My book is still on sale, but d <<...>> <<...>> difficult to find in an ordinary bookshop it seems.

For Teacher’s friend, there is a totally new version coming out. Please contact me for it.

 

Recently I was asked by someone over the internet what size primary school desks should be. I was rather bemused by this, as the obvious question is What size are the children who are going to sit on them?


When I started work in Southern Sudan in 1982, we were running a secondary school in a school built to be a primary school. Not only that but almost all the students were older than average and adult. And they were mainly Dinkas or Nuers who are taller on average and have longer legs in ratio to their bodies than most of the rest of us. You and a Dinka may be same size sitting, but you stand up he or she will tower over you. Sudanese bicyles are standardised at 28" rather than 26".

Imagine our problem then when we found that not only was it a primary school, but all the furniture was for primary children. 2 m tall on a chair meant for a 6 year old! The human body does fold in strange ways.

The reluctance to solve a problem on the spot by simply measuring has often surprised me. From steps in a staircase which all have different pitches (common in Sudan) to toilets that were put at angles or sizes that resemble no existing human species. In Uganda once I asked for a toilet in the refugee camp to be built up from the 'squatter' to something I could sit on. The person who did it made it taper upwards to a point, like an inverted funnel.

Going wider afield, you have shower rooms with no hooks to hand your clothes on and (noted before) hotel bedroom lights that require you to get out of bed to put them off.

Occasionally common sense deserts the best of us, as several attempts to trace out a big roundabout in a resource centre showed. No one seemed to remember that you just need a long string fixed at the centre and then walk around it.

But that is part of the total disconnect between school maths and the real world which I have often written about before.

Seen on Reliefweb, immediately following an advertisement for a job in researching people trafficking:

Procurement Specialist, South Africa

International Centre for Migration Policy Development

I wonder which meaning of procurement they actually mean …

Presidents and planes

Recently during the Commonwealth summit it was noted that many of the ‘smaller’ heads of states (Caribbean islands etc) actually came on commercial flights.

Earlier this year I was on a Kenya Airways flight to Bujumbura when we were held up by the red carpet treatment given o the president of Burundi who was to travel in our first class.  Longer delays occurred at the other end as the plane had to first take him to the official area where the bands and soldiers and ministers were lined up.

I was not the only one on the plane to be worried about this situation.  In the table of security hazards having a Burundian president on board ones plane must rank very high.  At least one has already been assassinated by shooting down his plane (in 1994).

Barry Sesnan

What I wrote once ...

I am civil society

‘Civil society’ as a phrase has an honourable ancestry in politics. One phase of the evolution of countries post-independence and of the evolution-in-parallel of NGOS and UN bodies has been the gradual emergence of the idea of ‘Civil Society’ as opposed to uncivil society? To military society? To ecclesiastical society? …. Well, that is another question.

This is just to celebrate the enterprising man who not only declared in a coordination meeting that he represented ALL of civil society, but that his NGO was called Civil Society.  Like the Church of God which appears in its name to have monopolised all religious possibilities at least for monotheists, Mr Civil Society presented himself as the unique interlocutor. His only reward though, was to be ignored by everyone.

Barry Sesnan

barrysbook.blogspot.com  ..     ebrealitycheck.blogspot.com

UNICEF desks and chairs

AUNICEF has sent delightful individual desks and chairs for our primary catch up project.

This is very nice, but the problem is in the word ‘individual’. Nice as they are for the children, they are a nightmare for the school management as they are so easy to lose after being borrowed for wedding funerals and the other innumerable ceremonies that take place in villages.   This decision taken unilaterally by UNICEF presumably related to some child-friendly policy is typical of how donors may sometimes completely control the agenda even when the reality we have to live is different.

It could be that they are trying to force schools to provide a seat for every child, but a double bench can provide room for three in a crush whereas a chair cannot.

Barry Sesnan

barrysbook.blogspot.com  ..     ebrealitycheck.blogspot.com
barrysesnan.site.voila.fr

Voluntarism

Spurred by a UNHCR remark some years ago that: Payment can destroy the sense of responsibility that refugees feel for their welfare.  I wrote the following

I actually have a fairly jaded attitude to voluntarism in Africa just now, not about work-camps, joint seminars etc. but trying to get labour for free as we often do in refugee camps. It is complex and coloured by various experiences, including in some work I am doing in Congo just now, where the international NGO pays almost nothing for teachers getting training in the afternoons on the grounds that ‘that is the government’s job’.  Since the government doesn’t even get round to paying them a salary, displacing themselves to be trained (with no guarantee of promotion at the end of it – also the government’s job) involves the teachers in significant costs (not able to farm, fish etc on those days).  

