Randy Weston's African Rhythms Quintet

Randy Weston is one of the first and foremost American artists to convincingly incorporate African sounds into the jazz vocabulary. Wait a minute, you might think, African sounds and rhythms have been around in jazz for a long time. Well, so has Randy Weston. The concert at New York’s Jazz Standard club I heard on April 8th, 2010, was part of the weeklong 84th birthday celebration of the maestro. The last time I had heard Weston live was during his 80th birthday celebration at the same venue.

Although jazz has its roots in Africa, it is a quintessentially American invention. The roots were dug up a long time ago, replanted in the soil of the new continent, and cross fertilized with implants from many other traditions. True, band leaders and composers like the great Duke Ellington inserted African influences into their music, like the Duke’s 'Black and Tan Fantasy.' But this was not African music. The real exotic influences from Africa and the Middle East were really introduced only by men like Randy Weston and Yusef Lateef starting in the 1950s.

The big man—Randy Weston stands 2.03 metres (6ft8) tall—came on stage and sat behind the grand piano. The solo introduction soon led to a slow blues in 3/4 tempo in which his long-time band, African Rhythms Quintet, joined, all five musicians donning white African Muslim style caps. The crisp-toned alto saxophone of TK Blue took the lead in stating the theme of the tune and continued with a lively solo. The band’s rhythm section differs from the average jazz combo as it does not include a regular drum kit. Instead, Neil Clarke sat behind three large congas surrounded with cymbals and other percussion instruments. Another feature that makes the rhythm section distinctive is the presence of Alex Blake, another long-term Weston collaborator whose work on the double bass is just unique. In a world full of amazing bass players, I am not aware of anyone else quite like Alex Blake. In these hands, the slow tune soon developed a tension that forced me to sit on the edge of my high bar stool.

Following the alto solo, Randy Weston himself began a solo using distinctly North African tonalities. He was on firm ground, having studied the region’s music for the past half a century. The atmosphere was ripe with Saharan winds as Weston hit the keys carefully choosing the notes using a scale that contained the telltale 1.5 step intervals. As the tension further increased, Blake and Clarke would alternate the slow tempo with sudden bursts of double time.

Sitting down on a low stool and hanging onto the fretboard high above his head, Blake picked the strings with the four fingers of his right hand. He slapped the thick strings and beat the big instrument as if it were a flamenco guitar. At the times I’ve seen him perform, I’ve always feared that any time one or more of his fingertips would just be severed and fly across the room.

The second tune, 'Saucer Eyes,' also started with Mr. Weston’s solo piano introduction. This time it displayed clear ragtime influences, as the leader launched into some mean stride piano. Like all real music reformers, Randy Weston is deeply aware of the history of jazz and stands firmly on the shoulders of his predecessors. The song turned more into a conventional jazz tune, with Neil Clarke playing the role of a conventional drummer with a cymbal ride above the congas. Alex Blake slapped his bass irreverently in the up-tempo piece. The tune also gave the opportunity to the trombonist, Benny Powell, to join in and to show his chops. Again, TK Blue took a solo, his clear alto soaring with references to well-known classics such as 'Take the A Train' and 'St. Thomas.'

Randy Weston was born in Brooklyn in 1926. He is a New Yorker who grew up listening to American piano jazz à la Fats Waller and Duke Ellington (he even recorded their songs in the 1950s) and, later, Thelonius Monk. You can still hear this tradition clearly in his playing.

But his adventurous mind led him to explore other musical styles. At the end of World War II, Weston was sent to the Pacific Theatre where he served as staff sergeant in the Philippines and Okinawa. This experience exposed him to Asian music, which in these archipelagos has a particular flavour and rhythm. In the late-1950s, he started exploring the integration of African musical forms into jazz. Already at that time he created a number of highly original and to my ear extremely successful fusion records, such as Uhuru Afrika and Highlife celebrating the newly independent African states. During those years, Randy Weston travelled to West Africa, visiting countries such as Nigeria and Ghana to study their music and culture.

In fact, Randy Weston clearly sees the connection between jazz and its African roots. According to him, there is no contradiction between the tribal traditions found in the villages of West Africa and the urban culture of New York. This is demonstrated, for example, by his masterful composition, 'African Village Bedford-Stuyvesant,' featured on the wonderful double LP The Spirits of Our Ancestors recorded in 1991. The album features a 9-piece jazz band amended with African percussion and instruments, such as the stringed genbri and karkaba metal castanets, all arranged by Weston’s long-time musical partner Melba Liston who regretfully passed away in 1999. The music benefits from guest appearances by two other great musicians who have sought to expand the geographical limits of expression, Dizzy Gillespie and Pharaoh Sanders.

Like all tunes that recent Thursday evening, the next one also started with the leader’s solo piano. Randy Weston again introduced new elements in his prelude to 'African Sunrise.' Playing a powerful bass with his left hand, Weston combined liberally traditional jazz elements with atonal quirks reminiscent of Monk. After the lengthy introduction, the trombone joined the piano in a low ostinato that evolved into a slow Latin tinged rhythm in 7/4. The alto again took the lead, backed by Blake’s bass and Clarke’s conga and maracas.

The next tune was a ballad featuring the horns. TK Blue’s alto was this time so old-fashioned lyrical that one could imagine sitting in a smoky Harlem jazz den of the 1940s. Alex Blake’s bass highlighted the big instrument’s amazing melodic and percussive possibilities in the right hands.

My first introduction to Randy Weston’s music was his 1972 album Blue Moses. I remember as a young schoolboy visiting the NK record store in Stockholm with my mother and choosing this album based on the intriguing concept that the cover and the names of the tunes conveyed. I also recognized the sidemen listed on the jacket. They included both established veterans, like Freddie Hubbard and Ron Carter, as well as rising stars of the calibre of Billy Cobham and Grover Washington, Jr. Perhaps most importantly, the cover informed me that the group included Hubert Laws, who was a great idol and inspiration to me as an aspiring flute player. While the record was a Creed Taylor production on his successful CTI label, there was nothing too sleek or superficial about it. The music was raw and its North African influences unapologetic. Don Sebesky's arrangements featured more instruments than most of jazz orchestras, including such unusual additions as oboe and the French horn.

Randy Weston himself played the Fender Rhodes throughout the record, which somewhat oddly did not distract from the genuineness of the music. On the contrary, the reverb of the Rhodes produced a haunting atmosphere in the rubato parts of the music against which the vocalist Madame Meddah could wail her Berber voice. At times when exotic rhythms took over, the Rhodes sounded more like a West African balaphone.

The interplay between Carter and Cobham is impeccable, the latter refraining from displaying his most showman-like pyrotechnics. The trumpet, tenor and—yes!—the flute all play inspired solos. Still today, the record holds a central place in my collection and, every time I listen to it, I get the goose bumps when, after a complex rhythmic element on the title track, Cobham cracks the rim of his snare drum indicating the beginning of the most swinging straight drive ever and Hubbard dives into a broad-sounded trumpet solo. Or when the electric piano intro of 'Night in Medina' turns into a compelling slow melody played by the horns, with Laws’ flute and percussionist Airto Moreira’s voice hovering mysteriously around it. Yes, indeed, Blue Moses is still just about the best record ever made.

A number of years ago, I was lucky to catch Randy Weston at the World Financial Centre in downtown Manhattan. That time he had brought with him a group of Gnawa musicians from Morocco to supplement the African Rhythms Quintet. The vast atrium with its evergreen winter garden and huge windows giving to the Hudson River and skylights allowing sunlight in from the blue sky was an appropriate location for the music that really should have been played outdoors. The Gnawa are a Moroccan ethnic group belonging to the Sufi Muslim sect known for their music that involves hypnotic rhythms, call-and-response vocals and string instruments.

The concert turned into a riot. The mood was so celebratory that Randy Weston himself, dressed in a flowing Berber gown and wearing a white North African cap, spent more time dancing with a big smile on his face to the music of the Gnawa than playing the piano. I remember that my wife Yoko and I went home completely exhilarated and exhausted, although it was only afternoon and no other stimulants had been involved apart from the music and the general joy.

Back at Jazz Standard, the final full piece the band played was another slow blues in 3/4 time, with Alex Blake producing rubbery glissandos on his bass. As the concert ended and the big man rose from his piano chair, TK Blue finally picked up his flute. Throughout the concert I had watched longingly at the flute and soprano saxophone that he had brought with him to the stage. Alas, he had until now chosen to focus on the alto. This was the first set in the series and I am sure he’d play more on the smaller winds later in the week. At least I was happy to hear the husky flute blow against the slow North African rhythm as the gentleman we had come to celebrate walked backstage.

I truly wish for many, many more happy birthdays to celebrate with the musical force and genius of Randy Weston.

Sandy Weather in Beijing

When I returned to Beijing on a late March evening, the sandstorms had subsided but one could still taste the dust particles in the air. The night was moonless and there was a slight haze. The meteorological authorities had recommended that residents stay inside as much as possible and keep their windows closed. Inhaling too much of the dust would have negative health effects, especially on respiratory organs.

The worst sandstorm of the year hit Beijing on a Saturday. It was the 20th of March 2010. On the following Monday, a second storm enveloped the capital city in a shroud of yellow dust that covered everything from the rooftops to the pavement on the streets. Trees as well as cars were coated by a layer of sandy dust. As an immediate result, dust pollution in the air rose to intolerable levels. People on the streets wore facemasks to protect their mouths and noses. Pharmacies were reportedly selling these items in ten times larger quantities than during normal times. Patients with asthma and other respiratory illnesses flooded the hospitals. Schools banned outdoors sports and even class breaks in the school yard.

Despite these dramatic consequences, the sandstorms were by no means unique in Beijing or elsewhere in China. In fact, according to the Chinese National Meteorological Centre, there have been on the average eight to nine sandstorms in Beijing each year over the past decade. Four-fifths of them occur in the spring.

The news reported that sandstorms over the weekend affected some 270 million people in 16 Chinese provinces covering an area of 2 million square kilometres. The numbers are staggering, but so is the scale of these storms. Fuelled by high winds from the north, the storms affected not only the capital region and the provinces north from it—Shaanxi, Hebei and Shanxi—but reached far south to the coast. Reportedly, the touristic city of Hangzhou—known as the most beautiful in China—in Zheijiang province in the east, and Fujian province on the southeast coast of the country were blanketed in yellow dust. As far south as Hong Kong, air pollution levels caused by the dust shot through the roof. Not even the island of Taiwan was spared: the dust pollution index in the capital of Taipei doubled.

