The Greatest Natural Clamity

I swiped the photo from this Web site because they were the only one to offer a photo credit which Google Translate helpfully renders:

1897 cattle plague raged in South Africa (image: Collection Onderstepoort)

Have you ever heard of Rinderpest? I hadn't until reading John Reader's Africa:A Biography of a Continent.

Rinderpest is a virus disease, very highly contagious, which manifests itself in fever, restlessness, loss of appetitite, blood-stained diarrhoea, and often nasal discharges. Some animals become maniacal; the great majority weaken rapidly and die.

Reader's book is really quite remarkable in providing a biography of Africa beginning with geologic and climatic detail and proceeding into human history. I found the book fascinating and engaging. Breezing through the customer reviews at Amazon you can get a sense for the problems some find; mostly the result of the sweeping enormity of the subject.

There are eight parts to the book each with multiple chapters. The brief few pages on riderpest are contained in Part 7 "The Scramble" and in the chapter "Resistance." The Scramble for Africa refers to the period between the 1880's and WWI as European powers competed to lay claim to the African continent. "Resistence" is a chapter dealing with the "tests" of colonial authority in Africa. Reader holds that a series of natural calamities "were no less influential" than the newly invented machine gun.

Reader's chapter's "Resistence" and "Rebellion" are shocking and depressing. As I read them I wondered how could it be that I'd never heard about suffering on such a scale. Somewhere I read about Adam Hochschild's impetus to write his book King Leopold's Ghost about the cruel exploitation of the people of the Congo Free State. In less than 40 years the population was depleted from more than 20 million to 10 million. He wondered why he hadn't heard about this tragedy?

I've read a few books on Africa or by Africans. I've made some African friends and follow some African blogs and Web sites. Most people have an enormous well of goodwill. It's heartening to see so many outside Africa take an interest. The more I learn, the more I understand how little I know. In order to create more collaboration for good in Africa, it's important to realize that the story we think we know is incomplete. And it's important to want to learn more.

Rinderpest has a long history, and figures prominently in Western history because outbreaks of the virus were spread by armies and their pack animals. The disease was brought to Sub-Saharan Africa first by Italian colonialist in Somalia by cattle they imported from India. The disease spread rapidly, cattle, sheep and goats were infected. The disease ravaged wild buffalo, giraffes, antelopes, and wild hogs. Reader writes:

In South Africa, drastic attemps were made to halt the advance of the disease. A barbed-wire fence, 1,600 km long, was erected from Bechuanaland to the Cape-Natal coast. Police patrolled the fence; disinfection points were established; infected herds were shot--in all, over 1 million [pounds sterling] was spent on trying to keep the disease out of South Africa, but to no avail. Two and a half million cattle died south of the fence; 5.5 million south of the Zambezi, and up to 95 percent of the cattle in Africa's pastorial regions generally.

The impacts of this calamity on people were obviously horrific. Reader cites South African scholar J. N. P. Davies in describing the rinderpest epidemic as

[T]he greatest natural calamity ever to befall the African continent, a calamity which has no parallel elsewhere.

Yet I had never heard or been told about it.

One of the connections that John Reader highlights about the great Rinderpest epizootic is that the results of the plague disrupted the ecological balance. Areas which had been grazed turned to scrub which allowed an expansion of the tsetse fly range. Tsetse flies in the process of feeding on the blood of animals transmit small single cell organisms called typanosomes. These organism create a serious disease in humans and animals, sometimes called "sleeping sickness." Reader notes that cases were reported in southern Uganda in 1902 and that the disease had killed 200,000 people by 1906.

Perhaps partly from understanding how the multiple plagues which beset Africa in the last century, we have a more ecological sense today; that everything is related to everything. One sort of side effect of thinking that everything is related is a feeling of despair that everything has unintended consequences and nothing will ever work out right.

African Agriculture is a wonderful resource for news about agriculture in Africa. The contact is for the blog is Chido Makunike, a Zimbabwean living in Senegal. The recent roundup of articles links to an article in the Seattle Times, Gates Foundation's agriculture aid a hard sell. The Gates Foundation along with the Rockefeller Foundation have created an initiative called Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, AGRA.

