Heritage, which already operates exploratory wells in the park, has failed to convince anyone of its good environmental stewardship.  According to Mapesa, Heritage must explain how they intend to deal with soil contamination from drilling effluents, a responsibility that they have yet to discharge at their existing installations.  Until the company provides answers to this and other questions, the UWA “cannot approve the new wells.”

What is so refreshing about this announcement is that in a debate in which propagandists on all sides are digging in for a protracted war for the hearts and minds of Ugandans, Mapesa has shown a willingness to re-asses his position based on the health and environmental integrity of the park and people who rely on it.  In an article appearing in The New Vision (Protected Areas Will Not Be Affected By Oil Activities — 25 August 2009) Mapesa had previously argued that civil society concerns over damage to the Park’s environmental integrity and reputation as an eco-tourist destination were simply concocted as a result of a “wild imagination”.  Mapesa’s article, which was intended to re-assure Ugandan’s that these issues had been thoroughly studied, was instead widely interpreted as patronizing and unduly dismissive.  Dickens Kamugisha, of The African Institute for Energy Governance  (AFIEGO), responded to Mapesa’s article by asking how oil extraction activities “can benefit Ugandans when government agencies (UWA) continue to disregard people’s legitimate concerns as mere wild imaginations?”  In withdrawing the UWA’s blanket endorsement of oil exploration in protected wildlife areas, Mapesa has demonstrated enormous integrity in a public policy debate that badly needs more of it.

For Uganda, the discovery of oil poses an enormous opportunity.  Its emerging oil wealth could be used to facilitate the socio-economic development, consolidate democratic advances and help bring peace and stability to its war ravaged northern Districts.

However, there are reasons for real concern.  With only a few exceptions, developing, oil rich countries have suffered from weak institutions and corruption, overvalued currencies (i.e., Dutch disease), environmental degradation and in some cases civil conflict.

Avoiding these ‘resource cures’ will be particularly difficult for Uganda for a number of reasons that include, but are not limited to the upcoming 2011 Presidential elections, Uganda’s extreme fragmentation (e.g., tribal, political, cultural, etc.) and the ecological sensitivity of the Albert Basin area.

Over lapping these domestic issues are still larger, geopolitical ones that emanate from its position in the heart of Africa (Uganda is both landlocked and contagious to unstable and failed states) and competing interests between patron states, which include the U.S., China and India.  Given the instability of the area and the new so-called “scramble for African resources”, managing the Albert Basin oil finds through regional governance mechanisms like the newly created Pact on Peace, Stability and Development in the Great Lakes Region (2006) will be a major challenge.

One resource governance mechanism of note that may help postpone or avoid altogether some of the worst propagations of the resource curse is Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI).  Increasingly, civil society actors, the World Bank, corporations and industry watchers have embraced it as the new “gold standard” for the reporting of natural resource revenues and have identified it as a “best practice” governance mechanism for oil rich developing countries.  How, or if, the EITI is employed in Uganda raises a number of allied questions.

The purpose of the Labyrinth is two-fold: (1) to provide a web-resource for anyone interested in the broad question of oil governance issues in the Ugandan’s Albertine Rift; and (2) to help organize and develop my own research interests in the area.

The Labyrinth became operation in late September 2009.  I am adding to it on a daily basis and hope to develop it until at least the 2011 elections.  The Labyrinth can be found at http://keithchild.info/Labryinth/Labryinth.html .

Your feedback and suggestions are appreciated.

Today we are hearing a very different story from Krugman, one that is much more in league with the very economic precepts that he so effectively critiqued in “For Richer”. In his December 17^th Blog entry Krugman responds to Kevin Drum who writes that,

(o)ne way or another, there’s really no way for the economy to grow strongly and consistently unless middle-class consumers spend more, and they can’t spend more unless they make more.

Krugman’s response?

This is a widely held view, and I’m as much in favor of a strong middle class as anyone. Nonetheless, I’d say that in terms of strict economics it’s wrong. There’s no obvious reason why consumer demand can’t be sustained by the spending of the upper class — $200 dinners and luxury hotels create jobs, the same way that fast food dinners and Motels do. In fact, the prosperity of New York City in the last decade — largely supported off of super-salaried Wall Street types — is a demonstration that you can have an economy sustained by the big spending of the few rather than the modest spending of large numbers of people.

I am not sure why a man of Krugman’s intellectual ability is propagating this sort of thing. My best guess is that Krugman occasionally suffers from the same myopia that most economists do from time-to-time, a mistaken belief that the ‘economy’ inside their mathematical equations is in fact the ‘real economy’. Alas, this seems to be an occupational hazard for economists and the preferred hegemony of the wealthy (mostly Republicans in the US) who get happily richer when the middle class gets poorer.

All of this may be about to change as the unquestioned hegemony of unregulated markets begins to develop cracks. Among the most disheartening – though hardly unexpected – findings of a recent OECD study is the conclusion that both income inequality and the number of people living below the poverty line has increased over the past two decades. What is more, these trends are not the exception but the norm in most advanced industrial states. According to the report, income inequality and rising poverty are “widespread, affecting three-quarters of OECD countries.” In the United States the report also noted:

• That income inequality increased “significantly” in the last decade;
  
• The threat of poverty has shifted from pensioners to young adults and families with children;
  
• That in addition to high income inequality, the number of people living in poverty is significantly above the OECD average (the United States is ranked as third after Mexico and Turkey).
  
• That the United States has both a high level of income inequality and one of the lowest rates of earnings mobility between generations. The coincidence of these two phenomena suggests the development of an “underclass” who are trapped in perpetual poverty across generations.
  

Coming at a time of deepening economic recession in the United States (and around the world) the three bulwarks that have traditionally held the emergence of class consciousness at bay are seriously under threat. The Cold War has been replaced by an unaffordable War on Terror which has already cost over a trillion dollars without any sight in end (military adventurism is the perennial welfare check of the US arms industry and despite Barack Obama’s assurances to the contrary, the US war machine will not be dismantled, but simply redeployed). Second, as the OECD study shows, the vast wealth of the American middle class has bubbled upward, thereby making relative deprivation more acute. Lastly, the growing numbers of unemployed in the US understand that merit has little to do with ones economic security. In the face of staggering job losses in the last two months, American workers are rightfully indignant that Wall Street gets a 700 billion dollar bailout after peddling garbage financial vehicles while auto industry employees are told to take a wage cut or get nothing at all.

Class issues have always been taboo in the US but that may be about to change.

    For those of you receiving this for the first time I have appended Part One at the end of this, the second summation of my journey through Africa (note: for the web version I have removed part one and posted it separately). I had meant to send this quite some time ago but two things happened. First, I became slightly addicted to Lewis Carroll‘s “Alice“ books at just the time I should have been writing this in Cairo. At the time I thought that I was just amusing myself with self-indulgent nonsense. Funnily enough though the more that I travel the more I have come to regard the “Alice“ books as somehow relevant philosophical texts of the post-modern variety, with Alice cast as the quintessential wanderer … but I won‘t go into that now. The second reason for delay was the discovery after I arrived in Italy of one of the great obscenities of Europe: ten dollar per hour internet cafes. I am in Grenoble, France now, staying in a friend‘s apartment and making use of his computer so after long delay, much humming and hawing and a sizable period of productive procrastination I can finally send you a brief inkling of my time in Africa. If by chance you have not read Part One of my summation then may I suggest that you take the advice of the King of Hearts, “begin at the beginning … go on till you come to the end: then stop.“ – Lewis Carroll

Murmurings from the Swahili Coast – Part Two

This is going to be a long night. Its 10:30 PM and I have just arrived in Cairo, Egypt. My room looks like a dishevelled British tool shed — cold stone walls, old dusty furniture and thick uneven floor boards that are worn with age. I shudder to think what manner of bug life is living in here, just out of sight for the time being. Nevertheless, I am content partly because I happen to like dishevelled British tool sheds and partly because music from the ally next door has filled the quiet of the night with a distinctly lyrical North African rhythm. Besides, I have my pen, a candle and a bottle of red wine to keep me company. My room may not be up to Hilton standards, but then neither am I.

So far my trip has continued much as I hoped it would, which is to say much better than I could hope to plan for. Since my last summation I have travelled through Uganda, Kenya, Ethiopia, Djibouti, Eritrea, Sudan and now Egypt. I still have all of my limbs and digits, and if I am carrying any unwanted worms, germs, bugs, etc., at least they don’t weigh too much. A crazy Sicilian (more about him later) once told me that “adventure” means suffering. After all that I have seen on this trip I hesitate to say that I have “suffered”, but if adventure also means discomfort, nausea, hunger, body odour and mind-numbing fatigue than I have had plenty of it. But, of course, I have also had some pretty wonderful times, and if they don’t qualify as “adventure” than that’s just fine with me.

I am travelling alone now. I left Willie in Zanzibar on January 3rd. The last I saw of him he was sitting under a beaming portrait of Freddy Mercury (Zanzibar’s most shining luminary — now deceased) eating pizza and drinking from a pitcher of beer. Willie and I had a pretty good time together, but as all things must come to an end so did our journey together. At some point in time near the departure date of Willie’s return ticket to the US he was inadvertently assimilated by Forbes magazine and un-expectedly announced that he needed to go home right away to pursue a career as an investment banker. I am not too sure how a Seattle anarchist and devotee of Bakunin decides to become an investment banker, but I expect that it had something to do with seeing dire poverty on a nearly daily basis — not too surprisingly, the poverty of other people has a way of focusing the mind on one’s personal finances. Anyway, Willie is in America now and rumour has it that anything is possible in America.

Our last day together was one of our finest but also fairly typical. While other people where sun tanning, paragliding, flirting with pretty girls or whatever, Willie and I were having a civil, though sometimes loud marathon debate over the question of whether human rights are a vehicle for Western cultural imperialism. Willie argued that they are, and since we were sitting within sight of a newly opened Benetton store, in an Italian Geliteria, in one of the wealthiest tourist ghettos on the eastern seaboard of the African continent I was hard pressed to defend the universal humanist perspective that is at the core of human rights. There have been many times when I have sat pensively, contemplating our last debate and some of the many others that we had; I like to think that they helped shake some of those “common sense“ prejudices that I acquired before the age of eighteen, but also that they have helped to confirm some of the others that I have more recently acquired. In any case, I miss Willie. I suppose the good news is that as time goes by my debating skills seem to be getting better since in his absence I am winning almost all of them now.

On this second leg of my trip I have given up counting African elections. Most of the countries that I have passed through in the last three months are embroiled in some sort of prolonged civil conflict: Uganda in what the UN calls the “worst unreported humanitarian crisis in the World“; Sudan in what the UN calls the “worst humanitarian crisis in the world“; Eritrea and Ethiopia who have been at war with each other for 40 years; Djibouti, which can only be described as occupied by French and American troops; and, Egypt, which has been under martial law since 1981 and now even has the judiciary openly calling for a more free and impartial judiciary. All of this tends to limit the possibility for an effective opposition and turns citizen voting into a mere expression of obedience. In a functional democracy it is normal to expect responsible government (i.e., a government of the people, with all the trappings like universal suffrage, regular elections, a free press, etc.), combined with civil and political rights (i.e., the right to protest, the right to a fair trial, equality before the law, and so on) and social and economic rights (i.e., security of the person, the fulfilment of basic needs and a reasonably fair distribution of material resources). A country that fulfils all of these criteria is doing pretty well. Alas, in north-eastern Africa talking about democracy is a bit like talking about an early Spring in Canada: an enticing theoretical possibility that is not too likely to happen. Here the emphasis tends to be placed on “democratization”, an ambiguous term that implies movement toward a democratic ideal, but is more often used by government apologists to deflect criticism and justify their shortcomings (e.g. “we want to be a democracy, but don‘t rush us“).

I had my first taste of “democratization” in northern Uganda where Joseph Kony‘s Lord‘s Resistance Army (LRA) has been terrorizing a poor and mostly rural population for almost twenty years. According to most estimates the LRA has created over 1.6 million internally displaced persons (IDPs), as many as in the Darfur region of Sudan, and has kidnapped over 20 000 children who have been forced to become either LRA soldiers or sex workers. The crisis in northern Uganda is beyond words to describe, but to most tourists it is possible to fly into Kampala, go white water rafting on the Nile and spend a few happy days tracking mountain gorillas in Bwindi National Park without realizing the extent of suffering north of Lake Kyoga.

    I made it as far north as Soroti in Katakwi Province with the help of a friend who invited me to stay with him and his family. Brent is the manager of an Irish NGO called CONCERN that is running IDP camps for 150 000 people. He has a lovely wife, Irene, and two beautiful kids, and guessing by the number of times he and Irene exchanged passionate kisses I would say that they are very much in love with each other. Apart from the obvious pleasure of enjoying their hospitality, sitting there on the edge of a war zone within sight of so much contrived human misery, Brent and Irene were a sort of reminder to me of how uncertain life can be: here they were, happy, healthy, surrounded with the comforts of a functional home and community, but just up the road there were a 150 000 people who‘s lives had been torn apart through no fault of their own.