In an interview with the China Daily on 23 March 2010, Duan Li, chief weather forecaster with the Beijing Meteorological Bureau, explained that, strictly speaking, rather than a sandstorm, we had just experienced a mere dust storm. The word ‘sandstorm’ is used when visibility falls to less than 1 km, she clarified, while this time visibility averaged between 2-3 km. Whatever the definition, the Beijing municipal Environmental Protection Bureau reported that the air quality was promptly deteriorating due to the dust and the city was experiencing level-four air pollution.

The perennial sandstorms plaguing the city originate in the northern parts of the country, often in the vast dry open areas of Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang and Tibet. A perfect sandstorm is created when cold Siberian winds from the northwest meet with soil that has been dried by the warming spring weather. The high wind velocity associated with the winter monsoon can reach 18-28 metres per second. Historically, strong winds occur for about a month every year but in rare cases they can last for up to a hundred days. Often the windiest days coincide with the dry season when sandstorms develop and blow away the dry loose surface soil. This time the epicentre of the sandstorm was located in the Inner Mongolia and Ningxia Hui autonomous regions.

Needless to say, the sandstorms are frequently seen as yet another consequence of human mismanagement of nature. Surely this must be yet one manifestation of how the greed of the contemporary man destroys the very base on which our lives depend? Undoubtedly, overgrazing of animals and deforestation in these naturally arid lands has caused significant erosion and loosened the topsoil that can now be blown away by the winds. Urbanization that these traditionally pastoralist societies are facing has put additional pressures on the natural vegetation that holds the soil together. The grasslands of northern China have been significantly degraded and deserts now cover 16 percent of the country. No-one can deny these facts.

But is this a new phenomenon? And is it particularly related to the exceedingly rapid economic growth and modernization of China over the past couple of decades? It would seem safe to argue, no, on the contrary, grassland degradation and drought have plagued northern China for centuries. My Beijing–based friend John explained how Chang’an, the former eastern terminus of the legendary Silk Road in Shaanxi province, collapsed in the 10th century C.E., partly due to environmental stresses on land and water caused by the large settlement. Sandstorms must have been a nuisance already then, more than a thousand years ago.

It is easy to blame recent developments for environmental degradation and the current trajectory may indeed not be sustainable. However, people’s memories are short and many environmentally concerned folks are intuitively sceptical about economic development. Yet, the history of degradation is often much longer and in some cases economic development has actually helped halt environmental damage as local people’s awareness and possibilities to invest in environmental protection improved. This has been convincingly shown by Jack Ives and Bruno Messerli in their now classic 1989 volume The Himalayan Dilemma: Reconciling Development and Conservation in which the two geographers show that, based on a historical record, the deforestation and land degradation in the world’s highest mountain range goes back hundreds of years and was largely due to colonial policies. According to their research, the intensive smallholder terraced agriculture has actually resulted in the stabilization of the slopes.

A similar storyline emerges from the book The Ordos Plateau of China: An Endangered Environment by another geographer and friend, Hong Jiang at the University of Hawaii. Ordos Plateau in the Inner Mongolia autonomous region is a fragile environment that is easily impacted by human activities, be it animal grazing, agriculture or construction. Subjected to overgrazing and deforestation, the flat open land becomes increasingly exposed to wind erosion that can have disastrous proportions. However, Hong’s detailed historical and field research demonstrates that the most rampant degradation in the region occurred during the first three decades after the takeover by Mao’s revolutionary guard in 1949. During this period that included the 'Great Leap Forward' (read: the opposite), the Chinese masses were mobilized to conquer the nature for the benefit of the new communist state. Since 1978, the degradation started slowing down and has in some areas even been reversed after environmental protection efforts were put in place.

Human factors were the triggering forces for environmental degradation, as well as the determining forces for environmental improvement, she concludes. Government policies played the most important role both in initially leading to the runaway degradation and, later, its reversal. Such policies were more important in determining the environmental outcomes than other factors, including economic growth, population increase and social practices.

With wealth often comes a raised awareness of the importance of environmental quality and an ability to do something about it. The Beijing-based Global Times reported that the Tibetan authorities have pledged to improve close to a million hectares of desert areas over the coming two decades by planting trees and grass. Similarly, according to China Daily, Beijing and its port city Tianjin have invested 4 billion yuan (more than 500 million dollars) into wind and sandstorm control since 2000.

Then again, the prominent ecologist Jiang Gaoming of the Chinese Academy of Sciences has pointed out that tree-planting projects in north China have been in existence for three decades and 60 billion yuan has been spent on preventing the sandstorms, but the results have not been impressive. To the question why this is the case, Jiang provides a set of answers that combine the technical (planting grass rather than trees; need to include remote, inaccessible areas that are ecologically degraded) and the social. His point is that many of these formerly nomadic areas in the northwest just are too fragile for permanent settlement and their carrying capacities have been exceeded by the current population levels (just as they were towards the end of the glory of Chang'an). Furthermore, there is a link to poverty, as poor people rely on the grasslands to feed their livestock and clear land for their crops.

But for now the dust had settled and I was able to enjoy a pleasant lunch in a courtyard of an old hutong converted into a trendy café near the Lama Temple just two days after the second sandstorm. The sky was blue and breathing the air was no problem. Still, another eight to ten sandstorms are expected to hit northern China between April and May this year. Zhang Peiqun, chief forecaster at the National Meteorological Centre, explained in the newspaper that this could be predicted due to the fluctuation between warm spring weather and sudden cold spells causing heavy winds to blow away the dry sand. We got a demonstration of the sudden variability of the weather the same evening when wet snow like white rags was pouring from the sky and everything was momentarily covered in sleet.

Like everywhere, springtime weather in Beijing is unpredictable. What is sure, however, is that the sandstorms will recur for the foreseeable future.

Tripoli

Libya does not have a great reputation amongst Westerners. That’s too bad, because the country actually has a lot to offer for a visitor: it has unique historic sites—including what is said to be the best preserved Roman ruins outside of Italy in Sabratha and Leptis Magna—decent food and a beautiful Mediterranean coastline. Yet, the US State Department keeps Libya on its watch list and even the Lonely Planet founder Tony Wheeler included Libya in his travel book Bad Lands: A Tourist on the Axis of Evil.

Libya’s bad rap of course has its roots in the unorthodox rule by the country’s long-time dictator, Muammar al-Gaddafi, whose larger-than-life pictures adorn all public spaces in Tripoli. There are so many of them and most of them different from each other: some depict the leader scanning the horizon for new challenges with a far-sighted look in his glinting eyes, while others show him smiling at his subjects in a fatherly and encouraging manner. Some are clearly from his younger days; others show a more mature Gaddafi sporting a moustache and a goatee. There are even posters of him praying on his knees at a mosque. The pious colonel is personally well-known for travelling with a troupe of gorgeous but lethal female bodyguards.

In 2009, the nation celebrated 40 years of Gaddafi’s rule. Libya has been accused of being a state sponsor of terrorism, and most likely for a good reason. Already in 1986 during the Reagan administration, the United States bombed Tripoli and the Benghazi region accusing Libya of terrorism. The United Nations imposed sanctions on Libya in 1992. These were suspended in 1999 and finally lifted in 2003 when Gaddafi agreed not to pursue weapons of mass destruction and voluntarily gave up his nuclear program. The relations with the West took a new hit in August 2009 when the Lockerbie bomber Abdelbeset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi was freed from a Scottish prison due to his terminal cancer. Unwisely, Gaddafi gave the convicted terrorist a hero’s welcome back home.

Personality cult aside, Gaddafi has done many good things for his country. He has posited himself as the self-proclaimed champion of Pan-Africanism, but his is probably the only country on the continent where abject poverty really does not exist. Women’s position is also quite equal compared with most other Arab countries. Women still wear headscarves and dress modestly in Islamic garb, but in all offices that I visited there were many highly professional and outspoken women in senior professional positions. Women’s literacy rate at 78.4 percent is almost as high as that of men—and exceptional in the Arab region. Today, the UN ranks Libyan Arab Jamahiriya—as it is officially called—as a country of ‘high human development.’ Its GDP per capita has doubled from $7,250 in 1990 to $14,364 in 2007 and life expectancy of the Libyans has risen from 62 to 71.6 years (and for women it is now 76.8 years, at par with many industrialized nations!).

One obviously unintended consequence of the international sanctions was that over the decades when the country was isolated ordinary Libyans suffered from deficiencies in education. Due to the isolation, the generation that today occupies important positions is largely monolingual Arabic speakers. Some people speak English, but the language skills of even well-placed government officials tend to be meagre.

The capital, Tripoli where I spent several days in December, is a historical city, dating back to 7th century BCE when it was apparently founded by the Phoenicians. Today it is a clean, white city, despite being Libya’s main port and commercial centre. Coming from anywhere in the neighbouring countries east or west—or north across the sea, for that matter—it gives a neat and organized impression. The architecture is quite attractive and most of the buildings are white, irrespective of whether they are of colonial or Arabic origin. Many have been renovated or are now being renovated. There is no litter on the streets and the traffic is more orderly than in other cities of comparable size.

My travel companions, Ragaa Makharita and my colleague Mike, and I had to visit a number of government offices, many of which were located in the suburbs outside of the city centre. Driving in the daylight confirmed what I had already observed during my first drive into town from the airport at night time. The suburbs were generally neat and orderly. Plenty of new housing seemed to be available and most of the complexes looked rather attractive. I asked Ragaa, an old Libya hand, whether there were any slums in Tripoli. He said no. All the slums that used to be there were or are being cleared and new housing is being created for the inhabitants. There are apparently many new projects that are being constructed by Korean firms. It was striking to see large groups of African day labourers gathered at virtually all major junctions outside of the centre waiting to be picked up for the various construction sites. This entire arrangement thus bypasses the traditional 'development partners' in Europe and North America.

One of the institutes we visited was the Libyan National Meteorological Centre on its new and impressive premises outside of the city. The UN has supported the centre in upgrading its operations and facilities with technical assistance from the World Meteorological Organization and the French Meteorological Services. The spic-and-span facilities now contain state-of-the-art computer systems capable of receiving satellite information and translating it into accurate real-time weather reports. This has been one of the most successful international collaborations in the country in recent years and a flagship project for the UN. What characterized the project and also lay behind its success was that weather services are largely technical and their political dimensions do not seriously challenge any mode of cooperation. The UN Development Programme that was managing the international effort was able to procure equipment and expertise where it was available without getting into the ill-defined issues of governance and democracy.

