Nairobi — The Germans know how to build cars. When the organisation I used to work for was getting a new office car, our choice - from the make to the colour - was primarily dictated by concerns about carjacking. A year later I was involved in a head-on collision, following which the car rolled. The car, a new Volkswagen Jetta, was written-off.

But I, amazingly, emerged unscathed thanks to its airbag and seatbelt. So I became a fervent advocate of German technology in a different sense than originally anticipated. A car bought for security from a carjacking perspective had provided safety in another way - and saved my life. Thus my emotional attachment to VW.

And my disappointment and irritation with the name it has chosen for its sports utility vehicle. How on earth did it decide that the name of a whole group of people is an appropriate name for a make of cars?

In the same tired old manner in which so many aspects of Africa are exoticised and romanticised - and then commercially exploited - the Touareg are now cars. The name, of course, is not-so-subliminally meant to evoke images of valiant crossings of the Sahara, with little or no water on hand.

I am sure the Masaai here, whose images are now used to sell almost anything to do with Kenya and East Africa, will empathise. If I were a Touareg, I would be lodging a claim to block to the use of the name. Or, at least, claiming a share of the profits from Touareg sales from VW.

It seems a frivolous point to make. But it is not. I had the privilege of hearing Awegechew Teshome, an Ethiopian scientist, speak to a gathering last week about the same issues - but in relation to Africa's plant genetic resources. He talked about the diversity of Africa's traditional food production systems, and the simplistic attempts to overlay large-scale, "modern" food production on them. Not all of Africa's ecosystems - on which the traditional systems were painstakingly built over time - take to synthetic inputs such as mass-produced fertilisers, chemicals and so on. Nor can they support mechanisation, particularly in the drylands.

HE TALKED TOO ABOUT AFRICA'S traditional domesticated plant species - over 2,000 of them - which he described as having been "driven into internal exile." Although many of them are drought-resistant, with high nutritional value, he spoke of being taught about them when being trained as a scientist as being "coarse grained, low yielding" and so on.

His conclusion - as if they were African people, not African plant species - was that they were first stigmatised and then neglected and under-utilised. With the result that although West Africa has its own rice varieties, the bulk of rice now consumed in West Africa is imported from Asia. Again, I'm sure people from western Kenya will empathise, given what's happened to their local greens. Even more distressing, in many drought-hit areas capable of producing a range of local foods, "relief" maize is now the only "food."

This is not just a problem with food security implications. It is a problem with economic implications. Why are the Ogiek so "poor" when their traditional habitat is home to, for example, Prunus Africanus - a plant found primarily in Cameroon and here, patented externally as the active ingredient for prostrate cancer treatments and providing the patentholders with returns from sales of $1 billion-plus a year? As Teshome summed up, the solution is found in valuing our internal resources - our biodiversity and the knowledge of African farmers and other users of that biodiversity . "You get only what you negotiate, not what you deserve." Wise words indeed.

L. Muthoni Wanyeki is a political scientist based in Nairobi