A seafood story

There are stingrays in <a href=”http://food.theatlantic.com/sustainability/american-seafoods-next-big-thing.php”>The Atlantic</a>

Animal stories

One from Rwanda
http://american.com/archive/2009/gorillas-in-their-midst

One from Canada
http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/0210/p04s03-wogn.html

Rwanda story

I’m hoping to post some photos soon.

In the meantime here’s a Rwanda story (with a photo) for my old friends at BusinessWeek.com.

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/08_38/b4100066758907.htm

Congo stories

The trip to ended with a trip to Congo, which was really the whole Africa package. Here are two stories I reported there with Jina Moore.

Blood cows

http://www.csmonitor.com/2008/0827/p12s01-woaf.html

Chikudus

http://features.csmonitor.com/backstory/2008/08/29/qchikudu/

Update

I’m leaving Africa soon. For a variety of reasons this blog has trailed off in the last few months. In any case I wanted to thank my readers, which is to say my parents, and everyone else who has been helpful over the last twelve months or so. That’s many many people who have been kind, generous and open with me despite having nothing to gain from it.

A few more stories are on the way.

For starters you might enjoy this one:

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/08_33/b4096062676521.htm?chan=top+news_top+news+index_news+%2B+analysis

There’s no place like home

Recently I met a guy in DR Congo who had traveled to New York to help out with an HBO documentary. As is fashionable for men here, he wore a shirt picturing a big map of this country and a plea for peace.

Discussing New York he had the usual reactions. From the 45^th floor, the cars looked like matchboxes! He dropped a matchbox on the floor for emphasis. He wondered about the sun which shines (in April) but does not produce heat. “What kind of a country is this?” He went to a few concerts. And imitated the way New Yorkers walk. Rush. Rush. Rush. “I cannot take this order,” he said. “I need my hell.”

Economies

Keeping up on the news back home, I can’t avoid hearing about America’s rotten economy. Six months or so ago this had me feeling a touch smug. The job market would recover by the time I was interested, I told myself. Of course it hasn’t and I’m chastened. Still it’s somewhat dissonant to hear about the U.S. rut from places where the local economies can’t even be measured in the same terms. The unemployment rate in the U.S. is something like five and a half percent. In South Africa it’s at least 30% and far higher in some areas. Outside that second world nation unemployment rate referring to an unemployment rate sounds quaint. Think about Uganda. There the large majority depends on informal agriculture. Might one say the unemployment rate is 90%? Another measure: A couple months ago I visited the Uganda Stock Exchange. It was in an office that looked recently abandoned by a dodgy call center, or it would have if there were more than four computers. One guy ran the place, taking orders from a few traders at the end of the two hour session. (There were three weekly.) He wrote their bids and asking prices on a white board in magic marker. At the end of trading he shook a little bell. I forget the exact numbers but daily trading volume averages, under $500,000. At the time I calculated it as less than the NYSE churns through in one second. Numbers like these have no importance to decisionmakers or anyone else curious about Uganda’s sometimes impressive development efforts. Since almost no one has a pension plan or something like a 401k tied up in stocks, it doesn’t make sense to call the main index a measure of economic sentiment, even though it has done pretty well lately. The recent GDP spurts charted by many countries also seems inadequate. Most of those countries owe their growth exclusively to the export of raw materials and the global commodities boom. These industries don’t usually employ many local people. So how can African economies be measured? I’m no scholar but in the better off nations consumer spending might be a better gauge, especially if it could track the size and spending power of the middle class. If the Internet was fast enough, or power reliable enough, I’d try to find some numbers on spending in Kenya, which is one of few nations in sub-Saharan Africa which can claim a middle class.

Across the river

A few days ago I was sitting on a dingy hotel patio next to a river. The river was narrow, maybe  35 feet across, and deep and a dark shade of greenish blue. Bleached white water birds flew low over it in V formation. On the other side the bank sloped up steeply into a few houses and huts that looked, as far as these things go, relatively prosperous. At night a few of them even had electricity.
What made this riverbank different from most others is that it was the edge of DR Congo. Looking across the river in the morning, I saw a boy in a red shirt running towards the river. He was carrying a white flag.

To the village

Not too long ago on the Lunatic Express, the train from Nairobi to Mombasa, I met a businessman who had lived in Nairobi since 1963. A real estate developer with some other interests he still considered his home the village where he had grown up and where he would return to grow old and be buried. Traveling from cities to villages, or what expats sometimes just call The Village is in many ways the quintessential African journey even though it’s sometimes short enough to walk in fifteen minutes.

I’ve spent most of the past ten months in cities but I’ve taken trips to the village often enough to offer a generic description. In a hectic parking lot teenaged boys thread between minibuses shouting out their destination. If you’re going their way they’ll lead you to their vehicle. If you’re white there’s a good chance they’ll stick you in the front seat and ask for more money. Men selling watches, airtime, water, soda and newspapers knock on the bus windows. When every seat on the bus is full, and never before, the bus shakes alive and edges out of the lot.

The trip begins near a city center with a few tall buildings and shops packed together. There are embassies and pizzerias. The road passes small factories and houses on hillsides. Pretty soon there are banana trees between the houses and the factories disappear. The road gets bumpier.

As people who know a lot more than me have pointed out, this journey is so important because it crosses the rift in 21st century life between commerce and tradition, respect for the past and hope for the future.

Bars

It would only be a slight exaggeration to say that every window I’ve seen for ten months has been protected with burglar bars. OK not always bars. Sometimes they’re covered by metal plates cut by sidewalk welders as decorative spirals or flowers or boxy shapes . Still there appears to be a plate of metal between every window in Africa and the outside world. This includes big storefront windows and tiny portholes in restrooms.

Not everywhere has Jo’Burg’s ostentatious security. There patrol cars full of armed security officers cruised around the rich neighborhoods, but every affluent organization and middle class home is surrounded by tall walls, usually topped with electric wire or barbed wire twisted in elaborate shapes or spikes or sometimes just old fashioned broken glass pointing up. Most of them also have security guards who generally don’t hold the keys to the house.