Pres. Pierre Nkurunziza of Burundi at the Wilson Center
October 6th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
Went to see a decently interesting discussion with Burundian president Pierre Nkurunziza at the Wilson Center last week. (There’s video of an interview he later conducted at the Center here.) As speeches by politicians tend to be, his presentation was a polished and upbeat discourse on Burundi’s post-war reconstruction, focusing on the country’s provision of free primary education and healthcare, and the success of consociationalism at keeping the peace. Perhaps due to the fact that he’s not up for re-election any time soon, the questions were considerably gentler than those thrown at DRC presidential candidate Leon Kengo wa Dondo during a speech he gave at SAIS a few days previously.
(Adding to my collection of blurry photos of African politicians)
That said, I was interested to note that the first commentator pre-empted my own question by asking about whether the country’s ethnic reconciliation would be durable. The responses given by both Nkurunziza and former Special Envoy to the Great Lakes Region Howard Wolpe fit the simplified formula I’m investigating in my thesis very well: powersharing + war fatigue = ethnic reconciliation. No discussion of mechanisms at all, although I didn’t really expect such in this type of public forum.
Travel Advice for the Developing World: Electronics
September 5th, 2011 § 1 Comment
Today in travel advice: the care and feeding of electronics.
You almost certainly don’t need to bring:
- A mobile phone equipped for international data roaming. This is just about the most ruinously expensive thing a traveler can do, and with the proliferation of domestic data networks (and internet cafes) in many developing countries there’s no reason to use international data. The BlackBerry and iPhone support sites have information about turning off data roaming.
- A voltage converter. Generally speaking, any piece of electronic equipment that’s capable of computing of some sort (from a phone to a camera to a laptop) will have a voltage converter build into its charger. However, if you’re using something simple like a hair dryer, a converter will be in order.
- Your new $1200 MacBook Pro (and yes, it is ridiculous that Apple has suckered so many of us into buying $1200 laptops). Dust, rain, and power surges are not your computer’s allies. If you strongly feel that you need access to a personal computer on your trip, this might be the time to bring an old laptop back into action if you’ve still got it around - or to consider purchasing a cheap used netbook. If your expensive laptop is your only option, make sure that everything is backed up and that your warranty is still valid.
Do consider bringing:
- A universal outlet adaptor. They’re cheap, they last forever, and they can be unexpectedly useful in regions with a lot of secondhand electronics, where an imported piece of equipment may have a plug that doesn’t fit the sockets used in the country.
- Water-resistant cases for your electronics. Very useful if you get caught in a downpour or something spills in your bag. BuiltNY and InCase both make attractive neoprene cases.
- Headphones. Great for maintaining at least a semblance of privacy whilst Skyping in crowded internet cafes.
- A surge protector. Power supplies can fluctuate unevenly, and plugging your electronics directly into a wall socket can be disastrous if there’s a large surge.
- Extra batteries and chargers. Spare batteries will serve you well if you need to work through a blackout (or through a long flight). If you wind up losing your charger or seeing it fried by a power surge because you failed to obey the cardinal rule of the surge protector, it’s good to have a backup.
- A universal USB modem. This is a clever little device that will allow you to get online virtually anywhere in the world with a cellular data network. One need only acquire a SIM card with data service on it and insert it into the USB modem to get online. The Huawei brand seems to be popular. Worth considering if you travel frequently and need constant internet access.
Do consider buying upon arrival:
- A cheap mobile phone and local SIM. In many African countries, the cheapest Nokia phones run about US$25. Prepaid SIMs can often be purchased, with no formal contract, for less than US$1. International call rates to North America & Europe are frequently comparable to Skype’s rate of US$0.30 per minute for calls to landlines (cf. MTN’s tariff plan for Ghana). That said, countries vary broadly in their approach to mobile regulation, and I’ve heard that purchasing a phone in India or some Latin American countries is more difficult than this.
Ugandan media thought of the day
June 24th, 2011 § 2 Comments
More belated conference blogging, but Maria Burnett of Human Rights Watch offered up an interesting observation about the Ugandan media at a recent OSI event on Museveni’s increasingly undemocratic rule. As she noted, the degree of press freedom allowed to English-language media is often favorably commented upon – but newspapers and radio broadcasts in local languages are significantly more constrained, and this has largely escaped scrutiny by the international community. This is really a clever way of controlling information flow to ordinary citizens whilst still maintaining the appearance of openness. I’d be interested to hear any thoughts readers might have on this observation.
I took this photo in Kampala in early 2009 precisely because I was struck by the diversity of Uganda’s print journalism in comparison to Rwanda’s tightly controlled media. It’s a shame to hear that this openness isn’t as thoroughgoing as it appeared.
