Hot items in Little Mogadishu

People in Nairobi say that whatever you look for, you will find it in Eastleigh, or Little Mogadishu, as this Somali inhabited neighbourhood few kilometres east of the city centre is called. Here is where I am doing my fieldwork, trying to make sense of Somali transnational businesses, and I can hardly deny it.
Clothes, electronics, foodstuff, currencies, you name it.

Pirates?
Sure, also pirates.

According to a reportage by a Somali journalist aired few weeks ago on Channel 4 and gone viral on social media, Western reporters in pursuit of an adrenaline pumping story need just a couple of hundred bucks per hour for a compelling blend of exoticism, Islamic menace and social grievances (“We were fishermen but the foreign trawlers forced us to turn to piracy”). Actually, it came out that most of the ‘pirates’ who starred on photo-essays and documentaries had never been to Somalia and they were not even Somali. They were mostly from the North-Eastern Province and worked as waiters, porters and shopkeepers, integrating their regular meagre incomes with splendid earnings out of long rehearsed performances. According to the reportage, these part-time pirates are managed by an agency set up in Eastleigh by a guy who knows well the editorial logics of Western media. The reporter-meets-the-pirate (and he comes back alive) experience is staged in details, including the tense waits (“not yet, it’s too dangerous now”) which prepare the ground for the thrilling face-to-face. At the end of the day, everybody gets what they want: “pirates” get the money, journalists get a story, editors get an enticing filling between commercials.

The reportage prompted embarrassed replies from the victims of this piracy scam: the most illustrious one, Time magazine, refused to comment. There are many creative ways to make money out of journalists, but this could have been an invention out of Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop. The way it mocks the hunger for sensationalism of some Western media casts a heroic light on the perpetrators. My Somali friends, with whom I share the story sitting in the backyard of a language school in Eastleigh, agree. They particularly like the point of the reportage when ‘Osman’ (it sounds like the lapping of the waves against the keel of the ship, it smells like a spicy chai) explains how it works: “The boss come to us and tell us, you know, ‘the guys, the white man has come we need pirates, you know,’ so he say, ‘assume to be pirates.” Does the white man know that he is being fooled? I ask. Probably yes, my friends tell me (I suspect that they have another answer in mind but they do not want to rage on the white man), but he refuses to accept it, plunging into a state of denial made of sloppiness, lack of time, difficulty to run a background check and hurry to pitch the story before others do. Indeed, this scam reveals more about the Western media industry than about piracy or the Somali community in Kenya. It is another variant of the demand meets offer dynamic, which casts a light on what makes a story (particularly a story from Africa) more sellable. In fact, Somali businessmen make a point of pride out of their skill to understand what people want and how. Turning the dispersal of the diaspora into an asset, they have the pulse of multiple markets. Living at the intersection of different worlds, they boast their capacity to look at the same issue from different perspectives. Piracy is still an appealing item for foreigners, especially in this period, but it is cooling down, to a reasonable level. Since (real) pirates seem in retreat and the number of attacks is sharply falling, the topic is more manageable. Same cannot be said of other ‘items’. What about providing fake Shabaab militants? The idea earns some giggles but nothing else: after the spate of attacks in Eastleigh in December and January, and as the Kenyan army continues to be engaged in the operation Linda Nchi in Southern Somalia, paranoia still lingers. No good businessman would put this item on the market.
Not for now, at least.

Gianluca Iazzolino, CAS PhD student

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African Popular Culture at Africa in Motion

The seventh edition of the Africa in Motion film festival has just finished, and after a weekend of sleeping and not much else, I am now in contemplative mode, and reflecting on the successes (and in some instances, also challenges and “failures”) of this year’s festival. With our overarching theme of “Modern Africa”, it was only logical to us that contemporary African arts and culture should take centre stage in the festival screenings and discussions, which is exactly what we did. We hosted a symposium at the University of Edinburgh on Sat 27 November, entitled “African Popular Culture in the 21st Century” and papers were delivered by academics and cultural practitioners on topics as diverse (but nonetheless related) as Ghanaian hiplife music (a reconfiguration of Ghana’s highlife pop music and globalised hip-hop music); African popular fiction; African film festivals and audiences; contemporary manifestations of the traditional Ciwara cultural practices of Mali; and a presentation by a group of young diaspora Africans originally from the horn of Africa, telling the audience of their work in reconnecting with their African heritage and searching for their identities while living in the UK. What became clear in all these presentations is that contemporary popular culture and arts in Africa is always a negotiation between the past and the present, between tradition and modernity, and is very much embedded in the search for African identities in today’s globalised, pluralised world. Today, very few of us Africans are from, in and connected to only one place, and it is the multiplicity of our experiences and influences that make up the vibrant and multi-layered landscape that define African identity in the contemporary world.

Our focus on contemporary art and culture also included a major emphasis on the “popular”, which has for long been a subject of scholarly and theoretical investigation. For almost 25 years now, to be exact, ever since Karen Barber’s influential and seminal essay, “Popular Arts in Africa”, appeared in 1987. I won’t go into the detail of the rather involved theoretical notions she developed to describe the “popular”, but what I would give is a rather simplified definition that the “popular” in Africa means that which is produced and consumed by “the people”. This is quite significant, as it means art and culture not created and enforced “from above” (like the notion of “high art” in the Western world which we might align with art forms such as opera and symphony orchestras), but art and culture that is created by ordinary people. In an African context it is particularly significant because many “ordinary” people in Africa have no voice and seemingly little opportunity to participate in the production, dissemination and consumption of art and culture.

