Listen to some of the more overheated rhetoric in America about immigration – Lou Dobbs, perhaps, or Representative Tom Tancredo, who is running a long-shot presidential campaign on immigration issues – and you’d expect these demagogues to come from parts of the country where Spanish had become the dominant language. Kirk Johnson, in the NYTimes Week in Review, points out that Tancredo actually represents the whitest district in Colorado, a district with an 8% Hispanic population, as contrasted with a 15% population across the US. Johnson goes on to suggest that what Tancredo is afraid of isn’t immigration so much as anxiety about a global economy where workers compete not just with their neighbors, but with workers in Mexico and China. (Even this is a lousy explanation for Tancredo’s fears, as Colorado’s economy is expanding, especially in Tancredo’s district.)

This conversation about American immigration anxiety and global economics is a good invitation to look at international migration dynamics… something that the Times makes very easy, with an excellent set of maps about migration, one of which appears in the same issue of the paper. (The online version is a great example of the power of multimedia, as it features five related maps and makes it far easier to access the data than the paper version.) The leading map in the set shows nations that are gaining or losing population through migration. The US is the largest gainer, with roughly 1.3 million migrants per year between 2000 and 2005. Mexico is the biggest loser, with roughly 800,000 people a year leaving, many of them heading north. While this is the sort of map that gives Dobbs nightmares, it’s worth checking out the accompanying map, which shows migrants as a share of population. Migrants represent 12.86% of the US population, well below Canada’s 18.92%, Australia’s 20.33% or Switzerland’s 22.88%. And these countries have nothing on UAE and Qatar, each of which have populations that are more than 70% immigrant.

The US is way above the mean in global immigration – there are roughly 190 million people around the world living in countries other than their country of birth, or roughly 3%, and slightly more than 20% of the world’s migrants are in the US. But rich countries will tend to be above the mean – migrants leave for richer countries, not for poorer ones, and it’s rare countries like Japan that have robust economies and low migration (1.7% of the world’s migrants.) Economist Daniel Cohen, in his brilliant “Globalization and its Enemies“, observes that this global level of immigration is a historically low one – in 1913, immigrants made up about 10% of the world’s population. By comparison, Cohen characterizes our current moment in globalization as “virtual”, “imaginary” or “immobile”:

Merchandise is traded among all parts of the world, but it is only through television, or during a few vacation weeks for tourists for rich countries, that one encounters other societies. Yesterday’s globalization was very different, at least in regard to Europeans population new lands. The effects of this globalization were not achieved through commodities or images but principally tghrough people who physically – not “virtually” – left one world for another.

What’s most interesting to me about the migration map is the less predictable gainers and losers. Spain’s gain of 570,000 per year is familiar to Afrophiles who’ve been watching migration from West Africa to Europe through Morocco, which has lost 110,000 migrants per year. But I was surprised to see that Afghanistan has seen a migrant inflow of 222,000 per year over the past five years, evidence that despite instability, some Afghanis are seeing opportunities in returning home. I was deeply surprised to see Russia’s popularity as an immigrant destination, with 183,000 immigrants per year. Russia is surrounded by countries losing immigrants, and this inflow of migrants has generated significant societal tension.

Of the BRIC nations – the large emerging economies that many economists think will be powerhouses early in this new century – Russia is the only one gaining population. China lost 380,000 migrants per year, India lost 270,000 and Brazil lost 46,000. (If you expand BRIC to BRICS, South Africa gained 15,000 a year.) Remittance from migrants was a substantial portion of the economy in India, representing over 3% of GDP. That’s nothing compared to heavy remittance economies like the Philippines (12.76% of GDP) or Jamaica (16.88%), but it’s a useful reminder for anyone fascinated by India’s hypergrowth – this is still an economy that’s losing workers because there’s insufficient domestic employment, and where remittance capital is still a key contributor to the economy.

I suspect that immigration opponents will see little but threat in maps like these, evidence that wages earned in wealthy nations allow poor and corrupt governments to remain in power through parasitic relationships. I see something very different – evidence that economic growth has a close relationship to labor and capital mobility. Looking at the map of remittance, it’s worth noting that significant amounts of money are sent home by migrants from Western Europe, a sign of labor mobility within the EU. The economies that are emerging as powerhouses are bringing in huge amounts of overseas capital. And the nations most desperate for aid and investment, especially those in Sub-Saharan Africa, are receiving extremely small remittances in absolute dollar terms.