I had an interesting discussion with two senior officials at the centre, Muftaf Khdashi and Hisham Ganedi, Director of Forecasting and Director of Technical Directorate, respectively, about cloud seeding. Libya, located between the Mediterranean Sea and the Sahara desert, is dry, its natural climate characterized by sparse and erratic rainfall. The country's leader has for long attempted to overcome such challenges to boosting agricultural and industrial development through various schemes, many of them quite bold to say the least. One of the more ‘visionary’ (read: ‘dangerous’) schemes has been the Great Manmade River, which aims to transport huge amounts of water from the Nubian Aquifer to Tripoli, Benghazi and other cities. While Gaddafi has called it the 'Eighth Wonder of the World,' it has been widely criticized for its unknown and potentially disastrous ecological impacts, including exhausting the huge fossil aquifer it draws upon in possibly just a century. But the project has proceeded since 1983 when the Colonel passed it through the General People’s Congress.

Another scheme, implemented by the Libyan National Meteorological Centre where I found myself on that particular sunny but extremely dry morning, pertains to cloud seeding. The aim is to distribute silver iodide into the clouds so that moisture in them will condense around these artificial particles and fall onto the ground as rain. Such technocratic solutions to natural problems are embraced also by other hubristic countries, notably China, with little consideration for their potential unforeseen negative impacts. How is the work going?, I interrogated my hosts as we strolled along the long corridors inside the centre’s headquarters. Not very well, was the answer. While cloud seeding appears to increase rainfall, it is very difficult to manage. Of course, it can only be applied from November to April when in the first place there are some clouds and rains might also appear naturally, so it’s actually hard to verify the actual increment caused by the seeding. More importantly, it’s impossible to accurately direct the rains. The Mediterranean weather patterns are unpredictable and orographic rains fall as moist air cools down while climbing the slopes behind the coastline. Sometimes, the rains become torrential and destroy the very crops they were intended to sooth.

Our visit to the meteorological centre took place on the day following the end of the 2009 climate summit, which had in the last minute produced only a watered down version of the Copenhagen Accords disappointing many activists. One of the many frontlines in the climate change debates is between those who urge serious cuts in greenhouse gas emissions and those who believe in technological solutions. On a small scale, the Libyan cloud seeding experiments demonstrate the practical difficulties in managing weather. Influencing global climate through technological means—many of which are now being cooked up in the wild dreams of mad scientists—would be infinitely more difficult and wrought with unimagined and possibly catastrophic consequences.

Clearly, one area where improvements are still needed if Libya is to attract more visitors is service. Ragaa, Mike and I stayed at what used to be one of the better large hotels in the centre of Tripoli. The building had all the necessary attributes to be fine—a solid construction, an elegant old-fashioned lobby, spacious rooms—but it wasn’t. The guest rooms had absolutely awful, narrow beds with only shallow flat mattresses and shabby linen thrown on them. The bathroom had hordes of uninvited non-paying occupants who would scurry to their hiding places brown antennae wagging always when I unexpectedly turned on the lights. After a couple of times, I learned to wait a few seconds before entering the bare room.

Most bizarrely, the hotel would want to receive payment for the room every evening in advance, although I had a reservation with them for the entire period I would stay in the country. Needless to say, this was a cash economy and no credit cards would be accepted. Like in cheap New York eateries that don’t either accept credit cards, there was an ATM in the lobby. So, one had to withdraw the funds and provide the lazy cashier a thick pile of well-worn dinars in order for him to agree to open the room door for you. On my last night, I had carefully miscalculated my supply of dinars, so that I wouldn’t have any left over upon leaving, and fell short by four (amounting to very little in any convertible currency). The man who knew me by then did let me into my room while I tried to contact Mike to lend me the missing notes. Unfortunately, he had gone out and couldn’t help at that very moment. Later, the cashier made a big joke about this to the both of us, repeatedly telling in halting English that I wouldn’t be able to leave in the morning without doling out the money.

On the last evening, our small group headed to the Alsaht Street fish market along the Mediterranean coast. Ragaa was our eager guide, as during his last visit to Tripoli he had been very disappointed to find the entire market closed. The evening was already dark when we arrived at the open door market but the numerous stalls were filled with fresh fish and other sea creatures. The vendors were all calling to us to inspect their catch. We approached one friendly fisherman and each selected a silver sided medium sized Dorato and instructed the delighted man to simply grill it to perfection. As a next step, we selected the restaurant where we would enjoy our meal. This was easy, as Ragaa led us directly to his favourite establishment, Astakosa, a spacious but warm restaurant spread over two floors. The system was interesting. The fishermen and the restaurants were independent of each other and one could order the former to bring the prepared fish to any one of the restaurants established adjacent to the fishing port. The restaurants made their money by selling the accompanying rice, cous-cous and vegetables. We started our meal with a wonderful assortment of olives, fresh salads and various mezze, as well as delicious seafood soup. When the fish came, it was grilled to perfection and tasted heavenly with ample lemon squeezed on it.

The enjoyable dinner helped me to endure the innate jokes of the lethargic cashier at the hotel and my full stomach provided a needed extra cushion against the hard cardboard bed before leaving Tripoli in the wee hours of the morning.

Casablanca

Casablanca. A city made legendary by a movie. The name conjures up images of intrigue, danger and, most of all, romance in a distinctly unromantic time. Casablanca is the largest city in Morocco and a major port on the Atlantic coast. The city, like the country, is quite liberal and rather cosmopolitan, defying the stereotypes of today’s Arab world. In fact, the North African nation of originally Berber culture is a relative newcomer to the ranks of Arab nations having been conquered by the Arabs arriving there via Andalusia only in the 8th century. Spain is just a stone’s throw away, only 14 km from the north coast across the Strait of Gibraltar.

Morocco has changed rapidly in the past couple of decades, much of it to the better. I was in town attending an international conference on national evaluation capacity, which focused on monitoring and evaluation for public sector accountability. The idea is that if citizens follow and assess the performance of their government, the latter has an incentive to ensure results that benefit the people. Transparent systems that monitor the performance of authorities and evaluate in an independent and credible manner the actual results of policies and programs can be powerful tools for democratic governance. The conference was organized jointly by the UN Development Programme and the newly established National Human Development Observatory under the Moroccan Prime Minister’s Office, known as ONDH based on its French name (Obvervatoire National du Développement Humain).

On the evening before the start of the conference, I was sitting in a lovely traditional restaurant, La Fibule, serving wonderful Moroccan cuisine. The host was Rachid Benmokhtar Benabdellah, president of ONDH, an intelligent and gentle man with a warm glint in his eye. Benmokhtar had studied IT engineering in France and started his working life with IBM. He had made most of his career in the private sector until he had been appointed Minister of Education by the King. He told stories about him being the first minister in the country to visit schools in remote rural areas and how his staffers were horrified when the minister wanted to talk freely with the local people.

The meal started with an amazing selection of mezze, small plates of North African starters ranging from hummus, babaganoush, tomato and beet salads to tasty pastries with meat and vegetable fillings. There were fantastic ornaments in the ceiling and the walls carved so delicately that one could only stare in awe at the craftsmanship. We were sipping good locally produced Cabernet Sauvignon and discussing the situation in Morocco.

“We’ve had some bombings here,” said Benmokhtar, “but always when there’s trouble here there’s some link to Europe, usually Belgium or France, from where the radicalized Islamists come from.” The soft spoken engineer continued: “Moroccans are not strict Muslims. It’s all mixed up with other traditions here.” This was confirmed by, Salima Aissaoua, a young woman who had only recently returned from France to join ONDH. Many Moroccans, like her own family, are not even believers but enjoy all celebrations, whether of Muslim, Christian or Berber origin. I noted that I had seen very few headscarves during my brief stay in Casablanca. Salima said that there was absolutely no pressure to wear a headscarf and that in the countryside it was even freer. This sounded counterintuitive, but on second thought may be understandable, as the Berber culture remains strong in the rural areas.

Another ONDH colleague, Mohammed Bijaad, was a Berber from Agadir. He had never learned English, so our discussion relied on my halting French. Bijaad originally went to a French school in Agadir. Then in 1960 a major earthquake struck his hometown and little Mohammed had to be evacuated with his family. Just when it would have been time for him to start learning English, his new school in the interior introduced Arabic instead.

As we continued with the main course, a delicious pot of chicken, rice and vegetables baked in a clay pot, Tajine, we were entertained by a highly skilful musician playing Oud, a traditional lute, and singing joyous songs whose lyrics mixed love and longing with religious themes. Some Moroccan colleagues joined in the songs and enthusiastically clapped their hands to the complex rhythms. It was a spontaneous and relaxing evening with excellent food and wine and delightful entertainment.

The conference started the following morning with more than sixty participants from twenty-two governments in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, as well as select representatives from international organizations. One of the key discussions from the beginning focused around who has the right to evaluate government policy. The room became divided. On the one side were those, like Angela Bester, a former government official from South Africa now with the private firm Deloitte-Touche, who in her opening salvo questioned the assumption that policy was always right and the tendency to blame everything on poor implementation. On the other side were some government officials, vocally led by a gentleman from Ghana, who argued that only the government itself could assess policy and, ultimately in a democracy, the voters would decide whether it worked. The role of independent evaluation was only to focus on programs and projects. This debate would be a recurrent theme over the coming three days.

In the evening I wanted to escape the hotel where the conference was held and where all the participants stayed. I went for a walk in the city centre—Centre Ville—where we were located. French is more commonly spoken in Morocco, at least in the big cities, than Arabic and I had noted that amongst all the government officials and academics I had met French was the language in which they would communicate with each other. I crossed l’Avenue de l’Armée Royale and entered into lively quarters with narrow streets and shops. I passed a bar from where an animated cacophony of discussion was flowing to the street. Its name was Chatan. With only a second’s hesitation, I entered the premises and ordered a Stork (bière de luxe première). The place was a far cry from what one could expect in an Islamic country. It was far from sophisticated (an understatement). Everyone—every single one of the patrons—was smoking and the air was thick with blue cigarette smoke. The age bracket was wide, I would say from people in their twenties into their sixties, which suited me just fine. I would melt in, I gathered. The present king and his father, King Hassan V and VI, stared from the wall above the bar counter. The old Italian hit Volare turned into Michael Jackson, while Sean Connery and Catherine Zeta Jones were silently robbing a vault on the small old TV screen. A large elderly woman in a pink kaftan was gesticulating agitatedly to her companions. A guy leaning on the counter already had five empty beer bottles in front of him—and it was only 7 pm on a week night. In one corner, a young woman dressed in jeans and a sweater stood alone smoking and drinking beer. At a nearby table, a shabby looking man was pouring beer into the mouth of a woman wearing a baseball cap.