Taking into account then this focus on the “popular” and “the people”, in the context of a film festival, we wanted to incorporate a focus on the popular African video-film industries, which are very much manifestations of popular culture in contemporary Africa, and have even been described as the biggest explosion of popular culture that the continent has ever seen. This phenomenon of course started in Nigeria and became widely known as Nollywood, although what is lesser known is that Ghana started producing video-films almost at the same time as Nigeria, although the industry in Ghana never got a catchy name (Ghallywood has been suggested, but it doesn’t quite have the same ring to it as Nollywood!). The production output of these industries is phenomenal, with Nollywood being the 3rd biggest film industry in the world, and the first economically self-sustainable film industry in Africa. Anyone can now be a filmmaker, by making use of affordable and accessible digital technology to produce and distribute films. However, these films are regularly criticised for their low production values, their melodramatic storylines, their stereotypical character portrayals… So, the challenge is what to do with these films in the context of an African film festival in the UK, with audiences used to the “arthouse” cinema from francophone West Africa, and how to discuss these films academically and theoretically? Birgit Meyer, expert in Ghanaian video-film, and Ono Okome, one of the pioneers of Nollywood scholarship, attempted to address these dilemmas in the seminars they presented at Africa in Motion, calling for these films to be seen as expressions of local, public culture, as manifestations of African modernity, and as ongoing conversations between producers and audiences. This discussion was also included in the Saturday symposium, which ended with a roundtable on the video-film industries.

After the symposium, we set off for Filmhouse cinema, where we screened a Ghanaian film, ELMINA, not exactly a typical video-film, as it was produced by a white artist from New York, but it was directed by a well-known Ghanaian video-filmmaker, and featured many popular Ghanaian actors. The screening created controversy, which I wouldn’t repeat here, as the debate has already been very astutely captured by Dave Holmes, a self-confessed cinephile who is also part of the AiM organising team, here: http://mubi.com/films/elmina/reviews/27462. The following week we also screened a Nollywood film, MAAMI, by pioneering Nollywood director Tunde Kelani. Tunde is one of the only Nollywood directors whose films have started to travel internationally, as his films are of a higher quality than the average Nollywood film, and in this sense he has become a worldwide spokesperson and ambassador for Nollywood. We were in luck, because the National Film and Video Censors Board of Nigeria decided at the last minute to fly Tunde over the Edinburgh (with around 11 members of the Board accompanying him!) and thus we had the great pleasure of welcoming Tunde to Edinburgh and Glasgow. And a pleasure it was indeed, as Tunde is interesting, wise, funny, warm and articulate and we were much entertained by his many anecdotes of his filmmaking experiences in the jungles of Nollywood.

Video-films aside, our focus on popular African arts and culture within the context of “Modern Africa” also included no less than a full day of documentary screenings on these topics, covering everything from the poetry of a Western Saharan griot; post-revolution art in Cairo; activist hip-hop from Senegal; Goema music from Cape Town; griot music from West Africa; hip-hop from Kenya; graffiti, fashion design, hip-hop, heavy metal, and video design from South Africa; and fashion, music and sport from Congo-Brazzaville! All these screenings, discussions, seminars and presentations around African popular and contemporary culture had a fairly simple aim: to display the vibrancy and diversity of cultural and artistic production on the continent and to create discussions around these topics. Of course, we are not denying that the continent also struggles with many challenges, and some of these were addressed in other screenings and discussions, but if there is one thing that AiM 2012’s focus on contemporary popular culture in Africa showed very clearly, it is that creativity is an essential human need and endeavour that can even flourish under the most unlikely and challenging of circumstances. In fact, it is often exactly the challenges of modern Africa that provide the most fertile breeding grounds for some pretty astonishing creative expression.

By Lizelle Bisschoff, festival founder and programme consultant

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Welcome to Africa now

Welcome to Africa now

As we put together the last details of Africa in Motion’s 7th edition – or as our dear trustee and wizard of words Paul Dale puts it: our lucky number seven – there is a sense of growing excitement around the AiM team. It is there because we are close to finally being able to share the positive but also critical atmosphere of films, events and conversations around contemporary Africa, in which our team has lived the past few months – with you, our audience.

We’ve programmed what we think is a wide, multifaceted and thought provoking proposition of films which cover futuristic and experimental genres (African Sci-fi, 26 Oct. & Short Film Competition, 29 Oct.), document the politically current and defiant (Arab Spring Docs, 28 Oct), uncover the fresh and the stimulating (African Popular Arts), access the innovative and newly released (more than 20 UK premieres, throughout the festival).

But, as we do, we not only want to provoke thought through the poignancy of the motion pictures we screen, we want them to generate a dialogue. It can happen through a symposium where you have the unique opportunity to reflect and hear from international scholars on African Popular Arts in the 21st Century (27 Oct.). It happens when people such as Nollywood filmmaker Tunde Kelani (MAAMi, 30 Oct. Glasgow & 31 Oct. Edinburgh) or Cameroonian African Sci-fi forefather, Jean-Pierre Bekolo (Les Saignantes, 26 Oct. & Quartier Mozart, 28 Oct.) sit down and learn by sharing with audiences who might be suffering from a ‘forced long distance relationship’ with African Cinema, but are eager to bridge the gap. It happens when children stay very still while watching animated stories, which feel funnily very close and very far at the same time – it happened last Saturday at our first Glasgow Children’s Day event, and could happen again in Edinburgh on Sun. 28 Oct. (African Films for Children).

These are the experiences we are eager to engender, and the images we cannot wait to project onto the big screen (with the help of allies in arms, Filmhouse Cinema and Glasgow Film Theatre). This is the experience of Africa cinema we want to bring and the visual stories we want to share. In the end, it might well be that you find yourself having seen some of what most provocative and new artistic work produced in continent today. It might well be that you are inspired by what you saw. It might well be that you now understand more. It might well be that Africa, its imagery, and its place in today’s global society, along with its idiosyncrasies, feel closer, and more palpable. If that is the case, then it will have been worth it. Faced with the possibility, we are indeed eager to welcome you to Africa now.