Why, firstly, asking mostly poor Africans to volunteer when they have no job, no ‘cushion’, no alternative is dubious I feel.  In refugee camps teachers and young people are asked to volunteer to get the schools going, and that is fine …. For a year. Then they also have the right to earn some money for their work.  Secondly, there is a world of difference between the first world volunteer and the third world volunteer. 

In another aspect of the same thing, when I was doing HIV/AIDS prevention work in Congo in UNICEF one of our partner NGOs (In this case the partnership was like that I have with my small dog who hangs around the table wagging his tale waiting for me to throw him something) rightly identified the bicycle taxi boys as good carriers of the prevention message to youth (like hairdressers and rap singers, for example) and told them to come for five afternoons’ training.

They refused on the grounds that

a) they were being given nothing to compensate for the income they would lose and

b) the NGO was full of fat people who were obviously getting ‘something’ from UNICEF which they were not passing on. 

They were right of course.

(I told them to make themselves into a suitable partner we could deal with directly! Thus indirectly encouraging that proliferation of NGOs that is so difficult to handle).

Barry Sesnan

barrysbook.blogspot.com  ..     ebrealitycheck.blogspot.com
barrysesnan.site.voila.fr

“5^th November, already 2 days past my 60^th birthday.  My current employers add 5 days to my annual leave immediately, and I think I am now entitled to a free bus pass in London. 

Last night a small dinner I gave in the flat  for friends and colleagues turned into a little birthday party as a cake was suddenly presented with, discreetly, one candle and several little union jacks! 

After the staff had also burst out singing Happy Birthday at lunch on Friday I felt really quite moved.

Where I was in 1977 (Mubi, Nigeria ), 1987 Khartoum,  1997 UK

Barry Sesnan

barrysbook.blogspot.com  ..     ebrealitycheck.blogspot.com
barrysesnan.site.voila.fr

Recent flight from Abidjan to Entebbe via Douala and Nairobi. Economy class.  Passengers usually nervous on this one because of the dreadful May crash at Douala.   The cargo door flailed to close at Douala (Take off was to be 2300 local). We were told this, but then had to sit for about three hours until we were informed that it would probably be necessary for engineers to come from Nairobi, and then we would not be able to take off until 1600 local because of pilots' rest requirements.  

By 3 am we were in hotels, despite the efforts of the ground staff who only communicated when prompted and then initially only in English though most of the passengers were French speaking (Abidjan, Douala, get it?). In my case we all squeezed (about 20 of us) into a minibus for 14 (the authentic Nairobi matatu experience) because no one trusted that it would come back again.

We had all left the airport without passing through immigration so we were woken up at 4 am (assuming you had got to bed) to hand over our passports.  (When we got back tot he airport KQ had left them in one of their offices and expressed surprise that we had not known this (by telepathy?) before reaching the lounge!   The fact we reached the lounge without our passports was alarming from the security point of view also.

The engineers arrived early on a diverted KQ plane and the plane was apparently fixed early.  But we didn't go till 1600.    And then the departure was delayed because $100 vouchers were being given out one by one in the lounge and being filled in by hand by one person.   (There had been ten hours at least to fill out the vouchers).

Why could spare pilots not have come with the engineers? 

Then we arrived into Nairobi at 2230  (half an hour early or 18 hours late depending on your point of view) with ZERO information given on the plane before landing. The passengers nevertheless applauded on landing.

Then in transit only one hostess in attendance at the connections desk to deal with at least 100 passengers. Since at least 80% of the passengers were going beyond Nairobi and had missed their connections, why was there no information ready, announced, about what we were supposed to do? 

Simply preparing the new boarding cards before we arrived would not have been beyond possibility (and Ethiopian would certainly have done that). Even the broadest announcement on the plane that 'Dubai passengers will be leaving at 3 a.m, Guangzhou on Wednesday etc' would have reassured people that someone cared.

I accidentally discovered that the last Entebbe flight(timetabled for 22h)  had not left (engine trouble); I am not sure anyone else discovered it.  So, I was in Entebbe at 2 am only 27 hours after take off.  

I am familiar with KQ, speak English French and Swahili and could even partially understand the pilot who sparingly gave out (accurate but insufficient) information in a voice so gruff and clipped that most native speakers would not understand it. Though there was French speaking steward on board no effort was made to translate. 

Most other people had no idea what was going on. 

The good side? 

1) Well, in the morning the ground staff in Douala were a bit more informative and the hotel had a clear letter telling us what would happen (and sensibly they asked the hotel to get us to the airport).  The hotel was of good quality (but virtually impossible to get water at that time, and then I had to pay for it). 

2) The man on the gate in Nairobi got me onto the Entebbe flight(once I discovered it had not left) without fuss, and was really trying to help.

3) My bag which understandably didn't make the Entebbe flight was well handled and I was called up to collect it (on Sunday they don't deliver). No problem for me as I live near the airport, a real problem if I didn't). 

