Ethan Zuckerman's musings on Africa, international development
and hacking the media.
Or “holiday”, as my British compatriots call it. I’m taking one. It’s brief, but I’m going to try to be offline, look at the ocean and whales and less at computer screens. Plan on being back online on September 4th, if not a bit sooner. In the meantime, please keep an eye on Somalia and DRC for me, won’t you?
While the situation in Somalia is still not garnering a great deal of news attention, some of the web’s smarter commentators are weighing in on the tensions between the Islamists and the Ethiopian-supported provisional government. Taylor Jackson sees the fact that Somalia isn’t front-page news in the US as an indictment of US foreign policy, a tendency to focus on situations only when they’ve exploded, not when they’re igniting.
“Somali militias may seem underfunded and inconsequential now, but plenty of people were saying the same thing about Afghan warlords and Saddam Hussein 20 years ago.
All this goes to show that the war on terror cannot be won as a fight against terrorists. It must primarily be a fight against the conditions that allows violent ideologies to flourish. Our war should be a fight against desperation, closed-minded ideology and the collective memory of America’s arrogant, failing foreign policy abroad.”
Meanwhile, I find myself agreeing with Foreign Policy’s Aditya Dasgupta - I can’t tell whether it’s worth fearing the advance of the Islamists or celebrating them. Despite some recent clan-based violence in Southern Somalia, the areas controlled by the UIC are a great deal safer than they were a year ago. And there are some truly remarkable developments, like a UIC ban on exporting charcoal and rare animals. As the IRIN story reports, Gulf states are willing to pay huge amounts - $15 a bag - for charcoal, especially sweet-smelling charcoal made from mango trees. At these prices, it’s very difficult for impoverished people to resist cutting Somalia’s remaining trees and selling them to Saudi Arabia.
(Charcoal is a big freaking deal in environmental and development terms. While charcoal is a smoky fuel, it’s a great deal cleaner than other biofuels - animal dung, for instance - which means it’s a healthier alternative. It’s comparatively affordable in many nations, fairly easy to produce, and gives the sort of heat most people are comfortable cooking over. (It would be great if everyone would convert to using solar ovens, but the cooking popular in the horn of Africa requires a pot over a flame, not baked casseroles…) But charcoal has horrific environmental consequences, leading to deforestation and, in some cases, increased desertification, especially when it becomes a commidity for export. Dr. Amy Smith at MIT’s D-Lab is focused on ways to create charcoal that doesn’t require cutting trees - corn cob, sugar cane and other biofuels.)
If the UIC can actually enforce progressive policies like these, it may increase their international legitimacy and reassure some who are concerned that UIC’s advance is a worse outcome than the vacuum of authority they’re filling. Then again, UIC may be focusing on other issues in the very near future - despite Ethiopia’s insistence that they don’t have troops in Somalia, the AP is reporting the presence of troops in Galkaayo, a key city in Puntland. The UIC has threatened a military response to this troop presence, which would almost certainly trigger the conflict observers have worried was impending.
It’s hard to prevent charcoal smuggling while fighting a land war against Ethiopia.
Other recent Somalia posts:
Mapping Somalia
UIC on the move in Somalia
And you thought it was hard starting a business in your country…
One of the miracles of Somalia is the extent to which a state without a central government has managed to be a business-friendly environment. (Indeed, there are libertarians who’ve made the argument that the absence of a central government makes starting a business easier. I’m guessing most of them have never had to hire gunmen with AK-47s to protect their business infrastructure…) Somali Telecom has had great success building a mobile phone company in Somaliland - started in the US, the company is now based in Dubai and manages a family of companies in Somaliland and Puntland.
Another business that’s helping spawn more businesses is Daallo Airlines, which provides weekly service from Nairobi to Mogadishu and Hargeisa. I haven’t been able to get their online booking application to work, so I can’t tell you the price. But a recent article from Karen Allen with the BBC suggests that there’s a lot of demand for their services. Allen reports that in a neighborhood of Nairobi popular with Somalis, the hotels are jammed full as expat Somali businessmen hoping to get to Mogadishu to get a piece of the action.
Many expatriate Somalis have been fiscally succesful, and some estimates suggest that Somalis send as much as a billion US dollars home every year in remittances. Two major obstacles had been preventing business investment in Somalia - the closing of the international airport in Mogadishu, and the security situation in the capital. But the airport reopened in July, and many report that the streets of Somalia are much safer under the UIC than they were before the Islamists took control. And Allen reports that people are literally lining up to fly back to Mogadishu and find new business opportunities.