Isabel Moura Mendes, AIM director

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Farming for Oil in Tanzania

Biofuels offer much to both developed and developing countries alike. Developed countries see biofuels as a way of reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions; switching to biofuels may help meet climate change mitigation targets without painful behavioural changes. Oil-importing developing countries may reduce these imports, possibly export biofuels to energy-hungry developed countries, and growing feedstock may be a stimulant to rural development. Environmental benefits for the developed world, economic and social benefits for the developing, too easy. However biofuels do not currently enjoy a tremendous reputation. Very legitimate concerns have been raised over several years around issues such as food vs fuel, land grabs, and environmental impacts (both GHG emissions of growing feedstock and deforestation – when I told a friend that I was off to research palm oil they immediately told me the uplifting story of a documentary about how palm oil plantations were killing off the already endangered orang-utans in Indonesia).

Sunset in Kigoma: Not a bad place to spend a bit of time

It was against this background that I travelled to Kigoma in Tanzania to research the work of FELISA, a local company who plan to produce crude palm oil (CPO) and biodiesel from oil palm trees.
Due to some money problems FELISA are yet to start production; however they plan to run their own large farm and contract local farmers to provide them with more palm fruits. CPO is used extensively for cooking and sold daily in villages, towns, and markets all over Tanzania. When heated to 700C CPO can power diesel motors without any engine modification. Palm oil can also be turned into biodiesel for transportation purposes.

Oil palm plantations in Malaysia and Indonesia have been responsible for significant deforestation and in some instances local communities have been displaced or marginalised, with large companies taking the lion’s share of any commercial benefits. Similarly, contract farming arrangements have a patchy record when it comes to exploitation of small relatively powerless farmers by large, much more powerful companies. However that does not mean that either palm oil production or contract farming are bad things, per se, rather the how of their implementation becomes paramount.

The good oil: Kudra (l) and his brother, Said (r), making palm oil

Oil palm trees have been farmed in the Kigoma region for over 100 years. Kigoma is on the shores of Lake Tanganyika and just 50kms from the eastern edge of the DRC. The climate is more tropical (read: sweatier) than much of the interior of Tanzania and conducive to growing palm trees. To make palm oil on a farm or in the village is a simple and cheap process if time consuming and not particularly effective at extracting the oil from the fruits. FELISA’s industrial method is the same except that by using diesel-powered machines up to 60% more oil can be extracted from the fruit than is possible when using the man-powered machines on the farms. This is one of several benefits that FELISA can offer to potential contractible farmers. The others are access to more markets for their CPO (in larger towns or cities), a whole new biodiesel market, and a higher yielding oil palm variety.

Due to the climate (suitable), the many long established oil palm trees (limited land-use change), the farmers of Kigoma being very familiar with oil palm cultivation (anticipated crop yields should be reached), their ability to make oil (maintaining their independence and reducing dependency on FELISA) and the expertise and market access of FELISA there is genuine potential for contract farming and palm oil production to lead to poverty alleviation while avoided the negative potential impacts of either contract farming or oil palm cultivation.

Simplistically put:

Kigoma environment + Kigoma farmers + palm trees + FELISA = possible success

My Swahili crash course – results were mixed

However it does not follow that this possible success has implications for wider poverty alleviation or other biofuel projects. If you change any one of the terms on the left of the equation there will be a new outcome on the right. To go with a cliché, FELISA could be part of a local solution to a local problem. But all poverty is local so a local solution can be the only solution. The concerns raised by people around biofuels and oil palm cultivation are genuine and well-founded. However broad-brush arguments for or against “biofuels” decontextualises and dehumanises the outcomes and can be unhelpful when they mask situations with the potential to work and help people.
There were times when I found the going pretty tough in Kigoma and other parts of Tanzania. Speaking no more Swahili than a few pleasantries daily communication was difficult. Transport – whether around the country or up and down Lake Tanganyika – was long, boring and uncomfortable. And at times I felt completely lost in regards to where my research was heading and how my dissertation was going to eventually shape up. However at other times it was tremendous. When something I had planned came together, like a focus group taking off or speaking with a particularly engaging farmer, or just being able to observe and partake in the lives of people that were my motivation to return to university study and enrol in CAS in the first place, the discomforts and doubts of the previous day or hour instantly receded in importance.

Alexander Chetkovich, former CAS MSc student

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Lighting Malawi – Using a Market-based Approach to Provide Solar Solutions

On Thursday 5th April it was announced that the President of Malawi, Bingu Wa Mutharika, had been admitted to hospital following a cardiac arrest. For 2 days local media continued to report that he was in ICU suffering cardiac arrest, despite it generally being accepted as a terminal condition. The foreign media was reporting his death but it wasn’t until Saturday 7^th April that it was officially announced in Malawi and Joyce Banda was sworn in as the new president.

It subsequently transpired that the ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), from which then-Vice President Joyce Banda had been expelled two years previously, had tried to by-pass the terms of the Malawi constitution – that give the Vice President power if the incumbent dies mid-term – in favour of appointing Wa Mutharika’s brother. Their efforts collapsed when Malawian security forces refused to undermine the constitution.

One of the new president’s immediate actions was to devaluate the Malawian kwacha by around 40%. Alongside promising to sell the presidential jet that Wa Mutharika controversially bought, the devaluation helped appease Malawi’s foreign donors including the IMF and the UK which had both suspended aid. Malawi typically relies on donor funding for around 40% of its government budget so this had caused a large deficit. The devaluation has provided a local income boost for farmers in the export market, particularly tobacco, and it should help economic stability in the longer term. In the short-term, however, it’s causing financial difficulties for many. This includes importers of foreign products and their potential customers.