30-second impression of Etienne Tshisekedi
June 20th, 2011 § 40 Comments
I was only able to attend a few minutes of DRC presidential candidate Etienne Tshisekedi’s recent speech at CSIS (as it started late and I had to leave for an evening class), but came away impressed with his analysis of the political situation in the DRC, which seemed articulate and astute. I wasn’t quite sure what to expect of the speech, to be honest; even given the political imperative to sound optimistic about one’s own candidacy, the level of certainty he displayed about his chances in this recent interview with Colette Braeckman left me wondering a bit about how accurate his understanding of the overall political context was, but he offered a clear picture of the challenges the country is facing. Please do share your impressions if you attended or were able to watch the whole thing. If you’d like to learn more about his campaign, I’d suggest checking out the coverage at AllAfrica, Jeune Afrique, or Radio Okapi.
(Note as of 28 July: This post has been edited to remove a comment on Tshisekedi’s age [he's 78] which many commentators found offensive. I don’t think it’s illegitimate to discuss a candidate’s age and health as well as his political stances, but many readers seem to have interpreted that comment as a suggestion that age is the primary axis along which a candidate should be judged, which wasn’t what I meant to say. Apologies to those I offended.)
(Note as of 16 August: Comments on this post are now closed, as it’s received a healthy variety of responses. Thanks to everyone who wrote in – I’d welcome your comments on other posts as well!)
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Additional Burundi photos
April 10th, 2011 § 2 Comments
The pathos of the dove bringing money to the outstretched hands of the people is just too much…
The central African landscape: continually and unbelievably gorgeous
Safe under the net
Burundian nationalism, financed by France
April 10th, 2011 § 1 Comment
One of my classmates recently mentioned that the grave of King Sobhuza II of Swaziland (the current king‘s father) was financed in part by China. It put me in mind of this photo from Bujumbura (taken in November 2008):
Here’s Place de la Revolution:
Close-up of the monument’s lovely mosaics:
It did seem well-restored, at the least!
James Ferguson on seeing what isn’t there
February 24th, 2011 § 4 Comments
Over at the wonderful Theory Talks, James Ferguson, the Stanford anthropologist, responds to the question of the “biggest challenge in global studies”:
One of the things that bothers me about a lot of what I read the in social sciences that’s, as you say, ‘globally oriented’, is that it seems to start with a bunch of certainties, a bunch of assumptions – a kind of Western liberal common sense – that we know how countries ought to be organized. They ought to be democracies; they ought to respect human rights; they ought to guarantee the rule of law; they ought to be at peace with their neighbors. And then you look at, say, a country in Africa and all you’re able to see is a series of lacks – of things that should be there but aren’t. And you end up constructing huge parts of the world as just sort of empty spaces where things ought to be there but aren’t. And it leads to a kind of impoverished understanding, I think, because you don’t really understand what is going on here. How do people conduct their affairs? How is legitimate authority exercised? How are rules made and enforced? You know, all the kinds of questions that ought to be the starting place tend to disappear or recede into the background. So, I think the real challenge is to approach this whole question with a sense of openness, a willingness to be surprised and learn something new and not to be so deductive.
I certainly believe that there are a number of Western development practitioners who have taken this perspective – of the limits of their own understanding – to heart, in useful ways. And it’s also quite clear to me that any number of practitioners persist in seeing the developing world as a series of gaps and lacks, filled with people who are not inherently passive, but are still incapable of generating substance and meaning on their own. When you look at a dirt road, and immediately wonder why it isn’t paved, rather than pondering the ways that people use it and the spaces it connects, your normative vision of the world is likely standing between you and a more proximately accurate understanding.
Shoe vendor, Kinshasa
I remember having this instinctive reaction myself when I took the above photo in Kinshasa (on my BlackBerry, apologies for the poor quality). Ha, a Congolese shoe store! That’s not the right way to move beyond bricks-and-mortar retail… I didn’t notice the creative display (maximum visibility of shoes in a minimal space, compared to piling them on a table). I didn’t think about the processes by which sending Western cast-offs to developing countries, to be purchased by the bale by clothing merchants, had become a normal and even admired aspect of globalization. It didn’t even occur to me that this particular vendor had thoughtfully specialized in white trainers. I only saw what wasn’t there. It’s the steady challenge of life, and especially work, in a globalized world, to learn to focus on what is there.
Six months
December 29th, 2010 § Leave a Comment
I left Ghana six months ago today, and I must admit that it still feels odd to be back. As Glenna Gordon aptly wrote about her return to New York a few months ago,
That time I was standing on a table in the middle of a tshirt factory when the owner walked in, I didn’t think, how did I get here? Or stranded on the side of the road somewhere between Sierra Leone and Liberia when the bush taxi broke down and we all sat on logs waiting for another car to come by and shepherd us to the next town, I didn’t think, how did I get here? … I know how I got to those places. The question is just how I got back.