In other words, as an Afrophile, I’d like to see a great deal more outmigration from Africa, both to increase remittance income and to open the possibility of the sorts of “good diasporas” we’re starting to see in countries like Rwanda and Ghana, where the populations returning home have investment capital and skills acquired abroad, which they can use to start businesses at home… which might reduce the need for the next generation to emigrate.

A couple of open questions I’d be very grateful for input into:

- There’s a couple of migration questions the maps open up that I can’t explain very well. Why is Tanzania losing almost 70,000 people a year, and where are they going? Is the inflow of migrants to Eritrea (46,000 a year) connected to outflows from Ethiopia? Would love your thoughts in the comments.

- If Cohen is right about “virtual globalization”, we would expect to see evidence in early 20th century literature about reactions to globalization, immigrant panic, etc. I’ve got absolutely no knowledge of this period of time, and would greatly appreciate pointers to evidence of either pro-globalization or anti-globalization attitudes in Europe and the US just before the Great Depression. Again, please have at it in the comments field and assign me some reading.

• In Focus – MacArthur Foundation
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What’s the US Army doing in the Horn of Africa?

Periodically pounding the crap out of Somalia, sure, but the larger story is a bit more complicated.

You get a free pass if you hadn’t noticed that Somalia became the US’s third major front in the “war on terror”. It’s been poorly covered by global media, in part because it’s virtually impossible for American or European reporters to operate in Mogadishu. (That said, Al Jazeera English is covering the story closely, and is probably the best source for stories day to day.) As International Crisis Group’s Colin Thomas-Jensen points out in this interview with On The Media, it’s possible to cover the story from Djbouti or from Somaliland, but most newspapers don’t.

For those of you in need of a quick refresher: Somalia hasn’t had a functioning central government since 1991. There’s been a “transitional federal government”, backed by the UN and other international entities, but it wasn’t able to control the capital until very recently. For much of 2006, Mogadishu was controlled by an alliance of warlords called The Union of Islamic Courts. The UIC managed to pacify Mogadishu, but was criticized by some nations for curtailing civil liberties. Neighboring Ethiopia, which backs the TFG, was worried that the UIC would invade the Ogaden region of Ethiopia and try to create a “greater Somalia.” On Christmas Eve 2006, with US intelligence support and likely support from US Special Forces, Ethiopia invaded Somalia and installed the TFG in Mogadishu.

Unfortunately, as the US (should have) learned in Iraq, taking over a country isn’t the same thing as governing it. Most Somalis hate the Ethiopians, who they’ve fought two wars with – having Ethiopian soliders hold the capital isn’t an option. The AU has provided a small number of troops to secure Mogadishu, but they’re coming under fire from heavily armed warlords.
321,000 refugees have fled Mogadishu since February – these are people fleeing the chaos in the city after the fall of the Union of Islamic Courts, not the invading Ethiopian and US forces. The US, targetting “foreign fighters” and “Al-Qaeda sympathizers”, has launched missle attacks on Somali territory as recently as early June.

I’ve found this situation, especially the US involvement in the situation, very hard to understand as I’ve read about it over the past year. Tom Barnett‘s recent article in Esquire, “The Americans Have Landed“, provides some extremely useful context for people fascinated by the US military’s relationship to sub-Saharan Africa.

Barnett is in an interesting position to report on US military strategy in Africa. For six years, he served as a Professor in the US Navy’s War College and spent a great deal of time briefing senior Pentagon officials on the need for the military to get good at rebuilding nations, not just killing bad guys. His slide deck on transforming the military from a “leviathan” capable of conquering the Russians or the Chinese in a land war to a “sysadmin” capable of quickly pacifying “disconnected” nations and increasing stability, using both traditional forces and groups that work on reconstruction, became a highly influential book, The Pentagon’s New Map. (For more on Barnett and his work, you may find my notes on his talk at Pop!Tech in October 2004 useful, or from last year’s Pop!Tech talk.) There’s a very real sense in which the US military strategy in Africa is one that he’s recommended… which makes it a bit odd to read his report on it.

