The Bright Continent: Breaking Rules and Making Change in Modern Africa - Hardcover

Olopade, Dayo

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0547678312 ISBN 13: 9780547678313

Verlag: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014

Inhaltsangabe

The path to progress in Africa lies in the surprising and innovative solutions Africans are finding for themselves

Africa is a continent on the move. It’s often hard to notice, though—the Western focus on governance and foreign aid obscures the individual dynamism and informal social adaptation driving the past decade of African development. Dayo Olopade set out across sub-Saharan Africa to find out how ordinary people are dealing with the challenges they face every day. She discovered an unexpected Africa: resilient, joyful, and innovative, a continent of DIY changemakers and impassioned community leaders.

Everywhere Olopade went, she witnessed the specific creativity born from African difficulty—a trait she began calling kanju. It’s embodied by bootstrapping innovators like Kenneth Nnebue, who turned his low-budget, straight-to-VHS movies into a multimillion-dollar film industry known as Nollywood. Or Soyapi Mumba, who helped transform cast-off American computers into touchscreen databases that allow hospitals across Malawi to process patients in seconds. Or Ushahidi, the Kenyan technology collective that crowdsources citizen activism and disaster relief.

The Bright Continent calls for a necessary shift in our thinking about Africa. Olopade shows us that the increasingly globalized challenges Africa faces can and must be addressed with the tools Africans are already using to solve these problems themselves. Africa’s ability to do more with less—to transform bad government and bad aid into an opportunity to innovate—is a clear ray of hope amidst the dire headlines and a powerful model for the rest of the world.

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The path to progress in Africa lies in the surprising and innovative solutions Africans are finding for themselves

Africa is a continent on the move. It’s often hard to notice, though—the Western focus on governance and foreign aid obscures the individual dynamism and informal social adaptation driving the last decade of African development. Dayo Olopade set out across sub-Saharan Africa to find out how ordinary people are dealing with the challenges they face every day. She discovered an unexpected Africa: resilient, joyful, and innovative, a continent of DIY changemakers and impassioned community leaders.

Everywhere Olopade went, she witnessed the specific creativity born from African difficulty—a trait she began calling kanju. It’s embodied by bootstrapping innovators like Kenneth Nnebue, who turned his low-budget, straight-to-VHS movies into a multi-million-dollar film industry known as Nollywood. Or Soyapi Mumba, who helped transform cast-off American computers into touchscreen databases that allow hospitals across Malawi to process patients in seconds. Or Ushahidi, the Kenyan technology collective that crowdsources citizen activism and disaster relief.

The Bright Continent calls for a necessary shift in our thinking about Africa. Olopade shows us that the increasingly globalized challenges Africa faces can and must be addressed with the tools Africans are already using to solve these problems themselves. Africa’s ability to do more with less—to transform bad aid and bad government into an opportunity to innovate—is a clear ray of hope amid the dire headlines, and a powerful model for the rest of the world.

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The Bright Continent

Breaking Rules and Making Change in Modern Africa

By Dayo Olopade

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company

Copyright © 2014 Dayo Olopade
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-547-67831-3

Contents

Title Page, 
Contents, 
Copyright, 
Dedication, 
Foreword, 
Orientation, 
Kanju, 
Fail States, 
Stuff We Don't Want, 
The Family Map, 
The Technology Map, 
The Commercial Map, 
The Nature Map, 
The Youth Map, 
Two Publics, 
Acknowledgments, 
Notes, 
Index, 
About the Author, 
Footnotes, 

CHAPTER 1

Orientation

A New Map of Africa

The search for the Nile River took two thousand years too long. The idea of searching is itself crazy: as far as human primates are concerned, the flat pan of water stretching from eastern Uganda to the vast Delta of Egypt has always been there. And yet the first foreign correspondents in Africa — white men from Europe — were caught in an amazing race to "map" the river from tip to tail. Their tales of travel on Africa's waterways and into its dense forests sailed back to newspapers in 1850s London, Brussels, and New York. Sending word of new tribes in Ethiopia, or safe passage to the interior lakes of central Africa, these men laid the foundation for a tradition of sensationalist writing about Africa. It was Henry Morton Stanley, in his 1878 account of his travels in the Congo, who coined the term dark continent.

The misunderstanding began before Christ. Herodotus's fifth-century map of Africa left the cradle of civilization looking like an afterthought. (Later, the Mercator Projection sold Africa literally short.) He wrote, "I am astonished that men should ever have divided [Africa], Asia and Europe as they have, for they are exceedingly unequal. Europe extends the entire length of the other two, and for breadth will not even (as I think) hear to be compared to them."