It’s not always returning citizens and their countrymen who open the first wave of businesses in troubled and recovering nations (I’m not brave enough to speculate whether Somalia is recovering or just troubled.) Nigel Twose, in the World Bank Private Sector Development blog has an interesting story about Lebanese entrepreneurs in Liberia:
Last Wednesday, I was sitting in the lobby of my hotel in Monrovia, waiting for my flight to Dakar and back to Jo’burg. Across from me were three men of Lebanese origin: the manager of the hotel, a 20-something, and an older man who had just left Lebanon to escape the war. The three of them were huddled over a laptop. One suddenly asked me: “Do you think Kentucky Fried Chicken would work in Monrovia?”
The entrepreneurial logic may well be sound: chicken is the most popular meat in Liberia, existing Lebanese falafel restaurants are full to bursting, the UN soliders and people working with reconstruction efforts in Liberia often have salaries that allow them to afford KFC prices. You may not be tempted to open a fast food franchise in a city that’s just recently regained electricity, but it just might be a great business opportunity for someone sufficiently brave and resourceful.
Twose notes that he’d just sat through a series of meetings where government ministers worried about Lebanese dominance of the Liberian economy and needs to ensure that the economy is “Liberianized”. On the one hand, local economic development may - inadvertently - favor ethnic minorities in businesses in Africa. The Lebanese - who dominate business in many African nations - often have outside capital with which to build businesses. Because they usually don’t have local political ambitions, successful Lebanese businessmen aren’t viewed as political threats, which might give them fewer political hassles than native-born counterparts. On the other hand, Twose cautions Liberia against shutting out the Lebanese, as they may be the people most capable of rapid economic development of Liberia.
(Twose doesn’t mention - but his post made me think of - Amy Chua’s book “World on Fire”, which argues that the business success of ethnic minorities can lead to global instability…)
What makes a country attractive to foreign investors? What makes a country welcoming to expatriates who want to come home? Are the Somalis in Kenya and the Lebanese in Liberia visionary, or foolish?
My European friends laugh at me for taking very brief vacations, instead of the month-long holidays they favor. (Actually, the Rabbi and I are about to disappear for six days to exotic, far-off Maine.) The truth is - I’m afraid of email. Were I to actually go offline for a few weeks, would I need to declare email bankruptcy, ala Larry Lessig? Turn off email altogether, like danah boyd? Or do what most of my friends do and bring a Blackberry with them, sneaking clandestine glances while on the beach?
And then there’s the blogs. And the news. Even if you keep up with the incoming email, that doesn’t prevent the rest of the world from moving on without you. Take the experience of my friend Andrew Heavens:
Andrew returned to Ethiopia from his holiday in Europe and discovered that:
- Blogs were no longer blocked by the national telecom company
- Flooding has led to a malaria outbreak and minor cholera epidemic
- The nation is making warlike noises towards Somalia and facing Eritrean troops massing on its border
- The government is executing fighters from the Ogaden National Liberation Front
As he puts it, “…when you come back from a month-long break and all this hits you in one day, you can start to feel a little overwhelmed.”
In the overwhelming news from Ethiopia is a fascinating “tale of two Ethiopian books“, which Andrew wrote up for Global Voices. One is a text by Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, where he argues that “…the neo-liberal paradigm is a dead end, is incapable of bringing about the African renaissance, and that a fundamental shift in paradigm is required to bring about the African renaissance.” This is probably not good news for countries like the US and the UK which have lionized Zenawi as an example of a progressive African leader… until his troops started shooting demonstrators in the streets.
Garnering much more attention than Zenawi’s book is “Dawn of Freedom”, by Dr. Berhanu Nega, an opposition politician and the mayor of Addis Ababa… until he was thrown into Kaliti prison in treason charges, a popular charge for Ethiopian opposition leaders these days. The book - written while Nega was in prison and smuggled out to be published in Uganda - has evidently sold more than ten thousand copies, and copies were selling in Addis for three times the cover price. For those of us who don’t read Amharic, Ethio-Zagol has a close reading, review and background on the book, complete with the abusive, anonymous comments that accompany any online Ethiopian political discussion.
By the way, the reason I found Andrew’s post on Global Voices? David Sasaki’s daily digest, which is the only way I can navigate the amazing volume of content our project creates every day. I highly recommend subscribing so you can find the best five stories we run each day - there’s at least one tale this convoluted and interesting every week.