While I was taking in the scene, I felt a bump and thought the man with a moustache and dirty red jacket had accidentally crashed into me. To my surprise, he handed me another bottle of Stork and said in gruff English that it was for me. We went through an elaborate handshake, shifting grips and ending in a rough bear hug, as I was profusely thanking him. The man returned to his table and his red wine. In Casa, the lingua franca is French, yet the man had spoken to me in English. Apparently, I hadn’t quite melted in and passed for a local. Maybe he was a seaman who had sailed the seven seas and visited bars like this in innumerable ports? Or was I just romanticizing things?

The port remains an important part of this city of some 3.5 million inhabitants. The architecture is today mostly modern. Wide thoroughfares cross the centre. The old town, Medina, still stands and is surrounded by the tall wall since time immemorial. Inside it is bustling with endless alleys, small shops and a bazaar. There are also cafés and small hotels. It is a place where one had better keep track of the wallet, both for pickpockets in the crowded and winding alleys, as well as the shopkeepers determined to part you from your money. Bargaining was never a sport I mastered, so I mostly focused on enjoying the colourful scene in which locals and visitors mingled. Casablanca is not a touristic city. Its raison d’être is purely commercial.

Morocco’s economy is doing relatively well. On my first day while driving from the capital of Rabat to Casablanca by the fine houses lining the churning ocean front, I asked the driver, Habibi, about the economy. His initial comment: “Ça va.” But the business was still good, he elaborated, and generally things were looking up.

The United Nations ranks Morocco as a ‘medium human development’ country. The country has made strides in the recent past. Its GDP per capita has more than doubled from $1,700 to more than $4,000 in just two decades. Social indicators show similar improvements: life expectancy has risen from 62 to 71 years and adult literacy from 34 to 52 percent. Especially female literacy levels have improved rapidly. While in 1987, only 22 percent of the women could read, this figure is now 43 percent. In particular, during the rule of the present youthful King Hassan VI, the human rights situation in Morocco has improved significantly. Still, big differences do exist between urban and rural dwellers. Some 14 percent of Moroccans still subsist on less than $2 per day.

On the day after the conference, I walked to the Mosque Hassan II, which took me about 45 minutes along a main street. It passed between the wall of the old Medina and the harbour; then onwards past the fashionable restaurants of La Sqala and Rick’s Café, which successfully capitalizes on its imitation of the scene where Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman meet. There was a segment that was quite slum-like, although nothing compared with the shanties in other African countries further south. Women there wore their traditional djellabas. Like everywhere, poverty and tradition went hand in hand here.

The mosque, while not a historical building, is impressive nevertheless. It was commissioned by its namesake King Hassan II in 1980 and was completed only in 1993. The construction is said to have cost $800 million. It is located in a gorgeous spot right on the shore of the open Atlantic Ocean. The huge yard with the smaller buildings surrounding it reminded me of Saint Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican. The mosque has a capacity to accommodate 25,000 worshippers and its minarets rise to the height of 210 metres.

While I was admiring the considerable waves breaking to the shore by the Corniche, Casablanca’s seaside entertainment district, I met Mohammed Sharif, a man of my own age or perhaps a few years older. He introduced himself as a tour guide and after some chitchat offered his services to me. I told him that I unfortunately didn’t have time for sightseeing. This was partially true, as I had reserved the afternoon and evening for myself, having spent several days in the company of many people. We nevertheless talked for a while. Today was Hijra, the Muslim new year, marking the Prophet’s and his followers’ move from Mecca to Medina in the year 622 CE. This was a big holiday and a long weekend all over the Islamic world. Here in relatively secular Morocco people enjoyed the long weekend. Like Mohammed said: ”In Morocco religion is not that important. We welcome everyone here, Christians, Jews, Muslims.”

A powerful wind blew from the sea raising dust into the air from the dry sidewalk. My eyeglasses were dimmed by the salt in the air spraying from the breaking waves. Mohammed knew that this northerly wind had brought first snow into the Atlas mountains.

I walked back to Centre Ville. Everything was dusty and my throat was dry. I bought a Fanta from a kiosk and found an old shoeshine man. He did a good job on my dusty shoes. There was a Moroccan man standing next to me having his shoes shined. I asked him how much I should pay; he told me 5 dirhams. When I gave the shiner his five dirham coin plus some change, he protested wildly. Expectations are that foreigners should add another zero at the end of the bill.

I had indeed decided to enjoy my last evening alone in Casablanca. I started it with a visit to a sauna to relax my sore muscles after my walk of several hours earlier in the day. Clean and equipped with an appropriate thirst, I then again crossed l’Avenue de l’Armée Royale and entered Saillant, a bar that I had already visited on earlier occasion. It is in the same neighbourhood as Chatan, but a notch above in style and clientele. It still is just a simple establishment with a long counter and a few wooden tables. Like on my earlier visits, I was the only foreigner. I ordered a Stork from the bar maid who reminded me of Herman Munster. When I took out a 100 dirham note to pay, she pleaded with me to find smaller change. The equivalent of $12 was far too large a denomination for this place. She only relented when I promised to have a second beer afterwards. Having served me, she returned to her own beer and cigarette while Egyptian style pop played on the background.

I continued my trip and followed a route that I had memorized from a map that I had studied prior to leaving my hotel this evening. The shop-lined pedestrian streets and plazas with fountains in the city centre were crowded with people and the lights from the various establishments provided a cosy atmosphere in the darkening night. After one junction, the street turned dark and quiet and I started to doubt my mental map. Just when I was about to turn around, I detected the sign to Al Mounia. A wooden door opened to a garden and I walked through it to the restaurant known for its authentic Moroccan cuisine. The two small rooms were decorated with elaborate carvings. A sofa circled the walls and small round copper tables were arranged in front of it. The place was not crowded yet. In a nearby table were three men discussing in Swedish. The waiters, all men, wore red fezzes on their heads, pasha pants, vests and pointed slippers. While thinking about what to eat, I started the meal with succulent olives and delicious bread, which I washed down with local Cuvée du President Cabernet. I decided to order brochettes kefta—Moroccan grilled meatballs—which came with six plates with different kinds of salads of tomato, onion, eggplant, zucchini, carrots and peppers. The food was exquisite both to the palate and the eye, and one could hardly eat a healthier yet fulfilling meal. By the time I left around 9:30 p.m., the place was starting to fill up. With the Swedes also gone, all customers were locals.

Not quite done yet, I headed to Cas-Bar, which I had heard was a hot nightspot in Casa. At 11 p.m. the place was still sedate but people were starting to arrive in groups. The majority appeared to be young women and all were Moroccan. The theme turned out to be karaoke, but what a feast it turned out to be. With the exception of a few English pop songs, all of the songs that evening were in Arabic. A bald headed DJ in the corner made sure that the right discs were turning. Without exception, the singers were good. They attacked with flair the polyrhythmic songs with meandering melodies. Two men sang a series of duets in complex harmonies. A particular young woman in a black miniskirt stood up to sing several songs with the panache of a professional karaoke star. The only place where the Islamic propriety was evident was the videos accompanying the songs: instead of people, they showed bees pollinating flowers. Their meaning would hardly elude the revellers.

On the last day of the conference Benmokhtar had once and for all settled the question of who could evaluate policy. In his final speech, he recalled how King Hassan VI was concerned with the lack of development in the country. While in purely economic terms Morocco was almost as wealthy as Portugal, it was lagging seriously behind in terms of human development. The King appointed a group headed by Benmokhtar to evaluate the policies of the past decades to find out what had gone wrong. The evaluation was highly critical and identified all the areas where the country’s policies were amiss: education, distribution of resources, gender, democratic governance, health inequities, and the differences between urban and rural areas. All findings of the evaluation were made public and decisions were taken to revise policies accordingly. Evaluating policy requires political will and courage, concluded Benmokhtar. As he said, the King did not have to worry about re-election. The point didn’t go unnoticed by many political appointees in the audience.

House of Peace (Still)

Dar es Salaam was like a breath of fresh air after Nairobi. Literally, as a breeze blew from the ocean. There were tree-lined boulevards and the traffic was completely tolerable. The Indian Ocean coastal city whose name translates into ‘House of Peace’ from the onset appeared to live up to its meaning. The harbour was protected from the worst outbursts of the sea by being secluded in the middle of the city, surrounded by land from all sides with just a narrow opening to the open water. I was staying with a less aptly named Harbour View Hotel that could only boast a sea view from a handful of rooms on the upper floors. I didn’t really mind, as my room was otherwise more than adequate (never mind the pigeon nest partly blocking my non-harbour view) and the walk to the seaside was rather brief.

On our first afternoon in the city, my travel companion Jed and I went for a long walk on the waterfront. At the pier where the ferries for Zanzibar departed, we were immediate accosted by persistent men who tried to sell us a boat trip to the island. We were only left in peace when we explained that this was our first day in town and that we couldn’t possibly travel immediately again. With the phone number of the most insistent tour promoter in hand, we left the port area. Jed would use their services some days later on a trip to the island. This afternoon we strolled on the lively but not too crowded Sokoine Drive, then up to Kivukoni Road and on to Ocean Road. The traffic was sparse and the sidewalks clean. Well-dressed ladies in colourful African dresses mingled with equally fashionably, but less colourfully dressed Muslim women with their heads demurely covered with scarves. A shoe salesman had spread his selection on the broad pavement in the shade of trees. In front of a white Christian church a choir was singing joyous gospel hymns.

A traditional felucca with its white sails contrasting against the blue sky was silently heading towards the ocean. Seeing the boat I fantasized of the fabled days maybe five centuries ago when Arab and South Asian traders prowled the coast of what is today Tanzania. What a cosmopolitan mix it must have been in the trading posts at that time, where a huge variety of wares, fish, spices and other things were traded. That was the time when Swahili, the lingua franca of most of East Africa, also developed, as the Arabic traders mixed with the native Bantu populations. Indian Ocean has almost a mystic glamour to me.

We entered into the fish market that was almost closing for the day. There were still many fishermen and women selling the morning’s catch of octopi and sleek silvery fish, although their supplies were getting depleted. On the beach behind the market, fishing folks were taking care of their nets and boats, while children were playing in the shallow water.

Further north, in front of the huge grounds of the presidential palace, the strand was wide between the thinly trafficked road and the sea. People were strolling leisurely or lingering in the late Sunday afternoon sun. A family with a child strapped with African cloth to the mother’s back; young couples holding hands exchanging glances; an elderly man with a white Muslim cap on his head sitting on a boulder contemplating the vastness of the ocean. The afternoon mood was tranquil and beautiful.

