Global Voices Online (Cambridge)
Ethan Zuckerman
12 July 2007
guest column
Arusha — TED Africa - introducing Africa 2
TED Africa - introducing Africa 2.0
I’ve only been to TED - the Monterey, CA-based “Technology, Entertainment and Design” conference twice - but I’ve worked out a basic survival strategy for those events. Because I spend the conference blogging in real time - a practice that requires roughly 120% of my brain capacity - I do my best to hide in a hotel room during off hours, sleep as much as possible and generally turn one of the world’s great networking opportunities into a near-solitary practice. My perpetual worry at TED is that I’m going to get distracted and say something short-tempered and piss off a billionaire who might otherwise have been inclined to support my work. So I lurk in corners, blog and generally try to be as unobstrusive as possible.
That’s not going to work at TED Global, and that would miss the point of this whole event. Chris Anderson and the TED crowd have decided to do something very different with this conference, holding it on the outskirts of Arusha at a beautiful hotel and lodge, inviting an amazing set of people, including a hundred fellows - mostly young African bloggers and entrepreneurs - to spend four days listening, learning and chatting with one another. There’s a healthy dose of the usual TEDfolk here as well - the good and great of the US and European tech and business community - but it’s a very different mix of people than I’m used to seeing at this conference. The bus from Arusha to the conference this morning gave me a chance to catch up with Jen Brea, Rafiq Philips from Your Group of Web AddICT(s), Derek Ashong from the Sweet Mother Tour - having wonderful folks like this at TED is clearly going to change the dynamic of this sort of conference and, I hope, broaden the worldview of both the usual TEDsters as well as my friends who are hear as fellows. (I got to meet Harinjaka on the plane ride over, as well as seeing old friends Jim Forster and Tami Hultman…)
I’m fascinated to see how the crowd - both regular attendees of the conference and first-timers - react to the program that Emeka Okafor has put together. This is a conference with a very strong agenda - Emeka wants to convince you that, as John Perry Barlow once wrote, everything you know about Africa is wrong. You’ll be hard pressed to find voices here mourning the “failure” of Africa - you’ll find many more talking about potential, both tapped and untapped. Leaning on his work on Timbuktu Chronicles, Emeka has found a set of business innovators who will represent the core of the speakers list, complemented by scientists, politicians and musicians, the vast majority of whom live and work on the continent. I suspect that the overall message of the event will challenge the preconceptions of all participants, African and non-African.
Preparing for this perspective, I re-read Charles Kenny’s excellent essay “Is Africa a Failure?” on the plane ride from Amsterdam to Kilimanjaro. Like Hans Rosling’s most recent TED talk, he makes the argument that we’re using the wrong metrics when we dismiss African progress - specifically, African progress in public health and literacy shouldn’t be ignored, and is more impressive than we generally give credit for.
While murderous dictators are part of the Africa we hear too much about, bringing these leaders to justice in a transparent fashion is definitely part of Africa 2.0. My friends at Open Society Institute are sponsoring a site to cover the trial of former Liberian president Charles Taylor. The site doesn’t appear to be accessible yet, but will be online later today - please check it out and keep an eye on it for news coming from The Hague.
Euvin Naidoo on bringing light to Africa
A note for everyone: I’ve gotten a number of requests to reuse content from this site about the TED conference. The answer is a blanket “yes”. Everything I write is available under Creative Commons atrribution license. That means that as long as you give me credit and preferably link back to here, you’re welcome to use my words whatever way you’d like.
Rokia Traoré welcomes the assembled crowd to the first session of TED Global 2007, “The Africa You Don’t Know,” with a beautiful Malian song. I’m thrilled to see Chris Anderson joined on stage by my friend Emeka Okafor, the remarkable Nigerian entrepreneur, thinker and blogger who’s put together this program. Emeka is clearly nervous to be on stage, co-hosting with Chris… but he deserves the honor given the amazing work he’s done.
Euvin Naidoo, the VP of Standard Bank in South Africa, welcomes us home to Africa. He invites the crowd to shout out the worst we’ve heard about Africa: corruption, famine, AIDS, slave trade. “But this is about Africa, the story we’ve not heard.”
Africa is on a turnaround, in terms of how it manages its public image and how it manages its destiny. Naidoo’s background is in turnarounds, beginning his work with McKinsey in South Africa. As a graduate student in the US, he wrote a case study on turnaround, focusing on Nelson Mandela - this became part of a book called “Confidence”, written by Rosabeth Moss Kanter. Naidoo has tremendous pride that an African story was used as an example of turnaround for US corporations.
