s son or maybe one of the more obscure Leakeys, but in my new seat I would probably have to pretend to be Kibaki’s wife. The long arm of the law saved me from that, as a policewoman quickly came to me to say that the entire section was reserved for members of the cabinet, and that I’d have to move. As it turned out, I was forced back into an even worse position in the crowd than I’d had before the scout’s intervention, and the ability to untuck my shirt on such a hot day was little consolation. (By the way, I hope I’m not endangering Kibaki’s life by saying that at no point in this process was I asked for identification or to empty my pockets of their visibly bulky contents-my camera and phone. I feel like things may have played out differently if this were America or Canada).

At least I can raise my spirits with the gift of music, having acquired a battery-powered radio while in Nanyuki last weekend. We get good reception on two Nairobi stations in Dol Dol. One usually plays Christian reggae (Chuck Norris’ favorite kind, I’m told) and the other plays the top 10 songs from last December. It’s pretty sweet living there, especially since the toilet was also fixed this week. It was, as expected, an ordeal. The plumber/locksmith/mechanic showed up drunk, having consumed his advance in the form of bathtub booze, and without any of his tools. He gamely tried for an hour to perform the repairs with a branch he pulled off of our front yard, but gave up and went back to town to get his tools. On the way, he got into a yelling match with one of our neighbors. Three hours later, after a liquid lunch, he came back with his tools and a small posse, and they staggered their way through the repairs. Fantastic. I don’t get to enjoy the fruits of his labor, however, because I’m back in muddy old Nanyuki for the week. Oh, and Robert! I don’t want to leave you thinking he’s sleeping on the floor of the Mukogodo jail. He was released the next day because, he says, the president called the jail on his behalf, telling the warden that he supported Robert’s important work on the environment. The president even sent him a letter, and Robert says he’s going to show it to me when I get back to Dol Dol. I can’t wait.

How to prepare for a Kenyan election

2007-05-26T07:22:00.000-04:00

As very few of you likely know, Kenya is having elections at the end of the year. Everything, from the presidency to the divisional councils, is up for grabs. Kenya is a very poltically conscious country, and this week it's been impossible not to hear about the campaigns.

The big national story, which has gotten some airtime internationally on the BBC and CNN, is the Mungiki killings near Nairobi. The Mungiki are a secret organization with the raison d'etre of promoting radical Kikuyu nationalism and female circumcision. Although banned by the government, they claim (dubiously, most people say) to have a membership in the hundreds of thousands. Usually they spend their time strong-arming minibus drivers into paying protection money and conducting mass circumcisions, but around election time their portfolio expands. In a country where voting goes along ethnic lines, the ability to suppress the voting by minority groups is beneficial; consequently, the Mungiki are sometimes stirred into action to kill some non-Kikuyus and intimidate others into staying home from the polls. It's also alleged that the Mungiki have been hired by some leaders to assassinate rival politicians. When six bodies turned up beheaded around Nairobi last week, the blame immediately fell on the Mungiki. The resulting investigation has resulted in two former MPs being arrested for their connections to the group, and two current MPs are being questioned. The Mungiki have vowed to assert themselves more in the coming months, and have announced some sort of rally for next weekend, though one might question why a secret organization would stage a mass rally.

Speaking of mass rallies, the big news in Dol Dol this week is President Mwai Kibaki's vist to town this coming Tuesday. This will be the first presidential visit to Dol Dol. Everyone I know in town is dashing between meetings to prepare for the event; Kibaki will be greeted by a whole day's worth of Maasai dancing, singing and theater prepared by the community groups. The local government has been making its own preparations. The last few days, tractors and huge trucks carrying fresh dirt have rolled into town, ready to repair and grade the cracked, rutted roads for the VIPs' arrival. This has actually embittered many local residents, who are pretty hostile to this government to begin with.

If Kibaki comes with a political present, he might get into the Maasai's good graces, however. The exact nature of this present is the subject of much speculation. A few have suggested it might be the deed to some of the white-0wned land bordering on the group ranch. The more popular prediction, however, is the promotion of Mukogodo from division to district (akin, in a sense, to promoting something from a municipality to a county). This would give the Maasai their own district, which is something they greatly desire, as they make up just 10% of Laikipia District's population and are dominated politically by the Kikuyu and other sedentary groups. As a district, the area would get more funds, more schools, electricity, communication and transport links, and prestige. As much as the locals think it will happen, though, it seems terribly implausible to me. Laikipia is a relatively small district, but it has about 330,000 people; Mukogodo, by contrast, has about 20,000. Dol Dol, the only real town in the division, has about 1,500 people and is only linked to the rest of Kenya by a tortuous, 45km road that takes over an hour to drive and is sometimes impassable in the rainy season. Still, the people in Dol Dol hope.