    During the week that I spent in Soroti I hitched rides on the top of supply trucks delivering soap to two IDP camps: Morungatuny, which provides sanctuary for about 9000 people, and Obalnga, which does the same for about 16 000 people. Travelling to these places involved driving down a dusty red road for about half an hour, then turning onto a bumpy cart road that is little wider than the truck I was riding in, and then turning onto something that looks like a creek bed for the rest of the trip. The fact that these are even called “roads“ involved a huge stretch of the imagination and points more to a shortcoming in the English language than anything else. Eventually the truck would pass through some narrow arch of bush and suddenly a thousand people would rush to its side, smiling and waving, happy just to see the sight of it. In my whole life I have never seen so many people so happy to be getting a free bar of soap (soap means life since poor hygiene facilitates the spread of disease).     

    My days in each of these places were spent talking with people who had been driven from their homes. One man, Emabu Moses, gave me a tour of Obalnga camp. He had been a water engineer before he arrived and so was put in charge of the camp latrines. As we walked from one latrine to the next I think he was inwardly elated to show off his work – I suspect that it is not very often he meets someone with a genuine interest in the construction of pit latrines. Emabu lived with his wife in a small mud hut, not much bigger than my tent. For a man with virtually nothing he seemed remarkably happy until thoughtlessly I asked him about his children. Suddenly he grew very serious. He explained to me that he had three: one was in a boarding school in Soroti, the other two had been stolen by the LRA – he didn‘t know if they were still alive. Such was the tenor of most of my conversations in the IDP camps, men and women who bore their circumstances with dignity, but all with some hidden nightmare that they kept hidden just below the surface of a calm exterior.

    I must admit that I am not always the most socially astute person. On my first trip to Morungatuny I was reserved and kept an almost clinical distance from people in the camp. I really did not know what to say to somebody whose circumstances where so different than my own. I had my notepad and stupidly kept interviewing people rather than talking to them; if you asked me the size of the camp population, how many wells it had, how it was organized administratively or when the last World Food Program truck arrived I would have no problem answering you, but if you asked me why someone like Emabu was in the camp I would have had no idea. Its all too easy, I discovered, to objectify someone I don‘t know and to turn my own discomfort into a lens through which to value others. I mentioned this to Brent who told me to lighten up, tell some jokes, be a little provocative and to forget my notepad, which is what I did from that day onward. Not surprisingly refugees prefer to be treated like people rather than refugees, and once I stopped speaking to them as if I was filling out a questionnaire I was rewarded by meeting people who talked about the joy of having a visitor, who smiled at my jokes and even told some of their own.

    By the time I left Soroti my body was preparing itself for a major breakdown. Despite my no hitchhiking policy something had crawled into my stomach and was determined to make my life very uncomfortable. The full extent of the coming malady had not quite settled in, but I already wanted to find a nice, no-questions-asked pharmacy to raid and then curl up in a soft bed while the wonders of Western medicine did their thing. I had tried to kill the little critters breeding in my stomach with Ugandan scotch (Bond 7) the night before, but only succeeded in giving myself a headache to match my stomach ache.

The mercy of the travel gods must have been with me to some extent because I did manage to meet a lovely Ugandan woman who took pity on me and for an afternoon became my guardian angle. With her help I travelled all the way to Eldorat, which is an essentially unremarkable town in Kenya except for one thing: a cheese factory that in my weakness seemed a comforting thought. Cheese aside, I met Eunice in the back seat of a mini-van. She was on her way to Busia (the Ugandan boarder town) to arrange the sale of some cars. I must have made her day when the conversation turned to agriculture: I told her that in Canada I had my own garden and grew a good deal of my own food. I guess the image of me trudging around in the dirt with my hoe like a peasant farmer must have been pretty funny because Eunice giggled for about five minutes. “Wait till I tell my father“ she said, “he will love that. You should come and work in our field!“

Crossing the Kenyan boarder with Eunice was about the easiest thing I have ever done. She looped her arm through mine and we slowly walked the half kilometre between Uganda and Kenya. At the boarder post she steered me toward a guard with whom she had a short conversation and a few laughs and before I knew it my passport was stamped and we were on our way. When I asked her how she had managed to get us through so easily, she said, “I told him that you were my husband and that you would be very lonely without me. Then, with a wink, she added, “so, you would be back soon.“ Just the mischievous look on her face as she told me this immediately got me to think about the possibility of immigrating; if I had been Eunice‘s husband I doubt I would ever leave at all. Once we were in Kenya, Eunice found the bus that I needed to take to Eldorat and despite feeling like I might vomit at any moment, I waved goodbye to her from the bus window with an enormous smile on my face and the feeling that the world was not such a bad place after all.

    Almost all roads in Kenya lead to Nairobi, and so did mine. Nairobi is the biggest city in East Africa and is growing fast. It has all of the pleasures of a city like Toronto without quite being Westernized. Half of the city consists of tall glass sky scrapers, the other half consists of three and four story buildings where it is still possible to see a Massi pastoralist walking a heard of cattle, though probably just to the slaughter house. My home in Nairobi was a place called Upper Hill Campsite. Despite having a bad reputation, I really like Nairobi. It is a lively town with a vibrant nightlife and good East Indian food. Most days I would go into town, listen to the evangelical preachers shout at the lunch time crowd, have a good meal and pretend to shop for old pictures of Johomo Kennyata. I knew it was not the safest city in the world, but I was fairly street smart and thought that I could tell a scam when I heard one. This illusion lasted for about three days. It was nothing dramatic, but as I climbed out of a matatu in front of the Sudanese embassy the Master of Nimble Fingers unzipped a pocket on the front of my leg and stole my wallet. I realized that I had been robbed just in time to see the matatu drive off into the sunset.

    Being robbed in Nairobi is not the worst thing in the world. It is true that all of my money and credit cards were gone, but since I was completely broke I had a good excuse to hangout at the campsite and get to know some of the passers-by while I waited for replacement credit cards. I established a sort of morning tea party that typically attracted half a dozen people. I would bring out my cook-stove and serve-up a cup of chai to anyone who sat down. There was Mike, an aging hippie from the UK who helped organize the Glastobury Festival each year; Venus, a beautiful Mexican woman who was travelling alone across Africa; Shelly from Mozambique who was so scared of Nairobi that she would not leave the campsite without her husband; my old friends Marco and Yannick, two Frenchmen who were bicycling from Cape Town to Cairo; four American girls who seemed to be in Africa just to go shopping (to their credit, they did give me a their old tent so regardless of the temptation it would be inappropriate for me to make fun of them); Sabastian who was a young PEI potato farmer with a cigarette perpetually hanging from his lips; and, a lecherous middle-aged Italian guy who had to leave suddenly after receiving news that his girlfriend in South Africa had been arrested for murdering her father. We were an odd assortment of people who would probably never have met if not for the luck of a stolen wallet.

    After spending ten days in Nairobi it was time to leave when I heard that there was a month long festival in Ethiopia to celebrate Bob Marley‘s sixtieth birthday. The trip from Nairobi to Addis Ababa was an adventure in itself. There is no public transportation between Kenya and Ethiopia. Anyone who wants to make the trip has to either fly or hitch a two day ride through the Kaisut Desert on the top of a cargo truck from Isiolo to the boarder town of Moyale in Ethiopia. The road through the desert is impassable on anything less than a four wheel drive vehicle and just to make matters interesting the road also provides the only source of income for marauding bands of Shifta who regularly hijack the slow moving trucks. I must confess I was a little apprehensive about making the journey. On my last trip to Africa I had never made it north of Nairobi. This was all new to me, I was alone and the thought of being hijacked was not a particularly pleasing one. On the other hand, I was told horror stories about virtually every where I went in Africa and so far nothing really bad had happened to me. Afro-sceptics, I reasoned, where just trying to find something to complain about.

    Isiolo is the sort of frontier town that would make Clint Eastwood a little skittish. It consists of nothing but trucks, bars, dust and a few shops that sell Coke, bottled water, canned vegetables and blankets. It‘s so ugly its almost interesting. It was here that at four in the morning I climbed onto the top of a truck going to Moyale. I was not the only one making this trip. As I pulled back the tarp on the top of the truck I was a little surprised to find a family of six curled up together, fast asleep. As it turned out, my companions did not speak a word of English and after they realized that I was harmless they all quickly fell back to sleep. This left me alone to watch as we pulled out of town in the pre-dawn darkness. It was freezing cold but the stars where out and I was filled with the sort of elation that can only come to someone who is willing to risk armed attack and spend two days driving through a desert in northern Kenya just to go see a Bob Marley festival in Ethiopia. As I thought about these things I could not help but smile. Life, it seemed, was starting to get pretty interesting.

    The trip itself was gorgeous, boring, poignant, exhausting and filled with surprises. After driving almost continuously for twelve hours the truck finally stopped in a town called Marsabit to unload drums of cooking oil at a small shop. A crazy man danced and sang on the ground about ten feet below the top of the truck so I had no huge compulsion to get down and stretch my legs until I saw two pretty Rasta women heading for a chaat cantina about fifty yards away. Apparently they had arrived on another truck and at that moment I could suddenly think of nothing better than buying some chaat for the rest of the trip. As it turned out, I didn‘t actually meet the Rasta women until I arrived in Moyale, but I did manage to at least wave to them as their truck lumbered out of town and, of course, I also managed to buy a big bag of chaat. For those of you who are not already avid chaat users, let me explain that chaat is a green leaf that when chewed is a mild narcotic. I think it‘s about the same as having a glass of wine and a salad. In Kenya it‘s called meira, but regardless of its name it is enormously popular in Kenya, Ethiopia and Djibouti where you are likely to see the telltale sign of green spit running down the chin of a great number of chaat users any time between two to six o‘clock.

    Driving through the desert that night was magical. I sat on top of the truck looking up at the stars and totally enjoyed myself. The chat was warding off my hunger pains and helping me think of Carl Sagan‘s “billions and billions of stars“ mantra. When we finally stopped at around two in the morning so that the driver could sleep I met Zed who was riding in another truck. In his normal life Zed was a reporter but on this trip he was taking his dead bride to Ethiopia to burry her. Zed told me that she was Ugandan and had been abducted by the LRA when she was young. She eventually managed to escape but not before she was raped and infect with AIDS. Zed was such a lovely man: intelligent, thoughtful and now widowed at the age of thirty-two. I did not want to ask if he had been tested for the virus.

    I arrived in Moyale so covered with dust that I think I scared a few young kids. At the boarder station I had to jump through the usual hoops: passport, visa, vaccination record, baggage check, etc. As I was filling out my entry card low-and-behold the Rasta women walked in, but instead of two there were now four. Apparently none of them had visas to enter Ethiopia and the boarder guard threatened to make them all go back to Kenya. I could not help but over hear that one of them was a Canadian, two were American and the other was a Kenyan. I have no idea what they said, but the guard agreed that they would not have to turn around if they could get their embassies to fax a request to the boarder station and ask them to issue a visa on the spot – not something that they usually allow. I happened to be holding a list of all the embassies and their phone numbers in Kenya so I offered it to them. I also told them that since the festival was starting in two days we would have to hire a car if we wanted to get to Addis Ababa in time for the opening night – it never occurred to me that they could be going any where else.

    That evening I ended up meeting the four of them properly for the first time. There was Millie, who was from Ottawa (“a small world“ does not capture the weirdness of meeting someone from your home town in Moyale), Wangui who was from Kenya, and Karen and Iona, both Americans. I also met Prince who was studying to become a priest at a Lutheran seminary school in Addis. Together we sat around that night and drank Gouder (Ethiopian red wine), talked about vegetarianism, chaat, the apparent lack of a self-preservation gene in our respective truck drivers and … well, I can‘t remember what else. I do remember though that we all joked about the threat of banditry in the sort of way one jokes about such things after the fact. I was feeling pretty carefree and happy when Wangui started talking about Ottawa. How in the world did she know so much about Ottawa I wondered, to which she answered that she and Millie were both students at Carleton! Both of these women might have been MY students if they had been in Canada the year before! I will concede that I was a little unprepared for this. One of my chief joys on this trip was a feeling of anonymity and the sort of freedom it brought.

    The next day the six of us took the bus as far as Awassa and then hired a van to take us the rest of the way to Addis. We arrived sometime close to one o‘clock in the morning and of course, this being the night before the Bob Marley festival we found every hotel in the city was completely full. In our desperation Prince offered to let us sleep in his dorm at the Mekane Jesus Theological Seminary (Addis is not the sort of place that you want to sleep on the street). Prince gave up his room for the girls and I was introduced to Reverend Grima and Mr. Dabba who were roommates. Before I really understood what was going on they each climbed into the same tiny bed so that I could sleep in the unused one. I won‘t hide the fact that I was deeply embarrassed by their generosity. As I lay in bed I tried to imagine what would happen to five Ethiopians if they arrived in Toronto at one AM without a hotel room. Would somebody give up their bed so that they could be comfortable?