Naidoo uses the NASA map of the earth at night to show us the contrast between the brightly lit North America and Africa, which literally looks like the Dark Continent. He quotes a geographer: “The only thing dark about Africa is our ignorance of it.”
One major source of our ignorance about Africa is the tendency to forget that the continent is 53 separate countries. “To say ‘invest in Africa’ is meaningless.” You can make money and lose money in Africa. But it’s worth noting that companies like Bain Capital are coming into South Africa and purchasing retail companies - that’s a bet on the emergence of the middle class. Nigeria must be taken seriously - it’s going to be one of the ten largest economies in the world by 2020, and we’re already seeing Nigerian companies capable of raising money through Eurobonds, securities with no government backing.And Nigeria currently produces as much oil as Venezuela or Kuwait. There are 135 million people in Nigeria, and 700 ATMs - that’s an opportunity, for serving tens of millions of unbanked people.
Naidoo is also bullish on Egypt, which had the world’s best performing stock exchange in 2005. He tells us about a $2.8 billion industrial park run by Singaporeans, designed to host textile and petrochemical manufacturing. Many African nations - now 16 - have soverign credit ratings. Some of these ratings aren’t very good… but they allow international investors to choose between African and non-African nations, comparing Nigeria to Ukraine, for instance.
Why is CNBC building a 24 hour news channel broadcasting nothing but African news? They believe there’s business to follow in Africa, and they want to shine a light on it. Naidoo urges us to take part in shining that light alongside them.
A different image of Africa
June Arunga tells us in her three minute talk that, as a kid growing up in Kenya, she was fascinated by “cool stuff” from around the world. “All this stuff had a label on it ‘made in X country’ and none of those countries where in Africa. “Why does the cool stuff come from elsewhere?” she wondered. “Why can kids at 16 get cars at graduation in the US, when it’s hard to get a car with a PhD in Kenya?”
Arunga ended up making a film for the BBC, travelling from Cairo to Cape Town, documenting the interaction between politics and economics. She believes that politics gets in the way of economics. The exciting recent development is that technology is now outpacing politics. The rise of mobile phones is creating new businesses that challenge how business is being done. The rise of a business around used cars is forcing ports to revamp - there’s a domino effect that comes from technological and economic change that forces governments to change as well.
The connectivity in the hall is down, so these posts are going to have fewer links than usual. Hope to flesh them out a bit more once I can get online…
Andrew Dosunmu, a filmmaker and photographer from Nigeria, starts his talk by telling us about encountering Joseph Conrad for the first time. He was a student in the UK, and he wondered about this Africa he was discovering for the first time, the Heart of Darkness that was so different from the Nigeria he grew up in, a place of life and vitality. As he looked aroung the UK, he found himself “confronting images that the Europeans were able to use to colonize Africa, grotesque images.”
Dosunmu’s quest is to show different images of Africa, “images of ourselves” that reflect the reality on the ground, not just the view through outside eyes. Dosunmu’s work has been through TV programming and music videos. He shows us a pair of videos, one made for Magic System, the remarkable band from Cote d’Ivoire. They’re colorful, vital, and show modern, urban Africans in cities that look unfamiliar to people who haven’t spent time on the continent.
We see clips from a TV show he’s producing for South African television, “Yizo Yizo“, which looks at the dark side of business in South Africa, and at the struggles of entrepreneurs to make it in contemporary society. The dialog shifts seamlessly from English to Shona and other languages. The visual sensibility looks a bit like Oz, a bit like the Sopranos - cuts between wide, cinematic shots and tightly framed closeups. This is miles away from the TV programming I watched in Ghana a decade ago - you could overdub and put this on HBO and I suspect it would do very, very well.
Dosunmu reminds us that he need to show “images of ourselves that are positive” - not all these images are positive or easy. Many are tense and uncomfortable, but they’re real, and radically different from the views we’re used to seeing from the outside of the continent.
he ends with a slideshow of images from Cote d’Ivoire, just as the nation learned they’d be playing in the world cup. His shots from here and around the continent are slices of life - people in their Friday best, young men looking tough, women smiling. They are faces we can’t see enough of.