At the very least, the visit has already made village life more interesting. On Tuesday, I was in a store talking to some friends when a police officer came in and asked me what I was doing in town, whether my documents were in order, and how long I was planning to stay in Dol Dol. I took this as the routine questioning of foreigners in a town that sees very few, and though it was much more forward and tactless than I've come to expect to from Keynans, I didn't think much of it. However, the rumor quickly spread around town that I had been questioned because of police suspicion that I was there to spy on the president. I swear to you, God and the Mukogodo Divisional Police Officer that I'm not a spy, but so long as I'm not locked up on Tuesday, I'll post here about the presidential visit next week or the week after.

Kenya and the Other

2007-05-25T06:48:00.000-04:00

So I've seen Dol Dol, and what a place to have seen. If God made Dol Dol, he started with the same blueprints he used in Arizona but took a break after laying out the climate and topography to drink a six-pack or two. When He got back, He got to work on the flora and fauna and the results were understandably strange: the cacti grow 35 feet tall, the locusts are neon blue and 8 inches long, and the deer and jackrabbits of Arizona have been replaced by zebras, gazelles, giraffes, camels (all of which I've seen in the last week) and elephants (which I have not seen, but which chased my friend's minibus yesterday). The town itself isn't much: a few schools, government offices, butcheries, and a row of stores. The Maasai themselves, many wearing their traditional red clothing and elaborate jewelry, provide the town's color. You'll see them in town shopping or on the hills outside town with their herds of cows and goats.

As you'd expect in a small town, everyone here is friendly. I've been meeting with a lot of the youth groups, and one took me out to their projects in the countryside. Out there they slaughtered a goat (I took pictures) and roasted it for me. Here, they slaughter animals through strangulation so that they can preserve the blood for drinking. Ah, but I digress. I'm picking up some Maa, but a lot of people speak English. The English here is oddly colored by development discourse. If you want to organize people to go to a pub, you "mobilize them". A local chief, whom we incidentally ran into while he was wearing army fatigues and carrying an M-16 through the forest is limited in his English to "What are your recommendations?", "field study", and "testable hypothesis." Strange place.

The youth groups I've been working with have called the area "The Other", as in "There's Kenya, and then there's The Other." The Other starts where the paved road ends, where the electrical lines stop, where the cell network dies, and where the government loses interest. That's a few miles outside Nanyuki.

My house is an example of that government neglect. It's part of a fenced compound built by the government 20 years, just outside town. The compound contains a huge granary and the houses designed to house the granary workers. The problem? The Maasai don't grow any grain and don't consume much either. The granary, which is easily the biggest building in town, has sat empty for two decades, and the houses have long ago been sold to private citizens. The result is that I'm living relatively well for Dol Dol: a squat toilet, a camp stove, two bedrooms, a living room, two gas lamps and running water once a week. Still, things are funny in The Other.

I'm back in Kenya (Nanyuki, in this case) for the weekend to meet with my boss, shower, shave, check the internet and drink something cold. I'll keep you posted.

My 21st birthday and an empty death threat

2007-05-19T07:07:00.000-04:00

I always thought I'd celebrate my 21st birthday at Wildflower's. It's a dreary place, but it's Pennington's only bar. Instead, I got a death threat from a white rancher, which is an altogether more memorable experience. It might even make me an honorary Maasai. Whites might represent 1% of Laikipia's population, but they cause the lion's share of the area's problems. They own huge tracts of the best land, expropriated long ago from the Maasai, and they keep the indigenous population from using it. The Maasai have staged protests, land invasions, and filed suit against the ranchers. My dispute, though, wasn't so high-minded.

Four of us were celebrating my birthday at the Sportman's Arms pub, when an sixty-ish white rancher introduced himself and asked if Viv, the other intern, was my wife. Finding out she wasn't, he cut between us, turned his back to me, and started talking to her. Apparently, he was talking about how the rape of Maasai women by the British military was an understandable and forgiveable phenomenon. As he got handsier and handsier and she looked more and more distressed, I decided to engage him in a little manly conversation to diffuse the situation. I am not a fighter, and as you'll see my usual tactic of gentle humor might not be well-suited for Kenya. I tapped him on the shoulder and asked him what he kept on the ranch. I grunted knowingly as he said, "Cattle, goats, sheep..." but I raised an eyebrow as he leaned in and said, "and between you and me, 22 women." This is where the trouble began.