    The next night, still faced with a critical shortage of accommodation the Rasta women and I took a room in a brothel that came with both a condom and a bible, presumably so that you could commit a sin at night and prey to God for forgiveness in the morning. Our change in accommodation, from a seminary to a brothel, turned out to be the first in a long string of contradictions that came to epitomize life in Addis, like the acres of slum housing that circle the green leafy boulevards of the Presidential palace; the gauntlet of beggars outside of the Sheraton where the PA system plays “Pennies from Heaven“ on a nearly continuous basis; or the everyday sight of hundreds of polio victims dragging themselves across newly paved roads on pieces of cardboard. The Bob Marley festival did not improve matters much. While Rita Marley sang “One Love“ I could see the batons of the police beating people in the front row; or the flight of the crowd when during “Africa Unite“ a convoy of riot police arrived beside centre stage. It was also at the concert that I met Kent, who is another Carleton student (its true, I even asked to see his student card)! Like me, he had come by truck through northern Kenya a few days before, but unlike me he was not so lucky: Kent watched as hijackers severely beat his truck driver and then proceeded to steal Kent‘s money and shoes while an AK47 was pointed at the temple of his forehead. (Parenthetically, I met Venus a few days later who told me that she had seen someone shot in the legs on that same stretch of barren road).

    The remainder of the Bob Marley Festival took place in Sheshemene, a little town that has become the spiritual homeland for Rastafarians the world over. In North America Rastafarians are perceived to be members of a pot-smoking underclass in the eyes of many people, but in Sheshemene I never met a Rastafarian I did not like. Yes, they smoke a lot of weed but they also refuse to consume overly processed foods, drink alcohol or engage in any form of violence. And, while other religions proclaim their peace-loving credentials, Rastafarianism seems to actually take all forms of oppression seriously. This got me to thinking about the possible linkages between it and a secular ideology like Marxism. I was in a bit of a fog one day thinking about these linkages when a guy with a six foot crucifix, a blue robe and a big Rasta hairdo sat down beside me. His name was Samuel Tassen, and he told me that during the 1970s he was a Deacon in Addis Ababa, but when the Durg Regime came to power in Ethiopia he renounced God and became a Marxist. I have had many strange experiences in my life, but none of them comes close to this one: while we were sitting under the shade of a big Eucalyptus tree on the edge of a red mud road he proceeded to tell me how he and his friend had assassinated an Ethiopian General! After this, he said, he went to Canada as a refugee and joined the Coalition Against Poverty (CAP). If you are from Ontario you might recall that about 10 years back (more or less) a group from CAP stormed the provincial legislature — he was one of about 15 people who were arrested. We ended up talking for hours about Trotsky, Rosa Luxembourg, Marx, the Black Panthers, Marcus Garvay, Bob Rae, Ed Brodbend and a whole swath of Marxist academics in Canada — we actually have a number of mutual acquaintances! A few years ago he returned to Ethiopia after being disillusioned with Canada and found God once again. He is living now as a monk at St. Ragueal Church in Markatu. I have no idea what the odds of meeting a blue robbed, crucifix-carrying, ex-Marxist are at precisely the moment that I was struggling to arrive at some conclusion regarding the linkage between (well, lets admit it) two fairly esoteric topics, but I would venture to guess that they are astronomically minute. Perhaps it was a message from Jah? If so all that I can say is she picked a pretty weird messenger.

    The trip to Djibouti was not quite as eventful as the one to Ethiopia, but it also included travelling through deserts, hitchhiking on trucks (again no public transit), tumbleweed frontier towns and the sight of pastoralists carrying Kalashnikovs. At around three in the morning I watched at a checkpoint as the driver of the truck that I was in get down on his hands and knees, kiss the ankles of a guard and beg him to let us continue — it seems that it is illegal for foreigners to hitchhike on trucks. I did not stay long in Djibouti. For one thing it was very expensive by African standards. More to the point, however, I did not like the sight of US marines dressed in full battle gear driving around in humvees looking like they wanted to shot something … shoot anything. I think that a lot of other people felt the same way judging by the graffiti on the sides of buildings which typically read something like, “W. Bush is terrorist“, or “Americon go home“. The huge number of French foreign legionnaires, dressed in their tiny little shorts, riding Vespas with their girlfriends in tow was a welcome contrast to the Americans, but it did little to make me feel any better (oddly enough I did not see any graffiti aimed at the French). The presence of so many foreign troops in Djibouti is probably one reason it has managed to avoid a war with Ethiopia, but a bunch of guys driving around with guns and armoured body gear doesn‘t do much for my sense of personal safety. Two days after I arrived I got on a wooden cargo boat heading to Obock and began to make my way toward Asmara.

    By this point I thought that I was getting used to the sight gun-wielding military and other assorted figures, but then I had yet to go to a small country actually at war and completely outmatched by its neighbour. Despite a fascinating mythology about the actual cause of the war between Ethiopia and Eritrea – the longest running war in Africa – the current reason is a tiny deep sea port town called Assab. Without Assab Ethiopia is completely landlocked. The problem for Eritrea is that there is no paved road between Assab in the south and the more populated north. It is a minimum two day trip across “roads“ that don‘t actually exist in many places from Assab to either Djibouti city or Asmara. Because of the war, Assab was completely isolated in what is already an incredibly isolated country, and today a city that was built for maybe 80 000 people is home to little more than 8 000, almost all of whom are soldiers. It‘s a strange feeling to be in a modern day ghost town that for reasons of national security is occasionally patrolled by armed soldiers.

    Having already acquired a visa for Eritrea in Djibouti I was now required to obtain a “Permission to Travel“ document that stated my planned itinerary. Every hundred kilometres or so I was required to present this document at one of the gazillion checkpoints that are all over Eritrea — why there are so many checkpoints I can‘t say, but I suspect the checkpoints constitute a major source of employment and are as coveted in Eritrea as a Bell Call Centre would be in Labrador. Everyone I met in Eritrea was exceedingly nice, but also exceedingly officious. For example, at roadside checkpoints I might be having a pleasant conversation with a soldier for fifteen minutes before his entire demeanour rapidly transformed into a pre-programmed mono-tone when it came time to scrutinize my passport and travel documents. The fact that almost everyone in Eritrea is or has been a soldier became apparent to me when I climbed aboard a troop transport for the ride to Asmara: instead of the normal pushing and shoving that typically inaugurates a bus trip in Africa, Eritreans stand back and wait for their name to be called; or the flirtatious girl sitting behind me who would ask questions like what rank I was, and to get my attention would striking me on the back with such force I secretly hoped some luggage would fall on her head.

    It was on the bus to Asmara that I met Mihretab, and later in Asmara his friend Andent. Mihretab was an engineering student and Andent was an English teacher (although he was about to begin law school). Both were in their mid-twenties and both had already completed their mandatory service in the army. I have no idea why these two were so keen to befriend me, but I think it was because of our politics. Both Mihretab and Andent hated the military almost as much as they hated the current regime of Isaias Afeorki and his People‘s Front for Democracy and Justice (PFDJ); I think talking to a long haired, unkempt, lefty foreigner like myself served as a sort of pressure release mechanism for all of their bottled up frustrations. Everyday for almost a week the three of us would meet from about 10 to 2 pm, drink copious amounts of coffee and discuss the current state of affairs in Eritrea. Since civil liberties are more of a theory than a practice in Eritrea our preferred meeting place for these conversations was in the centre of a cavernous restaurant near the outskirts of town where we could put at least half a dozen tables between us and other patrons. There were certainly a lot nicer cafes in town where we could meet, but they were busy and it was always possible that we might be overheard. Both Mihretab and Andent were part of a student movement that campaigned for democracy and for their activities both had recently been detained in jail for two months without charges being brought against them. Andent often told me wishfully about his friends who had deserted their military unit by simply walking through the desert to Ethiopia (unrestricted movement is not a freedom that Eritreans enjoy), but desertion meant permanent exile from his family and I could see that this was not something he was ready to do. According to Andent, Eritreans are “humiliated, exploited and abused. We are slaves here. The government says that it is building a nation, but they are not. They are doing the opposite.“

    One day I bought a government controlled newspaper so that I could read about what a wonderful country Eritrea was. On the front page was the text of a speech Isaias Afeorki had given while he was on a presidential junket to Egypt. According to Afeorki, Eritrea has a “two thousand year history of peace“ and consequently can be a model to other countries in the region. I showed this article to Andent and Mihretab and we all had a good laugh: usually when a politician tells a lie it is at least remotely plausible, but any thinking person would have been utterly amazed to be told that Eritrea has a history of peace – Eritrea has known nothing but war since the day it was created! Sitting there reading this I thought about Afeorki‘s double-speak and his People‘s Front for Democracy and Justice; then I thought about a conversation Humpty Dumpty had with Alice:

HD: When I use a word … it means just what I choose it to mean.

Alice: The question is wheather you can make words mean so many different things.

HD: The question is … which is to be master – that‘s all.

    Eventually I made my way to the port city of Massawa where I wanted to find a ride on a sailboat up the Red Sea to Port Sudan. (Note: getting a Sudanese visa had proven impossible in Ethiopia, and after a week of trying I decided that if I arrived in Sudan by sailboat I was much more likely to get a one.) The old part of Massawa has been a favourite target for Ethiopian bombs for years and is now little more than a few decrepit buildings amid piles of rubble. I elected not to stay at the first two hotels that I looked at because I was afraid that the rats would keep me awake, but as it turned out I found a ride to Port Sudan by early afternoon and did not need to sleep in Massawa anyway.

    Antonio, the Sicilian, is a short, stocky fellow with a muscular build and a deep tan. When I first saw him he looked the epitome of a long distance sailor walking down the wharf with his straw hat and jerry cans of water. Such people I have since learnt should be approach with extreme caution. I should have known that there was something wrong when another Italian skipper who discovered my plan to hitch a ride with Antonio wished me luck in the same sort of way you would wish a man luck who was marching off to certain death. Despite having a sense that I may be making a mistake, Antonio and I left Massawa that night. I reasoned that if the wind was from the right direction this was only going to be a two day trip and besides, I am a good sailor – I could sail us both half way around the world if I wanted.

    The wind gods are a cantankerous lot and if not properly appeased they are likely to take their revenge with extreme prejudice. I don‘t know what I did to offend them, but it must have been something pretty awful (I do remember making fun of Poseidon a few months earlier, but I thought he would have forgotten about that by now). In any case, instead of taking two days it took five days of sailing through head-on winds that blew over thirty knots some nights. In Antonio‘s 31 foot sailboat the motion of the waves and the roar of the wind made life on board pretty miserable. Antonio was just completing a two year circumnavigation of the globe so I figured his boat must be in better shape than it looked. Was I ever wrong! I made a list the following morning of everything that broke during our first night; it included three sails, one halyard, a solar panel, the head (a.k.a. toilet) and a repair that Antonio had made to a drainage hole in the chain locker, the result being that at around three AM I woke up to discover the floor boards floating in eight inches of water! With his boat falling apart Antonio became rabid. He would march around the tiny confines of the boat yelling and swearing at the world, shutting-up just long enough to smoke a cigarette, which as it turned out was the only thing that would pacify him. The next morning we sat in the cockpit and discussed Africa – or rather Antonio bad-mouthed Africa in a string of offensive slurs while I sat there in a state of impotent fury having decided not to tell Antonio what I thought of him until we were on land once again. This, unfortunately, was the price I had to endure. It has been one of my longest held dreams to sail up the Red Sea and there I was living my dream, but with the comic handicap of having to do it in the presence of an idiot. On my whole trip, indeed in my whole life, I honestly can not think of a single person who I dislike more than Antonio.

    Antonio and I arrived in a small Sudanese city called Sawakin and were immediately met by a port agent named Mohamed who told me that for a small fee he would go to Port Sudan one hundred kilometres away and arrange a visa for me. I wanted off that boat so badly I agreed to the price that he quoted to me without the slightest hesitation. I also asked him to buy me a bus ticket to Khartoum so that by four AM the next morning I could be on my way. After dealing with Antonio for five days I really liked Mohamed. He was a pleasant and competent man, and after Antonio was rude and gave him a hard time we agreed in the space of a knowing glance that Antonio was only fit to be gagged.

    I arrived in Khartoum late at night and with the help of a stranger eventually found a place to sleep. In the front lobby of my hotel, which was really just a rooming house with half a dozen bunks to a room, I met five young guys who immediately offered to share their dinner with me. This, I discovered, was typical of Sudanese hospitality. Walking down the road one day I heard a voice form behind me say “hello“. As I turned I was met by the smiling face of a guy about my age, topped with bright red hair and a bushy beard. Mark was an English teacher at one of the many universities that dot Khartoum. Together we went to his university and he introduced me to some of the students. It really did not take much effort. As soon as I walked onto the campus I was surrounded by inquisitive students who wanted to know all about me and life in Canada. That evening Mark introduced me to more of his friends who included several NGO workers, a couple of PhD students from the University of London and the editor of the Africa edition of Lonely Planet who was in Khartoum on a one week holiday. Thus passed my time in that most unlikely of cities: eating, drinking (non-alcoholic beverages only in Sudan) and meeting new people. During the three days that I stayed in Khartoum I think I ate alone twice. After my time with Antonio it seemed like Heaven.