And before all that the office staff in Abidjan were good and very helpful (they usually are).

Does anyone from KQ read this site?  Don't they realise how much easier everything would be if they were more communicative at all stages? Their staff need training in sensitivity - when we realised our passports were elsewhere we were told 'not to worry', but of course you worry.  if you are experienced you worry even more!  

When do I qualify?

http://www.theelders.org/elders/

I wonder if Mary Robinson is that happy to have become an elder!

Barry Sesnan

barrysbook.blogspot.com  ..     ebrealitycheck.blogspot.com
barrysesnan.site.voila.fr

RE:

You are Oga, 

Here they 'dress' you in local garb when you take part in a function. We were launching our new Passerelle class project to get children back into school in the middle of the former war zone.    The tribe is 'Wê'   related to the Kru of Liberia and found in the west of Cote d'Ivoire. 

Barry Sesnan

barrysbook.blogspot.com  ..     ebrealitycheck.blogspot.com

barrysesnan.site.voila.fr

><< BARRYWechief.jpg >>

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FREE pop-up blocking with the new MSN Toolbar MSN Toolbar Get it now!

The ABC of countries
Many of you know I categorise countries into

• A (lived there, set up a house - Uganda twice, Congo,
• Nigeria, Ghana, Sudan twice, Somalia, Kenya, now Ivory Coast)
• B (long or frequent stays),
• C (many visits),
• D (one main visit),
• E (Just a night), e.g. Morocco
• F (just a stop over), e.g. Cyprus
• G (seen from across a river or a border Publish Postor from a boat - not a plane) e.g Gambia, Angola, Eritrea.

Does your project show such «Clear sense of purpose?

Are your project's indicators of achievement so measurable?

Have you organised your logistics so well?

Are you as gender sensitive as these project staff?

Do all your key players look in the same direction?

Do you care for your environment as these people do?

Does your project give a meaningful role to other species irrespective of their colour, creed or possible sexual orientation?

If your projects do not measure up to these standards contact:

--
Posted By Barry to Barry's book on 9/27/2007 06:44:00 AM

Here they ‘dress’ you in local garb when you take part in a function. We were launching our new Passerelle class project to get children back into school in the middle of the former war zone. The tribe is ‘Wê’ related to the Kru of Liberia and found in the west of Cote d’Ivoire.

Barry Sesnan

barrysbook.blogspot.com .. ebrealitycheck.blogspot.com
barrysesnan.site.voila.fr

And the Chicken played the Chorale

The businessman is having his shoes shined by a cheerful teenage boy by the roadside. The mobile phone rings. The big man searches his suit pockets and briefcase but it is the boy who whips his phone out of his back pocket and, without missing a brush stroke, makes an appointment later in the day to shine his caller’s shoes.

This advertisement on Uganda television delighted everyone as they identified with the youth’s cheerfulness and ambition and also realised how their assumptions had been challenged. Mobile phones were now not for the elite alone but for everyone.

Other advertisements showed children calling grandma in the village, and later in very funny vignettes, instantly recognisable characters: the typical ‘briefcase’ businessman with a phone at each ear whose third phone then rings, the woman in the village who instinctively kneels according to her culture when her husband rings, the hairdresser who absently-minded pours water over her client’s face while talking to her boyfriend on the mobile.

Phones for the people

By 2000 when the shoe-shine boy advert aired, the South African company MTN had smashed the monopoly of the existing mobile company, which had priced its phones and services out of the reach of more than a handful of the elite. Now, for less than $100 you could have a phone on the spot, sold by trained salesgirls and boys who were polite to you, cheerfully explained how it worked and you didn’t even have to give your name or fill in a form.

What a contrast with the situation before, when to get a telephone you had to fill in a four-page form with a photograph, get counter-signatures from four levels of local government and then wait and wait, even if you had agreed to give a little something to the installation engineer. In 1990 Uganda had fewer than 1000 business and domestic phones with access outside East Africa. In 2006 there were more than a million ‘mobiles’, all capable of calling anyone in the world.

People often choose communication over other items. A survey that rattled the beer companies in Uganda asked people in the ubiquitous chicken, pork and beer roadside joints what they would buy if they had only $5 left at the end of the evening. The majority chose a phone card over more beer, something which also had real implications for the economy as all the phone card revenue leaves the country, since the phone companies are basically foreign, whereas the beer at least is brewed in Uganda.

It is astonishing how people in ‘officially’ poor countries afford phones, or at least phone calls. Throughout Africa used phone cards litter the streets, even in very ‘deprived’ quarters. I recall being at a seminar in Kinshasa where someone challenged some of the assumptions of NGOs by asking how come, if people were so poor, even the poorer quartiers were littered with discarded phone cards. The person posing the question became pretty unpopular, confirming once again that one should never challenge the humanitarian agencies’ premise that the people are poor!

