The future, as I see it

by Alex Park | 2008

I never wanted to do humanitarian work. Plenty of people parachute to Africa from another part of the world, arrange for someone else's food to be airlifted into this war zone or the next, and leave. They'll never admit it to your face, but they like the thrill of the work more than the place that they do it in. The worse the conditions, the luckier they think they are. The more ridiculous and more tragic the premise for whatever crisis they're up against, the more reason to go.

Human catastrophes exist on all continents, of course, but in the last fifty years, Africa has had more than its share. Some examples include the First and Second Congo War: five years, eight countries involved, 5.4 million people dead, millions more displaced. Ended five years ago and declared the bloodiest war since World War II. The Sierra Leone Civil War was another catastrophe which gained some a reputation in the West. It began when an ambitious ex-wedding photographer named Foday Sankoh founded a small "revolutionary" militia to take control of the country's diamond mines which was later made infamous for recruiting children by having them hack off their parents' hands. Fifty – ninety thousand dead. Lasted nine years, ended three years ago.

But I saw Africa as a place to build something, not just a hemorrhage gushing blood to dress, alleviate and later ignore. Sure, you could easily dismiss the place as hopelessly underdeveloped, but you could also say that it was waiting to be developed. While the West, try desperately to clean up their economies, reform their education systems and restore their environments, Africa has the good fortune of starting with nothing, and therefore having nothing to reinvent, or tear down, before they start building something new entirely.

There is even an inkling of that now. Africa is today the fastest growing cell phone market in the world—faster than China, India or the United States, and the vast growth has already yielded millionaires in a multitude of countries from Egypt to Nigeria. The continent once thought of as a sinkhole of modern technology is now developing its own. In Kenya, for instance, a pilot program developed by a local cell phone provider allowing users to transfer money via text message is already taking off while the same technology is unheard of elsewhere in the world. While sustainability activists in the West triumph "localism" as the future of our own food distribution, residents in Kinshasa and Harare have already begun farming on vacant lots in their cities to fill existing food shortages in their own communities. And while teachers and parents are pushing to make schools in the United States more technology-driven to prepare them for the future, solar powered laptops are already being distributed to children in slums and villages throughout Africa.

In a place quite detached from the West as so much of Africa is—in trade, in culture, in mentality—you have to respect the shear tenacity of the local way of life.

"Their pirogues and all the weapons and tools of their livelihood were efficient and had the beauty that is the unsought result of perfect function" Nadine Gordimer said of fishing implements used by villagers on the Congo River. "[Their tools] could have gone straight into an art collection."

South Africa, too, has its own array of beautiful household items: FM radios made from Coke cans, ceremonial dresses from bottle caps. My friend, Emma, bought a pair of plates entirely out of woven telephone wire, intricately stitched together in perfect concentric circles, one after another. Nadine Gordimer would have been proud: these really can be found in the Museum of Modern Art, Emma told me. They sell for 40 dollars a piece in the museum gift shop, but she got hers for less than five dollars each.

Africa always knew how to be Africa. Even if it hasn't always been able to feed itself, at least it has always known how to be that. In the colonial era, Christianity, Western languages, "civil society"—all of them were institutions that foreign powers tried to impose, succeeding for brief instances, but only to turn around and find that their ways of thinking were turned on their heads. Today, the West is more indifferent and more pitying: our computer waste is dumped on landfills in Ghana where we assume nothing could happen to it before finding that hackers working in slums have extracted the passwords to our bank accounts. Car parts, too rusted and too useless for our own tastes, are dumped in Senegal, passed off as a gift from the whichever country it came from, to be sold in local markets to generate a tiny income. Some of it is sold. But some of it is turned into art which both reflects and mimics the original purpose of the materials used.

It's in Africa that one finds the limits of globalization, and the possibilities of an alternative.

Still, you would be wrong, as some post-independence leaders mistakenly believed in the great upheaval of the sixties, that Africa was destined for unity and that superpower status was around the corner. In the West, we had our own optimistic thoughts and gut reactions. We cheered Africa when it became independent. Europe, paternalistic by experience, saw its children growing up and taking over the house for themselves, offering a helping hand while it looked forward to a more thoughtful relationship. The U.S., always sympathetic to a revolution, saw independence as an end to itself. But decades later, Africa is still too poor, too sparsely and unevenly populated, with too many slums and too few great cities. There are no roads or rail lines which traverse the continent, and the nations' leaders are still plagued by infighting (at least some of which is understandable given the circumstances).

For all this, the conventional wisdom is that "Africa has a long way to go." This is true. But even in its violent fits, waged at times to renegotiate borders imposed on it in a prior century, the continent is not stagnant in the way so many self-declared experts insist it is. Something is happening here. Something is changing. The place, the people, are moving forward, and where they end up may look entirely different than where we expect.

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