The Seattle Times article summarizes some of the criticism of the initiative:

But the foundation's nascent agricultural program is encountering more resistance than much of its other work, with critics concerned that its market-oriented, technology-centric approach will open the door to big agribusiness interests and genetically engineered food.

The answers to that criticism in the article and also gleaned from the excellent AGRA Web site impressed me and calmed some of my concerns.

The question is whether The Green Revolution is the right model. It's a good question, a question that bumps up against the difficult area of morality.

Steven Pinker had a widely linked to article in the New York Times Magazine earlier in the month called The Moral Instinct. It's a good article to check out for a number of reasons, but I mention it because Pinker points to Norman Borlaug as someone who's "most admirable." Borlaug is a plant scientist who's been called "the father of the Green Revolution." Borlaug also established The World Food Prize.

In 1999 the World Food Prize was awarded to Dr. Walter Plowright; from the WFP site:

Dr. Walter Plowright was recognized for his development of a vaccine that has resulted in the elimination of rinderpest, commonly known as cattle plague, from most regions of the developing world. His research has provided a practical means to re move a menace dating back 16 centuries.

The effort to irradiate rinderpest permanently by 2010 is ongoing, but realistically possible.

Pinker makes the case that it's very important to understand our habits about morals. He writes:

Our habit of moralizing problems, merging them with intuitions of purity and contamination, and resting content when we feel the right feelings, can get in the way of doing the right thing.

It's easy to say that we ought to strive to do the right things, but much harder in practice.

People must develop more ecological ways of thinking, to better imagine how the relationships which make are world are composed and interact. A part of that is understanding this ironic quality of moralizing can cloud our clear thinking and get in the way of doing good. That nowhere around the globe should the suffering caused by the rinderpest epizootic ever happen again is a good goal. That nowhere on the globe should people starve is a good goal too. How to achieve these goals and hundreds of others is the essential challenge for our time. To meet the challenge we must imagine that we are indeed capable of creating something good even while uncertain that we've hold all the answers.

Framing

Reading the newspaper on Friday, an article, Judge gets tough with convict who spit at officer produced a perverse chuckle. It seems that a man of whom the court-ordered medical opinion stated is "narcissistic beyond the point of rehabilitation" set out to represent himself in court over a matter of spitting on his probation officer. The judge exceeded sentencing guidelines and sentenced him to four to 10 years.

A friend sent me that photograph of me and I wanted to share it. I'm not an awfully good judge of character, especially my own. The picture captures a certain je ne sais quoi; no wait, it's pretty easy to say: I'm a goof. Partly wanting to run a picture has to do with having signed up this blog to Afrigator on the Ugandan channel. The problem is, you see, I'm not Ugandan. I've never been to Uganda, much less been to Africa. Oh and there's the unfortunate choice of "Kaunda" as a handle, and the even more ridiculous decision to post for a while a photo of me in an afro wig in my profile. Geez! What was I thinking?

The name was chosen because I was sure I'd make a fool of myself blogging and thought that some anonymity might be in order. All the good handles I'd dreamt up were already taken. Kenneth Kaunda came to mind. At the time I was hoping against hope that President Musevini would step down as Kaunda eventually did. Not surprisingly, because of Kaunda's authoritarian presidency, no other blogger had snapped up the name Kaunda. I bet I can change the name, but have figured out how to. In any case, I soon discovered doing searches from my blog quickly yielded results displaying my real name and other aliases. I was quite naive about online anonymity, or at least how to go about creating it.

Part of my mirth about the case of the irredeemable narcissist in the courtroom stems from my, decidedly unqualified, perceptions of the judge in question gleaned over time. You know, he strikes me as a wee bit egotistical; well, and maybe a tad on the narcissistic side of the scale. The Assistant District Attorney on the case said during the sentencing hearing:

Anyone who cannot control himself with the judge on the bench deserves the maximum sentence.

Note to self: Should you ever be compelled to defend yourself in court; get representation!