Of course the cards do not indicate that everyone has a phone. People load up other people’s phones with units they have bought, so they can use them. There are commercial phone providers who sit by the road side with a mobile and live on the tiny excess they charge you to call on their phone. In Uganda one of the companies made its service even better by having ‘fixed mobiles’ that used the mobile network but were in a shop or on a little table. There are also some extra-mobile mobiles rigged up in a sort of booth on the back of a bicycle and circulating the markets. As you would shout Boda! to get a cyclist-taximan to come to pick you up, you shout Phone! and it cycles in a leisurely manner towards you.

When mobile companies started billing in seconds, rather than whole minutes, there was a sudden explosion of roadside ‘simu ya jamii’ (family phones) where you bought a fixed number of seconds, typically in Kenya for 5 shillings (a sixteenth of a dollar). Just enough to say: ‘I am on my way home’ or ‘What colour did you want?’

People adapt to mobiles

Cultural habits have had to adapt as mobile phones have spawned a new culture. Most people are on pre-paid (pay-as-you-go). This means you yourself have paid for your minutes, or seconds, and you are going to treasure them. This is not your boss’s office line which you could use all day.

Gone now are the long Luganda greetings I learned, which start as you spy your friend coming towards you along the village path with ‘Osibye otyanno … bulungi ssebo … mmm …. Eeee …. Mmmm …’ and continuing politely after you have exchanged the formal news (always ‘good’ of course) about family, cattle, crops and so on.

That costs you UNITS which you have paid for. Now, the maximum you can spare is ‘ki?’ or ‘oli okya?’ [Hi! How is it?].

You can talk at length when someone else is paying, but politeness has a battle with economy when you have called someone senior like your father. Quite often I find the person who called me trying to find a quick and polite way to put an end to my ramblings, because he is paying for the call. Occasionally they just cut you off. After all, batteries are always going dead; it’s an excuse everyone has used.

In Congo the old chunky phones displayed LOBATT a word now used universally there to describe any temporary loss of powers. Yes, that too.

It is noticeable how fast people can talk when it is costing them money! The phone companies must make more money if people have to talk in French or English because they are spoken much slower. With Swahili, Lingala or pidgin or a mother-tongue, it goes much, much faster. The Somalis may well hold the record after years of experience on short-wave radios, the only communication after the state collapsed. This has also lead them to treat the mobile more like a megaphone, shouting into them irrespective of the company they are in.

Everyone learns the subtleties of each network’s tariffs and they learn to count the time in their heads. The traditional African good memory kicks in here also. There is an uncanny ability to remember huge strings of numbers, even though the phone has a memory. [I am hard put to remember my own number, and am quite embarrassed by this; I just ask the person nearest me what my number is, should I actually need to know.]

Mobiles and youth

It is with Africa’s youth, just like everywhere, that the mobile has become a central part of culture. A boy without a phone, like the Somali youth without a gun, is, in his own eyes, nothing. It is the single most desirable object from the age of 12 up.

What city girl will go out with a boy if he isn’t able to give her a phone, or if she has one already, at least be pretty generous with phone cards?

How do you juggle your life these days, especially your love life, without a phone? To people who are AM (ante-mobile), it probably seems as though it was easier before the mobile phone but the phone makes it more exciting, and you have to be on your toes! There is the decision about whether to let the person you called know your number, because she might not answer when she sees your number. There is also beeping.

Beeping

Beeping or flashing when you don’t have units is another specific exercise. The fine art of ringing someone and cutting off before he answers is called beeping or flashing. It is done to save money. Some, usually students, who are always broke, keep just enough credit in the phone so they can beep. A student who is in boarding school and has run out of money will count on his mother, at least, to call her back when she beeps. She might well text you some phone credit as well, another art which is finely developed.

Between boy and girl it can be a trial of emotions. Will he call back? Will she just beep back? If it is part of an emotional game it has to be played carefully. Has he rejected you or he also simply doesn’t have units?

sms

Then there is the SMS, much cheaper than a call, and bearing close resemblance to the telegram in that it is necessary to be sparing with words. Look carefully as you sit in a seminar or long meeting and you’ll see that a few people are twiddling their fingers just below the facilitator’s line of sight. These are the inveterate texters catching up on various things, running their offices or their social life. I am one of them and make no apology for it. SMS has given everyone the freedom to multi-task, to use the long periods of boredom while waiting for something to happen or to finish, to send messages all over the world. I try to send messages in good English or French, but most people don’t bother, especially if they have not mastered predictive texting. Even those of us who think we have mastered it are capable of sending off ‘on fire’ instead of ’no fire’ or ‘me’ instead of ‘of’.