Africa - open for business
If there’s a document that summarizes the spirit of African 2.0 that Emeka is trying to showcase at this conference, it’s Carol Pineau’s film, “Africa: Open for Business“. She tells us that her reason for making a film focusing on African entrepreneurship was her frustration as a journalist. She covered wars and famines, but she couldn’t sell a story to her editors about cellphones on the continent. She tells us that an African can-do ethic gives Africa amazing potential: “As an American to put a nail into a board and they’ll complain they don’t have a hammer. Ask an African and they’ll find a brick, or a shoe. Imagine what that spirit can do for African business.”
She shows us three clips from her movie: a Nigerian clothing company, making fashions for children called “Rough and Tumble”; Alieu Conte’s hugely successful mobile phone company in the DRC, which has had more than a 1000 times return on investment capital; the remarkable Somali airline Diallo Airlines, which operates in a country without a government (In his clip, CEO Mohammed Olan notes, “It’s sometimes a blessing not to have a government: corruption is not a problem because there’s no government.” That line gets a lot of applause.)
Africa, Pineau tells us, has the best return on capital of any market in the world. Why isn’t there widespread investment on the continent. Risk? Botswana has lower risk than Japan in terms of international credit ratings. The perception of risk far outpaces the real risk.
Pineau is concerned about the long-term psychological damage of poor coverage of the continent. She reminds us that colonialism tried to ensure that colonies were never able to compete with their conquerors. She argues that the images of Africa are a form of this colonialism, and they perpetuate uncomfortable trends. “Aid has never, ever developed a nation,” she argues.
One of the problems is that we rarely take African voices seriously - she points to reports of snow on the peaks of Kilimanjaro. British geographic societies wouldn’t believe reports of snow on the mountain’s peak until a British explorer had been there. The same thing happesn today, she tells us, in coverage of relief work. The people actually giving food and medical aid are Africans, but the people interviewed on camera are the “white saviors.”
While most of the North is ignoring Africa, China is not. Pineau points to the “love affair” developing between Africa and China, exemplified by the fact that this year’s African development bank meetings are being held in Shanghai.
Pineau’s new film is titled “African Investment Horizons” - it’s a view of the larger financial systems that are effecting African change. This is less about small-scale entrepreneurship and more about Africa-focused hedge funds.
She leaves us with two questions:
What would we do if we really cared about development in Africa?
What can we learn from Africa if we decided to listen and stop always trying to teach?
Getting rowdy with Andrew Mwenda
Ugandan journalist Andrew Mwenda is man of strong opinions. His opinions in 2005 about Museveni’s government were strong enough to put him in jail briefly. He tells us that this is an auspicious time for this meeting, since it parallels the meetings in Germany for the G8 which are discussing “a Marshall plan for aid for Africa”. To call Mwenda skeptical about this idea is to do him an injustice - he’s a firm believer that international aid is a dangerous and largely harmful direction for Africa.
“The media tells nothing but the truth [about Africa] but not the whole truth”. The stories covered - despair, civil war, famine - are not the only reality. Actually, they’re the smallest reality. These stories create a misframing of Africa, and lead us to the long solutions. By giving food to the hungry and medicine for the sikc, Africa is stripped of self reliance and of hope.
Why can’t African nations enable entrepreneurs to trade internationally and sell goods to international markets? Why hasn’t hundreds of billions of dollars of aid transformed the continent? It’s because governments listen too much to aid providers and too little to their own citizens. Because the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund give so much money to governments, they find themselves in the odd position of telling national leaders what their people need… from the outside.
This government aid, Mwenda feels, does little more than allow governments to spend beyond their means. He picks apart the Ugandan national budget, pointing out that the government spends 105% of the revenue it collects. It can only do this because donor moneys allow the government to support development, which wouldn’t otherwise be covered by the government budget.
Where does the government money go? He argues that it goes disproportionately - roughly 25% of the Ugandan national budget - to “public administration”, in other words, “mostly patronage”. He points to 70 government ministers and 114 presidential aides, “who never see the president except on television… and then the President advises him, not the other way around.” There’s 333 members of parliament - “you need Wembley Stadium to hold our parliament.” Mwenda believes that cutting international aid would force governments to cut their own spending and address these core questions like corruption.
His speech ends abruptly - he tells us he was told that a TED talk should be like a miniskirt - “long enough to cover the important parts and short enough to maintain interest” - which, combined with a rowdy speech gets the first standing ovation of the conference. It’s clear he’s thrown down the gauntlet to some people in the room, especially Bono, who has dedicated much of his life to international aid. At one point in Mwenda’s talk, he asks the audience to name a country where aid has led to develoopment - someone puts up a hand (Bono, I suspect) and tells us that government aid helped Ireland through the potato famine. Mwenda won’t concede the point, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see Bono take him on in a later session.