For my PhD research I’m currently based in Mzuzu, northern Malawi, at the office of SolarAid. It’s a UK headquartered NGO that has created a social enterprise called SunnyMoney which aims to catalyse the market for micro-solar li

ghting systems. They import products designed by western companies such as D.Light, Barefoot and ToughStuff and manufactured to international standards in China and India. SunnyMoney Malawi sells them through a network of dealers and entrepreneurs to householders that don’t have access to grid electricity. Since this constitutes up to 96% of rural households in Malawi, it’s a fairly sizeable potential market.

Rural areas here have generally relied on kerosene lamps for lighting, but withdrawal of donor aid and poor tobacco sales over the past few years created a severe lack of foreign currency. Malawi imports all its liquid fuels so this in turn led to a critical fuel shortage. As well as disrupting transport systems, it means many people have resorted to candles and torches for lighting.

Pupils at Hara primary school in Karonga, Malawi, using candles

It’s an interesting time to be at SolarAid’s offices here because they’re still in the process of shifting from a donor-based to business-based approach to micro-solar. This follows a broader trend in development projects involving energy technologies: it’s now recognised that overly-subsidised or even free distribution of products is generally unsustainable. Projects would advertise early successes as targets for numbers of systems distributed were achieved, but later follow-ups showed systems not being maintained and sometimes never even used. There also tended to be minimal progress towards establishing local market infrastructure that could make the products available beyond the project period.

SunnyMoney has so far sold about 16,000 micro-solar systems in Malawi. However, the next consignments of the imported systems have been paid for post-devaluation in US dollars, so their local retail price will now have to almost double. Having been founded by an NGO and termed a ‘social’ enterprise, there might be an argument for a backwards shift – re-incorporating donor funding to subsidise micro-solar products down to pre-devaluation prices. However, counter-arguments include that it’ll only postpone the impact until after the funding package has expired and, perhaps more crucially, it will distort the wider market in Malawi. Although SunnyMoney aims to sell micro-solar products, the bigger objective is to catalyse a sustainable market for them. Seriously undercutting existing or potential competitors through donor-based subsidies may be counter-productive to that overall aim.

Carbon finance can sometimes be used to generate subsidies for products that reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions: the emission reductions are sold as carbon credits to buyers wanting to reduce their carbon footprint. As the funding mechanism is in theory open to all, this may be less distortive to the market. Drawbacks, however, include the high cost of registering carbon credits compared to the revenue they generate, particularly for micro-solar. It’s also unclear at which stage credits should be claimed within a supply chain.

Children reading with a kerosene lamp (left) and a solar lamp (right)

In theory, the solar lamp end-user – e.g. a Malawian villager – generates them through reduced kerosene consumption, but they have no way of claiming the credits and generally no knowledge of the concept. Even if you want to explain it, there’s rarely an appropriate translation in the vernacular. This leaves manufacturers, importers, dealers and project developers to argue it out, but only one entity can claim per product.

Another difficulty is the variable price of carbon credits, exacerbated by uncertainty in the regulatory framework that creates demand for them. Since University of Edinburgh is an accredited observer organisation, I was able to attend the 17^th Conference of Parties (COP) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Durban in November 2011. At this annual COP, government negotiators from across the world discuss how to reduce and respond to human-induced climate change. During two weeks of painfully slow negotiations, however, little progress seemed to be made and there remains no international commitment to reduce GHGs beyond 2012, reducing demand for and thus price of carbon credits.  One advert
ised success of Durban was a decision on how a Green Climate Fund will operate, providing funding to low-carbon initiatives in developing countries, but the source of the funding is still undecided.

The UN has named 2012 as the Year of Sustainable Energy for All. With little momentum in related international frameworks, business-based approaches seem to offer potential. A recent IFC report estimates a $37 billion market opportunity for improved energy services in under-served areas. Despite the devaluation, SunnyMoney hopes to grow sales in Malawi and ideas such as pay-as-you-go solar are being trialled to provide customer finance options. It will be an interesting market to watch, and certainly a fascinating one to research.

Gill Davies, CAS PhD student

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Build-up to Elections in Kenya