The fad for text language with its abbreviations (‘w8 4 me’) can make for problems when the basic knowledge of the language already shaky anyway, but we manage to understand most of the time.

SMS are international and have greatly added to the irritation of the diaspora, illegal migrant or otherwise, in Europe and North America as their family members back at home text them incessantly asking them to send money.

The BBC has greatly increased participation in its Africa service programmes with the use of SMS and so has East African TV which runs text greetings along the bottom of the screen. At a more personal level, last Christmas I had invited a few friends for dinner but the person who was to cook it was running late on a bus coming back from Nairobi. We prepared everything under his text instructions until he swept in with his backpack, two hours before the guests were to arrive and took over.

Inventiveness and adaptability

Mobile phones also give full play to the inventiveness and enterprise of youth. You can buy a cheap ‘locked’ telephone on a contract in London and have it unlocked anywhere in Africa for about $20. Local companies tried to restrict buyers with contracts but no one was having any of it. People wanted to use the freedom of choosing their own tariffs; having two phones (or more likely two SIM cards) is common.

All sorts of accessories are on sale everywhere from new ‘faces’ to flashing phone covers, to different types of earphone. As so often in Africa you can keep something going so much longer than you can in Europe (though bad handling and the climate may also hasten their eventual demise – it is astonishing how many people sit on their phones, or wash them in their shirts, or lose them in the pit latrine).

Every element of a call can be rented or subcontracted. You can pay to have your phone charged in towns that have no electricity. You go for a swim and the lifeguard will put your phone somewhere with everyone else’s and tell you when it rings.

In villages that are just beyond the coverage of the local transmitter entrepreneurs build towers to catch the signal and charge you to climb up. For a year or so the refugee camps at Adjumani were not in the reception zone of any of the companies, except for one tiny patch at one end of the airstrip, and on one termite mound near town where you could make and receive calls. One of the snapshots I never took, to my regret, is of people lining up to climb the termite mound to make calls!

Phones and domination

One of the major indications of the power Rwanda held over Eastern Congo was when their sole mobile company put up huge masts on the hills of the two border towns leading into Congo, providing mobile service to Goma and Bukavu, but much more importantly to their troops deep inside Congo. Rwandacell became a symbol in the conflict with people demonstrating against Rwanda’s hegemony by tearing up their phone cards (after using them of course) to protest Tutsi domination of Eastern Congo.

Generally speaking only a government can do that. Any overflow to another country is usually accidental, though people will take advantage of price differentials. The fact that most phones in the world are GSM and use the same style of SIM card also assists when moving from one country to another. At one time I carried as many as 8 SIM cards around as I travelled. Roaming in Africa is still not common and when it exists it is very expensive.

Now in Southern Sudan

We were all left to wonder then when the new SPLM authorities in South Sudan approved a non-GSM system in Rumbek and Yei. Was it a deliberate continuation of the rebels’ long-standing, and in the days of satellites, meaningless policy of restricting communication, or was it just a mistake? Or more likely, had that entrepreneur got to the right official first?

Whatever it is, South Sudan will go through the same phases as every other country. People will answer their phones in seminars, forget to put them on ‘silent’, use their seniority to get away with being very rude, answering all phones whenever they ring. And, interestingly, this will all sort itself out in a few months. Now it’s actually fairly rare to hear a phone ring in company; most people put them on ‘vibrate’.

Its own set of jokes

The mobile has also spawned its own stories and urban myths; inevitably, given its close connection with all aspects of social life.

Finding your phone

A man noticed that his phone had disappeared while he was having beer and roast chicken in one of the ubiquitous ‘joints’ around Kampala. When you ‘miss’ your phone you call it immediately from another phone and it will ring, unless it has been stolen and the thief has turned it off. In this case it rang quite near, the classical piece he had chosen. In fact, the Ode to Joy.

But where was it coming from? Triangulating in, they reached the chicken boy’s barbecue grill, and there it was, inside one of the cooked chickens waiting to be sold. The boy had lifted the phone with some dirty plates and stuffed it into the chicken.

There were endless reports of phones going off in embarrassing places, like the phone of your friend ringing in your own marital bedroom when you call him. But then Charles and Diana had a bit of a problem like that when Last Number Redial first started.

The phone and the boss

When I was head of the UNICEF sub-office in Goma I was told that Carol Bellamy the head of the agency was coming for 36 hours. Now, heads of UNICEF offices quail at such a visit, which could only be likened to a tsunami coming, and caused at least as much stress as the day a few months later the town was sliced in two by a lava flow.

We had the usual contradictory advance programmes, the usual confusing instructions and of course we more or less stopped everything for the visit. Fellow victims e-mailed me from all over the world giving me advice. One told me: never, ever, let her be separated from her luggage.