Aked point blank whether he opposes all aid by Chris Anderson, Mwenda makes an important distinction - he thinks it shouldn’t be given to governments and should be given directly to indigenous groups and entrepeneurs.
Bono versus Mwenda
The second session opens with a remarkable piece of film, an excerpt from a stop-motion animation titled, “Only the Hand that Erases Can Write the True Thing”. It’s a haunting and moving piece, but i’s a bit jarring before we move into the rest of the session, which opens as a rebuttal of the first session.
Bono is the first speaker for the second session and he comes bringing greetings from Chancellor Angela Merkel, a video greeing that connects the G8’s meeting with TED’s meeting. She’s meeting with leaders of NEPAD and with President John Kufuor. She acknowledges dramatic African developments - the reduction in armed conflict, a 5% growth rate in several nations, an increase in the number of democracies on the continent. Yet, there’s still dreadful poverty, irregularities in Nigeria’s elections, and the ongoing situations in Zimbabwe and Darfur.
Bono takes the stage afterwards and says, “Try telling Chancellor Merkel that the Marshal plan was a load of crap.” He notes that Germany has been spending 4% of its economy to enable reunification. “Germans know better than anyone in the world how aid can work.” And he argues that the Marshall plan is “the best example of America intervening in a strategic way.”
Bono’s talk is a response to the “Mwenda plan” - a reference to Andrew Mwenda’s critique of foreign aid. He says he’s not sure there is a plan, and accuses Mwenda, in a swipe, of being a comedian - getting a laugh by pointing to the thing in the room no one will talk about. He argues that the money Mwenda complains about - $600 billion in the past 30-40 years - is really a very small amount of money, about $14 dollars per African over the past 50 years. (That doesn’t sound right to me - with $600 billion given and a current continental population of 900 million points to $600-700 per living African… but I don’t have historical population figures…)
The cold war was fought in Africa, Bono reminds us, and that we bear responsibility for supporting kleptocracies like Mobutu’s regime - “I don’t think its charity to not ask Mobutu’s grandchildren to pay it back.” He talks about his work on DATA - “Debt, AIDS and Trade Africa”, which he tells us can also be read as “Democracy and Transparency for Africa.” He explains that this came about through his attempts to get a meeting with George W. Bush. Meeting with Paul O’Neill, he confronted an ALCOA alum who’d done business in Africa, a realist who told him, “You’re crazy if you are asking for money so African leaders can decorate presidential palaces.”
The resulting conversations led to the Millenium Challenge Account, which has helped turn US aid from a historic low of 0.1%, half of which had gone to Israel and Egypt… and Bono argues that MCA is all about starting businesses.
Investment in Ireland has led to a very poor country becoming one of the wealthiest in the world. The key factor is a highly educated population. “I was educated by the state - there are some public goods worth spending for today.” He congratulates the US for writing a big check - $30 billion - and for enabling debt cancellation, which is letting 20 million people go to school.”I don’t want to be a defender of Museveni, but there are three times as many children going to school because of debt cancellation.”
Bono fields a couple of questions, two of them quite hostile. One notes, “a certain portrayal as Africans as unable to think, empty,” an accusation that clearly stings. Bono responds that he’s clearly done a poor job of showing his esteem for the continent, and notes, “I don’t think about Africans in any other way than I think about irish people.” A question from Derrick Ashong about how Africa can leverage its cultural patrimony gets a happier response: he notes that Irish culture isn’t a northern European culture, and that many traditional Irish melodies can be traced directly to Morocco - he illustrates with a short piece of song. “There’s a definite African heritage, a connection between Celtic and Coptic culture.” He leaves the stage to a standing ovation.
A 3.3 million year old toddler
Zeray Alemseged is an Ethiopian paleontologist who claims responsibility for an amazing discovery: the world’s oldest child skeleton. In northeastern Ethiopia, he’s discovered a skeleton of a three year old girl which is 3.3 million years old. The skeleton, called Selam, is a member of the species http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australopithicus.
The fossil he discovered comes from an enormously remote part of the country - driving from Addis Ababa, it took 27 hours to drive the first 400km, and four hours to do the last few kilometers. It’s an area rich in history - stone tools dating from 2.6 million years ago, flutes from 35,0000 years ago, and gorgeous beads from 75,000 years ago.Zeray corrected me today - the three artifacts he showed were from around the world and were shown to illustrate “technology” - tools, “entertainment” - flutes and “design” - beads. Thanks for the correction… When he arrived at the dig site, he was the first human to drive a car to the spot. Photos show us an incredibly remote, harsh desert - he reminds us that this land had very different carrying capacity in the past: “It is an extinct game part, where our ancestors weren’t especially successful” in hunting large mammals like elephants.
