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

259 Pages·2014·10.15 MB·English

by  Dayo Olopade

Table of Contents
Title Page
Table of 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
Copyright © 2014 by Dayo Olopade
All rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write
to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park
Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

www.hmhco.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
ISBN 978-0-547-67831-3

eISBN 978-0-547-67833-7
v1.0314

All photographs courtesy of the author, with the following exceptions:
Herodotus’s map of the world, [>], courtesy of David Rumsey Map Collection,
www.davidrumsey.com; United Nations poster, [>], courtesy of Stefan
Einarsson; Kenyan street murals, [>], courtesy of Andre Epstein; Boulton’s map
of Africa, [>], courtesy of Geographicus Fine Antique Maps; tribal map of
Africa, [>], © George Peter Murdock, Africa: Its Peoples and Their Culture
History; 2009 African undersea cable map, [>], courtesy of Steven Song,
licensed as BY; 2014 African undersea cable map, [>], courtesy of Steven Song,
licensed as BY; satellite map of the lights of the world, [>], NASA Earth
Observatory/NOAA NGDC; and Map Kibera, [>], © openstreetmap.org
contributors, available under an Open Database License, with cartography
licensed as CC-BY-SA.
This book is for Olufunmilayo Falusi Olopade and
Christopher Olusola Olopade, also known as Mom and Dad.
A man who uses an imaginary map thinking that it is a true one, is likely to
be worse off than someone with no map at all.

—E. F. Schumacher
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.”

In the fifth century BCE, Herodotus created a map of the world as he knew it.
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 the occasion, the UN sponsored a poster design competition. The
winning entry juxtaposed power (leaders of the Group of 8) and poverty (young
Africans in line at a refugee camp). The work may be clever graphic design, but
the tagline is heartbreaking. “Dear world leaders: We are still waiting.” A panel
of UN judges validated the biggest lie in modern history: that poor and passive
Africans exist only in the shadow of Western action.
If you’ve read other “development” books, it’s easy enough to get that
impression. Even as popular discourse begins to question the logic of foreign
assistance to the region, the conversation remains focused on how “the West”
can improve its performance. Familiar voices on the development beat write
prescriptions for everyone from the leaders of the G8 to the infantry of the World
Bank to the heads of landlocked countries like the Central African Republic.
Though many have spent decades examining the various ruts and bottlenecks in
economic growth, it is rare to hear about what ordinary Africans are already
doing to help themselves.

The United Nations held a poster competition to celebrate ten years of its Millennium Development Goals.
The winning image juxtaposed power and poverty.

This book changes that. As a reporter, I follow the advice of philosopher
Ludwig Wittgenstein: “Don’t think, but look!” The continent needs to be seen
and heard, not imagined and then ritually dismissed. Because when you talk to