I'm not at all sure how clinicians make their diagnosis of Narcissistic Personality Disorder. One clue that I might not raise to the level is that while the report of about the defendant did raise a chuckle, I'm well aware of my own ability to make a fool of myself publicly, so felt embarrassed for the defendant. Schadenfreund was offset by: "There but by the grace of God go I."

Living in this world seems a little crazy most of the time. And as a very ordinary American the notion of being of service to African people is something to deserving of some skepticism and inward reflection.

I was delighted to discover that Keguro has been blogging at new quarters. The man never ceases to amaze me with his capacity to peal back the layers revealing what's inside and under. In the post I read today he looked at a recent New York Times poll which asked readers: "whether 'rich countries' should help 'poor countries' with problems stemming from climate change."

Keguro notes that most people in "rich" countries are hardly rich, but then directs his attention to the rhetorical framing of the question:

Responsibility, what I would term culpability, is re-translated, through a very clever sleigh of hand, into altruism. Rich countries help Poor countries.

Recoded as altruism, culpability becomes yet another way to bolster one’s ego. Pushed to a certain illogic, the potential for recoding injury or criminality or responsibility as a form of altruism guarantees ongoing inequality and oppression.

Reading the whole post is very much recommended as is reading his blog Gukira frequently. The precision of the word, culpability, over responsibility is worthwhile. The connotation of trustworthiness in "responsible" tends to paper over the "blameworhiness" implicit in the word culpable.

Acting responsibly is of course no mean feat. How should one, privileged as I am, respond in a mad and unjust world? The strategy of narrowing ones boundaries contains a logic and even an inevitability. Broadening ones boundaries to include in sight people in the world far away is fraught with pitfalls, but also exposes one to a richness of life unavailable from a closed, provincial perspective. Without much wealth the advantages to the broader perspective would seem to easily outweigh the pitfalls. Nevertheless negotiating the unfamiliar terrain requires tact and self-awareness. Neither quality, it appears, have I in abundance.

Keguro's illuminating the rhetoric of "rich" countries and "poor" countries reminds that the problem isn't just me, but a pervasive framing, even propaganda, that shapes our worldviews, especially as Americans. Narcissism isn't only a personal disorder, but a persistent cultural expression; surely it's annoying.

Hash points to new developments at Kabissa and online social network for civil society organizations working in or for Africa. In the member spotlight at the Web site is Thembathi an organization dedicated to the support of orphans and other vulnerable children in the KwaZulu-Natal region of South Africa. Thembathi means hope with us in Zulu.

I bear culpability for injustices of many sorts, just by being born who and where I was. It doesn't seem fair, but there you go, injustice is a funny that way. So I have an obligation to try to help repair the world. But I'm a shirker and feeling guilty seems to motivate me towards inaction. Whereas, the invitation to hope with others moves me. My Ugandan friends inspire me to imagine Uganda's potential. Hoping with them enriches my life. Like so many of my ideas--have you seen Hats For Health?--Bazungu Bucks is a bit half-baked. Still the intention is to invite others to hope with us. I'm sure together we can create something good.

Afrigator

Last night My friend Nathan in Iganga Uganda sent me an IM: "What are you doing?" I told him I was looking over a list of Nobel Prize winners in Economics and asked what he was doing: "Chatting with a friend in Thailand," was his response. As it happens I was thinking about economics because an American friend teaching in Thailand is beginning some new research and sharing the process online.

A friend and neighbor is a well-regarded horseman. She's a horseman? I don't know what the less-sexists way to say it; horse trainer doesn't seem to fit her approach. I know not much about horses, and I met a friend of hers a while back who knows my friend primarily from the horses. After interrogating me to discover, I know nothing about horses, she said, "You don't have a clue who she is." My horsey friend is a polymath. Over time her friend has discovered some of the areas our interests overlap, or at least has got a sense that we actually do share some history. The friend got comfortable enough to tell me that when she first ran into me at the corner store and then at my friend's farm, she thought: "What a hick! What a hayseed."

Her first impressions of me weren't half wrong. That's why Internet conversations spanning the continents still seem so remarkable and enjoyable to me.