As predicted, the first round of elections in the DRC hasn’t produced a candidate with the majority of votes for President. Joseph Kabila came close, but wasn’t able to avoid a run-off, tallying 44.8% of the 17 million reported votes. The run off will be held on the 29th of October, pitting Kabila against Jean-Pierre Bemba, leader of the Movement for the Liberation of the Congo, who received 20.03% of the vote.
The announcement of results was accompanied by a gunfight between supporters of Kabila and Bemba in Kinshas - the UN reports five were killed in the shooting. So far, violence has been extremely limited, and finger are crossed throughout the nation that the run-off means an opportunity for political alliances, rather than for armed clashes.
There’s a strong regional component to the results - President Kabila received massive support in eastern DRC - 97% of the vote in Bukavu, for instance - where he’s viewed as the key figure in ending the conflicts that have devestated much of eastern DRC. But in Kinshasa, Kabila received 17% of the vote, as compared to 51% for Bemba. Kabila, a Swahili-speaker who grew up in Tanzania, is dismissed as “not Congolese” by some of Bemba’s Lingala-speaking supporters.
As alliances form before the runoff, Bemba’s coalition is uniting under the theme “Tout Sauf Kabila” - anyone but Kabila. The alliance is united by more than opposition to Kabila - they are likely to rally under the slogan, “Let us save Congo from the East-West partition,” believing that a Kabila victory will lead towards an inevitable geographic split, given Kabila’s unpopularity in the west, which might make the capital ungovernable if he were to win. Jonathan Edelstein, analyzing the situation on Head Heeb, suggests that the coalition-building process favors Bemba:
In other words, even though Bemba starts the runoff race far behind, Kabila is widely despised outside his base of support in the east, which will handicap him in winning key endorsements. His first-round performance, even though just short of a majority, may represent a maximum as well as a minimum.
The Malau, weighing in at The Salon, will be relieved that Kabila did not win the first round outright, “.. a true possibility, and one that I currently refuse to consider, because I fear it would mean Hell breaking loose on Congo.” But he doesn’t see an easy task ahead for either Bemba or Kabila:
Both coalitions seem to have to contend with the same reality: the need to overcome the apparent East/West divide in the country. Any future President will need to have the capacity to command respect, and have authority, in both sides, and that is a feat that so far, neither of the two front-runners have done very well.
In the meantime, external events could further complicate the situation. General Aronda Nyakirima of the Ugandan Peoples’ Defense Forces is threatening incursions into eastern DRC to uproot the Lord’s Resistance Army if peace talks in Southern Sudan between Kony and Kampala collapse. Incursions from Rwanda to uproot Hutu militamen was one of the proximate causes of the last major war in the eastern DRC - incursions from Uganda would likely force MONUC to engage Ugandan troops, and would destabilize the fragile peace in the east and badly complicate the next round of voting. It might also erode some of Kabila’s popularity in the east, given the connection between his success and his reputation for peacemaking.
Another critical factor will be the results from parliamentary elections in DRC, not due for weeks to come. Once the composition of the National Assembly becomes more clear, momentum may be more obvious for Bemba or Kabila, forcing the other into more complicated alliances to attempt to win a run-off.
A new story from the BBC suggests that there’s been more violence in Kinshasa, though reports are confused and confusing. It also includes an electoral map that shows how sharp the Kabila/TSK split is…
Meanwhile, The Malau recommends an excellent article in the South Africa Mail and Guardian by Stephanie Wolters, former editor in chief of Radio Okapi. She agrees that a run-off election is probably preferable to an outright Kabila victory, and shares an interesting bit of insight about winning and governing:
Bemba, a former rebel leader, has the advantage of having won support in areas that he has already governed. Kabila, on the other hand, has been most successful in areas that have little experience of his rule. He has the least support in Kinshasa, a city that has been his home since 1997, but whose residents have grown tired of the president and his cronies.
I got interested in Africa over a decade ago because I was interested in African music. I was lucky enough to attend a college that had a remarkable African dance program, led by Sandra Burton, a veteran of Chuck Davis’s African American Dance Ensemble. Sandra brought musicians like Obo Addy to our studio in rural Massachusetts, and I got the chance to work with amazing teachers, despite being miles from what anyone would reasonably call a center of Africa culture.