    While I was in Khartoum I talked to all kinds of people about the civil war that has pitted the Sudan People‘s Liberation Movement (SPLM) against the governing regime for over 21 years, and also about the more recent conflict in the western province of Darfur. Together these two conflicts are responsible for over 1.5 million deaths and the generation of countless internally displaced people. In January a peace accord was signed in Nairobi that should bring to an end the civil war, but leaves the problem of Darfur essentially unresolved. While the Western media portray the Darfur conflict as one between “Arabs and Africans“ they fail to acknowledge that Darfur is populated entirely by Muslims who are both black Africans and Arabs. The real cause of the Darfur crisis is not religious or racial in nature, but the outcome of political and economic tensions that have arisen from the monopoly of oil revenues held by a small governing elite located mostly in Khartoum. The reason that the Darfur crisis continues is because there is nobody in the governing regime that has any interest in ending it. It is largely because the main protagonists in this crisis come from within the government that there is very little awareness of the scope and magnitude of the crisis outside of the effect areas. In Khartoum itself there is certainly no indication of what is happening in Darfur; indeed, to the extent that they are aware of it at all many Sudanese believe that the Darfur conflict has been wildly exaggerated by hostile Western governments who simply want to seize a part of Sudan‘s oil wealth.

    On the train trip through the Nubian Desert, between Khartoum and Wadi Halfa, virtually everyone that I met was from the southern region of Sudan and was in the process of leaving for good. Some had relatives in other countries who they hoped to stay with until they found employment; some had no plan other than to reach Cairo where they would throw themselves on the mercy of the UNHCR. Both Christians and Muslims, African and Arab were leaving as fast as they could. The couple sitting behind me had three children with them and nowhere to go once they reached Egypt. Eventually they wanted to go to join a relative in Australia, but until then they would live in Egypt and make a living doing whatever they could find.

As I sat and listened to the stories of people who had lost family and friends and who were now embarking on the most uncertain of futures I began to think about my own troubles and realized with sudden wonder that I couldn‘t think of anything worse than the discomfort caused by the hard wooden benches that I had been sitting on for the last day and a half (our train broke down so it took just over forty-eight hours to get to Wadi Halfa).

    Getting out of Sudan is almost as difficult as getting in. If it had not been for the help of three Egyptian migrant workers who befriended me on the train, two Polish archaeologists and a couple who worked for the United Nations I would probably still be in Wadi Halfa wondering what colour form I need to request a bathroom break. From the beginning to end it took me five hours to get all of the paper work filled out, singed and stamped before I was allowed to LEAVE Sudan. It was a ridiculous ending to a long and tiring trip through the rabbit hole, but needless to say I did eventually make it onto the ferry that would take me across Lake Nasser to Aswan, Egypt. On board, the Polish archaeologists and I built a camp on the top deck of the ferry so that we had a good view of the shoreline. Having made the same trip several times before they had programmed their GPS receiver to beep whenever we approached a significant archeological ruin. I ended up getting a personal tour of Lake Nasser from two archaeologists and felt like I might be the luckiest person on board.

    All of this brings me to Egypt. In Ethiopia I was mistakenly called “the volunteer“; in Djibouti everyone thought that I was a reporter; in Eritrea — believe it or not — I was frequently mistaken for a soldier; but in Egypt I am back to being just another tourist. After so many months of travel it is almost shocking for me to see so many pale, dumpy looking people walking around wearing fanny packs and a thousand dollars worth of camera equipment. When I look at them now they seem like aliens, so out of place, so vulnerable, so (forgive me, but the word that I want to use is) inane. I know that this is entirely an aesthetic reaction and that eventually I will sit down and share a bag of chips with some lovely older woman who will likely show me pictures of her grandchildren with enormous pride – and I also know that I will be happy to see them. But the truth is that for now I have been enjoying myself and my quiet little neighbourhood in Cairo mostly because it is nowhere near the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities, the Gaza pyramids or any other tourist attraction. Since I arrived I have been taking it easy and trying to put on a little weight. I spend most of my mornings in a café where I study French and calligraphy and most of my afternoons in another café where I read, smoke and drink tea. My only exercise is going down the road to get some freshly squeezed orange juice and falafel. As conscientiously as possible I am avoiding areas of town that might have something of interest to a camera wielding tourist. In my neighbourhood people say “welcome“ to me as they pass, but I know that only a twenty minute walk down the road from here there is going to be a guy selling pyramid tours, perfume, beetle shaped jewellery or something equally tacky who will not see me but only my wallet, and rather than say “welcome“, he will say “looking is for free!“ And what I don‘t understand is how he can make a living doing this, but he does … probably a good one. People will spend all of their time buying boatloads of the kind of crap that anyone over the age of fourteen should be embarrassed to have in their home and not one of them will come into this neighbourhood and actually sit down and talk to an Egyptian. I used to think that the fear of death was what set Western societies apart from others, but lately I have started to think that perhaps it is also the fear of life.

    My path from South Africa to Egypt has taken me over 10 000 kilometres in the space of six months, and I know that my chosen path is only one of countless paths that might have ended in the same place. I won‘t say that I enjoyed visiting one country more than another because for me what made a place enjoyable was not the landscape, but the people who live in it. Mount Kilimanjaro is a beautiful sight and anyone would be crazy not to appreciate it, but so are the people, the school teachers, the shop owners, the pastoralists and the farmers who live all around it. There is a saying that if you love just one country then you divide the whole world. On this trip I have become a big fan of the concept of universal humanism. There are enormous cultural differences between the many peoples of Africa, but there is also a broader “uniculturalism“ rooted in our shared existential journey: to live life as best we can. When I think of Africa now, it is this reality that comes to mind before anything else.

Post-script:

I just received a letter from Willie. He says that his dream to become an investment banker was pure madness. He is now happily settled down in Portland, Oregon, working in the non-profit sector where he “can work with good people for a good cause”. For my part I have decided to keep travelling. After leaving Cairo I flew to Rome and bought a bicycle that I plan to ride from Greece to Norway. I realize this might not be the best career move in the world, but I figure that twenty years from now I will regret more the things that I didn‘t do than the things that I did. So, onward I go. I am in France now with 2000 kilometres on my bike odometer and still loving the experience. My plan is to finish my trip in early August, but who knows? Perhaps I will stay in Norway. If I have learnt one thing on this trip it is that once you step out of your front door you never know where you will end-up. As Lewis Carrol once told Alice:

All in the Golden Afternoon

Full leisurely we glide,

For both our ours, with little skill

By little arms are plied.

While little hands make vain pretence

Our wonderings to guide.

Cheers

kc

kc

Murmurings From the Swahili Coast

Dear Friends,

Today, I am in Dar Es Salaam (House of Peace), 12 000 kilometres from home. Its 33 degrees outside, the air is filled with the dust and exhaust from pre-catalytic converter automobiles and trucks and the sweat running down my sun-burnt forehead is starting to sting my eyes. So far today I have consumed the milk from four coconuts and, I must admit, I am beginning to wonder how many coconuts a person needs each day to stay properly hydrated — more than four apparently. All in all, I thought that now would be the perfect time to crawl into a heavily air-conditioned cybercafé (the real “House of Peace”) and wish everyone a belated Merry Christmas and Happy New Years! My thoughts and best wishes are definitely with you!!

I should start by apologizing for not writing more often — I know that I promised some of you weekly updates. On the other hand, I also know that a good number of you have a healthy appreciation for concision, coupled with the belief that electronic group mailings constitute one of the more creepy aspects of globalization. If you include yourself in this latter camp let me just say once again, “Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!” (You may now resume your spam deleting).

For those of you still with me, I admit that it’s not entirely a lack of internet access that has kept me from keeping in touch — although that has certainly been the case on several occasions. The truth is that right now I am kind of enjoying the anonymity and irresponsibility of my sojourn through Africa. Two years of living and working in Ottawa, saving money, paying for a house, snow removal, insurance, gas and, of course, lawn maintenance, was starting to make me feel … (well) ‘domestic’. Life in general was becoming just a little too routine (walk the dogs, work, dinner, walk the dogs, sleep). Don’t get me wrong, I love my dogs and all the rest of it, but a definite sense of weariness was starting to set in — one that needed to be promptly shaken before, through force of habit, it became malignant.

There where other things too. Many of you know that Saskia and I broke up. In the space of a couple of months she went from being my life partner and soul mate to a distant dream that woke me up at 5 AM each morning. If my justification for leaving was driven partly by some sort of existential search for a “real utopia”, the other part was just to find a good night’s sleep in a corner of the world that would give me something to think about other than the past. In short, my friends, I did what any male would do: having lost the ‘fight’, running away seemed my next best option.

My plan had been simply to fly to Durban, South Africa, and go north. Nothing too dramatic, just move northward until it was time to turn around and fly home. It seemed to me that Durban was a great place to start. Having lived there for eight months I new before I arrived what to expect, where to stay and what not to do. I figured that Durban would be the ideal “soft landing spot” and so it was.

On my first night in Durban (November 10th), my friend Willie and I celebrated his 26th birthday at a reggae bar called Cool Runnings (pretty cheesy hu?). It is one of those places that is sufficiently dodgy that it attracts a small, but eclectic clientele. By the end of the night, we knew who the owner was (the fat white guy without a shirt who made frequent quasi-obscene dance appearances), who the prostitute was (we think), who the habitual reggae fans were (unmistakable), and who, like us, just happened to be out on a Wednesday night wanting a couple of beers. Once word got out that it was Willie’s birthday — and the barkeep paid for a free round of drinks for everyone to commemorate the fact — Willie and I enjoyed a brief but entertaining period of celebrity. We made friends, of a sort, and returned to our hostel late on our first night in Africa feeling pretty happy to have made the trip.

The other reason to pick Durban as a starting point was purely aesthetic: I wanted to make a purposeful entry into Sub-Saharan Africa. A trip of this sort is not utilitarian, there is no conference to go to, no schedule to keep; I planned this to be a “journey” and I wanted to feel a sort of transition as I made my way from Here to There. Because it’s a big developed city with all the comforts of home, Durban sits on the tip of the east African coastline like a big welcoming vestibule to tempt the curious and comfort the leery before they push on deeper into the house – it’s the first, last and only ‘westernized’ city on the east side of the continent.

On my last trip to Africa, I had met people who had flown directly into Arusha or Kampala to see this or that tourist site (climb a really big mountain, hob-knob with gorillas, etc.). Almost without exception I had felt that they were somehow enfeebled by the experience; their connection to where they were was too technologically dependent, too artificial, too sudden. I guess it should come as no surprise that if you moon-shoot an office worker from downtown Toronto into the African bush you can expect a certain amount of culture shock (not to mention dysentery). This may seem old fashioned, but I like the idea of crossing Africa slowly, deliberately, even purposefully.

Its been roughly two months now since I started to weave my way serpentine-like up the coast. So far I have traveled about 3800 km by bus, mini-bus (variously called combies, chopas, matatos or dalla-dallas depending on what country you are in), ferry boat (the Illala), sailboat (a dhow), flat bed truck, walking and hitchhiking. My path has taken me through South Africa, Mozambique, Malawi, Tanzania and the revolutionary and semi-autonomous state of Zanzibar.

Through it all, Willie and I have been exceptionally lucky. Apart from sun burn, the discomfort of over packed busses and the occasional missed meal, we have been doing pretty well – true we have both been sick, but nothing too serious. I don’t know how to explain this. Other travelers that we have met along the way have been mugged, stranded or shit-out-of-luck/patience/money (you name it). I don’t have much of a theory on most this, but I think the reason we have not been robbed is due to the fact that I have recently taken on a striking resemblance (or at least so I am told) to both Chuck Norris and Jesus Christ, while Willie is known affectionately in these parts as “Osama Bin Laden”.

To the best of my knowledge, during the two months that we have been in Africa there have been three national elections: one in Ghana, Namibia and Mozambique. In these, as in other African elections, the results are always slightly ambiguous: yes, there is a clear winner (often without recourse to overt violence or fraud), but almost without fail it is the incumbent party who wins (this is a phenomena that afflicts African countries virtually without exception). Indeed, such is the state of opposition parties in Africa (with the notable exception of Ghana) that elections are less about changing governments than anointing the ruling party’s chosen candidate (Amanddo Guebuza in Mozambique; Hifikepunye Pohmba in Namibia; and John Kufuor in Ghana). Technically, each is a ‘formal democracy’ with a multiparty system based on elections that are regular, free and (relatively) fair, and yet each one reveals in its own way how shallow and flaccid the concept of a “formal democracy” is. If an opposition party would win just one election! … somewhere in Africa! … at least once in a while! … it would go a long way to dispelling the illusion that bourgeois democracy is simply a cover for the dominant class. But, alas, such is never the case.

The elections in Mozambique where held December 1 and 2. Willie and I happened to be in Beira at the time with little or no money, and no way to get any until the banks opened on the 3rd. Most of you probably know that Mozambique has been the site of almost 25 years of unremitting hostility, first between the national liberation movement (FRILEMO) and the Portuguese, and then between FRILEMO and RENAMO (a South African trained and funded counter-revolutionary insurgency group – or to use the currently more fashionable vernacular, a bunch of blood thirsty terrorists). Anyway, to the casual observer, one might get the impression that Beira suffered the brunt of the war and has only just started to sweep away the fallen concrete of pot-shot buildings. True, not a lot of tourists go to Beira (I’m not sure why we did). And true, the city does have a feeling of advanced decay, but to its credit, it also has a lovely beer garden and a pool table, and with very little effort at all (say two days) one can meet a whole bunch of politically opinionated people! For me this was the essence and lasting memory of Beira.