I met Nathan online probably over five years ago. The story of how that came about involves my horsey friend. She got me online. When I discovered all the news sources online, even ones which gave spare coverage to African issues, my cocoon of denial about the suffering of other people in the world began to unravel. I discussed issues of food security in the Eastern Horn of Africa with my friend and she said, "I've got just the book for you." The next time I visited she gave me a book by Robert Rodale, Save Three Lives: A Guide to Famine Prevention. Soon enough I searched "African pen pal" and made my first connection with Nathan.

Nathan's life is full of challenges I can only imagine. He was only seventeen when both of his parents had died, leaving him the oldest of five children. Something that's always impressed me about Nathan is how he's understood that his fortunes are closely tied to those of his community. So we've talked over the years and collaborated together on ways to do good stuff in his community.

Me, Mister Hick, Mister Hayseed, had quite a lot of learning to do about Africa and Uganda; I still do. But I wasn't so sure where to look for information in the beginning. In the last year or so the number of sources and opportunities for learning seem to have increased many-fold. Partly perhaps this has to do with just knowing better where to look, but quite importantly a number of new sites have sprung up. I'm particularly excited about a new site, Afrigator.

If you scroll to the bottom of my sidebar you'll see several buttons to various Web sites. I just noticed that the Taking IT Global Button doesn't work: I better fix that. There's a new button: Afrigator'd. I listed this blog on their Ugandan Channel. Maybe I really shouldn't have, but I suspect the ratings will allow this blog to fly under the radar.

Afrigator is an aggregator of African blog posts. I've had the feeds from Blog Africa sent to my Bloglines reader. I wonder why I've never championed that site? Probably because I subscribe to several African bloggers already and enjoy scanning through the many feeds through Blog Africa daily, but recognize that not everyone has the interest or time to do that. But my heart sank when I at read Ethan Zuckerman's excellent post on Afrigator:

Afrigator is very, very pretty and strongly suspect that it will make BlogAfrica obsolete at some point in the near future.

Zuckerman urges anyone whose blog is listed on Blog Africa to list it at Afrigator as well. I hope Blog Africa stays up for a long time because I do like the unfiltered stream of posts, because information and topics not on my radar often prove to be interesting and useful. But I especially hope that African bloggers do register at Afrigator in droves because the site is clean and provides many different ways to find posts of interest.

Blogs are such a great way to discover places because the posts are real people's perspectives. My friends now suspect I'm particularly informed about Africa. That's hardly the case, but they ask me all sorts of questions anyway. Very often the questions are about African politics. I'm a news junkie and follow American politics pretty closely. Oh man! The ins and outs of American politics are really hard to make sense of. Yes, I do pay attention to politics in Africa, but I'm a long way from really having much of a clue. I always tell my friends that there are over fifty African countries and that the continent is huge. Of course African politics is important for Americans to pay attention to, but that lens alone distorts our imagination of Africa. Reuters Africa is a great news portal for the news of the continent, and if I have the presence of mind do mention it. But blogs provide windows into business, art, architecture, technology, the African Diaspora and so much more. Blogs connect people. The people connections provide some context to begin to understand complicated issues like politics.

Afrigator's site is so clean and easy to use. One of the features I like very much is the Channels are based on countries and by the headers for each post is a little country flag. Symbols like that help me so much. First of all I have to practice a bit to recognize all the country flags. Then I make a mental note placing the country on the map of Africa in my mind. I love the tag clouds on Afrigator too.

Yesterday I noticed Microformats in the tag cloud. I'm so slow when it comes to computer stuff; for example, I seem to freeze when it comes to picking tags. But I do at least get the idea that tags and people tagging stuff is very useful. Microformats are something I have only a dim awareness about, so I clicked on the tag and scrolled through the posts. South African blogger Stii had a post directing to a great Firefox tool called Operator. I downloaded it and really love it. Among the features is that Operator will find the tags on a Web page and with a click direct you to photos at Flickr, bookmarks at de.licio.us or blogs at Technorati. I have a sense this is going to help me use tags more effectively than I would have otherwise.

The African blogosphere is already a very rich space and it's growing rapidly too. Afrigator is great addition to the Web universe. Kudos to Justin Harman and Mike Stopforth for bringing Afrigator online!