The Bright Continent: Breaking Rules and Making Change in Modern Africa
288
The Bright Continent: Breaking Rules and Making Change in Modern Africa
288Hardcover
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Overview
An exciting new voice offers a fresh portrait of Africans thriving in the face of adversity, showing the way forward for development on the continent and beyond.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780547678313 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | HarperCollins Publishers |
| Publication date: | 03/04/2014 |
| Pages: | 288 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.80(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.20(d) |
About the Author
Dayo Olopade is a Nigerian-American journalist covering global politics and development policy. She has reported for The New Republic, The Root, The Daily Beast, The New York Times, and many other publications. Dayo is currently a Knight Law and Media Scholar at Yale University.
Read an Excerpt
1
Orientation
The search for the Nile River took two thousand years too long. The idea of searching is itself crazy: as far as human primates are concerned, the flat pan of water stretching from eastern Uganda to the vast Delta of Egypt has always been there. And yet the first foreign correspondents in Africa — white men from Europe — were caught in an amazing race to “map” the river from tip to tail. Their tales of travel on Africa’s waterways and into its dense forests sailed back to newspapers in 1850s London, Brussels, and New York. Sending word of new tribes in Ethiopia, or safe passage to the interior lakes of central Africa, these men laid the foundation for a tradition of sensationalist writing about Africa. It was Henry Morton Stanley, in his 1878 account of his travels in the Congo, who coined the term dark continent.
The misunderstanding began before Christ. Herodotus’s fifth-century map of Africa left the cradle of civilization looking like an afterthought. (Later, the Mercator Projection sold Africa literally short.) He wrote, “I am astonished that men should ever have divided [Africa], Asia and Europe as they have, for they are exceedingly unequal. Europe extends the entire length of the other two, and for breadth will not even (as I think) hear to be compared to them.”
For the next millennium, the northward-flowing river puzzled European cartographers. A Greek merchant named Diogenes began a rumor that the source of the Nile lay among the so-called Mountains of the Moon, somewhere in the wilds of “Nubia.” As trade suffused the continent’s west coast, existing tribes and landmarks were inked with the exquisite penmanship of eighteenth-century European trade schools. But it was not until 1858 that John Hanning Speke “discovered” that the longest river in the world begins not on the moon, but at Lake Victoria.
As news of the White Nile’s source rippled through Europe, Major R. E. Cheesman, the British consul to Ethiopia, remarked, “It seemed almost unbelievable that such a famous river . . . could have been so long neglected.” Like Herodotus, Cheesman unwittingly exposed his Western bias. After all, the Nile bridges languages and climates, north and south of the Sahara. It has fed and ferried millions of people since the days of Moses. At the time of Speke’s trip, the population living and trading near the source of the Nile numbered almost three million. It might have been easier for the frantic searchers to ask locals where the big river began. A few might have advised them: here.
The search for the Nile charts the divide that has defined modern African history. Despite centuries of contact (based largely on slave trading), ignorance long governed Western encounters with what was seen as an impenetrable unknown — Josef Conrad’s “heart of darkness.”
So it was not without precedent that European powers, led by the Portuguese, French, British, and Germans, decided to carve up the African continent using maps and borders of their own creation. At the Berlin Conference in 1884, they drew boundaries that had never existed on the continent, scrumming for natural resources from tobacco to peanuts to gold (oil would soon follow). Their borderlines preserved the gap between foreign perception and African reality that has been difficult to close ever since.
More than a century later, Google showed up. Since 2007, the American Internet giant has opened offices in Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa, and Uganda and begun translating its most popular American applications to Africa. Maps were a top priority. Google’s team of digital cartographers fanned out across the continent, knitting African streets and cities into the fabric of the World Wide Web. The Americans spared no extravagance: a fleet of red Toyota Priuses mounted with cameras circled cities in South Africa to localize Google’s “Street View” project — just in time for the 2010 World Cup.
Like the ancient geographers in search of the Nile, the modern Google mappers imported a Western notion of mapping and navigation. They were well-meaning, but unaware. As anyone who has taken directions in Africa can tell you, a different kind of orientation prevails. In a developed country, a charming female robot might read out clear directions to a numbered street address. In Africa, however, here’s what you get:
If you are approaching from the Tuskys roundabout, stay on Langata Road till you have passed the entrance on Langata Road that would get you to Carnivore. Take the first right turn off Langata Road after this point. Drive down Langata Road for approximately half a second, and take the left turn right before the petrol station next to Rafikiz. Drive down this road for half a minute. When you see Psys Langata on your right, take that left.