Mozambique wasn’t all Beiraesque. I had my time on the beach sun tanning; I ate mangos for lunch in the shade; I listened and danced to a lot of very good music in Maputo (Africa’s ‘little Havana’); I enjoyed the sultry wind that blows in from the Indian Ocean and I even went to the “Museum of the Revolution” (dedicated to guns, and revolutionary leaders with guns, and … well, mostly guns). I also read a lot of Marxist literature: Marx and Engels, Rosa Luxembourg, Michael Lebowitz, Michael Burawoy and Lucas to name a few. There is something almost perverse about reading this stuff in a self-proclaimed socialist state that wants foreign investment so bad that its President will don some big, stupid, suggestive, grin like an out-of-luck Walmart greeter every time he shakes hands with a South African businessman. It’s a little bit like reading Salmon Rushdie in an Islamic state: I kept wondering if a government official saw me, would I be deported for “wrong thinking”? One got the feeling that a new (passive?) revolution had already eclipsed the old and that as the “War of Movement” waned the “War of Position” was rising over Sagittarius.

Malawi, on the other hand, was remarkably different. Here the seed of progressive politics had never been planted so its absence is far less conspicuous. The country has evolved (or should I say suffered) from Hastings Banda (1966-94), with his ban on long hair, women in pants and of course a huge swath of good literature, to Bakili Muluzi (1994-2004) with his “I deserve to be President for life” routine. Not surprisingly, Malawi is a veritable backwater on a continent known for its mud hut architecture. The UN Human Development Index lists Malawi as being 165 out of 177 (Mozambique is 171). What was surprising then, was the number of intelligent, thoughtful and politically engaged people that I met.

At some dreary ex-pat booze-up (“only two months left to go!”) I decided that I would talk to the only two Africans at the bar. So it was that I met Golden and his friend Joseph. Golden, it turned out, is a refugee from Zimbabwe. Because he is well educated and articulate, the local Zimbabwe power brokers expected him to make public speeches endorsing Mugabe’s ZANU-PF Party. When Golden refused the death threats and other assorted harassments began, and it became obvious it was time to leave. He and his wife Patience are now living in Zomba with their young child (the second is on its way), where Golden works as a mill manager for a lumber company. Willie and I ended up hanging out with Golden over the next few days; he gave us a tour of his mill, showed us around the Zomba Plateau and had us over for dinner.

It seems to me that pretty much every other well educated, middle class African who is not currently living in South Africa wants more than anything to live in “America” (anecdotal evidence only). I can’t really blame people for wanting to leave. The life expectancy in Malawi is 38. Up to this point, I was amazed at the number of complete strangers who had asked me to help them immigrate to just about anywhere. Walking down the street I could usually count on meeting at least one person who wanted to become pen pals so I could help him leave. I was curious why this had never come up with Golden, so I decided to broach the topic. As conversations go, I was pretty impressed with the level of intrigue this whole line of questioning revealed. It turns out that Golden and his family have been saving money for quite some time for the purpose of immigrating to Canada — he is hoping that he can use his experience in the forest industry to find employment. The problem is that his boss (the mill owner) is the Canadian consulate and would not appreciate hearing that his manager is planning to leave. As a result, Golden has been quietly biding his time until he builds some financial security before he takes any definitive action.

I am not sure when the magic moment will happen (sometime in the next year I expect), but when the time comes I have promised to do whatever I can to help them. I really like Golden and his family and would love to see them make it to Canada. If anybody else is interested in being a Good Samaritan let me know. I am hoping that I can set up a support group to help Golden and his family settle down in Canada.

As Willie and I pushed on, I was soon confronted with another issue. I’ll just say in advance that I have mixed feelings about game parks. If you look at a map of any African country you will see them dotting the countryside like big green colored snowflakes. Most Africans will never go to a game park, never know the thrill of tracking elephants from the back seat of a guided Land Rover, never earn enough money to even get through the front gate. On my last trip to Africa I lived here for over a year without ever setting foot in one. Many of Africa’s first game parks were created by European colonial governments, and although the management has changed the clientele is still white, wealthy and show a distinct preference for “exotic” African animals over “exotic” African people. That being said, around here the parks generate a lot of wealth and jobs and those are both things in short supply.

Being a man of principle I carefully considered all of these issues, but decided to go on a “safari” mostly because Willie wanted to. Besides, I had found a mission: I was going to test the hyraxe. A hyraxe is a gray, furry, squat little animal, but with some unexpected qualities, or so I wanted to find out. According to my guide book, “although hyraxes resemble large, robust guinea-pigs, they are most closely related to elephants and dugongs.” There was something compelling about this description of the hyraxe that made it my “must see” animal of the trip. I think my fascination had to do with the absurd contradiction between its appearance as a “robust guinea-pig” and its lineage: descendent from elephants. I wanted to corner one, or even better, a whole bunch of them to see if the cute, chubby, teddy-bear like creatures would try to stampede me. Fortunately for me and the hyraxes I never got my chance to play out this little experiment in animal psychology. In Liwonde National Park the only ‘game’ that I saw was a hippopotamus and a bunch of water fowl.

It was during the unexpectedly long hike (15 km) into the park that Willie and I met Gresham. He was a chatty young guy who worked as a clerk at the local hospital. He told us that he had ten days vacation and when he saw us walking by he decided that he would spend a part of it talking to us. I inadvertently pushed some invisible button when I happened to mention that I used to teach in the Department of Political Science at Carleton. Out of Gresham’s mouth came every secret ambition that he had ever had to be a politician and to study in Canada. He told us in detail his entire election platform; he begged me for advice on how to run a campaign; he kept saying “I am just a seed” and you as a teacher “must water me!”

To be fair, I am sure that my own prodding encouraged Gresham’s verbosity. I was just pleased that here was an intelligent young, civic minded guy that really wanted to contribute to the political life of his country. After all, it is not very often that you meet someone like Gresham either here or in Canada. In any case, Willie and I managed to walk all 15 KMs, find a camp spot, set up our tent and drink a beer before Gresham had finished telling us his hopes and ambitions for the future.

Gresham was actually a very sweet guy. The next day he met us at the bus stop and introduced me to his wife. She was sitting in the shade across from the station knitting a pink jumper, and she was extremely pregnant! Poor Gresham, he was hoping that he could travel with Willie and me to Monkey Bay, but after the previous day’s oration I felt like I needed a little quiet time. In the end Gresham gave me a copy of the Malawian constitution and a couple of pictures of him at work. We agreed to keep in touch and I am hoping that in five to ten years I will have a friend in the Malawian Parliament.

One of the nicest ways to get around Africa is by ferry. Five years earlier I had taken a very enjoyable ride between Mwanza and Bukoba on Lake Victoria. It was only later that I found out that the Bukoba, the ferry that used to make the same run had sunk a few years earlier, killing over 600 people. It was with some trepidation then that I boarded the Illala heading north on Lake Malawi. My fear was that like the Bukoba, the Illala would be over loaded with freight and passengers to the point of being un-seaworthy. Thankfully my fears of over packing turned out to be totally unfounded, or at least that is what I thought from my vantage point on the upper decks of 1st class. Here one could enjoy all of the luxuries of a Mediterranean cruise: a comfy lounge chair, a restaurant that showed movies, bar service and enough personal deck space to build a bowling ally. My fellow 1st class passengers and I had it pretty good.

On the lower deck the passenger arrangements were a little less refined. If Dante had put more imagination into dreaming up a ferry scene to cross the river Styx, I am sure it would have looked like 3rd class on the Illala. I had a reason to go there because this was the only place where I could find vegetarian food – beans and rice being deemed unfit for 1st class consumption. Each meal was a test of balance, agility and mental fortitude. Sacks of grain were literally packed shoulder high in some places, leaving a hole just wide enough to crawl through between the grain and ceiling. The unlucky 3rd class passengers were spewed listlessly across the bags of grain with their crying babies, luggage, chickens, goats and other ruminants. Just to make the image truly hellish, add tropical heat, humidity, cockroaches as big as your uncle, the deafening sound of a ship’s throbbing engine and the pervasive smell of sweat, urine and diesel fumes. I felt a little guilty about having so much personal space in 1st class while there were people below packed like animals into a cargo container. Mind you, I didn’t offer to change places with anyone, but … but nothing — maybe that is why it’s so difficult for a rich man to get into heaven.

With a little effort I forgot about the Bukoba and the people below and started to enjoy myself immensely (sorry third class). The sun was out, the breeze was cool and I was surrounded by a bunch of bright eyed, curious travelers. I am not going to list them all, but there was a young German couple on their way to the Middle East, there was Marco and Yannick, who are riding bicycles from Cape Town to Cairo; there were two Scandinavian girls, Brita and Malin who were on their way to Nairobi; and of course there were others. The ferry ride took three days and although it was boring at times, for the most part I just felt incredibly happy to be in the middle of Nowhere with a bunch of fun, interesting people.

The stars must have been smiling on Willie and I because after the ferry trip was over we kept bumping into the Scandinavian girls from time to time all the way to Zanzibar. The four of us celebrated Christmas at an Indian restaurant in Mbaya, Tanzania. Perhaps it was just the company, the charm of a feminine presence, but I still think of Mbaya as being one of the nicest cities I have been to in all of Africa.

After Malawi, Tanzania seems almost cosmopolitan. In Dar Es Salaam there is an interesting mix of Bantu, Maasai, European and Asian people and cultures which means that it is possible to visit a Christian church, a Hindu temple and an Islamic mosque all within a few blocks of each other. After spending so much time in small towns and villages I feel almost giddy being in the hustle and bustle of a big city.

As I read this over, it occurs to me how little I have actually said. The reality is that I can’t convey in such a short summation the number of people who have come and gone yet left an indelible impression on me, whether through the gentleness of their character, or the wit of their humor, or the profundity of their observations. There was Raul the smiley German; Johnny the Irish surfer; there was a whole troop of South African fire-dancers; there was the Polish travel writer; the jaded Malawian UNESCO worker; Yellica the beautiful doctor from the Netherlands; and a huge number of people who have no name but only faces and hearts filled to the brim with kindness for strangers. There were also the stories, music and politics, all of which I can’t tell you about. And of course there is the land! The Rift Valley, the cradle of human life, stretches over 6000 KM from the Red Sea all the way to Beria and I haven’t even mentioned that!

One of the great advantages of travel is that you get the time to indulge your literary pallet. I, for example, started reading some of the sacred texts from the Marxist pantheon (along with some of the less ‘sacred’ texts) and then went to work on the travel genre. Most recently I’ve read “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” (again), “The Razor’s Edge” by W. Somerset Maugham, and “Dark Star Safari” by Paul Theroux. I must admit that some aspect of each of these books has appealed to my inner Buddha. However, the one I have enjoyed most (for all sorts of reasons) is Fagles’ translation of Homer’s “The Odyssey”. Unlike the hero from that particular traveler’s tale, I am not sure yet if I have traveled between the Scylla and Charybdis; perhaps they are waiting for me further down the road — maybe somewhere in the Sudan or northern Kenya? Or, perhaps they are on my port and starboard side this very moment and only the perspective of time will reveal them? Who knows?

At any rate, I have a long way left to go. I started this trip without much of a plan. I thought that maybe I would go as far as Kampala, but after that I refused to speculate. Somewhere along the way, however, a real plan started to materialize out of the swirling cloud of potentialities. I think I was on Lake Malawi when I decided that I was going all the way to Alexandria on the coast of the Mediterranean in Egypt. If I make it (and I have to try now that I have ‘outted myself’) I still have Uganda, Kenya, Ethiopia, the Sudan and Egypt to transit. A casual glance at the map indicates that Nairobi is at about the half way point, which means I still have roughly 3800 kilometers in a straight line left to go. Who knows if I will make it? It seems a little presumptuous to speculate a great deal at this point. It is “a long way to go” and anything could happen along the way (although maybe I will go all the way to Oslo). One of my favorite passages from the Odyssey is the one where Odysseus explains with pointed irony to the doomed suitors why he is dressed like a beggar. He sings:

Our lives, our mood and mind as we pass across the earth,

turn as the days turn…

as the father of men and gods makes each day dawn.

– Homer: The Odyssey

So, maybe I’ll be home for summer — maybe not!

All the Best, Your Friend

Keith

I am going to talk about Africa quite a bit in this lecture. Before I begin I would just like to say how problematic it is to talk about a single Africa.