He turned his back to me again and resumed his pursuit of Viv, but I tapped him on the shoulder and joked "Viv's my friend, I know her pretty well. She's picky. I just don't think she's gonna be number 23." The conversation between us continued on, and soon Solomon came over and started arguing with him in Swahili. The rancher switched back to English and said, "I love women, but I crush men." As he said this, he bent his index finger, crushing tiny, hypothetical men between the second and third knuckle. "I'll shoot and kill you and you," he said, pointing at me, then Solomon. Solomon yelled that we should leave, and stormed out down the the stairs. Without a Maasai to pick on, the rancher lost interest and joined another table, where he was laughing and backslapping his friends a moment later. Apparently this is pretty typical behavior for the ranchers,
and the threats are always empty (so don't worry, parental unit). It's easy to understand why they're universally loathed in these parts, though.

Lydia attributed Solomon's anger to his Maasai-ness. This is part of what seems like Kenya's favorite game: attributing fairly typical human behavior to certain tribal groups. For instance, you'll hear "Maasai men are protective of women," or "The Kikuyu like to earn money." There's also a game Kenyans play where they attribute rather fantastic attributes to certain groups. I've heard, "All Luos drive Hummers" and "Germans eat people [watch out, Mar!]." The truth, though, is that the exact same situation could have, and has, happened in Montreal- maybe without the racial overtones.

Anyway, my birthday improved greatly from there, with healthy quantities of Tusker and meat consumed and an unhealthy amount of dancing. I'd love to keep you abreast of the Nanyuki club scene, but alas I'm leaving for Dol Dol tomorrow, and will be out of touch with the world for a week or two. As it turns out, there's a Yale Ph.D candidate in Dol Dol now who's working on the same issues I'm tackling in my internship paper. I take this as a sign of divine blessing for my endeavor, and thus I do not fear the white rancher.

Moving Upcountry

2007-05-18T07:17:00.000-04:00

Nairobi has come and gone. We arrived Monday night, and by Wednesday we were leaving the city behind us. This is no great loss. Sprawling and disjointed, Nairobi is a weird place. In the area we stayed, Upper Hill, rotting wooden food stalls share space with large walled villas on half-acre plots which are cast in perpetual shade by new 20-story office towers being erected in the neighborhood. Downtown, there are two parallel streets, 100 yards apart, leading the National Museum. One is bounded by a big leafy park and a row of thick shade trees. The other is lined with maybe 100 unlicensed auto mechanics, and the noxious air there is filled with welding sparks and the gravel road and sidewalk are sodden with motor oil.

For their part, Nairobians seem preoccupied with the same things North American urbanites are: traffic and crime. They complain bitterly about the congestion caused by the sprawling new middle class suburbs- of course, the city of millions has been expanding ever since it was founded as a supply depot just a century ago, but until recently the new arrivals were too poor to crowed the streets with their Renaults and Land Cruisers. However, if traffic is getting worse, I'm happy to say that crime is getting better. Only a few years ago, Nairobians were afraid to carry a purse or pull out a cell phone anywhere in public; once can safely do both simultaneously. What was the city's elegant solution? As someone put it, "The police now, they shoot robbers. Even if you just steal a cell phone, they kill you."

Well, goodbye to all that. We rode up to Nanyuki in the back of the organization's 20-year old Land Rover, a four-hire ride through Kenya's agricultural heartland. We passed palm groves, field of sisal and pineapple plantations, all laid out on soil so red that it would make Georgians hang their heads in shame. It reminded me a little of western Ecuador, but it was poorer: the rows of children walking home from school along the highway were barefoot, and the ploughing was done by animals, not machines. At some point, shortly after being mobbed by two-dozen banana vendors in Kiganjo, we climbed a ridge and emerged in a completely different landscape: the Laikipia plateau, my new home. The throngs of matatus (minibusses) and pedestrians slackened off in this sparse landscape, but with its gentle rises, thick grasslands and shade trees, it's not difficult to see what attracted white settlers 100 years ago: it is comfortingly familiar. Unlike the malarial land to the south with its banana trees and rice paddies, here the settlers could enjoy a gentler climate and expansive plains to keep their cattle. They even imported trout from England to stock Laikipia's streams.

