A Year in Review
August 12th, 2008 by Arno Kopecky in Notes from Nairobi![[Post to Twitter]](http://www.walrusmagazine.com/blogs/wp-content/plugins/tweet-this/tweet-this-small.png)
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“By the time bodies start piling up, that’s just a detail.” — Ugandan journalist Kalundi Serumaga, speaking at the Kwani Litfest in Nairobi.
NAIROBI—It was all over. We were gathered on the patio of the national museum’s café , post-morteming in the shade, coffee cups shaking in our hands. Binyavanga Wainaina—the next Achebe, or maybe just a good talker—going on about where’s a razor to shave his dreadlocks off: “I just want to see the shape of my skull.”
(”Ah,” said David Kaiza, Kampala’s neurotic genius, “you’re going to scalp yourself before someone else does it for you.”)
Meanwhile, investigative journalist Parselelo Kantai was describing the 1000-shilling bribe he’d paid the cops who caught him smoking a cigarrette on the street at four in the morning last night, while Kalundi was grumbling about everything in a very analytic way—that all the intelligence in this country had been trained outside of it, that everything we’d been talking about throughout the litfest was probably irrelevant, that the waitress had passed him three times without bringing him a menu and it took a blond mzungu to get her attention. “Hey man,” I said, “you could have lifted your hand too.”
One by one they came in from the Nairobi winter sun and joined our huddle, just as they’d come to this city from all over Africa and beyond to discuss what had happened and what our role in it was, or could be, or should be (”We mustn’t take ourselves too seriously,” Wambui Mwangi, academic with an attitude, had warned from the beginning, which was something we constantly needed to be reminded of, although as Binyavanga said, “If what we say doesn’t matter then why does Robert Mugabe dedicate half the national budget to shutting us up?”). Nice view of fat trees and the Nairobi river from where we sat, too far away to see the street kids washing themselves in it or smell the putrescence that washed down from the dump a few dozen kilometres away…I’d seen dead bodies in that river after the violence had supposedly passed, which went back to Kalundi’s earlier point—”Why was everyone so surprised?”—but what were a few urban casualties compared, say, to what Ishmael Beah had seen, had created with his own hands in his own country’s civil war in the nineties. Yet here he was, the only one who didn’t look hungover, looking instead like a Benetton model and sounding like a monk, gentle as nirvana, as though he’d spent all his violence back in Freetown, amputated it like some deformed foot so that nothing was left but articulate grace, maybe that’s why his book has already sold more copies than the combined total of everyone else at the table.
“Conflict is a part of human nature, it’s inevitable,” he’d said at one point during the festival, when someone pointed out the parasitic need writers have for conflict. “What we can do is minimize the impact.” Maybe. He was walking proof of something, no doubt, but no one could say exactly what—least of all Aminatta Forna, the other writer from Sierra Leone, who came from the upper classes of an older generation and was precisely the kind of person child soldiers like Ishmael had been killing—”He never even mentioned rape in his book,” she’d noted quietly earlier in the week, though the two got along well enough throughout the week.
It can get a little morbid. Why are Africans so violent—the most popular question from outsiders, who sometimes even ask it aloud. No answers, only words. The problem with differentiated skin colour is it allows us to see things in black and white, to reduce a whole continent to a pigment. The human condition as zebra stripe. Take those goggles off and you get a different sense, like stepping back in time, back into the plagues and thirty-year wars of Europe, the conquest of South and North America, the latter seemingly well-adjusted now because, as Kalundi said, they were better at genocide. Now, it seems we’ve resorted to killing with kindness. The headquarters for this renovated enterprise are here in Nairobi, a UN complex as lush and vast as the garden of Eden; perhaps (I wonder) if instead of paying for boreholes and mosquito nets, we just stopped picking off their doctors and engineers and physicists and, yes, their writers too, we could relieve them of the burden of our charity. Then maybe they’d find the energy to relieve their own leaders from office.