Africa is the second largest continent on Earth and with about 950 million people it is the second most populous. Africa is home to 53 independent states, all of whom have their own national interests and capabilities, and, unfortunately, it is also home to the majority of current UN peace keeping operations (roughly 78 percent of all deployed UN peacekeeping personnel). For many people Africa is a romantic, but mostly forgotten place. I don’t think that the average Canadian appreciates the fact that Nigeria alone has a population (144) that is larger than all of Russia (or to bring it home, about 4.5 times the size of our own population), or that just the Sahara Desert is about the same size as the United States. Having said that Africa is a huge and diverse continent that defies simplistic generalizations, I will draw distinctions between African countries when I can, but making generalizations sometimes has its uses, particularly in a 40 minute lecture.

The title of my lecture asks the question, is AFRICOM good for Africa. In Africa, this is a question that is being asked in every state capital and university political science department – not to mention among civil society organizations and among a broader public. But, before I get carried away, I know that this is the first time that some of you have heard of AFRICOM so I should take a few moments to explain what AFRICOM is!

AFRICOM is what the US Department of Defence (DoD) calls the new Africa Command. It is designed to co-ordinate all US military activity in Africa. One of the reasons it is an important issue today is because it is approaching the status of being fully operational. It was just over a year ago on February 6th, 2007 that President Bush announced its establishment, but with over a thousand newly hired personal it is only recently that it has acquired the human and organizational resources to be anything except an idea on paper.

The idea behind AFRICOM is to give the United States a Unified military command that will co-ordinate all US government activities on the continent. Supposedly, AFRICOM represents a shift in US strategy towards peace building. According to President Bush, AFRICOM “will enhance our efforts to bring peace and security to the people of Africa” and promote the “goals of development, health, education, democracy and economic growth.” These benevolent overtones were echoed by Ryan Henry, the Principal Deputy Undersecretary of Defence for Policy, (and others in the US government). According to Henry

“We want to help develop a stable environment in which a civil society can be built and that the quality of life for the citizenry can be improved, and that is the principal reason for standing up Africa Command at this time. ” (February 6th)

However, it is perhaps not too surprising that AFRICOM is viewed in Africa with suspicion by civil society organizations. Their fears are many, but the three most prominent are that AFRICOM will lead to (count on fingers)

(1) the militarization of aid,

(2) that it will bring the US war on Terror to Africa to a much larger extent then it is currently, and

(3) that it will function primarily as the new military wing of the US national energy policy.

More surprisingly however, is the resistance of African states to AFRICOM. Both Nigeria and South Africa have expressed concerns over AFRICOM. These are the two most powerful states in Africa, so their objections to AFRICOM pose real challenges to the US.

Many of you may remember that George Bush went on his second trip to Africa just a couple of weeks ago (on February 15 to the 21s). Ostensibly he was there to talk about economic development and to publicize his govt’s funding of HIVAIDs and malaria programs, but undoubtedly he was also there to find an African home for AFRICOM. In interviews with the press Bush said this is “baloney”, but AFRICOM is currently based in Stuttgart, Germany, and it is clear that the US regards this as temporary, so nobody really believes him. If finding an African home for AFRICOM was part of his mission, he was unsuccessful. In the months preceding his visit, the ECONOMIST wrote that African countries would be eager to host AFRICOM because of the enormous amount of money it would bring to the lucky country that managed to clinch the deal, but Bush received nothing but polite refusals from virtually every country on the continent except Liberia.

It is in this context that the BIG question becomes: will the US utilize its increased military presence, via AFRICOM, to support democratic rights, self-determination, economic growth and prosperity (in short peace building) or will it instead serve to subjugate the continent to US security and economic interests?

I’ll say right off the bat that I don’t have any firm answers to this question because its simply to early to say. I do however have some strong suspicions! In this lecture I will briefly flush out a few tentative ideas.

This map shows the world according to the DoD before the establishment of AFRICOM. What you see here are the existing Unified Commands that were set up during the Cold War as a way of better coordinating and integrating US military forces on a global scale.

US Strategic Areas of Responsibility

There are two kinds of Unified Commands. There are commands that are responsible for a FUNCTION and commands that are responsible for a region or territory. On this map you can see the five territorial commands in existence before AFRICOM. Each of the territorial commands has an AREA OF RESPONSIBILITY, so, for example, Northcom is responsible for all of North America (including Canada) and Southcom is responsible for all of South America.

What you can not see on the map are the commands that are responsible for a FUNCTION. There are 4 function commands: the Joint Forces Command, the Special Operations Command, the Transportation Command and the Strategic Command. So, for example, the Special Operations Command is responsible for co-ordinating all US special operations worldwide. Under this command structure, you can see that Africa is not particularly well served. This is a reflection of the fact that until recently Africa has always been regarded by the DoD as lacking strategic importance.

If you look at Africa closely, you will see that under the old command structure, Africa was the responsibility of three different Unified Commands. The E.U.command held the largest area of responsibility in Africa, but as you can see PACOM and CENTCOM also held a small area of territorial responsibility on the continent. This sort of shared territorial responsibility had a number of drawbacks for the US military:

• The most obvious of which is the potential for disunity, particularly along the boundaries or seams of the various commands. For example, in an imaginary US led intervention in Darfur the pre-AFRICOM command structure might easily face real co-ordination problems that might hobble the operation.
  
• Associated with the lack of DoD focus on Africa is the absence of a significant cadre of African experts. The African Center for Strategic Studies now helps to fill this void, but it is a relatively new creation in the last ten years.
  
• Each Unified command is commanded by a four star general. Until the creation of AFRICOM this meant that there was no high ranking officer in the DoD who took a continental view of US military operations across the entire continent. As the newly appointed commander for AFRICOM, General William ‘Kip’ Ward will now fill this role.
  

From an operational perspective, AFRICOM is expected to remedy all of these issues, and will bring the total number of unified commands up to 10.

For the US the emerging strategic importance of Africa was made clear in a 2006 White House briefing document to Congress called “The National Security Strategy of the United States of America”. In the document, the executive identifies what it believes are areas of strategic importance to the US and explains how it will manage them. In the document Africa is said to “hold a growing geo-strategic importance” and is a “high priority of this (the Bush) Administration”

The FOCUS of AFRICOM will be on at least six areas, which I will list discuss briefly:

• Counter-terrorism
  

The US already has two large-scale counter terrorism operations in Africa. The first is called the Combined Joint Task Force Horn of Africa (CJTF-HOA), and the second is called the Trans-Sahara Counter-Terrorism Initiative (TSCTI).

The first, CJTF-HOA is housed in Camp Lemonier in Djibouti. In 2005 I was in Djibouti and was astonished to see the number of French and US troops who are stationed there. The French foreign legionnaires wear tight little shorts and bicycle around the city with begets sticking out of the backpacks, but US soldiers drive around in armoured personal carriers, wearing flak-jackets and carrying heavy weapons. If ever you want the feeling of living under a military occupation then a holiday stop-over in Djibouti City is not to be missed. When I was in Djibouti in 2005 Camp Lemonier was only 97 acres. In 2007 it was expanded to 500 acres. The second, the Trans-Sahara Counter-Terrorism Initiative operates in co-operation with ten different Saharan countries to increase boarder security. In 2005 the US congress provided 500 million in funding to the program.

These two large scale programs are themselves aided by smaller intelligence programs in dozens of African countries. According to a 2007 Congressional Research Service report, these smaller programs are themselves being rapidly expanded. AFRICOM will oversee all of these initiatives and provide them with unified command.

Why does the US fear the threat of terrorism in Africa? Well, primarily because there is a perception that there is a new radicalisation of African Muslims helped along by the export of Wahhabi-style clerics from the Arabian Peninsula. There are already Muslim populations throughout Africa, but the vast majority of them live in the North. In Cairo I once accidently and absent mindedly walked through a street protest of the Muslim Brotherhood, but I must admit the influence of radical Islam in northern Africa is not something I have much knowledge of. Added to this is a substantial history of terrorist threats to US interests in Africa. My first visit to Nairobi in 1999 was particularly memorable partly because it was shortly after a car bomb had reduced the US embassy from a 7 story building to a smouldering pile of bricks. An identical attack in Dar es Salaam brought down the US embassy in Tanzania. Until 9/11 these two bombings were among the most grievous acts of anti-Americanism on record.

Parenthetically, on my last trip to Khartoum I was reminded by many Sudanese people who I met that the US had sent a cruise missile into a pharmaceutical factory located on the outskirts of Khartoum in retaliation for the loss of its embassies.

• Containing armed conflict and humanitarian crises
  

Paul Collier, who is a Professor of Economics and Director of the Center for the Study of African Economies at Oxford, recently finalized a statistical analysis of countries that are in danger of becoming embroiled in some kind of armed conflict. In his analysis he found three significant linkages that, while I don’t want to discuss them in any great depth, I still think are worth mentioning. The first is low income, followed by low rates of growth and third, an abundance of natural resources. Suffice it to say that almost all African countries share these indicators.

I mention this only because I found the statistical analysis to be quite compelling, though I realize that statistical analyses are always somewhat contentious. What is less contentious is that since 1990, 23 African countries have been embroiled in civil conflict with greater than 1000 casualties. Some of these civil conflicts have been relatively short in duration and of a low-intensity, others like the war in the DRC has been appalling by any standards. There, the war has claimed over 4 million lives, the majority by disease or famine, making it the deadliest conflict since world war II. It involved twenty armed groups from nine countries in what can only be described as a scramble to control natural resource wealth. For a country at war, armed conflict is essentially development in reverse, but as the case of the DRC illustrates, armed conflict can have profoundly negative consequences for contiguous states and can destabilize entire regions.

Until recently, the US was unwilling to become directly involved in African conflicts and relied instead on the Africa Contingency Operations Training and Assistance Program (ACOTA) to train and equip African militaries to respond to security and humanitarian emergencies. So far ACOTA has trained about 17,000 African troops in 10 different countries. The ACOTA program emerged in the 1990s after the US experience in Somalia (the lasting impression of which was of a US soldier being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu and the genocide in Rwanda that claimed over 800,000 lives.)

In 2004, the G-8 introduced the Global Peace Operations Initiative (GPOI), which is a multilateral programme that aims to create a self-sustaining peaceforce of 75,000 by 2010, many of whom will be African. While AFRICOM will not directly manage either GPOI or ACOTA, it will undoubtedly be an important partner and provide technical assistance.

• Reducing international crime (e.g., drugs)
  

To the extent that African countries are collectively in the high risk category of states prone to some kind of conflict — be that civil war or interstate war – they are also potential bases of operation for criminal activity. For example, we know that roughly 95% of the global production of hard drugs come from conflict countries. Presumably this is because once states loose control of their territory, the production of hard drugs is both lucrative and possible.

• Slowing the spread of HIV/AIDS
  

I won’t say too much about this, except that the HIV/AIDS epidemic is devastating parts of Africa. In 2007 there were approximately 22.8 million people living with the virus in Africa. HIV/AIDS not only imperils food production and raises the cost of business, it is also extremely mobile. HIV/AIDS is both a global health problem and a development issue. I think the current US President also feels an evangelical compulsion to try and do something about HIV/AIDS in Africa. (pause) or he just wants to claim fighting AIDS in Africa as part of his Legacy. (funding for HIV programmes went from $1 billion to over $6 billion per year)

• Containing China’s growing influence
  

For the past decade, China’s economy has experienced at double digit annual growth. By 2040, if not sooner, China will be the largest economy in the world. In a recent Foreign Affairs article, John Ikenberry characterised the rise of China as one of the great dramas of the twentieth century – a sentiment I might add that is shared by a number of the current US presidential candidates. For Realists, of which there is no shortage of in the US government, the fear is that as China becomes increasingly powerful, and the power of the US position erodes, two outcomes are likely.

First, that China will use its growing influence in the international system to reshape global governance institutions to better serve its own interests. As this occurs, the US (and other allied states) will be forced to use their power to counter that of China. This is, in fact, what AFRICOM is all about. During the Cold War, the USSR and the US fought a global battle, but one that was centered on Europe. In the next ten years, the new bad guy will be China and that the new battle ground will become Africa.

In a recently published book called Africa’s Silk Road, Harry Broadman (who is an economist at the World Bank who specializes in Africa) points out that Africa’s exports to China increased at an annual rate of 48 percent between 2000 and 2005, which is two and half times as fast as the rate of the region’s exports to the United States and four times as fast as the rate of its exports to the European Union (EU). Most of this increased trade is concentrated in only a handful of countries and is largely built on extractive industries. For example, eighty-five percent of the continent’s exports to China originate in five countries, the oil-exporting nations of Angola, Equatorial Guinea, Nigeria, the Republic of Congo, and Sudan. The structure of Chinese/African trade is not too surprising when you think of China’s growing domestic energy demands. By 2004, China was already the world’s second largest consumer of oil, behind only the United States and at current rate of growth, Chinese oil consumption is expected to increase by 10 percent per year. In an attempt to gain control over its oil import needs, China is increasingly focusing on Africa. An estimated 25 percent of China’s total oil imports currently comes from Africa and this will only increase in the future.