Rising (just a little) from this landscape is Nanyuki. Nanyuki is home to 40,000 people- mostly Kikuyu migrants- but it can feel much smaller. Pretty much everything is located along the highway or one of a handful of cross streets. The tallest building is five stories. Three banks, innumerable bars, a few restaurants, a handful of small hotels, a row of craftsmen's kiosks, a second-hand clothes market, two men selling shoes on the sidewalk, two Indian-owned dry goods stores, three cripples begging, a cyber cafe, 125 cell phone shops, a dozen street children and a vegetable store: this is Nanyuki's commercial life. I do genuinely like Nanyuki, though, for its lack of pretensions. Here, unlike Nairobi, there is no one dressed like a corporal in the King's African Rifles using white-gloved hands to open the door of cars arriving at the Hilton, nor are there Indian businessmen bustling around in Armani suits, talking on their Razrs.

Anyone who travels these days to a developing country seems obligated to write something about the collision between the modern world and the traditional one. If I were inclined to follow suit, a small city or a big country town like Nanyuki would be the perfect setting for such a vignette. I could tell about the Maasai tribesman who bicycled down the street in full regalia, carrying a traditional staff, and then entered the Safaricom store, perhaps to buy more minutes for his cell phone. I could tell you about the radio statio that plays traditional songs of the Luo people interspersed with the best of Jason Mraz. I could tell you that in an unmarked, unelectrified hamlet in the midst of a pineapple grove about 10 miles south of the equator, the only commercial enterprise is Thriller's Exquisite Luxurious Fish 'n Chips Pub. Not only that, but if I were a great thinker like Tom Friedman, I could tie these vignettes together to build a theory explaining the future of the global economy and the political order. But I'm not, and I won't. Instead, I'll tell you about a haunted hotel.

Our first night in Nanyuki, we stayed in Simba's Lodge, located on the outskirts of town near the orphanage. It is a big walled compound containing a series of cement buildings. Upon check-in, we were greeted by a half-dozen workers, fressed in faded tuxedos and frayed, gold bow ties, who escorted us to our room, the only one of 30 to be occupied that night. Again at dinner, we were alone in a dining room that could fit 100, and seven or eight workers, dressed again in tuxes, watched us eat. I decided the place was creepy. Then, sometime before dawn, I awoke to a faint but haunting noise that I could not place. I sat up in bed, my pulse spiking and a knot forming in my stomach. It was only after a few moments' concentration that I deciphered the noise was the muzzein's call to prayer being broadcasted to Nanyuki's Muslims. I fell back to a peaceful sleep and later ate breakfast in the again empty dining room, where a TV had now been turned on to an African soap opera in which one protagoinst had AIDS and another attacked a rival in love with a machete. This was all a refreshing departure from the night before, but we still changed to a different place for the weekend.

What about work, you say? Right now the organization's staff is scattered around the world (New York, Ghana, Dol Dol) so I've only been partially briefed on what's going on, but I'll probably be leaving for Dol Dol on Sunday. Before then, I have to buy my supplies to take there. I also have to find rubber boots for the afternoon thunder storms that you can see rolling off Mt. Kenya from 15 miles away and which turn Nanyuki's dirt sidewalks and sidestreets into muddy bogs.

You can tell a woman is a regular in Nanyuki, I'm told, if she can walk in the mud with heels on. I'm still searching for the male equivalent.

An introduction and a primer in Maa

2007-05-07T19:24:00.000-04:00

What does ol-ashumpai mean? Nothing, really.

There are something like 50 languages spoken in Kenya, and to my great fortune, the Maasai and Samburu I'll be working with speak one of the most difficult: Maa. It's highly tonal, and Maa-English translation dictionaries come with elaborate diagrams of the mouth, nose and throat with arrows and suggestions for how to make Maa noises. Good transliterations of Maa sentences are fascinating-looking things with backwards "c's", horizontal lines bisecting words at a time and accents sprouting at improbable angles from improbable letters

"Ol-ashumpai" is a bad transliteration for the Maa phrase for a white person. The real transliteration requires symbols that my computer can't make and yours can't read. I just wanted to avoid titling this blog some Kenya-related pun, like "Kenya Dig It?". So in that regard, this is success.

As a tangent, the Maasai used to have a much more colorful term for white colonists: "iloridaa enjekat" which translates as "those who confine their farts"- a derogatory reference to the pants-centric sartorial choices of British soldiers. Cole, I think the Maasai are your natural support bloc should you run another campaign based on your opposition to pants.

All of this linguistic dabbling is just a distraction. As much as I like travelling, I hate preparing for it. Drawing up lists, packing, making hotel reservations- who needs it? Far better to try to wrap your tongue, throat and nose around "karbobo naainyala endaa". True, lots of things need to be done before I leave on Sunday, but I can immediately think of dozens of situations in which I'll need to tell a Maasai "It is squirrels that have destroyed the food" in his native tongue. Of course, that could be the mefloquine talking. Mefloquine speaks Maa.