I have spent the last eight weeks in Kenya, as an intern with the African Centre for Technology Studies (ACTS) for an MSc Africa and International Development dissertation. My research is focussing on using bioenergy to help with local-level climate change adaptation, and is taking place in Nairobi (the ACTS HQ), with fieldwork in and around Kisumu. Kisumu is described as a ‘sleepy town’ on the shores of Lake Victoria in Western Kenya. I suppose that by comparison to the hectic, cosmopolitan and crazy Nairobi it is relatively quiet. However, this description fails to take into account the generally riotous nature of Kenya, in which peace and quiet can be rare commodities. Kisumu is famously the home of Barack Obama’s grandmother, an elderly woman who receives enough visits per month to have been, at one point, issued with a US Marine guard. This guard was reportedly repeatedly frustrated in his duties by the villager’s social habit of popping in and out of homes and using other people’s houses as thoroughfares. The town has local fisherman’s bars where you can watch the sun go down and look for hippos in Lake Victoria, and is home to a large proportion of the country’s Luo tribe. According to local stereotypes, Luo’s are the country’s romantics and ‘ladies men’! Kisumu is also something of an ‘NGO central’, ranging from large UNDP programmes to local start-ups which operate out of tin shacks.
It is a very interesting time to be in Kenya, and in Kisumu. Four years ago, Kenya hit international headlines for a shocking outbreak of post-election inter-tribal violence between the end of 2007 and the beginning of 2008, which resulted in several hundred deaths and internal displacements across the country. Kenya’s tribal affiliations are part of what makes the country so enduringly fascinating and diverse (the first question on meeting someone is generally “which tribe are you from?”), and since independence the multiple groups have lived in, if not quite harmony, then at least peaceful co-operation. The eruption of violence along tribal lines, in protest against disputed election results and social inequalities must have been terrifying for ordinary citizens. Kisumu was the site of some of the most shocking incidents, including over 50 deaths, allegations of police firing into unarmed crowds and the systematic targeting of Kisii businesses and homes by other local tribes. Most people that live in the town willingly recount their experiences. As one friend described “when the police ran out of tear gas, they started on rubber bullets, and when these ran out, they switched to real bullets”.
Kenya’s new constitution, a direct result of the conflict, focusses on equal rights for women, a citizen’s bill of rights, and sweeping reforms to check political corruption and improve accountability. The women I have spoken with feel that equal property inheritance and employment rights are long overdue. With elections looming again, it will be interesting to see if the ‘one Kenya’ rhetoric adopted by politicians after the violence, along with frequent TV adverts from young, trendy Kenyans speaking out against tribal division has had the desired effect. The country also faces new challenges in the build-up to this election, most noticeably the threat from Al-Shabab, a Somali militant Islamic group protesting Kenya’s involvement in military action in Somali, which has claimed responsibility for several grenade attacks on public places. Since I have been here, these have included public places like bars, shopping centres and churches in Nairobi, Mombasa and Garissa.
Alongside this new threat, there are still large question marks over the accountability and credibility of many of Kenya’s leading politicians. Public debate is raging over the prosecution of three senior figures for crimes against humanity in the International Criminal Court at The Hague. At least two of these, including Deputy Prime Minister Uhuru Kenyatta have confirmed they are running for senior office in the forthcoming elections. Understandably, Kenyan citizens are closely watching progress of the trials. In addition, the public are outraged over MP’s plans to hugely increase their wages and backdate these raises to 2002. They are already amongst the country’s leading earners, often from significant private business interests in addition to their public roles, as well as being proportionally among the best-paid parliamentarians globally. There remain the most outrageous income inequalities, and Kenyan’s often display a profound cynicism with the political class as they are perceived to be primarily motivated by personal gain.
My time in Kenya has led me to reflect on these inequalities and divisions, but also to try to understand the place of development in Kenya’s future. If you believe the electioneering politicians, the country’s future is very bright indeed. With an educated, ambitious and able middle class, Kenya’s Vision 2030 sees the country developing into a middle income country built on IT technology, kind of an African silicon valley, and growing its economic and social lead in the East African region. In several prosperous areas of Nairobi, you can certainly believe that this is well within the country’s grasp. But this glossy vision is in danger of obscuring challenging realities. Every gated, air-con, high-tech compound is matched by an informal settlement where basic livelihood challenges make the 2030 vision seem a million miles away. Kisumu, for example, is the country’s ‘HIV capital’, with some areas of the town suffering a shocking 20% infection rate. Yet, according to local NGO staff, the government often fails to provide ARV drugs, support to families, or adequate hospital treatment. If Kenya successfully progresses towards its 2030 vision, where does this leave international development? Will development’s primary role be to fill the gaps left by the seemingly unaccountable political class? It seems that, despite the new rhetoric, Kenya’s politicians are failing to get the basics right. This failure to tackle the country’s gaping inequalities will surely threaten its ambitious economic transformation.

Kate Symons, MSc Africa and International Development

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A Sense of an Ending: Notes on the sentencing in the trial against Charles Taylor

On Wednesday, May 30^th, trial chamber II of the Special Court for Sierra Leone sentenced Charles Taylor, the first sitting head of state indicted for war crimes in history, to a prison sentence of 50 years. From the very beginning it was clear that Taylor could not expect any leniency. The presiding judge, Justice Lussick from Samoa, drew heavily on the lore of horror stories from the civil war in Sierra Leone. By way of introduction he told the story of a witness who had carried a bag with chopped off heads from which the blood was dripping only to realize that she had carried the heads of her children. He did not omit to invoke amputees, raped girls, ‘children raped of childhood’ and a traumatized society in order to justify the lengthy prison sentence. The judges confirmed their finding that Taylor participated in the planning of the rebel attack on Freetown in January 1999, infamously known as ‘Operation No Living Thing’. They did not find any mitigating circumstances and instead found a number of aggravating factors such as the abuse of his position as head of state to ‘fuel the war in Sierra Leone’, according to the sentencing judgement. When the length of the sentence was announced Taylor did not show any emotion playing the role of the statesman until the end.

Unsurprisingly Brenda Hollis, the court’s chief prosecutor, was in agreement with the judgement although it fell 30 years short of the 80 years the prosecution had recommended. She hailed the sentencing as an important milestone in the global fight against impunity. This was disputed by Courtenay Griffiths, lead defence counsel, who refused to admit utter defeat and insisted on achievements of the defence such as the judge’s decision to enter not guilty verdicts on joint criminal enterprise and command responsibility but rather on aiding and abetting and planning the attack on Freetown in January 1999.

Griffiths failed to address an apparent contradiction in the defence strategy. From the outset the defence maintained that the trial against Taylor served the political agenda of the US and the UK. Taylor himself stated that he never ‘stood a chance’ and the defence saw their worst fears confirmed when the judges handed down 50 years. This raises the question whether the defence regretted to have done such a good job in defending Charles Taylor as they could be seen to legitimize a fundamentally flawed criminal trial they themselves criticized for being political in nature.