Confused? These are real — and typical — directions for Nairobi, the Kenyan capital where I lived while reporting this book. Of course, Nairobi and many other cities in Africa have roads and districts with formal names, and some buildings with assigned numbers. But even in the most cosmopolitan cities, the address is mostly beside the point.
Locals use businesses, billboards, bus stops, and hair salons as a dynamic, alternative framework for navigation. We rely on time, relative distance, egocentric directions (right or left), and shared knowledge. In Khartoum, the North Sudanese capital, one prominent local landmark is a building where a Chinese restaurant used to be. In the six months until it was repaired, I gave directions to my home based on a particularly cavernous pothole. Frequently, the final direction is “just ask someone.”
Anthropologists would call Nairobi streets a “high-context” environment. Such navigation is a holdover from a time when centralized systems were absent (which, as we’ll see, is often still the case). More importantly, a high-context route from point A is no proof that point B doesn’t exist — it just means you need a different map to find it.
The same goes for modern Africa. Whether you’re working for an American tech giant struggling to standardize navigation, an entrepreneur from Brazil looking for new business opportunities, a French tourist in search of adventure, a nonprofit trying to improve lives, or a curious global bystander, you probably don’t have a very good map of life south of the Sahara.
In fact, it amazes me how little the world thinks of Africa. I mean this in terms of time and of reputation. As a first-generation Nigerian American, I have personal reasons for paying attention; but what we all think of Africa when we do is very revealing. In 2010, the United Nations celebrated the tenth anniversary of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) — eight ambitious targets, from fighting HIV transmission to improving education around the world. The UN sponsored a competition to design a poster for the occasion. The winning design juxtaposed power (leaders of the Group of 8) and poverty (young Africans in line at a refugee camp).
The work may be clever graphic design, but the tagline is heartbreaking. “Dear world leaders: We are still waiting.” A panel of UN judges validated the biggest lie in modern history: that poor and passive Africans exist only in the shadow of Western action.
If you’ve read other “development” books, it’s easy enough to get that impression. Even as popular discourse has begun debating the logic of foreign assistance to the region, the conversation remains focused on how “the West” can improve its performance. Familiar voices on the development beat write prescriptions for everyone from the leaders of the G8 to the infantry of the World Bank to the leaders of landlocked countries like the Central African Republic. Though many have spent decades examining the various ruts and bottlenecks in economic growth, it is rare to hear about what ordinary Africans are already doing to help themselves.
This book changes that. As a reporter, I follow the advice of philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein: “Don’t think, but look!” The continent needs to be seen and heard, not imagined and then ritually dismissed. Because when you talk to real people in Africa — shopkeepers, day laborers, executives, or educators — and commit to telling their stories, once-hidden strengths come to light.
The story is as simple as walking to work. Once, my mother and I took an early-morning flight from Kenya to Uganda. We woke before the sun. Riding in a car to the airport, we saw dim shapes come into focus on either side of us. “Where is everyone going?” my mother mused. The figures streaming toward the city center were neither child soldiers on the march, nor mothers queuing for bed nets; they were thousands of ordinary people walking to work. Hundreds of millions of Africans do this every day, waking before dawn to provide for their families.
Nearly every day that I wrote this book, I saw Gladys Mwende working the soil in an open field next to my apartment complex. Technically, she had no right to do so. After moving to Nairobi from the smaller Kenyan city of Machakos, Gladys, her husband, Benson Muthame, and their six children found themselves occupying the abandoned colonial home outside my window. It’s a pretty stone and tile structure with two floors of rooms for all the kids — aged ten months to thirteen years. Only its punctured windows and rotting wood cornice reveal that its best days are decades past.
It was bizarre to see this facsimile of rural African life — cooking with firewood, toting water, raising chickens — at a busy intersection in Kenya’s largest metropolis. But the land is what matters. As unpaid caretakers of the plot, the family treats its urban farm as though it were a ranch in the Great Rift Valley that keeps the world in coffee, tea, and flowers.
Table of Contents
1. Orientation 1
Why the world needs a new map of Africa
2. Kanju 16
Walking the fine line between genius and crime
3. Fail States 34
How bad borders made bad neighbors
4. Stuff We Don’t Want 52
The mistakes that make do-gooding worse
5. The Family Map 67
How Africans rely on the original social network
6. The Technology Map 91
Leapfrogs and lessons from Africa’s digital moment
7. The Commercial Map 121
How to buy—and sell—a better future in Africa
8. The Natural Map 157
Why Africa will feed, fuel, and shape the world
9. The Youth Map 191
Harvesting Africa’s demographic dividend
10. Two Publics 217
Who’s in charge, anyway?
Acknowledgments 237
Notes 239
Index 264