After viewing a few of my facebook posts of my journey to date, a friend of mine asked me for a 500 word essay on the development of African nations viz a viz the Asians in the last century. I replied that one word would suffice: governance.
Billions of aid money has been directed to African states. Name a problem, and there is some funding from some aid agency. Yet the solutions they formulate are too theoretical. The impact is only for the short term. Too many of these can't scale. Worst of all, it continues to impoverished the peoples of these states. Instead of being taught to fish, as the saying goes. Only now that a new theory of change has been formulated and enacted that these can be more impactful.
Beyond aid, there is the greatest failure of all: governance. These countries are ruled by men (invariably) who exploit rather than develop the country. Joyce read it well, "the movements which work revolutions in the world are born out of dreams and visions in a peasants heart on the hillside." And here in Africa there are still too many peasants too ready to believe the empty promises spun by their leaders... some of whom even invoke the power of the divine to compel devotion, others employ more destructive forces to force obedience.
We flew out of Egypt after 10 days there into Ethiopia. Like Egypt, this country too had its god-emperors but unlike Egypt, in Ethiopia, there seems to be a better glimmer of hope after all those decades of famine and brutality esp during the Mengitsu reign where vultures were literally waiting the eat the poor and famished. The Addis Ababa we saw is a modern city. Maybe because it's newer but it looked better, cleaner and more organised than Cairo, Dar Es Salaam and Nairobi which we saw recently. The mayor should be credited for her good adminstration. The Ethiopians deserve a break. They have a rich history and a welcome perspective for an inclusive world. The people we met (albeit as tourists) are inevitably polite if a bit melancholy. Each one harbouring a hardship or two in life. After all, they are still living in conditions best described as the middle ages. Nonetheless, I see hope, for there has been progress, not least in the attitudes of the Ethiopians themselves.
After Ethiopia and its green shoots of growth, we overflew Kenya (generally regarded as the best developing country in East Africa) and landed in Tanzania. We were just here last year in Dar Es Salaam and Zanzibar, its two most developed cities. This time we went straight to the rural/nature heart of the country (and maybe the world). Our flight landed in Kilimanjaro and we started our week-long safari in the Serengiti (and Lake Manyara and the Ngorongoro crater) along with the thousands of tourists here during the peak season.
We saw evidence here of a government (albeit still corrupt) who is trying to do better esp to boost tourism. All entries and exits into parks are guarded and of course paid for. Rangers keep the area safe and guides and tourists alike keep it clean and the ecosystem untouched (as far as possible) though having been a spectator at a few hunting episodes, I do think we may have interfered.
Like in the bush, there is a sense of hierarchy that pervades Africa. None of that "if you hurt one of us, you hurt all of us; no one left behind" at work. Here, like in the Gold Track separation at the airport, there are levels with the lion being the apex predator. But even then, it's status is not one where ease is enabled. Every lion still needs to eat and nothing is served to it unless it hunted for it. "You eat what you kill" is the expression that fits here. You don't have to be the fittest, just the fitter (avoiding the predator) to survive. So at the airport despite the gold track, one still needs to jostle at the security, passport and boarding lines.
It's worth mentioning airports in this entry because land infrastructure remain poor (no rail, poor roads) and the most efficient way to get around is by air (in all manners of planes, big and small, jet or propeller-powered). Even then, network connectivity is bad and flights. All in we took 11 flights in 28 days just to get to/from 7 cities. Flights tend to be overbooked and poor J had to spend the night at JRO trying to get onto one. Both Js got affected actually. The first one was unsanitary water gave J the runs which I narrowly avoided for I drank the same iced up cocktail. He was still nursing some discomfort on his way back. So they got a bigger adventure that was anticipated while D and I flew back up north from JRO to ADD, stayed overnight nearby in order to get our flight to CPT to continue our trip.
It is somewhat fitting that Bole International Airport in the capital of Ethiopia is the main node in our travels. We got here from Egypt. We flew to Tanzania from here and then to South Africa. For if this is the motherland, all migrations also start from here. Indeed early humans would have followed the animals in the movements, which they still do today just as we had witnessed with the wildebeest crossing the Mara River. It is a credible theory that some groups, maybe a couple called Adam and Eve :-) some 200k years ago, developed the initiative not to follow the animals back and instead kept moving ... dreaming of a better abode, however perilous that may have been. That DNA of migration remains in us all today.
Our final stop of this journey is South Africa, specifically Capetown. It was here 30 years ago, when our guide at the end of our honeymoon tour, asked us to turn around to view the sunset to which she added, "once you have seen an African sunset, you will always come back". We decided that we would make her statement prophetic and has been back here every decade. This year is our 30th anniversary and we revisited the places we first saw in 1994 which was also a very significant year in South African history because the apartheid system was overthrown and Nelson Mandela got democratically elected as the country's president.
He was the embodiment of one who served his purpose rather than his weaknesses (of which they were a few). I hope more African leaders will rise to the ovassion. Egypt's pride, Ethiopia's history, Tanzania's untamed nature could all be a foundation for progress and not a crutch for standing still.
The Cairo to Capetown route that Cecil Rhodes megalomanically dreamt of building a century and half ago was through a very different African continent. The indigenous people were nearly all colonised (except Ethiopia). When Paul Theroux undertook the venture (mostly overland), the African nations have been independent for about half a century but it's people are still living under the yoke of some variant of dictatorship or other.
Maybe it's the tribal nature of the communities here - with mutual mistrust, misgivings and misunderstanding about each other- that the colonial masters exploited and their own indigenous leaders also did. George Orwell's Animal Farm may be about Soviet Russia after the Imerial reign but it's lessons are prophetic especially here in Africa.
The thing that struck me in this four weeks of travel is that one doesn't get to choose where you are born but you can decide how you want to live in it. One's station at birth should not be the major determinant of the standard of life or place in the world. It is not a case of forgetting one's roots but to know where you came from so you can know where and how to go.
Trips like this does not leave one with answers. Rather it pose more questions. In this case, it's about what kind of world we want and what do we do to achieve it.