Barnett argues that the military is trying to do two things simultaneously in the Horn of Africa – pound the crap out of any Al-Qaeda-connected forces in Somalia, and build long-term, trusting relationships with the people of the countries where they have bases, notably Djbouti and northern Kenya. Needless to say, there’s a conflict between these two strategies: “There’s a lot of concern here that the establishment of Africa Command may do more harm than good – the poised hammer that makes everything suddenly look like a nail.”

The portrait Barnett paints of the US military’s efforts in Kenya is a sympathetic one – he shadows Army Captain Steve McKnight, an affable guy who appears to be doing everything right, making hundreds of friends within the local population by acting more like a Peace Corps volunteer than a warrior. But it’s his analysis of the Somali situation and the strategic logic for the military to be in Africa that’s most interesting and provocative:

After being ignored since the beginning of time (save for its slaves and its treasure), Africa just got strategically important enough for us to care about. And the Bush administration’s decision to set up Africa Command is historic, but not for the reasons given or assumed.

There aren’t enough Islamic terrorists in Africa to stand up to a full combatant command. If all we wanted were flies on eyeballs, a small number of special-operations trigger pullers would have sufficed for the forseeable future.

…

American is going to have an Africa Command for the same reason people buy real estate – it’s a good investment. Too many large, hostile powers surround Central Asia for the radical jihadists to expand there, but Africa? Africa’s the strategic backwater of the world. Nobody cares about Africa except Western celebrities.

So as the Middle East middle-ages over the next three decades and Asia’s infrastructural build-out is completed, only Africa will remain as a source for both youth-driven revolution and cheap labor and commodities. Toss in global warming and you’ve got a recipe for the most deprived becoming the most depraved.

You may wonder why, after two weeks of “Africa rising” blogging here, I’m now quoting a thinker who puts forth lines like “the most deprived becoming the most depraved.” The main reason is that Barnett, due to long engagement with Pentagon thinkers, is a believable source when he gives you insights into US military thinking. If most of non-celebrity America is ignoring Africa, it’s worth noting that the US military is not, if only because they’re projecting some very ugly long-term scenarios where poverty and weak governance leads to a need for military intervention.

What’s most interesting in Barnett’s article is watching him confront the challenge of implementing his vision for military transformation. To carry out the functions Barnett believes the military – in cooperation with aid agencies, diplomats and humanitarians – should engage in to strengthen nations, the military needs the trust and cooperation of the communities it operates in. But the fact that the military base houses a special operations unit – guys whose job it is to show up and kill bad guys – goes a long way towards raising local suspicion. And interventions like Somalia – all killing, no building, and carried out with as much secrecy as possible – go a long way towards eroding the sorts of relationships Barnett believes are so important to build.

• McClatchy Washington Bureau | 06/21/2007 | Native voices blog out of Africa
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• Africa Command — Military Bases in Africa – Esquire
  Barnett’s excellent essay on the US military presence in the horn of Africa
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• Google Public Policy Blog: Taking the Wraps Off Google’s Public Policy Blog
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  Hackers are using a Russian toolkit – probably related to the one I reported on in the IPowerWeb iframes exploit – to target Italian websites and seize passwords and other personal details from Italian web users
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If oil has the potential to destabilize or grow a nation’s economy, very few economists are concerned with the negative economic impact of wind power. While wind is a resource that hasn’t attracted mass investment yet in Africa, it’s often a great resource for isolated communities that have no other steady source of electrical power.

One of those areas is the Mastala Village in the Kasungu district of Malawi, where William Kamkwamba grew up. It’s a rural agricultural area about three hour’s travel from the capital, Lilongwe. Like many rural parts of Africa, there’s no grid electrical power. But there is wind.

William had to drop out of secondary school in 2002 because his family lacked funds to pay his school fees. Determined to continue his education, he started reading books from the primary school library, which had been contributed by USAID in a teacher training scheme. He discovered a pair of books on energy, one of which included the design for a windmill, and he began work on a five meter tall windmill near his family’s home, built from scrap timber, an old bicycle frame, and blades made from PVC pipe heated and pounded into flat blades. The windmill powers a bicycle dynamo, designed to power a bicycle’s headlamp. William ran the bicycle dynammo through a transformer, which provided enough power to charge a 12 volt battery. That battery in turn powers four lights, two radios and a mobile phone charger in William’s home.