This assessment, however, was not shared by Morris Anyah, who will act as lead defence counsel in the appeals procedure. According to him, the trial chamber’s judgement is affected by flawed witness testimony and numerous errors that are ‘systemic and affect the quality of the judgement’. Mr Anyah was confident that the defence will succeed in convincing the court’s appeals chamber of this and that the case is ‘not a closed case’. Looking at the record of the Special Court’s Appeals Chamber it is difficult to share his optimism.

Whether the draconian punishment of Charles Taylor will actually contribute to deterrence of future crimes or a sense of closure in Sierra Leone and Liberia is open to debate. Public debates in both countries but in particular in Liberia suggest a much more contradictory picture than the one painted by those who hail the judgement against Taylor as an important achievement in the global fight against impunity. But what is the point of punishing Taylor anyway? Maybe it is asked too much for any criminal court to contribute to laudable but chronically ill-defined and abstract objectives such as national reconciliation, closure or healing of collective trauma. Whether the punishment of Taylor will really deter others is also hotly debated and findings from research on deterrence in national jurisdictions are not encouraging. This might become clearer in the coming years as more and more politicians and military leaders will face trial before international criminal tribunals. In any case, most of them will be Africans.

Gerhard Anders, Centre of African Studies, University of Edinburgh

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Ambivalent Rwanda

Rwanda is an ambivalent country: the more I know about it, the more I both like and dislike it.

I had visited Rwanda twice before starting my PhD. In 2006 and 2008, I travelled from Japan, where I was doing my Masters degree, to this country of a thousand hills, to observe the activities of the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) and a Japanese NGO, the Africa Reconciliation Committee (ARC).

In 2011, I returned to Rwanda for three months to conduct fieldwork for my PhD. As my research examines the history of Rwanda during the period of decolonisation, my main ‘field’ had previously been the archives in Brussels, New York and Rome, where I collected written materials. The purpose of my field trip to Rwanda this time was to interview older people about their memories of the past.

During three months in Rwanda, I stayed in three places: Kigali, Butare and Kibungo.

Kigali is the capital of the country, busy and quite developed. A Kenyan supermarket is open 24/7; a skyscraper called Kigali Tower stands high above other buildings; and the construction of new buildings, mainly carried out by the Chinese, can be seen everywhere. Foreigners enjoy coffee in air-conditioned cafes; foreign exchange bureaus are positioned at every corner in the city centre; and various kinds of food – from Italian to Korean and Japanese- are available. Most Rwandans dress themselves in western clothes. Even a bus boy can speak some English. I was surprised by how quickly the city had developed in the 3 years since my last visit.

Butare is located in the south of Rwanda, less than 2 hours by bus from Kigali. It is a cosy campus town, smaller in size than Kigali. I went to Butare in order to use the library of the National University of Rwanda (NUR). Founded in 1963, the NUR is the oldest and most prestigious university in the country. Students I passed on the street or I talked to felt pride in studying at NUR and seemed to expect a shining future ahead of them.

During the majority of my fieldwork, I stayed in Kibungo, the Eastern Province. Affiliated to the Institute of Agriculture, Technology and Education of Kibungo (INATEK), my daily routine consisted of conducting interviews and visiting the INATEK library. INATEK is a private university whose students have more diverse backgrounds than those at NUR: some directly enter INATEK after graduating from high school, but most study part-time while working full-time as teachers, business people or even politicians. Compared to Kigali and Butare, Kibungo is quite small. There is only one main street in the town with neither a single currency exchange bureau nor a non-Rwandan restaurant. Few people can speak English and I had to use my poor French, especially when I was talking to middle aged or older people.

My ambivalent feelings towards Rwanda stem largely from the gap between the rural areas and the cities. I often used motorbike-taxi to travel to the rural areas for interviews, which took one hour or so on bumpy roads from Kibungo. Life there is completely different from life in Kibungo, needless to say Kigali. People in Kibungo all wear shoes and fine clothes. In the rural areas, people wear torn clothes and no shoes. They mainly eat just banana and beans, once per day. There is no electricity and no running water. While my translator told me that most people in Kibungo have just one or two kids, a family in the rural areas will have at least five or six children, who can be seen playing outside, bare foot.

I could not believe that Kigali and the rural areas in the Eastern Province belong to the same country. After staying in Kibungo for two months and returning to Kigali at the end of my fieldwork, I came to think that there are two Rwandas: the one in Kigali nicely displayed to the international community to appeal to its focus on post-genocide development, and the other in the rural areas, where people cannot enjoy the prosperity of the capital city. I did appreciate and enjoy the convenience of life in Kigali, but at the same time, I felt a bitterness and sense of guilty for staying there.

Another thing which shaped my ambivalent feelings towards Rwanda was the people.
The Rwandans I met were all nice. It was easy and rewarding to cooperate with taxi drivers and my translator. Every time I had been to the archives previously, I had worked alone. This time in Rwanda, I went to interviews with my translator riding on bike taxis driven by the same drivers for nearly two months. So, as time went by, I felt a sense of fellowship with them. Even though the drivers could not speak English, they tried to teach me some Kinya-rwanda and invited me to their homes. Since my translator is the same age as me, he gradually expressed his honest opinions not only about history and my research but also about the current situation in Rwanda. Many people I interviewed in the rural areas welcomed me and sometimes offered me food even though they do not have enough for themselves. In Kigali and Butare, I also enjoyed kindness from the Rwandans. I did and still do appreciate the kind-heartedness and hospitality I received during my fieldwork.