Selam’s skeleton was encased in a sandstone block, because she was buried by the river. Alemseged speaks about the sense of wonder and responsibility of holding this block in a terrifically remote part of the world. It took five years to remove the skeleton from the block - a second birth, he says.
There’s good visual evidence that Selam is human - her skeleton indicates upright walking, and the flat forehead is more similar to humans that chinpanzees. He was able to determine sex by analyzing the teeth - because of sexual dimorphism, teeth are smaller in female than in males - her canines were so small that, even though they were baby teeth, he feels confident that she was female.
One remarkable feature about Selam is a hyoid bone - this is a bone that supports the back of the tongue and is critical to speech. This bone in Selam looks very apelike - he believes that her cries for her mother would have sounded very chimplike. This apelike feature found in a human skeleton is a profound reminder of our anthropological and evolutionary heritage.
Alemseged closes by uring us to have a positive African atitude towards Africa, urging Africans to “walk upright” to the future and to take charge of their heritage as the birthplace of humanity.
Ken Vickery drops some history on us
Historian Kenneth Vickery is a pinch-speaker today, filling in for George Ayittey. It’s awfully hard to fill Ayittey’s shoes, but Ayittey has been well represented by early speakers, and Vickery has a useful set of stories to tell - historical stories from the continent from the past millenium. He starts with his own story - a young graduate student, hitchhiking from Nairobi to Arusha, and collecting stories from the man kind enough to pick him up and the people he encountered on the trip. He found “people with stories, intertwined with the stories of their ancestors,” and was convinced that there was a life’ss work in collecting these stories.
He tells us three historical stories, points of inflection that could have radically changed the course of events had they played out differently, offering a story from Mark Twain, that “history does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme.” He starts with the encounter between kingdoms in the early 16th century - the Portuguese, and the Kingdom of the Kongo, based in what is now northern Angola. The Kongo Kingdom is a “classic late iron age” society - it had a surplus production of food, organized pottery and textile industries, copper and ironwork, and a currency based on cowrie shells. There was a feudal system, with lesser lords supporting and occasionally challenging the main kind, the ManiKongo.
Vickery focuses on Nzinga Mbemba, king of the Kongo from 1506 onwards. Dozens of letters were dictated by the king to “my brother kings” in Portugal. He converted to Christinanity and sought literacy for his kingdom - he sent his son for education in Lisbon and Rome, and he became the first African bishop. The king requested physicians, surgeons and apothecaries, and offered ivory and, tragically, a small set of slaves, captured from the edges of his kingdom in return. The Portuguese didn’t send the doctors, but they took more and more slaves, eventually putting a massive strain on the kingdom and ultimately collapsing the kingdom.
Slavery extended into the middle of the 19th century. When it ended, commercial contact between Europe and Africa continued. Palm oil was a key commidity from West Africa, neccesary in a pre-petroleum age to lubricate the new machinery being installed in mills. Ironically, the heart of the palm exporting region is the Niger delta, the most oil rich part of Nigeria today.
Ja Ja, king of the Opobo in the 1880s, was a former slave who became a trade king. He tried to form a monopoly of ownership of palm oil to challenge the European monopoly over shipping. At one point, he tried to organize his own shipping company, paying ship captains directly to cut out the middlemen. For his entrepreneurial spirit in challenging the trade monopoly, he was lured into a “negotiation” with British officials, kidnapped and deported to the West Indies. A noted politician observed, “In other countries, it would be called kidnapping”
Vickery ends his lecture talking about the moment immediately after independence for most African nations, the middle 1960s to the 1970s. There was amazing success in many nations during this time - he points out that Zambia’s GDP per capita grew every year in 1960s and through half of 1970s. Most African governments kept promises to improve education and healthcare, raising primary school enrollment, building universities and hospitals.
But the international climate shifted in the 1970s - oil shocks and resulting changes in the terms of trade shifted the playing field against commodity producers. The dependency of governments on a small set of primary products led to economic disaster. Many leaders responded by becoming more authoritarian. “What if civil society had been strong enough to resist?” What if the legacy of colonialism is the absence off institutions that can keep power in check? Is this one of the other factors in explaining the challenges African nations and economies have faced over the past decades?
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