The Twelfth Post

The opening of a commercial overheard on FM radio the other day (the minibus drivers tend to blast it):

(Sound of a couple saying their wedding vows; “I do.” “I do.”)
Voiceover: Getting married is the happiest day of your life. On this day, you would never even think about how cement products are all around you.

Best. Non-sequitur. EVER. Come back zinc!

Brilliant ads like that aside, FM radio in Kenya is identical in every way to FM radio in Australia – apart from the fact that the announcers are African, you could be listening to 2Day FM. It’s a good example of the sort of mix of tradition and modernity that you see quite often here. On another occasion, I was sitting in a mudhut in a tiny village a 45-minute motorbike ride down narrow dirt tracks, attending a microfinance meeting of a group of women, as rural as you can get – when suddenly a mobile phone starts ringing with a Kylie Minogue ringtone, and one of these old African mamas picks it up and starts talking away, and nobody (bar me) bats an eyelid.

In many ways it’s a very different place to what I’m used to, but at the same time the marks of a globalised world are everywhere. Mobile phones are the most obvious thing – it almost seems like a phone has become one of the bare essentials: the fourth thing you spend your money on after food, water and shelter. The English Premier League is another. It’s strange how certain aspects of Western society are embraced wholeheartedly, but ways of thinking tend to remain very African.

To return to Trevor, star of one of the previous posts – the guy who’s trying to introduce new agricultural techniques to shift local farmers from subsistence operations to profitable businesses. One of the things he’s trying to do is to stop farmers growing so much maize, which is the absolute staple crop here. One of the national dishes is a flavourless paste called ugali which is made from maize and water, and they eat it with everything. Trevor’s trying to convince people to grow cash crops like bananas, tomatoes, sweet potatoes etc instead of maize. His attempts to explain that if you sell enough cash crops, you can buy all the food you need and you don’t need to worry about living on a paste made of maize and water are just too much for most people – they think if they don’t grow maize, they’ll starve. What would people say of a farmer that couldn’t provide enough maize for his family? The social sanction is too much to bear.

And another thing. Cows, sheep and goats are everywhere, and they’re all strange-looking. The cows are skinny and have horns; the sheep are furry and have long fat tails. Thing is, they don’t seem to do anything. They’re not used for milk, and they’re seldom eaten. So why do people have them, we wanted to know? Much of it relates to status – if you have a cow it means you’re well-off, even if that cow produces nothing. If you have two cows… woah.

We met an English doctor called Ailsa on safari. She’d been spending her time doing medical camps in various villages. The way a medical camp works is, they advertise in an area that a doctor will be in town on a particular day, and then on the day hundreds of people show up to get medical care they can never usually access. Many of them have conditions that really, really need treatment – in fact should have been treated some time ago. Ailsa told us that, for the most part, she could prescribe something and send people on their way, but on occasion she’d have someone who was really sick. She was blown away when she first said to someone “You need to go to hospital right away or you could die” and was told “Oh, no… I can’t go to hospital today”. Even when she offered to pay.

It seems to me (and I’m sure many have pondered this before me) that while the trappings of modernity may be creeping in, it’s a change in the way of thinking that would really make the difference for African development. Investment in health, education, more effective agricultural practices, entrepreneurship… these are the things that made us rich and could do the same for Africa – if only they’d think and act like us. The paradox is, if you think like a Westerner, you can be rich like a Westerner, but you might be giving up a lot in the process. A lot of positives come from Africa not being like the West – strong community support networks and family ties, a spirit of togetherness, a willingness to share virtually everything one has – is forsaking those qualities the price of development? Or is it that we think they need to be like us in order to develop, simply because that’s how we are and we can’t imagine a different way? You can be poor and communal, or you can be rich and individualistic, but does the choice have to be as stark as that? Or can you mix the best of the two?