As I started listening to recordings from the continent, what turned me on was not the traditional and neo-traditional music we were playing in the dance studio - it was the places where Africa and the rest of the world collided, sonically. Shina Peters and “Afro juju”, where traditional meoldies played on crappy electric keyboards thundered over traditional drums. The endless jams of Fela Kuti, with horn sections that sounded like Lagos traffic. But my favorite was Mandingo, Foday Musa Suso’s project to bring Gambian griot music into the 21st century.
Foday Musa Suso, in his late 80s electro phase
Suso, a master kora player from The Gambia, came to the United States in the late 1970s and found himself playing with modern jazz greats Don Cherry and Herbie Hancock. His collaborations with Hancock were especially fruitful, resulting in “Junku”, a composition for the 1984 Olympic Games, and two legendary albums together: Village Life and Jazz Africa.
Village Life is a set of live studio recordings in Tokyo (August 7-9, 1984, album released 1985), with Suso on kora and talking drum, and Hancock on Yamaha DX-1 and drum machine. Hancock says, in the liner notes, that he’d planned on playing piano to accompany Suso on traditional griot pieces, but saw the DX-1 on a Yamaha factory tour and fell in love. Because the DX-1 was tuneable in microintervals, Hancock was able to make his instrument closer in tune to the kora. The two are still strikingly different instruments, of course, and the meeting of the two is farther afield than other North/South encounter records, like Ry Cooder and Ali Farka Touré’s remarkable Talking Timbuktu.
(I’ve just digitized Village Life and posted two tracks - Moon/Light (first track, side one), and Kanatente (the second side of the album). The LP I’m working from is not perfect - and it took me a good three months of online searching and bidding to get the copy I have. You’ll hear a lot of noise on the first minute of Kanatente - my apologies.)
Suso and Hancock produced another album together, which was also released as a concert film: Jazz Africa. I’m willing to pay far too much money for this on LP, but have yet to find a copy of it - a live album, it features the two, plus Santana’s percussionist, Armando Peraza, and is supposed to be blazingly hot.
Hancock moved on from his electro and African fascination to experiment with jazz/hiphop crossovers, with mixed success. But the collaboration had a deep impact on Suso, who released two Afro-Electro albums, produced by Bill Laswell, who had produced the Village Life sessions. Hancock played on the first - Watto Sitta - though not the second - New World Power - which moved into darker, harder, dancier territory. Not only are they some of Suso’s best albums, I’d put them right at the center of Laswell’s best world music collaborations.
Suso’s Mandingo albums are difficult, though not impossible, to find. The Hancock collaborations are much rarer. Neither sold well - record stores didn’t know where to shelve the recordings, never mind how to recommend them. Jazz purists had already given up on Hancock years ago as he got more fascinated with electronic sounds, turntables and the raw ingredients of 1980s hiphop. And world music purists had a hard time with the electric edge of the sound, especially as Mandingo’s later recordings made the kora just another ingredient in an electric stew.
But these collisions between the modern and the traditional are what Africa sounds like. Demanding that Suso play the kora the way his forefathers did, and not the way Herbie Hancock would, is like demanding Africans stay in those picturesque, malarial villages and not move to cities. Suso’s music - like Peters’s or Fela’s - broke stereotypes and complicated people’s views of what African music sounded like. It’s hardly a surprise no one bought them - complicated views of Africa are hard to sell in the US.
Tracks, downloadable in mp3
“Junku” - from Herbie Hancock “Sound-System”, 1984
“Moon/Light” - from Foday Musa Suso and Herbie Hancock “Village Life”, 1985
“Kanatente” - from Foday Musa Suso and Herbie Hancock “Village Life”, 1985
“Harima” - from Mandigo “Watto Sitta”, 1985
“Tell Me One More Time” - from Mandigo “New World Power”, 1990
A group of students at Cambridge Community Television took on a class project in a video production class: a short documentary on Citizen Journalism. The documentary they produced puts many “professional” efforts to shame - it’s an impressive, creative and well-produced introduction to the field of citizen’s media, with a focus on projects in the Boston area. It’s viewable online and features a number of smart citizen’s media people, including Steve Garfield, Lisa Williams and Bill Densmore, as well as yours truly. Check it out.
(Personally, I prefer the term “citizen’s media”, as much of what’s most interesting to me isn’t journalism, but people expressing opinion, talking about their lives, etc. But hey, it’s an excellent piece and probably all for the best that no one wasted time arguing terminology…)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
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