Just before the visit I got an e-mail from her office asking me to make sure that a phone would be available for her and to send the number. This I did and added a couple of flippant remarks confirming that it would have international access and that she could call ‘Tallahassee, Schenectady and ..’ without problems’. When I next checked my e-mail there was a flood of messages from top to bottom of the UNICEF hierarchy. I hadn’t noticed that my reply had been automatically copied to Carol herself. Though there was nothing but a few flippant words I was given to understand that I would probably be hung, drawn and quartered, by my own boss first and then by everyone else. I was guilty of lese-majesté.

The day dawned, she arrived on time. My boss, Martin Mogwanja, from Kinshasa came first out of the executive jet, and promptly fell down the steps, injuring his knee. Then, Bill, the security officer who came with them from Kinshasa, without consulting anyone, re-organised the convoy we had set up so carefully. In one of those awful inevitabilities her luggage went to the wrong hotel, because of this re-organisation of the convoy. As Martin sat nursing his knee, and I tried to make small talk while trying to solve the luggage problem on the mobile glued to my ear, I felt my last days had come.

Well, the luggage arrived, the visit went well, despite Carole deciding on our field trip to distribute the lunch sandwiches herself on the plane back from Lake Albert, so I had to run round retrieving the pork ones from the Muslims.

She was interested, very well-informed and pleasant, reserving strong remarks (she can limit her vocabulary to very few short pungent words) for deserving targets. Then having changed in my office for the next lap, she handed me back the phone and laughed and said, well, I didn’t call Tallahassee!

An anti-poverty device

It was not long before Ugandans discovered the business and marketing advantages of mobiles and developed many inventive uses for them. Today an NGO called Foodnet provides national commodity prices by SMS and has wiped out exploitative middlemen by letting the farmer know directly what today’s price for rice, or matooke (cooking banana), or sim-sim is in the main towns.

On the lakes fishermen catch the huge Nile perch, phone up a Kampala hotel from their dugout canoe, bargain and sell it, and then call their cooperative to have a pick-up van with ice waiting at the landing site to rush it to the hotel before lunch. None of this was possible before; perishable commodities were sold for next to nothing to rapacious middlemen.

Whatever you call it (Mobairu, portable, mobailo, cellullaire for starters) the mobile phone is a true anti-poverty device. The fixed and clunky Internet cannot yet fulfil this role.

Opening up the political space, uniting the people

The mobile phone had an astounding effect in the Congo after the country reunified in 2003. People who had lost contact for years could talk to each other. Just as when the phones started again in Goma (courtesy of those huge Rwanda towers) the day after the volcanic eruption people could call across the hot lava to find out what had happened to their house or the rest of the family, people in Bukavu or Kisangani could call their relatives in Kinshasa or Lubumbashi and begin to catch up with their news.

There was another side. In Bunia the militias and their warlords and their representatives in Kinshasa also used the phones to communicate. I wondered sometimes if the occasional cutting off of phone service was to prevent this but over my time there I saw no evidence that the warlords’ phones were being tapped either by the government or by UN forces, though this would have been a sensible thing to do.

In Uganda Joseph Kony, the rebel leader, used to call FM radio phone-in programmes from the bush. It was this that made people realise that the government was not very serious about capturing him, since even if they could not triangulate to find him the should certainly be able to detect whatever generator he was using in the bush to charge the phones.

Drama at the VIP lounge

One day in Uganda I was in a communal taxi coming back from giving lectures at Nkumba University. There was a sudden excitement among the rest of the passengers. They were listening to one of the numerous FM radios which was relaying the voice of someone calling excitedly in. He was calling from the VIP lounge at the airport, not far from where we were. He was an ordinary citizen (OK, not quite, as he was in the VIP lounge) who was witnessing the attempted arrest, or kidnap, by plain-clothes men of a politician who had just defected from the ruling party to join the not-quite-legal opposition.

The breathless reporting by him and others was blow by blow as the target resisted arrest; at one point the German Ambassador intervened and sat on the politician to try to prevent him being carried away. He was finally taken away on some spurious grounds, but the government had been extremely embarrassed and the man was released not long after. The mobile phone and the FM radio had triumphed. So had democracy.

================================================

Appendix

E-mail or mobile?

The internet spread slowly across Africa at the same time as the mobile was spreading by leaps and bounds. By 2000 most towns had an internet café (in fact ‘café’ now means Internet Café in several countries). When you looked into the café what did you see? Nine young men to one woman. Many doing e-mail, more consulting pornographic sites, and a very few looking anything else up. Now it is changing, in the big cities, and curiously, in Somalia, there are more women, and certain types of business research goes on, like into the sale of second-hand cars from Japan or Dubai.

Many more people are using e-mail, or like the heavily veiled girls you see in Somali internet cafés, instant messaging. Yet, compared to the mobile phone the internet has several disadvantages, starting with the problems of setting it up, maintaining an electricity supply and paying for the line.