Unlike in most large cities on the continent, a walk through Dar es Salaam is not to invite trouble. Even two muzungus as clearly from out of town as we were are mostly left alone, except for the few eager trip salesmen around the pier. Not for a single moment did we feel insecure, let alone threatened. Even in the evening after dark when we would walk along Samora Machel Road to find a restaurant to eat dinner we felt no danger, despite the fact that even in the city centre the streets at night are dark and quite deserted.

Amidst all the bad news from Africa, Tanzania seldom grabs international attention. In Tanzania’s case, no news is indeed good news. The country has lived peacefully and rather harmoniously for the decades since its independence. It is a place where people of different cultural and religious backgrounds mingle peacefully. The name itself implies an amalgamation of two separate countries and cultures: Tanganyika and Zanzibar. Tanganyika, before the war a part of the German East Africa, then a British colony, gained independence in 1961 under the leadership of Julius Nyerere. Even the independence struggle was quite peaceful and the transfer of power uneventful compared with, say, neighbouring Kenya. The island of Zanzibar off the coast had in turn been ruled by Arabs for centuries. They had sailed there from Oman with the assistance of the monsoon winds. It too became a British colony but there the overthrow of the colonialists in 1963 was more sudden and not quite as peaceful. That story is told brilliantly by Ryszard Kapuściński who was among the handful of foreign correspondents to reach the island just days after the coup by Abeid Karume, the leader of Zanzibar’s Afro-Shirazi Party representing the black African population on the island. The two newly independent nations merged in 1964 to form the United Republic of Tanganyika and Zanzibar.

Nyerere became the long-term president and TANU (Tanganyika African National Union), the party he had formed in 1954 to oppose the Brits, would be the only one in the country until the mid-1980s. The president was known as Mwalimu or teacher in Swahili, his profession before turning fulltime into politics. A modest man who avoided the excesses of many of the other leaders on the continent, Nyerere made turning Tanzania into a socialist paradise as his priority. For its well-meaning socialist policies, the country became the favourite of ‘progressive’ donor countries, such as the Scandinavians. Taxpayers in the Nordic countries chipped in when Mwalimu launched his disastrous Ujamaa policies. The goal of Ujamaa—‘Familyhood’—was to collectivize farming and to bring about benefits to the community from rounding up the farmers into planned villages. Many a Northern socialist thought this a great idea.

In fact, Nyerere’s worldview had been strongly influenced by Mao’s Cultural Revolution in China. Tanzania sought the support of China, which willingly complied. Luckily while the teacher modelled his nation accordingly, the policies were implemented somewhat half-heartedly. Traditional villages were systematically destroyed and people were herded into the brave new planned settlements. Thousands perished, of course, but Ujamaa never resulted in quite such terror as the Cultural Revolution or mass starvation like another one of Mao’s lunacies, the ‘Great Leap Forward,’ had done in China. Yet, the collective economics continued in Tanzania much after China had abandoned its most extreme social experiments and decided that getting rich was actually glorious. The Tanzanians were to wear Mao-inspired safari suits long after the Chinese themselves has switched to dark business suits and designer silk ties.

The decades of socialist experimentation did impoverish this beautiful nation, rich in natural resources. According to the United Nations Development Programme, Tanzania ranks 159th in human development out of the 177 countries ranked. Almost 90 percent of its population lives with less than US$2 per day. Tanzania possesses huge wealth by way of gold, diamonds, platinum, uranium, coltan and many other precious minerals. Tanzanite is a precious stone that has only been found in Tanzania and has a higher price by carat than diamonds. The problem is that Tanzania has not been able to develop any industry and all of its valuable raw materials are shipped out in their unprocessed form providing the value added to foreigners from South Africa, Europe and North America.

Another, obvious, source of wealth in Tanzania is its fabulous nature, which holds enormous potential for tourism. Kilimanjaro that rises close to 5,900 metres above the sea level is the highest mountain on the African continent. Its snowy cap shines bright white above the surrounding savannah beckoning climbers from all over the world. World famous game parks like Serengeti with their still abundant wildlife, including lions, giraffes, elephants and other large animals, are also in Tanzanian territory. The crater of Ngorongoro is unique on earth with its stupendous landscape and animal wealth. In 2000 when I was in Serengeti I could observe the different levels of accommodations that had been put up for the safari tourists. Some of them were truly upscale catering to the wealthy foreigners who want to experience their wildlife watching without having to spend the night in conditions lacking adequate facilities. Others were closer to the bush. Either way, visitors would have a wonderful opportunity to experience the dramatic African nature.

The former US ambassador to the United Nations, Andrew Young, has recently produced a film focusing on the positive sides of Africa, choosing Tanzania as the scene for the movie. In my view, Young places far too much trust on tourism and associated services and industries as the saviour of Tanzania. However, commenting on how the wildlife in the park has become accustomed to the four-wheel drives hauling tourists as being just other peaceful animals, the good ambassador makes a sweet point saying that that’s how we all should be approaching Africa, like “just another peace loving animal.”

Unfortunately, environmental challenges are mounting. There has been a prolonged drought that threatens the farming communities. Agricultural production is naturally dependent on the erratic rains and food shortages are looming. It is predicted that there will be famine, at least in some parts of the country, in the coming season. I asked Damian Gabagambi, a senior researcher at a non-governmental centre for research and training on poverty reduction in Dar es Salaam, REPOA, what his thoughts were about the situation. He explained at length the challenges that the agricultural systems have feeding the rapidly growing population. The expansion of agriculture is leading to deforestation and farmers are invading protected areas, like the Kilombero Valley floodplain in the south that has been designated as a protected wetland under the Ramsar Convention. In an attempt to intensify production, the government is promoting the indiscriminate use of inorganic fertilizer, which will have serious environmental consequences.

According to Dr. Gabagambi, the free range of livestock is catastrophic. Especially with progressive land degradation in their traditional homelands, the pastoralists are roaming everywhere, their goats and sheep clearing the land of all vegetation.

One of Tanzania’s greatest challenges when it comes to both economic development and the environment pertains to population. The country today has more than 41 million people and still growing at an estimated rate of just over 2 percent every year. The population is young: the median age is just 18 years and 43 percent of the population is in the 0-14 age bracket. This puts an enormous strain on agricultural land. The limited availability of farm land and decreasing size of holdings forces people to move after better livelihood opportunities.

As people are pushed out of agriculture, small-scale mining has become one of the biggest environmental problems in this country of ample mineral resources. There is a veritable gold rush as people scramble to open up open pits for mining. In several parts of the country these mines have created a landscape pockmarked with unattractive scars. Habitats for plants and animals are destroyed as farmers cut the trees to gain access to the land perceived to contain their future fortunes and to provide fuel for its exploitation. At the same time, the mines are a major health hazard to the miners themselves. Many use mercury and other dangerous chemicals to extract the minerals. Many do not know about the huge risks they are taking for their lives, as the chemicals destroy their health and the heavy metals affect their central nervous system, like in the famous historical mercury pollution case of Minamata in Japan. Others know, but do not care. Like a assistant director in the Ministry of Finance and Economic Affairs, Servus Amo Sagday remarked when we were discussing the issue: “People don’t worry about the longer-term consequences as they want to make money now.”

Said another official: “Tanzania is committed to environmental conservation, but if a foreign firm now discovered uranium in one of the national parks, many members of parliament would be tempted to grant a concession for a mine.”

Many rural people move to the cities. The population of Dar es Salaam, the largest city in the country, has burgeoned from a medium-sized town of less than half a million inhabitants 30 years ago to the current 3 million. For how long can the city remain as liveable as it still is today? Many of the migrants have a hard time finding jobs. And as Tanzania’s education system has been able to train an increasing number of school leavers unemployment becomes a ticking time bomb.

Since the first democratic elections in 1995, there have been certain tensions. Some of the elections have been contentious and there have been squabbles between the mainland and Zanzibar. One day when we were driving through the city, Jed asked Blandina Chege, our counterpart in the Vice President’s Office, a question about Zanzibar. Her response was revealing: ”They are so much trouble,” she sighed. ”They don’t want independence but they want to be different. All the small islands are troublesome. You go to international meetings and they are always talking as if they were afraid someone annexing them. All the small nations are like that. Not Swaziland, but when you go to African meetings, the Lesotho representatives are always talking endlessly. Same with Uganda and Rwanda and Burundi; they want to have their way.”

Mwalimu, with all his mistakes, demonstrated that he actually was a descent chap by officially retiring from politics in 1990 and keeping to his word that Tanzania would be a democratic country. With this gracious exit from the national politics, he truly achieved the status of an elderly statesman. He continued to be active on the world scene and was the chief mediator in the conflict in Burundi towards the end of his life in the late-1990s.

In 2009, the Ibrahim Prize was not delivered. The news hit the stands while I was in Tanzania. In 2007 Mo Ibrahim, the Sudanese-born business mogul and founder of Celtel, established the Ibrahim Prize for Achievement in African Leadership. The prize is awarded to a “democratically elected former African Executive Head of State or Government who has served their term in office within the limits set by the country's constitution and has left office in the last three years.” The selection committee is chaired by Kofi Annan, the past UN Secretary-General, and consists of such luminaries as the former president of Finland Martti Ahtisaari (who was awared the 2008 Nobel Peace Prize), Mary Robinson (the former president of Ireland and the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights), Mohamed El Baradei (the high profile head of the International Atomic Energy Agency) and others. This year the committee refused to nominate anyone for the prize. This is sad testimony to the fact that in recent times no African leader can claim to have the qualities required to actually deserve such a prize. What is it with these people that makes them—allows them!—go against people’s will year after year, often decade after decade?

On my last day in town when there was a drizzling rain, Blandina, Jed and I searched for a place to have lunch. We entered a simple establishment with a few tables and coal grill visible from the dining area. Its name, Al Basha, and the menu suggested Middle Eastern specialties. We sat at a wooden table and after a while were approached by a large Tanzanian waiter with a friendly smile on his face. We said that we were a bit in a hurry and wanted to know what items could be served rather fast. The bearlike waiter slowly explained that, because the food was prepared on the premises, it would all take some time and it would be difficult to rush. There were no other customers in the restaurant. Three cooks were visible loitering around the grill. Deciding to try some other place—there were several in the vicinity—we got up to go, when a young Lebanese woman rushed from behind a counter and asked us to please sit down again. She was apparently the proprietor of the venue and had witnessed our interaction with the kind but inefficient employee. She immediately told us what would be fast and what to combine for a fulfilling lunch. In 30 seconds or so she virtually told us what to order and we were soon sitting contented with glasses of fresh mango juice in front of us. I couldn’t but help to wonder whether the lack of urgency displayed by the Tanzanian staff was not another legacy of Nyerere’s socialist experiment.