Waking up in my own apartment, with running water and central air and electricity to keep the fridge going, still feels stranger to me than piling into a matatu in Kigali with twenty other people and a few chickens. Stranger than walking back to Walewale after a day surveying in rural villages, using the Tigo cell tower next to my office to navigate my way through dusty fields. Not quite as strange as the double economy in Kinshasa, where one could pay US$8 for mangoes imported from Belgium at City Market or 20 cents for local mangoes at the bus stop – but still. The thought of six months passing since last I stood in Ghana is unreal.
It is in memory of this that I’ve been flipping through all of my Africa photos again, and thought I’d post a few favorites from countries beyond the usual suspects:
A tree grows in Kampala
Mosaic from a monument at Place de la Revolution, Bujumbura
Drinking local in Addis
The social norms of bribery
May 9th, 2010 § 5 Comments
Police at the Gombe station, Kinshasa, DRC
Aid Watch had a good post a while back about why “failed state” is a failed concept, which sums to the recognition that current use of the phrase A) offers no coherent definition of state failure and B) offers no analytical insight into the political trajectories of states considered failed. Unsurprisingly, this contributes to a lot of confused thought about the Congo, which often gets termed something like “the world’s largest failed state.” The sloppiest reporting & analysis end up portraying the country as an economic free-for-all, with chaos envisioned as the inevitable consequence of the absence of Western standards of legitimate taxation & property rights, among other things. (Texas in Africa recently did a great take-down of Jeffrey Gettleman on a variant of this mode of thought, with specific regard to the war in eastern Congo.)
This is a very two-dimensional way of looking at a place as fascinatingly complex as the DRC. Case in point: the social norms that have developed around the endemic corruption of the Kinshasa traffic police. Bribe-seeking is technically illegal & unregulated behavior, and can look rather chaotic to the first-time observer. If you’re wealthy enough to be traveling by car in downtown Kin, you may rest assured that the roulage will be looking for any pretext to stop you and ask for payment of an imagined fine. (In the situation leading up to the photo above, a friend had parked quite legally in a designated parking spot outside my apartment – after which we were surrounded by police & escorted to the station on claims that we were blocking the road.) Interestingly, though, the key word here is pretext. I never saw any interaction between the police & drivers that did not involve some sort of legalistic claim to the driver’s money, even if both parties knew that the accusation was false. By contrast, white foreigners probably look just as wealthy walking down the street as they do when in cars, but the same police officer who stopped us morning after morning whilst we were driving to work scrupulously ignored me when I walked past him on my way to lunch. Imagined moving violations are presumably easier to justify than imagined walking violations, and the group norm specified that bribery in this particular location had to have a legal pretext. (This is likely not representative of all corrupt Congolese police all the time – but it was always the case in my personal experiences with them.)
All of which is to say that it’s a blinding misconception to think that the opposite of a strong state is chaos. Order (organic if not judicial) can be found everywhere, if you take the time to look.
Contextualized illustration
May 3rd, 2010 § 1 Comment
IPA-Tamale recently moved to a new office, and in the course of packing up the Examining Underinvestment in Agriculture storeroom I found a flipbook used by the Ministry of Food & Agriculture to educate farmers about the benefits of using fertilizer on their maize fields. MOFA has its share of politicized decision-making and elite capture, especially with regards to fertilizer distribution, but interestingly enough it still commissioned illustrations that were thoroughly representative of the lives of the average smallholder farmer.
Cover. As you’ll see, the intended audience is one of male farmers, who grow maize as an accepted male crop – but their wives still play a significant if unacknowledged role.
Skipping to the middle of the book for a second, this illustration of the farmer in his field captures a lot about the intended audience. Note the straw hat, simple sandals, manual distribution of fertilizer, and use of a repurposed condensed milk can to hold it.
Contrast this to the implicitly better-off fertilizer salesman, who shows up to deliver fertilizer in a baseball cap and closed-toe shoes. (Jan Chipchase has a good post mentioning footwear as status markers.) There’s not much romanticization of the economic prospects of smallholder farming here.
There’s some great detail as well in the section on how to avoid storing fertilizer improperly. The protagonist obviously isn’t doing too badly, because he has a metal roof, but leaks are a persistent problem. His young daughter, here seen splashing in the spilled fertilizer, is wearing appropriate earrings and waist beads. (And yes, it’s quite normal that she’s wearing nothing else.)
What does it mean for farmers to recognize themselves in this officially sanctioned view of how to farm?