And yet, the hangovers wear off, we realize we’re laughing now, that it isn’t so bad, the story never ends. A week-long literary festival culminated the night before with a cocktail party at the American ambassador’s mansion, and who didn’t have a good time? Strange choice of venue, true, but as Binyavanga had announced towards the end of the night, “We are living in a global terrain of ideas,” the whereabouts of your body matter less than the wandering of your mind. And yes, writers thrive on conflict, but it’s only one ingredient; look at what our very own Atwood and Ondaatje and Munro have come up with in its absence. Imagination can prosper in peacetime as well.
Listen to Ishmael tell his audience about a recent return trip he’d made to Sierra Leone. “I visited a tree near my home village that was used to kill prisoners during the war, with its bark all hacked up from machete cuts and blackened with blood,” he described. “But when I came back, I saw that the cuts had all healed. The tree was blooming green and beautiful, and people were resting in the shade of its leaves.”
And we’re off, into taxis toward separate planes, or simply to walk down the sidewalk to the next conversation, dispersing like ripples in a pond: Ishmael to Brooklyn, Kalundi and David to Kampala, Aminatta to London, Wambui to Toronto, Binyavanga to stick around…me, I’ll be in touch. Not from here though; this little note is moving on. For those who remain curious about the what-nexts of east Africa and beyond, stay tuned for my replacement, Glenna Gordon, in whose clever hands the story will continue to unfold.
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Posted on Tuesday, August 12th, 2008 at 11:16 am. Follow comments through the RSS 2.0 feed. Comment or trackback.
August 13th, 2008 at 12:03 am
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December 5th, 2008 at 5:23 pm
Certainly a new way of saying the the same thing development experts have been saying from the seventies. Perhaps the Kenyan violence was a blessing in disguise to Africa although almost 2,000 kenyans had to die to achieve that. Why do i say that? Because it underscored the number one problem of SSA-Its Politics (especially radicalised because of the increased inequality brought on by a host of reasons. The radicalised SSA politics leads to what researchers are wrongly focusing on-Violence in SSA- which in turn undermines the other varaiables -like investment climate- that are necessarry for developement.
So how do we address the root cause of the problem without throwing away the baby and the birth water? This is a question that has streched the minds of some of the best eceonomists in the world to no end. They have tried practically everything but the problem persists which must either be because they have put on the ideological goggles that restrains them from going beyond their own intellectual biases that defines the questions they ask and therefore the solutions they can obtain.
But suppose we thought of it differently? I always tell friends who are going to Europe for the first time that they need to realise that the plane they are about to board will after eight hours time take them two hundred years ahead in human history. The plane has become the ultimate time machine!!!! The reverse applies for those emabrking on the trip back to Africa(Kenya writ large-in my case).
As such our so called western-trained “intelligence†should have had enough time adapt to the realitiesn of the continent’s underdevelopement by now.
And what is that reality? The Environment. The Environement. The Environement. Why is it that three quarters of kenya land is practiaclly desert? Why is it that every other second year we practically face famine requiring huge buidgtary adjustments? Why is it that the average Kenyan (about 50% by SID statistics) is practically underfed and therefore virtually stunted form birth? Why is it that so few (the rich) find it so easy to hoodwink so many so many times? well again need i say? The environment, The environment, The environment. We need to mitigate on the effects of this on the most basic human condition. Is it true that the UNEP has been loacted in Nairobi Kenya for over two decades? So is there a need to speculate further? I hope you enjoyed your tea!!!
By the way maybe you could have gotten better insight on the african condition and the way foreward had you had tea (most probably coffee), with the award winning author of the celebrated novel “a hundred years of solitude” It is a magical book…but so is Africa for the chief reasons i have given above–The enviro….
December 5th, 2008 at 10:11 pm
Surely a restatement of what development experts has been saying sine the 1970s. Perhaps the Kenyan violence was a blessing in disguise to Africa although almost 2,000 Kenyans had to die for that to be achieved. Why do I say that? Because that violence underscored the number one problem of Sub-Saharan Africa-its Politics. When politics becomes radicalized because of the increased inequality brought on by a host of reasons what naturally occurs- as history’s natural experiments have proven time and time again-is violence. The more the inequality and the more extreme the poverty that it engenders the worse the violence when it finally comes as come it must. Social science researchers who are cast in the scientific mind set would most probably want to investigate – in some fancy regression equation no doubt – the causative factors behind the violence using a number of representative indices but always being careful to indicate that they expect there results not to capture all the determinants of political violence. Violence anywhere in the continent -of course because of “rational†ignorance (?) -is seen as undermining the investment climate and therefore growth which is crucial to the alleviation of poverty.