I recently watched a person who was just learning about the Internet and was keen to get on line, stumble over the ten to twelve necessary steps from switching on the computer, clicking on icons, through Windows, passwords and other paraphernalia. Even when he reached his e-mail he was completely fazed by the task of sorting out the adverts from the text. Compare this with the way the mobile phone has developed: no wires, simple buttons, portability and privacy.

In Mozambique in 2000, an Australian benevolent foundation connected a teacher’s training college to the Internet. There were three computers, one was in the principal’s office and always worked but no one else had access to it.

One was in the common room. It was usually broken down.

There was one in the library ‘for reference’. A quick glance round the library showed that there was no reference culture in the college. The book ‘selection’ was a set of random donations, not even all in Portuguese. The dusty books, even the encyclopaedias, were virtually never used because the teaching style did not require any independent research. For the library, read Internet.

By contrast, the mobile phone is simple and elegant. You carry it in your hand; it’s ready to work immediately, and in the form of SMS it serves as a sort of simple e-mail. A quick look anywhere in Africa will show that it is the mobile phone which is the really revolutionary device, ensuring a massive flow of information between individuals, saving time and increasing individuals’ efficiency, where transport is poor and mass media slow and not always accurate.

The mobile phone is a precision instrument compared to the blunt tool of the Internet.

Barry Sesnan

Entebbe 2006

Went to bed too early last night after a diet busting schwarma and beer, following a long day on the project budget ... so I am up very early at the time I like best, the early African morning, before dawn. The Mosques haven't woken up yet, though Islamic stations dominate the middle of the FM spectrum in this city which on the surface is very catholic and middle class. A lot of the population is Muslim though and it's Ramadan so the 'prayer is better than sleep' first call to prayer will soon start. The one and only cock in this very urban area crows all night - the street lights confuse him, I guess (yes they work here). Could be there are no hens around also.

At this pre-dawn time even Abidjan pauses for a moment, at least on weekdays, only the odd security guy on his motor bike checking out the night guards. Once again you wonder how things develop differently in different countries. In all the great Lakes cities motor bikes (the boda boda) are the principal taxi system - as they were years ago in South eastern Nigeria . Only Kigali, run as it is by control freaks, has managed to ban bodas from the city centre .

Here, like in Nairobi, they hardly exist, but sensibly the security companies use them a lot, something I never saw in Kampala, for instance where they use beat-up old pick-ups. Liek in many countries, security guard is a big job opportunity here, and like the guys who pack and carry your shopping at the supermarket, have to be seen like that, just doijng a job to get a crust. Just as the boda riders in Uganda (90,000 youth who would otherwise be unemployed and at a loose end) it is a way to give a respectable, if small, job.

Guards here ('vigils') almost all wear yellow uniform tops like Congolese traffic police. Traffic police and all militias, gendarmes, CRS etc all wear dark khaki and black uniforms making them almost invisible at night, perfect for popping out in front of you and claiming you have been caught on 'radar', or that you ran a red light (yes, they work too). And when they fine you they give you a receipt, if you insist, 'Contravention'. [There are also huge red light districts, but that's another story].

Giving the BBC a rest for the moment, though noting that they have finally discovered the value of mobile phones and have programmes full of their advantage in Africa (I am sure you have read my article on that . If not, it follows). The BBC has been a bit slow on that and their commentator, assuming that anything that isn't the latest GP 99 with bells and knobs must be useless, has to be reassured by a calm-sounding Ghanaian that actually people manage fine on GSM and have thought of a thousand ways to use it. A good contrast to the frustrating news items that say 'and you can get more on this topic on our website' - yes, of course, in Guehebly village here in Cote d'Ivoire, with no electricity, in a refugee camp in N Uganda, or simply when I am taking a bucket bath in the fence 'bathroom' behind the hut where I was living in Juba, I can just get onto the Internet ... I can't even do that in the bath at home. Sorry, one of my hobby-horses!

Listening to an FM which is on all the time, very clear signal with just the right combination of music for me, but which never seems to identify itself. So far they have played the full 'Sweet Mother' the song by Nico Mbarga which is just as iconic in West Africa as Malaika is elsewhere, a couple of jazzy French songs, a kind of Alpha Blondy (Ivorian after all), something pop from Senegal less rarefied than Youssouff Ndour, and a couple of pop arias from opera, and a great Arab/French rap track . I have the impression of someone also sitting up late/early like me just playing what he likes for my delectation. I might even be the only one listening.