However, I am not naïve enough to simply appreciate the generosity of the Rwandans. I have heard from some Japanese working in Rwanda that Rwandans and Japanese share similar characteristics. For instance, Rwandans and Japanese are both shy and socially polite. Moreover, the Rwandans I met were all on time, which was a nice surprise to me. On the other hand, Rwandans can be as unclear as Japanese. They do not give ‘bad’ answers nor refuse to respond when asked a question or favour. They say, “Nta Kibazo (no problem)” even though actually there are problems. Moreover, both Japanese and Rwandans tend to (or, at least, get used to) obey authority. It may sound absurd, but the mixture of politeness, obscurity and obedience I experienced in Rwanda led me to see overlaps between the history of post-war Japan and that of post-genocide Rwanda. Even though historical background and political, social and economic settings are different, both countries seem, at least for me, to share the problems of how to establish governance and democracy and to deal with the violent past.

Rwanda is a beautiful country of kind people. I enjoyed staying there so much that I am looking forwards to returning after I finish my PhD. However, as I come to know more about the country, I find that I not only like it as much as I dislike it but I also worry about its future.

Aya Tsuruta, CAS PhD student

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Mali’s Curious Coup

Weeks away from what would have been the West African nation’s fifth consecutive democratic elections, the people of Mali woke up to military rule on the morning of Thursday, 22 March 2012. The incumbent President, Amadou Toumani Touré (known as ATT) was not even standing for election. Much of the media commentary on the coup has focused on two points: that this coup is part of the inevitable fall-out from the revolution in Libya and, ironically, that it has toppled one of the few bastions of democracy in Africa. Meanwhile, on Sunday, neighbouring Senegal celebrated a successful democratic transfer of power from Abdoulaye Wade to former prime minister, Macky Sall. So what exactly has happened to democracy in Mali?

There are signs that this was not exactly a planned take-over of power. The seemingly “accidental coup” began as a mutiny by low and middle ranking soldiers at the Kati military training base on Wednesday, following a visit by the Minister of Defence. Young soldiers have been protesting the lack of supplies of arms and food, and inadequate training, which have contributed to humiliating defeats by rebel groups in the North of Mali recently. At the outset there was no clear intention to stage a coup. It looks as though young men got carried away in a testosterone-fuelled riot, quickly over-stepping the point at which they were capable of backing down: a sign, perhaps, of the poor quality of their military training.

The rapid move to take control of state television and radio was, however, suggestive of a coup attempt and perhaps certain officers were poised to take advantage of the momentum created by the mutiny. This analysis doesn’t quite fit, however, with the amateurish performance thus far of the leader of the newly formed National Committee for the Return of Democracy and the Restoration of the State (CNRDRE), Captain Amadou Haya Sanogo, who was an instructor and English teacher at the Kati military training base.

One thing is clear: the young mutineering soldiers are angry, and beneath that anger, is fear. Their fear is justified. Under-resourced troops have been facing a formidable and poorly-understood enemy in the North: an enemy who, in the trademark gesture of Al Qaeda, slit the throats of an as-yet-unconfirmed number of Malian soldiers after they ran out of ammunition in the Saharan village of Aguelhoc last month. The coup leaders stated that they would hand over power “as soon as the country is reunified and its integrity is no longer threatened.” That may take some time.

The end of the Libyan conflict and the dispersal of Gaddafi’s weapons have indeed re-fuelled separatist Touareg groups, which have rebelled repeatedly since the 1960s and have now formed an alliance, the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA). However the political scene in the North is highly complex and merits a separate blog entry. The immediate problem is that the coup has divided the military, and each faction must battle on two fronts. The mutiny spread to the Northern town of Gao and, according to unconfirmed reports, to Timbuktu. The MNLA has taken advantage of the lack of opposition and seized control of a number of towns in the North.
There is still the possibility of a counter-coup, but parachute regiments and high ranking officers loyal to ATT are deployed on the frontline. Thus far the mutineers have been unchallenged in Bamako. The main problem on the streets has been the loss of law and order. The coup leaders have broadcast messages calling on police to return to their posts and civilians to be ready to return to work on Tuesday, after the bank holiday weekend, ironically commemorating the country’s last coup d’état, on 26 March 1991.

The 1991 coup was led by ATT himself, who seized power from incumbent dictator Moussa Traoré at a time of rebellion in the North. But that is where the parallels end. General ATT, as he was at the time, toppled Traoré after the latter brutally quashed pro-democracy demonstrations. The General immediately handed power to a civilian transitional government. For this, ATT has been dubbed the ‘Soldier of Democracy’. It was not until 2002 that he re-entered politics, this time as a civilian. He was set to step down this Spring, having completed the constitutional maximum of two terms in office. All of these democratic credentials raise the question of why he should become the victim of a coup attempt.
Returning to the query as to whether this coup d’état was intentional or not, one possibility is that the coup leaders are in cahoots with or have been manipulated by members of the political class. The only opposition leader to have come out in favour of the coup is Dr Oumar Mariko, leader of the left-wing party SADI (African Solidarity for Democracy and Independence) and veteran leader of the 1991 student revolt. On the Tuesday before the coup, SADI hosted a public meeting in Kati for soldiers to air their grievances about the sitation in the North. The possibility of being swept to power by a popular uprising may be too tempting for this old-school Socialist, who has always been an outsider in the presidential race.