So how do we address the root cause of the problem without throwing away the baby and the bath water? This is a question that has “stretched†-to no end- some of the best minds in economics. The problem persists despite almost all that has been thrown at it. But their efforts are probably left unrewarded because of their ideological goggles which blinker their perceptions -no doubt determining the research questions that they can ask and the policy solutions that they can propose from the answers they get to the same.
But suppose we thought of this issue differently? I always tell my friends who are going to the west for first time that they need to realize that the plane they are about to board is a veritable time machine that will in effect take –after eight hours of travel (if they are going to Europe)- them forward almost two hundred years in human history. The reverse applies for those embarking on the trip back. Although then they may be traveling back even seven hundred years in human depending of course on their objective social “reality†once they are back.
As such our so called western trained “intelligence†should have had enough time to adapt to the realities of the continent they came back to almost fifty year ago. And what is that reality? The Environment. The Environment. The Environment. Why is it that up to three quarters of Kenyan landmass is practically desert
(officially classified as arid of semi arid)? Why is it that every other two years we experience famine- requiring huge budgetary adjustments? Why is it that the average Kenyan (about 50% by SID statistics) is practically underfed and therefore virtually stunted from birth-with the attendant effects on their cognitive abilities? Why is it that so few (the rich and privileged enduring political class) find it so easy to hoodwink so many so often? Well again, need I say…the environment. The environment. The environment? Are there no innovative policy options to mitigate on the effects of the environment on the most basic human condition? Is it true that the UNEP has been located in Nairobi Kenya for over two decades? So need we speculate further? I hope you enjoyed your tea!!!
By the way maybe you could have gotten better insight on the African condition and the way forward had you had tea (most probably coffee), with the award winning author of the celebrated novel “a hundred years of solitude†and not the future replicator of the celebrated author of “The Trouble with Nigeria†The former is a magical book…but so is Africa for the chief reasons that I have enlisted above ad nauseum…The environ….
December 9th, 2008 at 2:39 am
In our Life time …if the Environment is the Problem I
In an interesting twist of events -the birth almost two thousand years ago- of an “upstart†middle -eastern social critique who also happened to be the “son†of a earthly carpenter (from of all places Nazareth), will be marked with much revelry and soul-searching for the naturally contemplative.
Few of those who relentlessly persecuted him because of either not understanding his vision or his mission or being too impatient in their hurry to proceed on with life would have been ready for the upheaval -positive and negative- that his otherwise harmless message –Love-would inspire on a world that misinterpreted it.
Also referred to by many as the Prince of Peace –one may be forgiven for hoping that at least those who spread that message may had first comprehended what exactly is meant by peace? Is peace the absence of war? Or is peace the intervening period between two periods of war? Is it true therefore that to be human is to be in conflict?
Conflict in this sense can be simply portrayed as being the relentless attempt by humanity in all geographical jurisdictions to attain a personal level of happiness consistent with their own estimation of what constitutes a personal minimum threshold level of social esteem. Defined thus conflict may be said to be common to most humanity born in circumstances not too distinct from those in which the founder of the Christian faith was born to human parents-in other words the third world.
The dual tension of trying to reach a minimum level of happiness without compromising certain social mores is consistent with Adam Smith’s postulates in his two celebrated books: “The Wealth of Nations†and the “The theory of Moral sentiments.â€
Indeed as the recent financial crises has portrayed the two tensions must go hand in hand for society to flourish. If we are to presume that social mores have a moral or theological basis in most societies that is usually encapsulated and codified in the laws of a particular polity then it is important that the socialization process of any society must not be amoral as we seem to continually perceive as normal in our country.