• And Second, Securing natural resources (e.g., oil)
  

Even if you have trouble believing that the US needs to feel threatened by China, or African-grown terrorism, or drug cultivation, AIDS, etc., the trump for the US is its own energy needs. Why will Africa become increasingly important to the US? In a word … OIL

In 2006 the US imported about 10 million barrels of crude oil each day. Of this, somewhere just under 22 percent of it came from Africa. Drawing on US National Intelligence Estimates, the head of EUCOM said in March 2006 that “recent exploration in the Gulf of Guinea region indicate potential reserves that could account for 25-35 per cent of US imports with the next decade” To give you a sense of how important this is to the US, in 2006 oil imports from Africa were more than the total imports from Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Kuwait combined. Within a decade, oil imports from Africa will be greater than imports from the all of Middle East. Angola (parenthetically) is now China’s main supplier of crude oil, replacing Saudi Arabia in 2006.

I think that as the US government looks around the world it sees increasing resource nationalism in South America and Russia. The Putins and Hugo Chavez’s of the world are, to put it lightly, not viewed as reliable suppliers of oil. In the Middle East, instability has been a perennial concern for the US. Saudi Arabia, the birth place of Osama Bin Ladin and a fortress for Wahhbi-style Islam is viewed with increasing suspicion. All of this makes Africa, and particularly the Gulf of Guinea, with its wide open access to the Atlantic Ocean and US ports seem pretty attractive.

If oil alone was not a compelling enough reason for the US to refocus on Africa, then certainly its abundance of other natural recourses helps to sweeten the pot. These figures show Africa’s share of global production of certain commodities.

• Africa Produces:
  
  • 90% of cobalt
    
  • 64% of manganese
    
  • 50% of gold
    
  • 40% of platinum
    
  • 30% of uranium
    
  • 20% of petroleum
    
  • 70% of cocoa
    
  • 60% of coffee
    
  • 50% of palm oil
    

Like other unified commands, AFRICOM is tasked with co-ordinating all US military activities in its Area of Responsibility. However, unlike other Unified Commands, AFRICOM has also been mandated to prevent conflict. Potentially, this represents a fairly significant change in thinking for the US military toward a recognition of the idea of soft power. In order to achieve this expanded mandate, AFRICOM will become the lead agency in co-ordinating all US governement agency opperations in Africa. In other words, AFRICOM will be a Unified Command ‘Plus’ where the plus means peace building widely construde. One of the qualities that makes AFRICOM different is its organizational structure, which will include more civilians and representatives from other US government agencies. For example, one of AFRICOM’s top deputies is a senior Foreign Service officer — Ambassador Mary Yates, who has served as the U.S. ambassador to both Burundi and Ghana and .

A more complex organisational structure will obviously create a number of challenges. To achieve the goals that the US has set for AFRICOM a large number of government agencies that are not used to working together will have to learn to co-operate effectively. Most obviously, the DoD will have to co-operate with other agencies like USAID, the State Department, Justice, the Treasury, and civilian NGOs if, as President Bush claims, the “goals of development, health, education, democracy and economic growth” are more then just rhetoric.

AFRICOM’s expanded mandate appears to be based on lessons learnt, partly through the US experience in Iraq. What are some of these lessons?

1. Development and Security are linked
   

To my mind, the most important lesson is that development and security are tightly linked. The US has never been very good at making this connection, but their experience in Iraq and to some extent Afghanistan has proven to even the most reluctant sceptic that kinetic weaponry is not enough. Poverty and the lack of economic growth can lead all too easily to civil conflict.

1. Combat prevention is better than combat
   

This is supposedly at the very heart of AFRICOM. To quote Ryan Henry who is the Principal Deputy Under Secretary of Defence for Policy, “the purpose of the command is … what we refer to as the anticipatory measures, and those are taking actions that will prevent problems from becoming crises, and crises from becoming conflicts. So the mission of the command is to be able to prevent that.”

1. Post-conflict stability operations may determine “victory”
   

The US military is increasing aware that post-conflict stability operations are just as important as combat operations in the determination of victory. In 2005, the DOD issued a directive (3000.05) the defined stability operations as a “core US military mission” that “shall be given priority comparable to combat operations”. Accordingly, operations built around disarmament, demobilization and reintegration of combatants should receive considerable attention under AFRICOM.

How much weight one wants to attach to such directives, particularly in light of the bungling US post-conflict reconstruction efforts in Iraq is a judgement call, but it is precisely because Iraq has proven to be such an enormously expensive venture for the US military that there is some hope that this sort of directive will be taken more seriously in the future.

The good intentions of the Pentagon aside, if Africa can make the interests of the US compatible with its own and exploit that relationship effectively, it is entirely possible to make a convincing argument as to why AFRICOM might benefit Africa; all of which can be summarized by three broad categories: Security, Growth and Development. I hesitate to add, that exactly how each country exploits this relationship is entirely dependent of the particularity of that country, so I don’t think that there is a written in stone general prescription. Most likely, some countries will benefit from the relationship and other will not.

Lets begin with Security. There are a number of conflict databases that estimate the level of armed conflict in Africa. Some of the most well known databases are the University of Michigan’s Armed Conflict Database at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, the Heidelberg Institute for International Conflict Research at the University of Heidelberg and the Uppsala Conflict Data Program. For those of you who are interested, the UN’s IRIN also provides considerable qualitative data that can be used to provide a human face to African conflict data.

One of my ideas to impress upon you the extent of wars in Africa was to print out a list that I could show you on a PowerPoint slide. The point was not talk about them individually, but just to give you a visual sense of how many wars there have been. Unfortunately, my list turned out to be 8 pages long and no matter how small I shrunk the font I couldn’t figure out how to put them all on a single slide. I have the print out here if anyone would like to see it (see end of blog for list). But regardless, I don’t think you need to be an expert on Africa to know that civil conflict is a perennial concern there. If AFRICOM can increase stability, even if that comes at a price for African societies, I expect that it will be a price many ordinary Africans regard as worth paying. Africans as a general rule have a healthy scepticism about the US and its motives, but if AFRICOM can be shown to create stability, I think even some of the harsher US critics would quietly be glad.

In terms of Growth: in a report recently published by Oxfam, the authors argue that wars in Africa have cost the countries involved an estimated 284 billion dollars since 1990 (2000 constant year baseline). This is roughly the equivalent loss of about 18 bn per year, or roughly the equivalent of aid from OECD countries. Paul Collier, in the statistical analysis that I mentioned earlier found that a typical low-income country faces a risk of civil war of about 14 percent in any five-year period. Each percentage point added to the growth rate knocks off a percentage point from this risk. Because slow growth and conflict seem to be related, at least statistically, he called this self-re-creating cycle a conflict trap. Many of the poorest African countries may well be caught in this trap, which means that by themselves they may not be able to escape it. In the best case scenario, AFRICOM will help countries escape the conflict trap and thus divert the enormous amount of money that is spent on conflict toward wealth creating opportunities.

Finally, I will just briefly mention Development. To my mind, economic growth and development are very similar, but not quite the same thing. Development implies long term growth, the emergence of a middle-class, stable, representative government, quality educational and health services, and an implied sense of hope that your children will inherit a better world.

Obviously this a lot to expect from AFRICOM, but this is the future that Africa could enjoy under a more stable security structure. Africa’s economies are currently booming. Over the past decade, Africa grew at an average rate of 5.4 percent, on par with the rest of the world. Much of this growth is due to expanded trade with China and India. The US will need to compete with these emerging economic superpowers by offering more aid, preferential trade deals and, of course, tighter security co-operation.

Not surprisingly, many Africans have a difficult time imagining a best case scenario for AFRICOM. There are real fears about AFRICOM and its current home in Germany party underline the point. Briefly, I just want to raise a few of the most pressing concerns. I have slit them into Civil Society concerns and government concerns, though I think to a large extent, governments in Africa also share those of civil society.

For those of you who want to find out more about civil society’s perspective on AFRICOM, I encourage you to visit the Pambazuka website. They publish all sorts of civil society related material and news, including a blog roundup on selected issues, including AFRICOM. I will go through these fairly quickly because I know that I am running out of time.

1. Militarization of Aid
   

Many Africans are concerned that since USAID operations in Africa will now be directed by AFRICOM, that increasingly aid is going to be tied to geo-strategic military priorities.

1. Resource Grab
   

Others are concerned that the US is only interested in securing access to natural resources and that the US will use its increased military presence to help secure and guard resource extraction.

1. Bringing the War on Terror to Africa
   

For many, the US war on terror has a reputation that is synonymous with a denial of civil rights (Guantanamo, extra-ordinary rendition) civilian casualties (Iraq, Somalia, Afghanistan), and the support of unpopular regimes (the US support of Zenawi in Ethiopia or Sharif in Pakistan).

1. PSCs
   

Africans watch the news too and one of the issues that the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan highlight is the reliance of the US military on private security companies. Blackwater is probably one of the most well known US-based PSCs, but others include DynCorp and AEGIS Defence Services. At the moment these companies are actively engaged in either Iraq or Afghanistan (Blackwater, for example has a contract for 109 million in Iraq and DynCorp received 1.1 billion to train an Afghani constabulary). These conflicts are helping to create an enormous industry build around military sub-contracting. African’s rightly fear that as these conflicts subside, there will be an influx of unaccountable mercenaries to the continent. Crossed Crocodiles is a long-time African blogger. This is what he says:

“I don’t think the greatest immediate danger posed by AFRICOM is from US soldiers and sailors. One of the things that worries me is that I suspect the mercenaries and mercenary corporations are what the US plans to use in Africa, in addition to training African military as US surrogates. These mercenaries may be employees of the US State Department, or some other US government department, as they are in Iraq. Or they may be the employees of giant corporations, such as oil companies. Whatever US objectives, arms and mercenaries can only destabilize. The presence of actual US military personnel may just be window dressing. The dirty work will be done by private armies and private CIAs. Already in the US these are taking over the functions of the military and intelligence. I am hoping a change in US administration may change the direction of this trend, but there are no guarantees.”

So, we are back to where we started. Should Africa fear Africom? The answers to these questions will go a long way toward answering the question of how AFRICOM will be judged.

What will the US “stabilize” in Africa?

Many of you are familiar with the struggle of the Ogoni people to secure a fair share of the oil wealth of the Niger Delta. Micheal Watts, among others has written passionately about the issue of petro-violence in the area, and the associated ecological and community degradation that it seems to cause. One question that looms large is weather the US will use AFRICOM to stabilize community struggles that are waged largely in the name of economic justice?

Will the US be accountable to African governments or their citizens?

Or will the US use its dominant economic and military power simply to pressure African states into exploitive relationships?

To what extent will the US deploy unaccountable Private Security Companies?

The US has promised that AFRICOM will leave a small footprint and yet it has been tasked with considerable responsibility. As Crossed Crocodiles asks, will the presence of actual US military personnel just be window dressing for the creation of a new industry of African mercenaries? As I said, that has not turned out to be the case. With the exception of Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf of Liberia, there have been no takers so far. Meles Zenawi claimed victory in the 2005 election despite evidence that his Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front party lost badly. He then cracked down on the opposition, killing at least 200 and injuring up to 700. Two years later he invaded Somalia in what was regarded as a sort of US proxy war in Somalia.