Dr. Hartford Mchazime, the director of the Malawian training academy where William had found the books came to visit the village and was told about William’s windmill. He was so impressed by the young man’s ingenuity that he arranged for William to begin attending secondary school at government expense, and asked a reporter from the Malawi Daily Mail to report on the wind project. The Daily Mail story caught the attention of Malawian software developer and blogger Soyapi Mumba, whose post got picked up by Hactivate, Afrigadget and other blogs. Emeka Okafor from Timbuktu Chronicles – curator of the TED Global conference in Arusha – was so impressed that he arranged for William to come to the Arusha as a conference fellow.

William stands atop his windmill, which now is 12 meters high.

William’s work stole the show at TED, where he gave a three minute talk about his work and answered questions on stage from Chris Anderson. More than a few of the TED attendees were moved by his story and agreed to subsidize William’s education, both in and out of the classroom. Tom Rielly from the TED team is visiting Malawi with William this week to talk about the best ways to help William, consulting with Dr. Mchazime, William’s family and Soyapi and others of the African bloggers who’ve had the experience of moving from homes in rural areas to secondary schools in bigger cities. While the TED community is able to raise the money that would be necessary to send William to secondary school anywhere on the continent, Tom is looking for all sorts of opportunities for William to learn more, both formally and informally, both in classrooms and in machine shops.

William shows off his transformer and battery system in his house. Photo by Tom Rielly.

One important resource for William will be the brilliant geeks at Baobab Health. Soyapi and others have been building open source touchscreen health systems with Baobab, using retrofitted thin client systems. A recent volunteer project at Baobab helped build an 18m windmill – William visited the NGO yesterday and received a voltmeter and a 48 volt motor which is likely to be used in his next windmill system. Since William used his first computer only a few weeks ago, it might be a while before he’s regularly updating his own blog, but I suspect that if Soyapi has his way, William will be building power control systems in Ruby on Rails within about six months…

William’s push-button wall switch. Photo by Tom Rielly

Tom has been sending notes and pictures from the road to some of the TED community. It’s been very humbling to see what this young man has accomplished with hard work, patient reading and almost no money. The photo above shows a wall-switch for the lights in his family’s house that William engineered from PVC pipe, springs, wire and rubber from flip-flops. I take a certain amount of pride in my ability to build complex things from simple parts… but I’ve got a Home Depot down the road, disposeable income and a pickup truck. Ask me to wire my house using plastic conduit, bare copper wire and a used pair of shoes and I’d laugh at you. William would get to work and get the job done.

I’m not the only one who found William to be an inspiration. Nii Simmons, a Ghanaian-American entrepreneur, points to William’s ingenuity, and his statement, “I saw, I make,” as an inspiration for his own work. Hash has a great version of William’s story on his blog as well, and Juliana has a great video interview with Simon Mwacharo, the founder of Craftskills, a group in Kibera, Nairobi, which is building renewable energy projects in African cities. It’s likely that Mwacharo will be a great resource for William in the future… and that William is an inspiration for Mwacharo and anyone who cares about African innovation and ingenuity.

William’s not the only new African blogger to appear on the web this week. Ike Anya and Chikwe Ihekweazu have both leapt onto the scene with their new blog, Nigeria Health Watch, which looks at public health issues and innovations in Africa’s most populous nation. Welcome, guys. It’s a great time to be a reader of African blogs – if you’re not getting your daily dose, take a spin by BlogAfrica, Afrigator or Global Voices and make sure you’re getting your recommended daily allowance of African innovation.

My friend Henok Mehari sent me a link to this story from the BBC about the discovery of substantial oil reserves off the Ghanaian coast. He wanted to know whether I thought this was a good thing or a bad thing for Ghana.

It’s an excellent question. I’m not sure anyone has the answer.

There’s a theory in development economics called “the resource curse“. It’s an observation that countries with substantial natural resources often develop more slowly than countries with scarce resources. There’s several reasons why oil revenues might be a bad thing:

The “Dutch Disease” – revenue from natural resources increases wages and the valuation of a country’s currency, which makes it harder for industries to be competitive on international markets.