Man’s attempts to run away from God are of course legendary. As a student of Christianity- I am more familiar with the story of Adam in the Garden of Eden as portrayed in the book of Genesis after he had eaten of the forbidden fruit. The instructions issued to him were very specific but as he tried to explain later he had been misled. His ‘extenuating’ circumstances should have surely elicited for him some sort of reprieve from an all merciful God!!! At the personal level of course that is what it seemed like to him. But God being Love He did actually provide Adam’s seed with the reprieve they needed by sending his son to die on the Cross as a redemption for those who would believe in him.
Christ’s key message when he came to earth was simple. Love. In its timeless wisdom that message translates to: “positively engage with the society you find yourself in.†To those who were impatient with the manner in which he taught the message –preferring to focus on his socio –economic conditions rather than what he was saying- he of course appeared an anarchist. But it may also have been that the political and social order of his time reflected intolerance to divergent opinion from that imposed by the economic, political and cognitive elite.
There are similarities that one can draw between the social reform engendered by the simple message of Christ and that likely to be brought on by today’s global financial crisis. In my opinion the message of that social reform, is likely to be spear headed by a few “unlikely†crusaders urging their fellows to re-examine the relative weight they place on the two dominant tensions that drive humanity as clearly brought out by Adam Smith.
To avoid the mistakes that have led this continent to lose its most important resource-human capital- to other more accommodating climes it may time that we too as a society re-examine why and when we started persecuting our own prophets and then collectively vow-never again!!!
December 15th, 2008 at 12:27 pm
In Our Life time… if the Environment is the Problem-II
If the critical variable in development is education, then it must also be the case that development is a linear progression in the diminishment of ignorance. But it may also be conceived of-depending on which side of the spiritual divide you find yourself in- as a non-linear progression in the realization that “Ignorance is Bliss.†But that is a subject for another day as today’s subject is linguistics.
I seek to ask whether our linguists-or those we entrust to educate us on the same- are not caught in some sort of time warp. Why? Language like the culture it portrays and conveys is never static. It actively progresses with the dynamics of the culture from which it originates. Thus, one might for example safely conclude -from a brief flick through the various editions of the Oxford English Dictionary that the English language is indeed itself dynamic. An interesting research I have always wanted to carry out is to examine the evolution of the word cowardice. Why? Because everywhere and always human societies must have had some sort of concept of what constitutes cowardice. It would be interesting for example to find out how this concept has changed for various societies since the age of chivalry in the northern societies to the twenty first century (2009) in the South. Has it changed with the socio-economic progress of society? Or has the concept changed mainly due to the gradual acceptance of peaceful co-existence as a norm to which all human societies should aspire to? If the latter exactly what material and spiritual conditions brought this about?
Obviously an impatient language guru would want to point me out to the dictionary of the history of the origin of words and idioms. That may not be sufficient especially if the main reason for seeking to understand the concept of cowardice is to test a particular proposition that I took as gospel truth when I was young and growing up but I now find a need to re-examine especially in the light of the recently accepted –by some in our society- that there are no constants in life but death and taxes. The proposition I wish to test is whether indeed “Cowards Live longer.â€
How might one go about doing this? First let me say that I do not believe that we have or will ever reach a position in human development under the current institutional arrangements where all things are provable through “scientific†verification. I also believe –and will need to be convinced otherwise through my own personal study- that successful institutional reform sometimes requires major man-made (or Technological if you want) “shocks†to existing institutional arrangements. Depending on which side of the global power relations equation one is in when they become this curious the number of options for “scientific verification†of the proposition above may actually be rather limited.
But a more peaceful way of satisfying one’s curiosity-especially in an environment where knowledge is shunned or never pursued for its own sake- one may seek to study publicly available history of the northern societies and juxtapose it against the known socio- economic and political history of Africa, (Kenya writ large), conditions in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
At the micro level of course we all know (or do we?), that every family has its own coward. Well every family certainly has its black sheep (or does it?). We might of course move this scientific verification to the village level. Those brought up in villages or those brought up by those brought up in villages can of course quickly verify that every village has its own coward. But that would of course need someone or a committee to establish the objective and (statistically verifiable) criteria through which we can all say that so and so is a coward or that so and so is not a coward having agreed of course on what constitutes cowardice in each particular case given the past, prevailing and objectively foreseeable socio-economic and political as well as institutional environments of that particular village. To arrive at a national level resolution of this vexatious issue we may then need to aggregate the findings for all villages. Human beings are not omnipresent or omniscient so to even go beyond the village level with this exercise would require enormous coordination, human and material resources of the scale that can only be done occasionally.