Still today Dar es Salaam remains a pleasant place, but one must be concerned about its future, as well as the future of the entire country. Coping with the challenges of a youthful and rapidly growing population, environmental degradation and climatic variability will require that the economy will be able to expand to absorb all the new entrants into the modern sector. Otherwise, the enviably harmonious lifestyle in the House of Peace will be threatened. It is up to the Tanzanians to create the conditions for such economic development that will provide opportunities and incentives for

Good Intentions All the Way Down

Over the weekend I saw a new low-budget film by two young American filmmakers, Landon van Soest and Jeremy Levine. The movie that was shown as part of the Margaret Mead Film & Video Festival here in New York City was called ‘Good Fortune’ and it depicted the story of two separate and very different development projects in Kenya. While the projects were indeed different in both their genesis and execution, they had one thing in common: they were both failing and faced strong opposition from the local population.

One of the projects was a government initiative supported by UN-Habitat to ‘upgrade’ the huge slum, Kibera, on the edge of Nairobi. Kibera houses the poorest third of the city’s over three million inhabitants. They are mostly people from the countryside who have moved there in search of jobs. Kibera is an enormous shantytown with no communal services, running water or sewage. The improvised shacks are hooked up to electricity through impromptu connections to the grid by the inhabitants themselves. The place is enormously densely populated and dirty with muddy roads. As the well-intentioned young UN-Habitat programme officer, Sara, declares in the beginning of the film: Kibera should not exist!

Yet it does. And it provides shelter and livelihood opportunities to the poor people who otherwise would not have a place where they could afford to stay in the city. And despite all the problems, there still are many more opportunities to earn an income in the city than in the impoverished countryside. The film follows the struggle of Silva, a midwife, and her family as the ‘housing improvement’ project slowly but surely threatens the place they call home, the place that has allowed Silva and her husband to earn a decent living.

There had been earlier projects to provide housing to the inhabitants of Kibera, but few had benefited them. The flats in High Rise, a project built near Kibera with European aid, had been sold on the market by the Kenyan First Lady. Another project stood empty, as it turned out that the politician who had been the developer had embezzled millions of shillings from the government during construction. Having seen it all, the denizens of Kibera were naturally sceptical. But the government was pushing for the slum removal with the help of the UN. I felt somewhat sorry for the young Italian UN official, who came across as hapless and naïve in the film. At one point she did raise concerns about what to do about the people who had to be removed while the slum was being erased and new housing would be built. But she, like everyone else, had no answers.

The other project—and the conflict around it—was unfolding in the western part of the country, where an American-owned firm, Dominion Farms, had leased 2,300 hectares to be developed into a huge rice farm. The founder and owner of Dominion Group of Companies, Calvin Burgess, was interviewed telling how the goal was to transform the area and the people’s lives—in fact, their entire worldview—into something modern, so that they could live like people in America. All that was needed was resources, hard work and a change in the mindset so that, with the help of God, this “worst part of Africa” would be turned into a Garden of Eden. With its grand ambition, Dominion proceeded to dam the Yala River, thus flooding the area the firm had purchased, alongside most of the adjacent land that they hadn’t, where farming families had been living for ages. With the flooding, the families lost the crops they had planted and their cows and goats died because of the inundation of the grazing lands. The Dominion Farms manager suggested that the farmers should just think differently and change their livelihoods from cattle and become fishermen instead.

The film depicted the struggle of Jackson, a school teacher whose parents had come to the Yala area in Siaya forty years ago. Jackson lost his crops and cattle to the flood, but he decided to fight back. He started mobilizing his neighbours and was determined to remain a thorn in the side of Dominion Farms as long as there was life in him.

The two projects were very different on the surface. Their philosophical starting points also differed considerably. While the Kibera project was based on a concept of the government and the public sector helping the poor, the Yala project was unashamedly construed as a private sector development project. God helps those that help themselves, seemed to be the motto. Dominion Farms made no bones about being in it for a profit (the Oklahoma-based Dominion Group of Companies states on its website that for over 20 years they have “responded to opportunities to privatize governmental functions and projects for which state and federal agencies lacked the funding or flexibility to deliver themselves.”). In both cases, the reformers with lofty goals of transforming the lives of the ‘backward’ unwilling people worked closely together with the corrupt authorities. Dominion Farms was in cahoots with local politicians, many of them MPs from the disadvantaged district, who clearly had a stake in the proceeds. In Kibera, UN-Habitat appeared to have been co-opted by the Kenyan government and Nairobi elites into demolishing what had long been perceived an eyesore.

In neither case, were the affected people consulted regarding what their needs were or what they wanted. Politicians, businessmen and bureaucrats knew better what was good for the people. Yet, it was also obvious that the local people were well informed, resourceful and active in confronting the threats to their livelihoods.

The film struck in the middle of a longstanding and at times heated debate about development and the role of external assistance. Can external interventions transform how societies work and the lives of people? Can the Millennium Development Goals that call for the end of poverty by 2015 be reached if we just have bigger, more comprehensive and visionary programs? If only the citizens of the rich countries would open their hearts and their purse strings to the plight of the poor, we would all be able to share in the abundance of the world! The good citizens in the North are outraged by the poverty and deprivation in the South they see on their TV screens. They demand results from the programs funded with their tax money.

What the film showed was of course nothing new. Like everyone else working in the field, I had witnessed much of the same for decades. When in the late-1980s I was working as rural development consultant in Zambia, the goal of the projects was to create a European way of agricultural production and marketing in the remotest and most inaccessible parts of the country. The rural cooperatives were to transform the lives of the peasants and to modernize the economy, so that subsistence farming would no longer be necessary. At the same time, we wanted to tie the aid to Finnish exports. I had many a fight with the development agency people back in Helsinki as we were shipping out trucks and tractors from Finland to the cooperative that we had established in Mongu in Zambia’s Western Province. I had seen too many of them broken down on the bad roads—or not been able to reach the villages at all—because they were not built to operate in the African bush.

Today the battle lines have been drawn between those who believe that Africa needs a ‘Big Push’ to get out of poverty and the others who argue that master plans brought from the outside just don’t and won’t work. In the first category are politicians, such as those gathered in the 2005 G8 Summit in Gleneagles, Scotland, that promised a doubling of aid to Africa, spurred on by NGOs and incensed celebrities like Bono. Their intellectual leader is Jeffrey Sachs, director of Columbia University’s Earth Institute and a special adviser to the UN Secretary-General. He argues that the only reason why the billions of dollars in aid have not helped Africa is that, well, the money was too little. (Bono actually wrote the foreword to Sachs’ 2005 book The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time). They call for comprehensive solutions that will transform the society—a veritable Marshall Plan for Africa. In a recent US News & World Report (November 2009) interview, the president of the Rockefeller Foundation, Judith Rodin, summarizes the approach. According to the article, the foundation has committed $150 million to launch a “full-blown agricultural revolution aimed at lifting millions out of hunger… (and) … has developed a comprehensive plan that includes tackling such disparate challenges as improving degraded soils, opening access to markets, and combating government corruption. ‘A more piecemeal approach,’ says Rodin, ‘will not get at root causes.’”

Others argue that such hubris is reminiscent of the utopian dreams of the 19th century and will not work. Last year, the Zambian economist Dambisa Moyo gained significant publicity through her book Dead Aid: Why Aid is Not Working and How there is a Better Way for Africa (see my blog of 22 April 2009). The book was quite simplistic in its fervour but it hit a chord, having actually been written by an African who had experienced the problems firsthand. A more systematic and nuanced argument of why such grandiose top-down schemes to change entire societies with a Big Bang have consistently failed is put forth by the New York University professor William Easterly in The White Man’s Burden: How the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good (2006). Unlike Moyo, Easterly does not condemn development aid wholesale. He makes a convincing case for well targeted projects that, based on consultation and feedback, address the actual needs of the poor people they are intended to benefit. Instead of all embracing unattainable ideals, the projects should have measurable outcomes so that they can be evaluated for their results and for learning lessons. Donors should be held accountable to the people who are the intended beneficiaries.

Easterly contrasts the people with the great plans (‘planners’) with ‘searchers’ who find out about local conditions at the bottom, adapt to local conditions, match supply with demand, receive feedback from the ‘client’ (i.e., the people who need the service), and accept responsibility for the results.

An astute observer, albeit not a development professional, the travel writer Paul Theroux in his 2003 book Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town comments on the efforts of aid workers (whom he calls agents of virtue) in Africa:

“It is for someone else, not me, to evaluate the success or failure of charitable efforts in Africa. Offhand, I would say the whole push has been misguided, because it has gone on too long with negligible results. If anyone had asked me to explain, my reasoning would have been: Where are the Africans in all this?”

Building upon people’s own initiatives and empowering them has been at the core of participatory development thinking for decades. Grameen Bank, the ‘bank of the poor’ that provides microcredit against group collateral to tiny enterprises often managed by village women, has been able to demonstrate significant results. The Grameen Bank and the force behind it, the Bangladeshi economist Muhammed Yunus, received the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize for "for their efforts to create economic and social development from below.” Such participatory approaches building upon the local people’s own initiatives are unfortunately often missing from the high-flying schemes to change the world in one big swoop.

Inevitably, in the Q&A session with the filmmakers after the screening, the question came: Did you see any aid projects in Kenya that actually worked? Landon, the thoughtful young man who said he had spent virtually his whole adult life in Kenya and studied international development and public health, immediately answered in the affirmative. But he added that the projects that he thought were having positive results were generally small ones, close to the ground, working with local people.

So what happened to Silva and Jackson’s ordeals? Towards the end of the film, Jackson thought he had won, at least temporarily. A major flood had destroyed the dam that Dominion Farms had built and the project was back to square one (there was spontaneous applause in the audience). However, a look at the Dominion Farms website gives the impression that the enterprise is back in full force. The website boasts that:

“Today Dominion Farms is the most celebrated example of technology-based, irrigated agriculture in western Kenya. It is a model for long-range planners who seek to develop the water resources and expand the land under cultivation that is needed to sustain the fast-growing Kenyan population.”

Silva and her husband decided to leave Kibera when the bulldozers came. They returned to the countryside to try start anew there. However, the filmmakers were able to report that they were back in Kibera and had fallen onto bad times as the husband had lost his job as a night watchman.