Unpredictable revenue – All commodities are subject to international price fluctuations. Unless you’ve got a monopoly on a commodity – as the South Africans did with diamonds for a few decades – the price may shift radically, making your economy subject to sharp peaks and valleys.

Failure to develop human resources – Countries that are rich in oil sometimes fail to spend enough money on education and training, assuming that the country will make money from resources rather than from the industrial or service sectors.

Corruption – There’s a lot of money in the oil industry, and much of that money makes it into the pockets of corrupt government officials. This is the fault both of the government officials and of the companies that elect to pay bribes.

Conflict – Countries with mineral reserves tend to have a great deal of conflict. Sometimes that conflict is ethnic and regional; other times it’s international, as with the conflict over minerals and timber in the eastern DRC.

There’s was a brilliant story broadcast by This American Life a few weeks ago about Ed Ugel, who bought lottery jackpots from winners, the vast majority of whom discover that winning the lottery leads to massive financial problems. Basically, when someone tells you you’re a millionaire, you start acting like a millionaire, even if lottery prizes are paid in small payments over twenty years.

It’s easy to imagine how this could happen to an economy.

Oil-rich African states haven’t exactly had an easy time of it. Nigeria has proven reserves of 30 billion barrels – vastly more than the 600 million discovered in Ghana – but the wealth from pumping 1.1 million a day hasn’t done nearly enough to alleviate poverty in the nation, especially in the regions where the oil is produced. Oil has funded a kleptocracy in Equatorial Guinea that has suceeded in enriching the ruling family while creating one of the most economically unequal societies in the world.

Looking at the problems of oil in Sub-Saharan Africa, the World Bank attempted to fund creation of a pipeline from newly discovered oilfields in Chad to Cameroon with strong constraints designed to ensure that oil funds would go towards education and economic development. When the power of Chadian president Idris Déby was threatened, he changed the petroleum law to eliminate a “future generations” fund and increase spending from oil monies on the military.

So will the same thing happen in Ghana? There’s reasons to think the Ghanaian government will be able to avoid some of the traps other nations have fallen into. Ghana is in excellent economic shape in comparison to its neighbors. It’s one of the very few nations in West Africa on pace to meet its millenium development goals and to halve poverty by 2015 – the percentage of Ghanaians living in poverty has dropped from 52% in 1992 to 35% by 2003. Economic growth has averaged 4.5% a year since 1983, and has been at or above 6% the last three years. This growth has had some connection to natural resources and commidities, including gold and cocoa, but has also included growth in tourism and service outsourcing. A stable, investment-friendly government has encouraged many diaspora Ghanaians to return home and start businesses. Friends from around the continent report a sense of excitement in visiting Accra and Kumasi, and a sense that the country is going through an economic revolution. At least one Nigerian friend is looking into acquiring Ghanaian citizenship…

Most economists believe that good governance has helped Ghana grow so rapidly the past few years. That good governance could help Ghana steer clear of some of the perils of the resource curse. Ghana has a long tradition of multiethnic society, with members of more than 40 tribes living together peacefully – if the benefits of oil wealth are distributed equitably, there’s a much better chance that the country will benefit, not suffer from this new development.

The best news about Ghana’s oil may be that there’s not a huge amount of it, and that it’s going to take a long time to get to it – Tullow Oil, which holds drilling rights to the field, tells the Ghanaian government that it could be seven years before the oil is flowing. And while the fields discovered are “one of the biggest oil discoveries in Africa in recent times”, it’s not going to turn Ghana into a producer on the scale of Nigeria. My personal hope is that Kufuor and his successor will be so successful in transforming Ghanaian economy independent of oil money that the natural inclination when oilfields come online will to be to maintain the same steady course.

Henok offers his thoughts on the issue as well.

• Theres Global Voices in my head on Flickr – Photo Sharing!
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• Foreign Policy: The Failed States Index 2007
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Bono wants the world to care more about Africa. So do I. After that, it gets a bit harder to see eye to eye.