For the next millennium, the northward-flowing river puzzled European cartographers. A Greek merchant named Diogenes began a rumor that the source of the Nile lay among the so-called Mountains of the Moon, somewhere in the wilds of "Nubia." As trade suffused the continent's west coast, existing tribes and landmarks were inked with the exquisite penmanship of eighteenth-century European trade schools. But it was not until 1858 that John Hanning Speke "discovered" that the longest river in the world begins not on the moon, but at Lake Victoria.

As news of the White Nile's source rippled through Europe, Major R. E. Cheesman, the British consul to Ethiopia, remarked, "It seemed almost unbelievable that such a famous river ... could have been so long neglected." Like Herodotus, Cheesman exposed his Western bias. After all, the Nile bridges languages and climates, north and south of the Sahara. It has fed and ferried millions of people since the days of Moses. At the time of Speke's trip, the population living and trading near the source of the Nile numbered almost three million. It might have been easier for the frantic searchers to ask locals where the big river began. A few could have advised them: here.

The search for an omnipresent river was not merely inefficient; it charts the dynamic that has defined modern African history. Despite centuries of contact (based largely on slave trading), ignorance and hubris long governed Western impressions of what was seen as an impenetrable unknown — Joseph Conrad's "heart of darkness."

So it was not without precedent that European powers, led by the Portuguese, French, British, and Germans, decided to carve up the African continent using maps and borders of their own creation. At the Berlin Conference in 1884, they drew boundaries that had never existed on the continent, scrumming for natural resources from tobacco to peanuts to gold (oil would soon follow). Their borderlines preserved the gap between foreign perception and African reality that has been difficult to close ever since.

More than a century later, Google showed up. Since 2007, the American Internet giant has opened offices in Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa, and Uganda and begun translating its most popular American applications to Africa. Maps were a top priority. Google's team of digital cartographers fanned out across the continent, knitting African streets and cities into the fabric of the World Wide Web. The Americans spared no extravagance: a fleet of red Toyota Priuses mounted with cameras circled cities in South Africa to localize Google's "Street View" project — just in time for the 2010 World Cup.

Like the ancient geographers in search of the Nile, the modern Google mappers imported a Western notion of orientation. As anyone who has taken directions in Africa can tell you, we're running a different kind of software. In a developed country, a charming female robot might read out clear directions to a numbered street address. In Africa, however, here's what you get:

If you are approaching from the Tuskys roundabout, stay on Langata Road till you have passed the entrance on Langata Road that would get you to Carnivore. Take the first right turn off Langata Road after this point. Drive down Langata Road for approximately half a second, and take the left turn right before the petrol station next to Rafikiz. Drive down this road for half a minute. When you see Psys Langata on your right, take that left.

Confused? These are real — and typical — directions for Nairobi, the Kenyan capital where I lived while reporting this book. Of course, Nairobi and many other cities in Africa have roads and districts with formal names, and some buildings with assigned numbers. But even in the most cosmopolitan cities, the address is beside the point.

Locals use businesses, billboards, bus stops, and hair salons as a dynamic, alternative framework for navigation. We rely on time, relative distance, egocentric directions (right or left), and shared knowledge. In Khartoum, the North Sudanese capital, one prominent local landmark is a building where a Chinese restaurant used to be. In the six months until it was repaired, I gave directions to my home based on a particularly cavernous pothole. Frequently, the final direction is "just ask someone."

Anthropologists would call Nairobi streets a "high-context" environment. Such navigation is a holdover from a time when centralized systems were absent (which, as we'll see, is often still the case). More importantly, a high-context route from point A is no proof that point B doesn't exist — it just means you need a different map to find it.

The same goes for modern Africa. Whether you're working for an American tech giant struggling to standardize navigation, an entrepreneur from Brazil looking for new business opportunities, a French tourist in search of adventure, a nonprofit trying to improve lives, or a curious global bystander, you probably don't have a very good map of life south of the Sahara.

In fact, it amazes me how little the world thinks of Africa. I mean this in terms of time and of reputation. As a first-generation Nigerian American, I have personal reasons for paying attention; but what we all think of Africa when we do is very revealing. In 2010, the United Nations celebrated the tenth anniversary of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) — eight ambitious targets, from fighting HIV transmission to improving education around the world. To mark theoccasion, the UN sponsored a poster design competition. The...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2014
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0547678312
• ISBN 13: 9780547678313
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 288
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: eVatmaster Consulting GmbH; 497000000000; contact@evatmaster.com; ; Bettinastr. 30,60325; Frankfurt am Main; 60325; Deutschland