Meanwhile, planners in the capital cities of the world are busy devising ever more ambitious schemes to solve the problems of the developing world. After all, the deadline for reaching the Millennium Development Goals is just six years away and we still have a long way to go to end poverty.

Environment and Poverty in Kenya

The rain started three days ago and it was welcome. For more than three long years Kenya had been suffering from a drought. It still wasn’t much and certainly didn’t reach every part of the country but it did wonders on the Central Highlands. The savannah no longer looked parched and greenery was returning to the landscape. Due to the elevation, the weather was cool although we were on the equator.

Life in the country had seemingly returned to normal since the political violence that followed the flawed presidential elections in December 2007. Now the pressures caused by the lack of rain had been raising tensions. Water was rationed in Nairobi, the modern capital city with a population of more than three million. Large herds of cattle could be seen grazing in empty lots and inside traffic roundabouts close to the centre of the city. I heard rumours about the Maasai, the legendary pastoralists, abandoning their traditional lifestyle and selling large tracts of land in Kajiado south of the capital, as they no longer could survive on the land. According to reports, they had lost most of their cattle which they depend on to the drought. They blamed the agriculturalists who lived upstream for cutting down the forest and polluting the water.

The talk of the town was what was happening in Mau Forest. The mountainous area that was the main source of headwaters in Kenya was being rapidly degraded. Over the past decade and a half, some 20,000 families had encroached upon the slopes and settled into the previously pristine forest. They were cutting down the trees to clear land for agriculture and to burn charcoal that they could sell on the booming market. Some 100,000 hectares or about a fourth of the watershed had been cleared this way. As a result, the forested mountain range that was widely considered the water tower of Kenya could no longer supply water to the rivers that flowed down to irrigate the plains. Apart from the water shortage inconveniencing the city dwellers, the entire Kenyan economy was threatened. There was not enough water in the hydroelectric dams that were being clogged up with all the silt flowing into them due to erosion in the hills. Consequently, the power supply was unreliable and the country had to import increasing amounts of oil in order to compensate for the failing hydropower. At the foot of the mountains, lived the Maasai who were getting increasingly agitated by the farmers and squatters whose activities they believed were robbing them of their cattle and livelihoods. Conflict between the two groups was looming.

In a country whose economy is largely dependent on tourism, this was all bad news. The numbers of visitors to Kenya had already fallen dramatically due to the political violence and insecurity last year. Now the rivers that fed the renowned Masai Mara National Park were drying up. Animals were dying in hordes. The annual migration of the wildebeest over a roaring river that every friend of wildlife everywhere in the world recognized had turned into a much less spectacular hop across a trickling stream by the still large herd of animals. Should things continue downhill, Kenya could kiss goodbye to the safari tourism that was its lifeline.

Quite appropriately, my purpose this time in Kenya was to launch a large worldwide evaluation study of just such linkages between environment and economics, and how the United Nations was able to support governments in the developing countries in the area. We called it the Poverty-Environment Nexus. It truly amazes me that there still are people—in government, private sector, the UN, and ordinary citizens—who fail to see the intrinsic links between economic development and environment. Indeed, some people continue to see them as contradictory, as if environmental preservation and regulation were constraints to development. Yet, it should be clear that sustainable management of the environment and natural resources is absolutely essential for sustained economic development and human wellbeing. Recent UN studies show that especially in many lower income countries the economy is heavily dependent on the environment. The estimated contribution of just a subset of environmental assets—subsoil assets, timber, non-timber forest resources, cropland, pastureland and protected areas—to the country’s total wealth in Kenya is 21 percent.

“We environmentalists have done a really bad job,” said Yolanda. I was travelling with Yolanda Kakabadse, the past president of the World Conservation Union (IUCN) and the former minister of environment of Ecuador. Her point was that the environmentalists have failed to make the economic case, often actually advocating against it. Instead of engaging with the private sector, the environmentalists have mostly seen the private sector as the enemy: the evil empire that’s in it only for the money, destroying the environment, screwing the indigenous people, exploiting the poor countries for a profit. Instead, we should have long ago made the case that what is good for the environment is—at least in the longer term—good for business and the economy. Principles of sound business management dictate that one counts in all the productive assets, factors in capital costs and depreciation. A transport business owner discounts the value of his lorry as it gets older because he knows he will sooner or later have to purchase a new one. Unfortunately, environmental costs are considered mere externalities by economists and, therefore, the depreciation of natural resources does not factor in the calculations. Yet, there is no new Earth that can be bought when this old one we have is worn out.

Of course, there are cases where there are trade-offs. But more often than not these are based on differences between short- and long-term needs. Like in the case of the Mau Forest where the conflict was between making a fast shilling now on charcoal and agriculture versus maintaining a healthy environment for continued economic development in the future. Naturally, people must make a living and poverty forces them to utilize every bit of land where they are able to eke out a living. It doesn’t help that Kenya—like many other African countries—has a very young population that is still growing at a hearty rate. The stagnating economy that is hampered by notorious red tape and rampant corruption is not able to provide jobs for the large numbers of school leavers every year. They thus don’t have a choice and must rely on the land that has been rendered increasingly fragile by the intensified use during the drying climate. Poverty and environmental degradation are inextricably linked through a two-way street where poverty forces people to destroy their environment for immediate survival, while reducing the essential support that a healthy environment brings for longer term development.

Geographically, the central areas dominate Kenya both economically and politically. “While 80 percent of Kenya falls within the arid and semiarid lands category, the government policy reads as if everything was like here in the agricultural highlands,” said Philip Dobie, a long-time Africa hand and an expert who heads the UN Drylands Development Centre and Poverty-Environment Facility based in Nairobi. “The government sees the ASAL, as they are called, only as a drain on resources,” Phil continued, “but with proper management they could be a highly productive part of the country.” Indeed, the dry north towards Sudan, Ethiopia and Somalia is widely neglected by the Kenyan government and left to the nomadic and semi-nomadic tribes herding goats. During the worst periods of drought, they receive support from the centre, but developmentally they lack behind. The country is thus not living up to its full potential.

That night there was a short but heavy downpour after which the air was particularly fresh. Through the open window I could hear the crickets and the sounds of night birds singing in the trees outside of my guesthouse. As I fell asleep, I thought about how the nature would be blooming in the morning when I’d wake up. I also hoped that the sudden powerful rain would not wash out the dry earth causing further erosion that was a constant worry even here in the wetter central part of the country.

On Kenyatta Day—a national holiday to celebrate the founding president of independent Kenya, Mzee (Old Man) Jomo Kenyatta—we headed out of Nairobi, northwest towards Lake Nakuru. My companions were Yolanda and Jed Shilling, a former World Banker turned environmentalist who now chairs the Millennium Institute. We constituted the core group studying the UN’s work on the poverty-environment nexus. On this free day of ours, we wanted to take it easy and see some of Kenya’s famous wildlife. Years ago, the easiest thing to do when you just had a day to spare was to drive to the Nairobi National Park just outside of the capital. I myself had seen cheetahs and other big animals—or ‘charismatic mega-fauna’ as it is known in conservation lingo—there in the past. But the days when the famous photographs of lions against the backdrop of the rising Nairobi skyline that decorated the face of many a postcard were gone. The city was expanding rapidly and squatters were settling in the park. If one now wanted to observe any big fauna it meant a three or four hour car ride to the Lake Nakuru National Park.

The morning didn’t look promising. As we departed the city at 7 am there was a thick fog and a drizzle dotted the windshield of our vehicle. As we continued out of town and the road climbed to the ridge alongside the East African Rift Valley we actually drove into the low-hanging clouds. It was impossible to see even a metre beyond the edge of the road and the great geological formation opening to our left was entirely obscured by the thick grey blanket of wet air. Our driver, Bob, was not optimistic about the weather clearing up anytime soon. This was going to be one expensive luncheon outing, I said to Yolanda only half jokingly. We had paid good money for the trip and Bob’s services for the entire day.

But the day did clear up. By the time the road was descending towards the rift, we could already see the shallow Lake Naivasha down in the valley. There was a flock of flamingos wading in it. Although there were still plenty of these pink birds, even their numbers have dwindled. I remembered when I first took this road in the early-1980s when as a student from the University of Helsinki geography department I was visiting the sister department at the University of Nairobi. As we then descended towards Lake Nakuru, the next in a row of the Rift Valley soda lakes, I and my fellow graduate students were stunned speechless at the astonishing sight in front of us: the entire lake appeared pink because of the huge flock of flamingos carpeting the surface.

Down at the bottom of the valley the weather was clear and a bright sun shone from a hazy blue sky. We stopped in Nakuru, the main city in the Rift Valley and the fourth largest in the country. Nakuru is a bustling trading post, quite different from the capital or the two cities at the opposite ends of the country: the heavily Muslim influenced Swahili port of Mombasa on the Indian Ocean coast and the fishing industry centre of Kisumu on Lake Victoria, the world’s second largest lake. The dusty Nakuru town appears to be booming. Even on this national holiday the market was in full swing and the streets were crowded with people. Several modern buildings with steel and glass fronts had risen in the centre since my last visit (which admittedly was a couple of decades ago). We did not linger (after it became evident that there was no place where the internet was working) but continued towards the national park.

This, too, had changed. Years ago, there was open access to the lakeside but now the entrance to the Lake Nakuru National Park was tightly controlled and one had to pay a handsome fee to enter. Close to the gate, a group of park rangers—men and women—were milling about their sturdy green Land Rover. They themselves looked professionally efficient in their green military-style fatigues. The professionalism of the Kenya Wildlife Service had received a major boost under its former boss, Richard Leakey, the son of the legendary anthropologist Mary Leakey. Richard’s determination and uncompromising attitude in favour of the wildlife had ruffled feathers (no pun intended) in Kenya. He lost his legs in a small aeroplane crash while cruising over one of his beloved parks, but this did not slow him down. He later moved on as the anti-corruption tsar for the Kenyan government, a position in which his single-minded fervour gained him equally few friends.

We visitors and the rangers were not the only primates hanging around the gate. There were numerous baboons and monkeys in the trees and on the ground around us. A passenger vehicle was parked next to our van while the owners, a rather elegant young African couple, went to pay for the entrance fee. They had made the mistake of leaving the car window open and I soon saw a small monkey enter the car through it. It immediately found a bag on the backseat and started rummaging through the contents. The curious creature made a quick exit as the legitimate occupants were returning. The good people took it all in a stride, the pretty woman laughing heartily at the audacity of the hairy little fellow and their own thoughtlessness of encouraging it by not locking the windows.