Bono had a bit of a rough ride at TED Global in Arusha. In the first session of the conference, he found himself heckling Ugandan author Andrew Mwenda. When he took the stage in the next session, to defend the idea that increased aid would benefit Africa, he talked about the benefits of development aid to post-war Germany, an analogy that has some major flaws, as Germany was one of the wealthiest and best educated nations in the world prior to WWII. Most commenters, myself included, saw many of the TED speakers consciously challenging Bono’s idea that increased attention to Africa could lead to increased aid from the G8, and from there to political change. (According to commentator Brendan O’Neill, Bono has now become The People’s Republic of Bono, the ninth member of the G8 – we’ll expect to see his direct aid contributions increasing in the near future. Tip of the hat to Sokari for the link, found in her excellent dissection of Bono’s Africa efforts.)

While I enjoy a bit of Bono-bashing as much as the next guy, it’s worth noting that the rock star’s concern for Africa led directly to the remarkable conference that I and so many others enjoyed. Bono won the inaugural TED prize in 2005, and asked the TED community to help him provide internet connectivity to every school and hospital in Ethiopia. Chris Anderson and the TED staff consulted with a number of tech and development specialists, myself included, before concluding that the task wasn’t possible and was probably politically inappropriate, given Zenawi’s crackdown on political protest after the 2005 parliamentary elections. The TED Global conference focused on Africa in part as a consolation prize for Bono. That the conference had an entirely different flavor than Bono might have organized is a great credit to Chris Anderson, Emeka Okafor and the TED staff – that Bono appeared to have a pretty good time before heading north to yell at G8 leaders is, I think, a credit to him and to his willingness to be challenged by voices from the continent.

I wish the timing had been a bit different, though. It would have been great to see Bono engage with more of the extraordinary Africans who took the stage in Arusha. And I really wish he could have spent time with us before working with Vanity Fair on their July edition – maybe he’d have done things a bit differently. If you want to understand why so many Africans are upset about how they’re portrayed in the northern media, this issue wouldn’t be a bad place to start.

Let’s begin with the cover. Shot by Annie Leibovitz, there are 20 different covers. (Collect the whole set!) Each features a pair of celebrities, shot in closeup in some form of interaction. The twenty are as follows: Don Cheadle, Barack Obama, Muhammed Ali, Queen Rania of Jordan, Bono, Condozeela Rice, George W. Bush, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Brad Pitt, Djimon Hounsou, Madonna, Maya Angelou, Chris Rock, Warren Buffett, Bill and Melinda Gates, Oprah, George Clooney, Jay-Z, Alicia Keys, and Iman Abdulmajid. So… count along with me – that’s three Africans out of twenty cover subjects. Yes, it’s a great representation of African-American influence on American culture, but the actual African participation in the project seem, uh, limited at best.

Jay-Z and George Clooney discuss sustainable farming techniques appropriate for preventing desertification in the Sahel. You’d be surprised – Jay-Z is surprisingly knowledgeable about erosion-resistant ground cover.

In his video interview about the issue, Bono tells us what these twenty people had in common: “They’re passionate about Africa.” And most of them have highly recognizable faces, which never hurts when you’re trying to sell a glossy magazine to society matrons in Iowa. As Bono says, he was trying to “bring some sex appeal to wanting to change the world.” Well, Somali supermodel Iman helps with her attempts to climb out of her dress. And I do suspect that it would have been interesting to listen in on some of the conversations “depicted” on the cover – what do Chris Rock and Warren Buffett say to each other at a joint photo shoot anyway?

The message of the cover is that Africa is important and sexy because important and sexy people care about it and are willing to lend their “talent” and celebrity appeal to the “cause”. This tends to piss off my friends who are begging the world to think of Africa less as a cause and more as a continent, particularly as a continent open for business. How hard would it have been for Vanity Fair to pair some of these well-meaning celebrities with actual Africans working to build businesses, repair hospitals and save forests? Put Corniele Ewango on the cover and let Brad Pitt look up to him, an actual superhero, someone who has risked his life numerous times to preserve the forests of the eastern DRC. Put Madonna on the cover with William Kamkwamba, the remarkable Malawian youth who built a windmill to power his family’s house. (Wait, scratch that – she’d probably adopt him.)

Photo by White African. Don’t sue me, Hash.