But supposing the urgency of getting this answer is such that we do not have the luxury of waiting? Might we then not seek to simply verify by examining all the available historical records –statements and non-statements being included in the above- of public officials- past, current and future? But before we can label the public officials perceived of by their communities as cowards we would need to take into account all the circumstances prevailing at the time they were labeled as cowards by their communities. Was all the information available to these public officials that informed the choices they made resulting in this (mis?)Label also available to the public? Or was it a case of trial by the mob? Did their communities define cowardice in the same manner? An exercise of this nature done all across the African continent (Kenya writ large), maybe instrumental in coming up with an objective criteria for the search for leaders in a manner that may avoid the (rational?) mistakes of the past that we presently seem so intent on blindly repeating- as if we learn nothing from history!!! Our planet is in threat anyway or so we are told so danger is an ever present reality.
But what is the relationship between the foregoing and the positive alleviation of the adverse effects of environmental degradation (taken here to mean the diminution of tree cover)? First the growing of trees has an almost spiritual (sometimes philosophical or magical) dimension to it. Africa’s tropical forests are renown for having trees as old as 1000 years-probably more in the Congo. It will be difficult to know the motivation behind the recent publication in a local Nairobi newspaper of robbed members of a certain church that held specific beliefs about the divine nature of a 200 year tree under which they were worshiping. But that image has remained on my mind for some time. My reasoning (questioning) process went thus: why would people who believed in Jesus Christ – a historical figure who was crucified on a tree- believed by Christians to be the Son of God and to have resurrected after his death , consider a tree to have divine qualities? But then it occurred to me this last Sunday that these people must actually attach their belief in the supernatural to concrete available evidence –a two hundred year tree has existed how many generations?
In the eyes of one brought up to pray to an unseen God –this may obviously appear as unwarranted superstition. But what is that? Doesn’t every society have some belief in something whose origin must have begun in something perceived of as superstitious? In any-case if the superstition does not affect publicly accepted (and scientifically verifiable) norms of civilized (my definition here is peace promoting) behavior, whose business is it whether someone relates their belief in Jesus Christ to a Tree (most churches after-all have a wooden cross) or a rock (is He not referred to by Christians as “the Rock of all ages)?†It is evident to all contemplative people that when you rubbish someone’s faith without working extremely hard to replace it with something more viable –with which he can relate his present circumstances and aspirations to -then you are creating the recipe for chaos. And this is not a matter of reminding us of the superiority or not of science (since Isaac Newton).
In the same Nairobi newspaper, a few days later a “poor†believer was depicted kneeling down and praying to an unseen God to intervene in the matter of MPs paying taxes. It was obviously hilarious to those who see themselves as being the non-poor and therefore having recourse to the courts or other means of influencing events in a legally mandated manner-in other words the minority in this society. But I then thought again was the “poor†believer being wise?
There are statements attributed to the third King of Israel -also esteemed by those who believe in the Judeo-Christian scriptures -to be the wisest man (not person) ever to live. I am particularly intrigued by the statements in Ecclesiastes 7: 16-18 and Psalms 37:3. It seems to me that only old age and peaceful contemplation can lead us to confirm the veracity of these statements. Given the present conditions in which the majority of the (Kenyan and the rest of the third world) population find themselves, I would recommend to all aspiring “leaders†who are young and intellectually curious to seek more creative ways of “scientifically†answering the first question I posed in this piece (hopefully not the last post!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!)- Do cowards live longer? We might then make the slogan “Never Again†more encompassing!!!!!!!!!
December 16th, 2008 at 5:21 am
Be fair to the guy he has read and seems very well informed…pavlovian intuition on might say!!!!