The entry to the park passes through a small forest, which looked very dry. The river to the lake was but a trickle. As we exited from the shade of the canopy, a lone tree stood tall by the stream and on its crown perched a single marabou stork. A few ibises waded in the dwindling creek. We made a turn towards the plain, our robust vehicle shaking through the ruts where the mud had dried months ago. I wondered how the young couple who had been visited by the monkey would fare in their small Toyota.

The landscape in front of us was completely flat and treeless. We were driving on what had formerly been the lakebed. In the past decades, prolonged droughts had reduced the size of the shallow waterbody to a fraction of its original extent. Now the reduced flow from the Mau Escarpment had further affected the drying lake. Herds of zebras were grazing on the sparse grass that was now growing on it. We soon saw a pair of white rhinoceros ruminating at a distance undisturbed by the passing vehicles.

A pack of hyenas was basking in the sun as we drove by. They eyed us suspiciously and soon dispersed. Hyenas are amongst the most misunderstood species in the world. Many people revile them because of their scavenging lifestyle and less than beautiful looks, but hyenas are intelligent animals with an organized societal structure. And they perform a needed function in the ecosystem. This latter was made clear by the many carcasses of buffaloes and other beasts that were scattered around the former lake bottom. This most recent drought had taken a heavy toll on the wildlife and huge numbers of animals had perished. The hyenas survived on their misfortune and cleaned the land.

We caught up with a school bus that was packed with children like sardines. Dark faces sticking out of the windows with big round eyes all turned our direction. The kids seemed more interested in us muzungus than our wild relatives inhabiting the park. We all alighted at the same spot close to the lake shore so that we could get closer to observe the flamingos. The kids all wore bright red jumpers and were led by two teachers. I thought how good it was that the children at least had this chance to observe wildlife that used to be so abundant before. Even in Africa, kids growing up in urban areas have precious little contact with nature. Without that contact and firsthand experience, nature becomes an abstraction and people don’t feel it deep inside themselves. Consequently, its protection is not a priority.

As we approached the lake, the hard-baked soil became gradually wetter and our feet were pressing deeper into the soft mud. There was no wind and the surface of the lake was perfectly still. A few hundred—or probably a few thousand—flamingos stood idly by without moving their long skinny legs knee-deep in the water. They did not stir as we approached. The morning sun was climbing steadily towards zenith. High fluffy clouds were sailing languidly across the sky. Behind the lake and reflected in its mirror-like surface alongside the slow moving clouds stood a dark mountain ridge. The place was perfectly still and the only sound was that of the wind blowing across the open plain. Even the school children were quiet awed by this otherworldly, gorgeous landscape.

We continued inland from the lake, towards a rocky cliff sporting a sparse and dry forest. The top of the hill to which our vehicle climbed following a road of hard red clay was called the Baboon Cliff. From there the view down to the lake was breathtaking. Between the treeless plain and the shadowy ridge on the opposite side, the lake glimmered blue and white mirroring the clouds. The reflections made it difficult to distinguish the lake surface from the sky towards the distant horizon. The beauty of this barren place was startling. Yet, from this vantage point it was possible to see why it was necessary to keep the park fenced off. The growing city of Nakuru could be seen sprawling on the hillsides towards east.

Leaving the lakeside we traversed further through another small wooded area where buffalo, zebra and waterbuck were grazing in the meagre shade of the leafless trees. At a distance we could see a group of giraffes, one of them stretching his neck to see whether we were up to any good. We entered the open savannah where troops of baboons were spending a lazy afternoon grooming each other, cute little babies riding on their mothers’ backs. I couldn’t help but think how close to us these relatives of ours are. I also remembered the lovely and funny book by the Stanford biologist and neurologists, Robert Sapolsky, A Primate’s Memoir, that describe so vividly his years of research and observation amongst the Kenyan baboons.

An impala buck with impressive horns was browsing leisurely, ignoring the half a dozen females belonging to his herd on the other side of the track. The idyll of the savannah was complete with various species living peacefully side by side. A pair of monkeys stood watch where a white rhino slept in the shade of a lone bush-like tree. Thompson’s and Grant’s gazelles mixed company with the zebras while groups of bush pigs hurried along on some business of theirs. From one bush a pair of foxes watched us with alert eyes.

During the peak heat of the day when the equatorial sun hung directly above our heads we lunched at the Sarova Lion Hill Lodge, a comfortable establishment overlooking the lake from its south side. At lunch hour there were lots of people. What struck me as interesting was that so many of the people were South Asians. In fact so many, that the buffet had a specific table for vegetarian Indian fare. After the dusty road it was indeed a pleasure to be guided to a table on the terrace by the lovely maître d’ Betty and order an ice cold—Baridi sana!—Pilsner, to me the crown of the noble line of products by Kenya Breweries.

To many, ecotourism represents the best alternative to providing sustainable livelihoods to people and communities who otherwise would be destroying the environment. Instead of cutting down the trees and killing the animals, you protect them so that the rich urbanites from home and abroad can come and gawk at them. It is called stewardship. Ecotourism certainly is important and has plenty of potential. The definition is broad enough to encompass ‘ecotourism light’ like what we were engaged in on this trip to the Lake Nakuru National Park—observing animals from the safety of our vehicle and lunching in relative luxury at a comfortable lodge—to hard core roughing it in the bush. The lowest common denominator should be the do-no-harm principle and that the benefits accrue to the local communities. Regretfully, it is not easy to see ecotourism as a panacea: to be successful, it requires adequate infrastructure (the ecotourists have to be able to get there and around!) as well as adequate skills. Furthermore, given the finite number of potential ecotourists, it resembles a zero sum game whereby newly established ecotourism sites would necessarily compete with the older ones.

Sadly, not many other alternatives have been invented. The problem is not that different from finding financially viable alternatives for opium and coca growers to switch to (in Afghanistan, cut flowers appeared to be a great opportunity but, alas, the liberally minded Dutch blocked their import to the European Union, thus killing the initiative; in Kenya, the successful cut flower business is controlled by the Dutch).

We returned to Nairobi through the Rift Valley taking the low road across the valley bottom. We stopped at the Lake Naivasha Country Club, just 80 kilometres south of the equator and at an elevation of 1,890 metres above sea level, for late afternoon tea. The club was rather crowded on this holiday afternoon and we were lucky to find a shady table on the extensive lawn. The clientele was mixed. There was a Kenyan couple at the closest table biding the afternoon drinking ample quantities of beer. At the next table sat an American woman with a friend. She had spent six years in Zimbabwe and just recently moved to Kenya. She said that she still preferred Zimbabwe, but her reasoning pertained mostly to the climate. Apparently the brutal disregard for human rights and the near total collapse of the economy under the octogenarian dictator, Robert Mugabe, had not penetrated her sphere of life.

En route to Nairobi we passed camps of internally displaced persons (IDPs) whose privileges could not be compared with those we had just partaken in Naivasha. I asked Bob who these people in the camps were and what ethnic group they belonged to. Bob told they were mainly Kikuyu, the dominant tribe in the Central Highlands, who had been displaced during the post-electoral violence less than two years ago. Tribalism is alive and well in Kenya, and exploited to the hilt by the politicians. It is easy to generate hatred against other tribes—and thus draw attention from one’s own problems and corruption—with incendiary rhetoric; a favourite tool of politicians everywhere in the world where a large segment of the voters is poorly educated and thus easily moved (witness the ‘tea parties’ organized by the Republican Party in America against President Obama’s proposed reforms in late-summer of 2009). The IDP camps lay in the shadow of Mt. Longonok as the sun was setting behind the rift. Mt. Longonok is a huge caldera of an ancient volcano that exploded long ago. Its existence is a reminder of how the entire great East African Rift Valley is a product of intensive seismic activity associated with volcanism.

The low road started its climb back to the top of the ridge. The traffic was moderate with plenty of trucks going both ways. In places the climb was steep and we left the valley rapidly behind us. We passed a small Catholic church that had been constructed on the hillside by the Italian prisoners of war who had been forced to build this road during World War II. East Africa had been one of the, now largely forgotten, fronts of the war. The sun was setting behind the opposite edge of the rift. Its rays were filtered through low-hanging clouds. It was easy to understand why someone would see god’s light shining through the clouds. Continued rain would indeed be a gift from the gods.

Whether or not the prolonged drought that has punished Kenya and many other parts of Africa in the past years is the result of human induced global climate change is a moot point for the people having to live through it. For them, it is a matter of survival: a struggle between what needs to be done now and the longer-term perspective of sustainable development. If manmade climate change is indeed threatening the world as we know it, Africans are the last people who could and should be blamed for it. They certainly have the fewest polluting factories, the smallest number of cars, and by far the lowest amount of energy consumption per capita as compared with any other part of the world. Europeans on the average emit 50-100 times—and Americans 100-200 times—more greenhouse gases per capita than Africans! Yet the Africans are the ones most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change and variability because of their reliance on natural resources—and they are also the least able to cope with such impacts.

Today, many people see mitigating climate change as an environmental issue, while adaptation to the impacts of climate change is understood as a development issue. Yet the two are closely linked. When you start from a very low level as Africa does, it is very hard to institute large cuts in greenhouse gas emissions. But instituting early on an energy transition from fossil fuels to clean renewable sources could pre-empt future growth in emissions. And, like Angela Cropper, the deputy executive director of the UN Environment Programme reminded us, adapting to the climate change is not only a development, but importantly an environmental issue. It is true that people and societies must adapt to the impacts of climate change and that requires action on all fronts, from developing better infrastructure to changing to more appropriate agricultural products. At the same time, adaptation will be needed by the non-human parts of the world as well. Climate change will potentially wreak havoc on biological diversity and ecosystems, making life hard for our non-human co-habitants of the planet. In places like Kenya, it is obvious that there is a direct linkage between the two sides.

What then should be done with the people who invaded Mau Forest and are destroying its watershed? Back in Nairobi, I talked with Winston Mathu, a senior Kenyan expert who had thought about these things for a long time. “People used to live in the forest without destroying it,” he said. “We should let them stay, but control their activities so that they are manageable.” He had told that much to the powers that be in the country but, alas, the government had decided instead to remove the people—by force, if necessary. This appeared to have popular support amongst the environmental movement, as well as donors such as the World Bank and the good Scandinavians. What alternatives the removed people, some of whom had stayed on the hills for years and raised their families there, would have afterwards was not clear.

Any solution currently on the table doesn’t seem to be fully addressing the long-term challenges. The majestic concept of sustainable development (which by its nature may well be a contradiction in terms) cannot ignore either side of the coin: the sustainability of people’s livelihoods and that of the environment that provides the entire—and only—basis for our existence.