Or throw this photo on the cover – here’s Bono talking to some of the young entrepreneurs that George Ayittey terms “the Cheetah Generation”. In the straw hat and badass shirt is Eric Osiakwan, one of the very fastest of the cheetahs, a young innovator who’s worked extremely hard to ensure that the submarine cables that connect the African internet to the North will actually bring down the cost of connectivity on the continent. Vanity Fair isn’t going to make Condoleeza Rice any more famous, but it would probably help Eric get more attention for his work.

But that’s not the point of the issue, as the table of contents makes clear. Genocide in Darfur, AIDS in Rwanda, Jeff Sachs’s attempt to raise $200 billion to transform villages, Madonna in Malawi. The only story in the online table of contents remotely connected to entrepreneurship is a slideshow about the airlines that serve as transport infrastructure for the DRC. It’s possible – and quite likely – that some of these stories are excellent and worth reading. But the overall picture is the one that so many Africans find themselves fighting – Africa as basket case.

Most Americans don’t get it. Howard French, unsurprisingly, does. One of the best journalists of a generation, French knows both Africa and China well enough to see things most people miss. On a flight from Addis Ababa to Beijing, he observes that the vast majority of his passengers are Chinese businessmen, looking for ways to make money on the continent. Flights from America, infrequent as they are, have a different set of passengers:

As I remembered them, the passengers one finds aboard the few existing flights linking the United States to Africa make for an interesting comparison with my Chinese fellow travelers. Yes, there is a smattering of business people and of tourists. But the Americans who travel to Africa tend to be aid workers of one kind or another: officials of the U.S. government and of the international financial institutions, like the World Bank, and the army of well-paid consultants and contractors that they deploy. They are also relief workers and missionaries and Peace Corps volunteers, and academics doing research.

There is much to be gleaned from the contrast here. Chinese people today look at Africa and see opportunity, promise and a fertile field upon which their energies, mercantile and otherwise, can be given full play. Too often, the West looks at Africa and sees a problematic pupil, a sickly patient, and a zone of pestilence, where failure looms in the air like a curse.

As one of those former well-paid contractors, and current researching academic, I can confirm French’s observation. The US businesspeople aren’t getting on the planes yet. Conferences like TED may change the minds of some of the people at Google and AMD, but we’re way behind China, which leads to some of the continent’s more visionary leaders – as well as some of the most repressive – looking eastwards to the future.

If Vanity Fair is on its way to rescue Africa, can you blame Africans for running towards China as fast as they can?

It’s possible to portray Africa in a different light. Ask Emeka Okafor, who put the remarkable speaker list for TED Global together. Flip through the photos on Flickr from the event, including this one, which may be the first example of me being turned into a LOLGeek… Maybe Bono will ask Emeka or some of the other cheetahs for some help the next time someone asks him to represent an entire continent in magazine form.

Update: Several commenters and bloggers have made the point that the contents of the magazine are significantly broader than portrayed on the website, including some of the speakers from the TED Africa conference. Juliana from Afromusing – who’s collected four of the twenty covers – makes this point especially well… With her recommendation, I plan on buying one – though only one – copy of the magazine to see whether I agree with her assessment… :-)

There are moments at the World Economic Forum that everyone would like to go a bit faster. These usually involve a Very Important Person saying things that are semantically meaningless in a very serious voice. (“We must redouble our commitment to the transformation of the continent.”) Andrew Heavens of Meskel Square attends more of these than I do, poor man, and notes that they’re generally the feeding ground of the figures George Ayittey terms “hippos”, in contrast to the “cheetahs” he celebrates, who we all saw on display at TED. By contrast, WEF is HippoCon.

But there are also moments at WEF that I’d like to unpack and savor at length, or at least untangle so I could be in two places at once. At two this afternoon, a distinguished panel sat down to ask whether a “Marshall Plan” was neccesary to provide Internet connectivity to the entire world. Represented on stage were senior figures in the International Telecommunications Union, the CEO of one of Africa’s government monopoly telecoms, and a minister with oversight over Telkom, South Africa’s legendarily extortionate telecoms parastatal. There weren’t exactly a whole lot of open spectrum or access to fiber activists in the room…

The panel opened with a question to the audience, asking if it should be a priority to provide connectivity to the world. An audience member – tightly connected to the ITU – jumped to his feed and declared, “Without connectivity, there is no solidarity, there is no progress.” (Actually, my research suggests that even with connectivity, there’s often no solidarity…) ITU, which has been searching for meaning in a world where negotiating international direct dialing rates seems increasingly quaint, clearly would love a Marshall plan under their direction. Pushback from the private sector was surprisingly weak on this front, since there’s a good chance that the materiel deployed in this Marshall Plan might come from manufacturers in the room. When a private sector supporter dared to point to Rwanda as evidence for commercial investment in infrastructure, Mr. ITU interupted to claim credit for building Rwanda’s basic telecoms infrastructure.