As for the coup leader, he has claimed that he is not partisan. When asked in an Africable interview if his putsch was supported by elements of the political class, Captain Sanogo replied that he is not a political man and proudly offered as proof of this the fact that he has never in his life voted in an election. The interviewer struggled to keep a serious tone, making an aside about him clearly being an exemplary citizen. Sanogo’s naïve response is nonetheless instructive.
After twenty-one years of democracy, it has been possible for a coup d’état to forestall democratic elections in Mali because enough Malians do not see elections as particularly relevant. Although ATT has shrewdly sold an image of democracy as one of the country’s most valuable exports abroad, within Mali liberal democratic values have not taken deep root. ATT’s brand of ‘consensus politics’ – consensus without dialogue, as Susanna D. Wing has astutely observed – has narrowed the field of genuine opposition. Indeed Mariko’s SADI is the only one of the main parties which has remained an independent voice in national and local politics. There are multiple cultures of civic participation in Mali, but representative democracy is a poor fit. There is an argument for a more direct form of democracy, as was attempted, ultimately unsuccessfully, by ATT”s predecessor, Alpha Oumar Konaré.
It remains to be seen whether the coup leaders can master the nyama – the potent life-force of destruction/construction – which they have unleashed by overturning the established order. An estimated 200,000 people had already been displaced a result of the conflict in Northern Mali before the coup took place. Now, at the start of what is known locally as ‘the hungry season’ – the hottest, dryest time of year, when shortages of food and water are normal occurrences – Mali’s coup d’état of March 2012 will undoubtedly worsen the humanitarian disaster unfolding across the Sahel region.

Clare Coughlan, CAS PhD student

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Discovering the spirit of Ubuntu in the Horn of Africa

The Horn is like no other place in Africa, at least that is what I thought prior to my six months research trip to Ethiopia, with a brief visit to Somaliland. The truth is that no two places are the same in Africa. Yet, I discovered that whether I am in the Horn, Southern or Central Africa there is a common thread connecting the people of Africa, that of unbridled warmth and kindness, otherwise known as Ubuntu.
I set out for Ethiopia in August 2011, fortunately it was not my first visit to the country; however, the nature of the current visit was vastly different from the previous one. Not speaking Amharic the official language, nor sufficiently familiar with the society, I was apprehensive. The obvious fact that I am an African from Africa did not in the least ease my apprehension; in fact it made it worse! It is common knowledge that the ‘typical image’ of a researcher in Africa is not that of an African female from Africa.
Starting off in the comfort of the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa, the research process was set in motion. Addis is a typical capital, in addition to being Africa’s diplomatic capital; it is cosmopolitan, fast-paced and connected to the rest of the world. I had to start in Addis; it is where the main archives are kept, it is also the location of the oldest and leading institution of higher learning, Addis Ababa University. After nearly two months in the capital, locating the archives, speaking to people at the university and registering as a researcher, it was time to head for the main research site.
The research site is the eastern Ethiopia borderlands or periphery, some 500+kms from the capital, the area stretching from Harar to Togochale on the border with Somaliland. The greater part of this area is in the Somali regional state of Ethiopia as arranged under the current federal system. Here, my interest is to discover the processes at play in the development of citizenship by investigating specific interactions between the periphery/lowlands and the central/highland state over a period of time. This is all in an effort to answer the main question of why the states in the Horn are more prone to fight over their borders than other African states.
I began in Harar, an ancient former Muslim city-state dating back at least one thousand years. In Harar I was received with curiosity and a degree of scepticism. Some said that I am investigating a ‘sensitive’ subject. They thought that my focus is on the actual status of the contested Ogaden region of Ethiopia. This region has been the source of great animosity between the Ethiopian and Somali states since the latter gained independence in 1960. Nevertheless, it is in Harar that I met Mohammed Jami Guleid, the man who would become my assistant. Mohammed is a capable man of many talents with a vast knowledge of the region; he also embodies the nature of Somali identity in the Horn: born in Ethiopia to northern Somali parents, and with family in both Djibouti and Kenya.

I then moved on to Jijiga, the capital of the Somali regional state where I had to get permission to go to the border town. The plan was to conduct interviews with immigration and customs officials at the border, and to make observations on the usage of the border. I was not expecting such a high degree of cooperation at the border town of Togochale (Tog Waajale in the Somali language). The officials were highly cooperative. In fact one of the interviews took place after lunch one day. This is significant because in this part of Ethiopia and in Somaliland the period after lunch is when men and some women (the latter more discreetly) chew the mild stimulant leaf called khat or qat. You will find the men wearing their sarongs and relaxing on pillows with the occasional shisha and chewing way into the afternoon, usually discussing current issues. I was lucky enough to join in many of these sessions (bercha). Work usually resumes after three in the afternoon.
The border town itself was a challenge, with little to no water for the most part. However, the people and the Somali food made up for it! Being on the border was an interesting experience; so much that I decided to cross over to Somaliland. The plan was to try to see and understand things from the perspective of those on the other side of the border. After getting back to Addis and preparing for the trip, Mohammed and I set off for Hargeisa, the Somaliland capital. Crammed in a small car on a nearly three hours’ drive from Togochale to Hargeisa was a somewhat surreal experience. Upon discovering that I am not Somali, my co-passengers were fascinated, some invited me to their homes in Hargeisa for a meal. It also amused them that at the five checkpoints between Togochale and Hargeisa we were waved through without any hassle as it is customary to request identification from foreigners on this route.
Going to Somaliland is a risk in every sense of the word, but one well worth it. Most western countries have a travel warning for all the Somali regions; there is no insurance coverage and you must bring all your money in cash ($US). After being stamped out of Ethiopia I felt decidedly vulnerable. There was no need to feel this way as the Somalilanders go out of their way to make visitors feel safe. In Hargeisa I visited a peace and conflict research unit based at Hargeisa University, a local research NGO, and had the pleasure of meeting a few high ranking state officials. From the cheerful immigration officers at the border, to meeting the Minister of Foreign Affairs and the family members of my assistant, the people of Somaliland rewarded me for going to their country.
Overall, I had what I believe to be a truly exceptional experience, where there was a mutual feeling of being one and the same with the people while still retaining my researcher’s hat. Going back I will be more confident, knowing that my identity is my greatest asset. I look forward to what promises to be a long-term personal and professional relationship with this region of Africa.

Namhla Thando Matshanda, CAS PhD student

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