Algeria
* Algerian War
* Algerian Civil War
o List of Algerian massacres of the 1990s
* North African Campaign (World War II)
* Sand War
Angola
* Angolan War of Independence
* Angolan Civil War
o Battle of Cuito Cuanavale
o Battle of Cassinga
Benin
* Punitive Expedition of 1897
Burkina Faso
* Agacher Strip War
Burundi
* Ethnic Violence in Burundi
* Burundi Civil War
o Titanic Express Massacre
o Itaba Massacre
o Gatumba Massacre
Cameroon
* West Africa Campaign (World War I)
* West Africa Campaign (World War II)
Chad
* Chadian Civil Wars:
o 1965-1993 Chadian Civil War (led to Libyan intervention)
* 1978-1987 Libya-Chad War
o 2005- Second Chadian Civil War (also involves Sudan)
Comoros
* Comorian Secession Crisis
Congo-Brazzaville (Republic of Congo)
* Congo (Brazzaville) Civil War
* Kongo Civil War
Congo-Kinshasa (Democratic Republic of Congo)
* Congo Crisis
o Katangan Secession
o South Kasai Secession
* Simba Rebellion
* Shaba Invasions
* First Congo War
* Second Congo War
o Ituri Conflict
Côte d’Ivoire
* Côte d’Ivoire Civil War
Djibouti
* Djiboutian Civil War
Egypt
* Arab-Israeli War (1948)
* Libyan-Egyptian War
* Mahdist War
* North African Campaign (World War II)
* Six Day War
* Suez Crisis
* Yom Kippur War
Eritrea
* First Italo-Ethiopia War
* Second Italo-Abyssinian War
* East African Campaign (World War II)
* Eritrean War of Independence
o List of massacres committed during the Eritrean War of Independence
* Eritrean-Ethiopian War
Ethiopia
* East African Campaign (World War II)
o Battle of Keren
* Eritrean War of Independence
* Ethiopian-Adal War
* Ethiopian Civil War
* Eritrean-Ethiopian War
* 1868 Expedition to Abyssinia
* First Italo-Ethiopia War
o Battle of Adowa
* Ogaden War
* Second Italo-Abyssinian War
o Battle of Maychew
Gabon
* West Africa Campaign (World War II)
o Battle of Gabon
Gambia
* Casamance Conflict
Ghana
* Accra Riots
Guinea-Bissau
* Guinea-Bissau War of Independence
* Guinea-Bissau Civil War
Kenya
* East African Campaign (World War I)
* East African Campaign (World War II)
* Mau Mau Rebellion (1952-1960)
* Shifta War (1963–1967)
* Turbi Village Massacre (2005)
Lesotho
* Gun War
* South African intervention in Lesotho
Liberia
* First Liberian Civil War
* Second Liberian Civil War
Libya
* Chadian-Libyan conflict
* Italo-Turkish War
* Libyan-Egyptian War
* North African Campaign (World War II)
Madagascar
* Battle of Madagascar (World War II)
* Madagascar revolt
Mali
* Agacher Strip War
* Tuareg Rebellion
Malawi
* East African Campaign (World War I)
Mauritania
* Mauritania-Senegal Border War
Mauritius
* Battle of Grand Port
Morocco
* North African Campaign (World War II)
* Spanish-Moroccan War (1859)
* Rif Wars
o Rif War (1893)
o Rif War (1909)
o Rif War (1920)
* Sand War
* Western Sahara conflict
Mozambique
* East African Campaign (World War I)
* Mozambican War of Independence
* Mozambican Civil War
Namibia
* Herero Genocide
* Namibian War of Independence
* South-West Africa Campaign (World War I)
o Maritz Rebellion
Niger
* Tuareg Rebellion
Nigeria
* Nigerian Civil War
* Yelwa Massacre
Rwanda
* Rwandan Civil War
o Rwandan Genocide
São Tomé and Príncipe
* Batepá Massacre
Senegal
* Casamance Conflict
* Mauritania-Senegal Border War
* West Africa Campaign (World War II)
o Battle of Dakar
Sierra Leone
* Ndogboyosoi War
* Sierra Leone Civil War
Somalia
* East African Campaign (World War II)
o Italian conquest of British Somaliland
* Ogaden War
* Somalian Civil War
* War in Somalia 2006-present
South Africa
Main article: Military history of South Africa
* Anglo-Zulu War
o Battle of Isandlwana
o Rorke’s Drift
o Battle of Intombe
o Battle of Gingindlovu
o Siege of Eshowe
o Battle of Hlobane
o Battle of Kambula
o Battle of Ulundi
* Cape Frontier Wars
* Battle of Blood River
* Battle of Blaauwberg
* First Boer War
* Second Boer War
* Sharpeville Massacre
* Soweto Uprising
* South African Border War
o Battle of Cassinga
* South-West Africa Campaign (World War I)
o Maritz Rebellion
* Weenen Massacre
* Zulu Civil War
Sudan
* East African Campaign (World War II)
* The Mahdist War
o Battle of Abu Klea
o Battle of Omdurman
o Battle of Umm Diwaykarat
* First Sudanese Civil War
o Anyanya rebellion
* Second Sudanese Civil War
* Darfur Conflict
* Chad-Sudan conflict
Swaziland
* Second Boer War
Tanzania
* Abushiri Revolt
* Anglo-Zanzibar War
* East African Campaign (World War I)
o Battle of Tanga
* Maji Maji Rebellion
* Uganda-Tanzania War
* Zanzibar Revolution (1964)
Togo
* West Africa Campaign (World War I)
Tunisia
* North African Campaign (World War II)
Uganda
Further information: Military history of Uganda
* 1971 Ugandan coup d’état
* Operation Entebbe (1976)
* Uganda-Tanzania War (1978 – 1979)
o Fall of Kampala (1979)
* Uganda National Rescue Front (1980-1985)
* Ugandan Civil War (1982 – 1986)
* Uganda People’s Democratic Army (1986-1988)
* Holy Spirit Movement (1986-1987)
* Lord’s Resistance Army (1987 – present)
* Allied Democratic Forces (1996-?)
* Uganda National Rescue Front II (1996-2002)
Western Sahara
* Ifni War
* Western Sahara conflict
Zambia
* East African Campaign (World War I)
* East African Campaign (World War II)
Zimbabwe
* First Matabele War
* Chimurenga – overview of Rhodesian/Zimbabwe Civil Wars
* Second Matabele War a.k.a. the First Chimurenga
* Second Chimurenga/Rhodesian Bush War a.k.a. the Second Chimurenga

ATLIS Conference, Roundtable Discussant

Delivered: Friday, November 16

Last year I think we passed a pivotal moment in the public debate on climate change. In Canada, certainly, but I think even more broadly as a global society we finally came to terms with climate change. We realized 1) that climate change was caused by human activity and 2) that it is going to have devastating consequences for people around the world.

Until then it was still possible and even common place to hear reasonable people argue that there was

• insufficient evidence of climate change;
  
• that global warming was part of a naturally occurring long wave cycle of the Earth’s climate and consequently we were not to blame;
  
• or simply to minimize the importance of climate change altogether.
  

In a short period of time two reports made both of these positions largely untenable.

I am referring here to the publication of the Fourth Assessment Report of the (IPCC) Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In this report we learned that the science of climate change modelling had been vastly improved since the third report; that new evidence of climate change is unambiguous; and that global warming is caused by human activity.

The second report that I am referring to is the Review on the Economics of Climate Change, written by Sir Nicholas Stern, a former Chief Economist and Senior Vice-President of the World Bank, who pointed out that Climate Change was going to be very expensive (by this I mean in the realm of the First and Second World War and the Great Depression combined) and that global warming represented the single largest market failure in history.

Naturally, there are still people willing to call Stern an economic hack who monstrously bungled the whole report. And of course there are still lots of people who will say that the overwhelming opinion of the scientists who make up the IPCC is fundamentally wrong – the product of “junk science”. Fortunately, however, I think we are largely past this point in the debate.

Today we are no longer arguing about whether or not climate change is actually happening — we all know that it is. We also know that it will have devastating consequences and we also know that it is largely our addiction to consumer capitalism that is the root cause of it.

It seems to me that today we are on the precipice of what Blühdorn and Welsh call the “politics of unsustainability”. This is not climate change denial, but rather the politics of trying to maintain an economic way of life that we know is ecologically unsustainable.

At the root of this new politics is the insistence that consumer capitalism and ecological sustainability can be made compatible through technological innovation, market instruments and managerial perfection DESPITE the fact that empirical evidence tends to point to the contrary. There is, I think, a near pathological insistence on these strategies that is wishful thinking at best.

A few years ago, George Monbiot, wrote in the London Guardian a short article called ”Sleepwalking to Extinction.”. In the article he says that

We live in a dream world. With a small, rational part of our brain, we recognize that our existence is . . . destroying the conditions for human life on earth. Were we governed by reason, we would be on the barricades today, dragging the drivers of Range Rovers and Nissan Patrols out of their seats, occupying and shutting down the coal-burning power stations, bursting in upon the Blairs’ retreat from reality in Barbados and demanding a reversal of economic life as dramatic as the one we bore when we went to war with Hitler.

This is what we should be doing, but we are not. When I think of the most important issue facing us today I think it has to be our seeming withdrawal from the realm of political possibility. That is we seem increasingly willing to replace or subordinate political solutions with supposed market solutions. The traditional politics of environmental movements that emphasized values like inter-generational equity, north-south redistribution of wealth and long-term preservation of the eco-system are constantly marginalized by market concerns for economic growth, competitiveness and innovation.

Broadly speaking there are three ways to deal with Climate Change:

• An Institutionalist approach which relies on the promotion of institutions, norms and regimes to manage global environment.
  
• The market liberal position which sees the perfection of free markets, and therefore market efficiency, to be the best way to mitigate and adapt to climate change.
  
• And the third approach which is a Social Green approach. This entails a rejection of capitalism and/or industrialism, and instead generally embraces progressive conceptions of local community autonomy and empowerment; and the promotion of ecological justice and indigenous knowledge systems, etc.
  

Very briefly I will talk a little about each of these approaches.

I have always been sceptical of the Institutionalist approach and yet it also seems like a necessary ingredient to addressing some of the issues associated with global warming simply because it is, after all, a global phenomenon.

As most of us know already the Kyoto accord which began as an insufficient but necessary first step is now largely irrelevant. Emissions from developing states like China and India were never really constrained by the accord and countries like Canada, the United States and Japan have never been serious about implementing it. In retrospect, we can see that it was a symbolic treaty that played to a sort of symbolic politics.

The Kyoto Accord comes to an end in 2012 and it appears that there will be no binding carbon emissions target set to replace it, until developing countries like India and China, are willing to make similar commitments.

This has always been the position held by George Bush, but it was driven home to me a couple of weeks ago when it was repeated right here at Mt. Allison by Kevin Lynch, Canada’s Clerk of the Privy Council, who said that Canada will not make any major reductions in our carbon emissions until other countries do.

Now I know that Kevin Lynch is constrained about what he can say in public, but that does not mean that the rest of us should be.

In maintaining this argument, two objectives are achieved.

First, by saying that Canada will never enter into a treaty with binding emission caps until everyone else does he is essentially saying that we are not going to do anything (or at least that we are not going to do more than our main economic competitors).

The second objective served by this kind of argument is the maintenance of the illusion that people in developing countries simply don’t care about climate change or the environment: that their “right to develop” trumps all other concerns.

This is a caricature of people in the developing world that I know is fundamentally misguided. I’ll give you an example. I spent my summer in Uganda this year recording what was called the Mabira Forest Protest. This was the largest civil society protest in Uganda’s history and it also happened to be about saving the environment. I could mention other prominent environmental protests in Taiwan, Kenya, India, and others throughout the developing world, but the point is simply to stress that significant sectors of the population in developing countries are concerned with environmental issues. You might not hear this from their political and economic leaders but they know as well as anyone that it is poor people from developing countries who will pay the greatest price when it comes to climate change.

Unless Canadians show a willingness to pressure their political leaders into a robust international treaty with fixed caps on carbon emissions, what we will end up with is another round of symbolic politics and symbolic treaties that will do little to reduce the real threat of global warming.

The Second approach that I mentioned was the market liberal approach. By default this seems to be the emerging preference for consumer driven societies in the affluent world.

Price-mechanisms are supposed to induce eco-efficiency and theoretically we will simply be able to spend our way into a cleaner world. Apart from the dubious record of these sorts of exercises in accounting it seems to me that the real problem with this approach is that it leaves intact the underlying economic principles and norms of non-sustainable consumer society.

Given the continued export of western styles of living and consumption to developing countries the paradox behind eco-efficiency is that rather than reduce our overall consumption, it is more likely that better, more environmentally friendly engineering is likely to simply lower the cost of consumer goods and therefore make it easier for people around the world to afford them. Making the conveniences of consumer goods available to people around the world is not a bad thing in itself, but it’s probably not very good for the environment.

I will just briefly mention the last approach, which is sometimes called the Social Green approach. In terms of theoretical usefulness I think the social green perspective is the most illuminating. The basic diagnosis is that the capitalist insistence on infinite economic growth and wealth accumulation are ecologically and socially unsustainable and that western consumer ‘needs’ in terms of animal protein, air travel or electric energy to name just a few cannot be satisfied in ecologically sustainable ways.

The more radical critiques and politics that call into question the viability of our carbon based economy seem out of favour today. To even suggest that states need to restrict growth or place a cap on carbon emissions or redistribute wealth is met with bewildered looks of non-comprehension or even hostility.

All of this brings me back the politics of unsustainability. Today eco-politics appears to revolve increasingly around the goal of managing our inability and unwillingness to become sustainable. In terms of sociology there is a lot here that needs to be investigated. How do we as a society sustain the unsustainable?

From a political science perspective, part of the answer undoubtedly touches on our society’s general withdrawal from the political. For those of you who missed the opportunity to hear Elly Gotz last night, he brought up in a very different context the fact that 18-30 olds don’t, as a group, tend to vote. Many people feel that our political leaders are no longer trustworthy and have consequently withdrawn from political engagement.

What they don’t realize is that politicians have also lost faith in the public to make painful sacrifices. Political elites will never show visionary leadership and move our country toward a more sustainable path because they don’t think that the public will support them.

I am not completely pessimistic. I can look out right now and see that you are all concerned with and engaged in environmental issues. And I know from experience that people all around the world feel the same way. The trick in this conference and other participatory initiatives will be to transform good intentions into real public re-engagement with environmental politics so that we are not simply sustaining the unsustainable. Ultimately we need to move past defending and continuing with the status quo and move into a political project of reviewing and changing our established non-sustainable habits. This will not occur as a result of individual angst or trendy eco-friendly buying habits, but through a renewed activist politics that forces politicians to become environmental leaders.

–END–

Almost 25 years ago Andre Gorz summed up the frustration experienced by many Social Greens when he wrote:

Ecology is like universal suffrage or the 40-hour week: at first, the ruling elite and the guardians of social order regard it as subversive, and proclaim that it will lead to the triumph of anarchy and irrationality. Then, when factual evidence and popular pressure can no longer be denied, the establishment suddenly gives way – what was unthinkable yesterday becomes taken for granted today, and fundamentally nothing changes. – André Gorz, Ecology as Politics, 1980:3