It was great fun to hear the CEO of a former monopoly telecom warn other countries about the dangers of “over-competition” in the phone market. (The danger is that competing companies will pay too much to the government for spectrum licenses. Funny, hasn’t been too much of a problem in Ghana or Nigeria, which have opened their mobile spaces and seen usage explode.) And I had many questions for the gentleman who oversees Telkom, especially about his announcement that the company would be building a new West Africa cable to replace SAT-3 – no word (and no questions) on whether access to that cable would be open.

As much fun as it was watching hippos romp, I ducked out to attend the BBC Debate about Zimbabwe. Monitored by Nik Gowing, it was a bit one-sided, as the Zimbabwean government wasn’t able to attend, the ZANU-PF refused to participate, and South Africa declined to send a government official. The participants were Zimbabwean opposition figures, Zimbabwean businessmen and international economists. Gowing set a very stark stage, listing facts and figures about the country:

- 3700% inflation officially, with estimates of much higher rates. Gowing tells us that central bank governor Gideon Gono has said, “Our job is to print money. It’s unorthodox, but it’s our way to survive.”

- 80% unemployment, 78% of people living below the poverty line, 56% of people living on less than $1 a day

- Enormous outward migration and reliance on remittance from expatriates for the survival of people still in the country

- 44% drop in agricultural productivity since land redistribution began, and the likelihood of a major shortfall in maize production this year.

Given the scene that was set, I’d expected doom and gloom. But there was a surprising degree of optimism in the panel, not about the end of Mugabe’s regime, but about the prospects for Zimbabwe after a change of government. The global economists argue that Zimbabwe’s highly educated population and remaining infrastructure will make it reasonably easy for Zimbabwe to turn around, “not overnight, but in three to five years.” The businessmen announced that they were staying out of politics, simply trying to keep their businesses afloat so that could rise again when the economy recovered. And Arthur Mutumbara, leader of one of the factions of the MDC (and a fellow Young Global Leader), was the most optimistic of the lot: “There’s a danger of understating our ambitions. We don’t just want recovery. We want to be better than South Africa and Botswana. We want to be the Singapore or Malaysia of Africa.”

The economists had reminders that there’s really no way out of four-digit inflation without causing great harm to the poorest and most vulnerable in society. Pegging the Zim dollar to the rand – or, more likely, simply adopting rand as currency – would halt inflation, but would also force massive cuts in government spending, as Gono could no longer print money. Aid packages to the poor would likely need to be cut, or would need to come from outside the government. More than one speaker wondered whether the current government had enough political popularity to put their populus through tough structural changes like this – this might be the job for the successor to Mugabe.

Where some disagreement emerged was on the wisdom of Thabo Mbeki’s strategy of “quiet diplomacy.” One speaker pointed out that loud diplomacy and public condemnation certainly didn’t seem to be working. Another suggested that Mugabe would need an “exit package”, including financial and diplomatic guarantees for his family before he would step down. Several speakers urged patience and caution. The major dissenter to these views was Collen Gwayo, a leader in the Zimbabwe Council of Trade Unions (another fellow YGL), who argued that Mbeki had been quiet for far too long: “You don’t negotiate to stop one man from beating the other – there’s no need to be quiet about that.” Given Gwayo’s first-hand experience of the climate of violence in Zimbabwe, he deserved and got a round of applause for his point.

Ironically, I had to leave the session early… so I could fly to Jo’burg and attend some meetings focused on Zimbabwe. I’ve got high hopes the debate will make it from the BBC to the web – it was one of the better and more informative exchanges in my time at WEF, and did a good job of challenging my views on Zimbabwe and its future.