In an hour the sun will rise and I will go for an early morning swim ... and read up things I have been leaving to an idle moment. Then go to an urban school to witness the launching of a back to school for girls campaign ... ironical in the context that getting to school here depends on having the right documentation, which itself depends on decisions on identity ... which have been the major cause of the civil war. So the simple task (which is part of my job also) of getting children into school has huge political implications which have often led to violence as locals perceive 'foreigners' trying to take over and 'foreigners (often just from another part of the country) maintain that they are no longer foreign after several generations ...

And the photo above ... well, to do with back to school also. In a lot of Africa you have to be able to touch your other ear over the top of your head to be deemd edold enough to go to school. Many years ago, in Nigeria and other countries on leaving primary, big boys were sent to teachers' college and small onces to secondary school. And in Nigeria there was a hea dof a training college who inisited that he had to check the boys age by having then drop their trousers for him so he could verify that puberty had happeened. But that's another story.

It looks like the time has come, after nearly five months in this job and this country to do a little update and to note that life continues to have its odd side.

I have travelled a little, one journey to Norway via UK, and another for a few days leave in Uganda (and by accident, not design, two extra nights in Nairobi, courtesy of Kenya Airways).

I was in UK for a couple of days on my way to and from Norway, where I had a week learning about the organisation. . Oslo was so nice, though, as recently confirmed, Oslo remains a very expensive city. It was the middle of summer and in the evenings I used the 'rover' travel tickets to the fullest to see different parts of the city.

Jeffrey now in Sweden, came by train to see me and to look for a job in Oslo. He says that jobs are there (and he now speaks some Swedish, and seems not to be fazed by Norwegian), but feels that he needs to get a Swedish or Norwegian driving licence.

By contrast, the days in Britain which 'bracketed' my visit to Norway were busy and rather taxing. Despite quite a lot of planning I had to sleep on the floor of both my sister's house when the local hotel did not honour my booking (not at all convenient to her as she was just a couple of weeks off having baby Rose) and my mother's flat (now sold but then without beds).

I had a nostalgic weekedn in Edinburgh with a friend, found they had knocked down my former secondary school (and I had no idea!), but that Edinburgh had totally changed into a confident, not-drunk-late at night capital. However, I still managed to get abused at a bus stop for being English (and for pointing out to my friend who had read the Da Vinci Code, that you could get a bus to Roslin. I hadn't known that the Da Vinci Code was a conspiracy to enable the English to control Scotland's heritage, but now I do.

In Edinburgh, it started raining, and then I had the nightmare the next day of trying to leave for London on the 8 am train, finally leaving at 10 and getting in 5 HOURS LATE at 5.30 pm, because of heavy flooding.

I was privileged to hear one of the most bizarre announcements I have ever heard in my life when we had been stuck at Newark station for an hour. The guard first informed us that it was highly unlikely that we would make it to London at all and that we should get off and start going back home again (despite having just announced that all lines ahead were closed, so clearly no trains were going north either).

Then in a masterpiece of communication he informed us over the loudspeakers that the train was TOO HEAVY and that some of us would have to get off. However, as he gave us no idea how any individual would decide if he or she should get off, of course no one moved. He changed it to ‘100 had to get off’. Still no guideline on who. Then he got down to fifty. At no point did he say anything like: 'Everyone standing' or all teenagers' or everyone with a red shirt. .

Martin had barely finished his Masters in Manchester than he was off to ASngola towork for Mines Action Group, thus giving me (eventually) a chance to visit Angola (I insisted on an invitaton before I would give him a reference).

Ebrahim grdauated with his diploma in journalism, Richard went back to South Africa to finish (we hope) the pilot's course (which turns out to be somethingof a scam in financial terms; it seems that the course is getting longer and longer, while he would have finished this stage long ago if he had stayed in Nairobi. I have noticed this tendency before in South Africa, to squeeze out every last penny.

Annie had a baby. And so did another Annie in Bunia.

A report on the project I ran in Ituri came out from the Norwegian donors, confirming several of my positions on management, which had led to quite a lot of argument between me and UNDP Kinshasa.

Here, I was robbed of both my phones in less than a minute by a smooth artist who rang the bell, swept into the flat and out again in less than a minue, pretending to have thought it was her brother's flat. Light skin (meant I hesitated briefly in challenging her (to my shame), large African dress hid what she was doing beside the table. very audaciaous, very professional. I was robbed at gunpoint here in 2003 so this was slightly better I suppose.

Our main project work is some hours drive from the capital, and in this phase of launching the project, I am travelling a lot. Much by helicopter. Landing at wrong airporrt reminder about Catholic and protestant airports in Dungu.

I live in a flat in Abidjan 9soemtimes in this early phase, I seem to be here only at weekends). It would be nice to have a house and garde, because I have discovered that peple have mongooses as pets. I would really like one.

Ssesse weekend

Here in CI, I trundle on. It’s a bit like Somalia in that the crisis is totally man made and could be solved politically in a day if any one was really willing. This was a truly prosperous and well organised country (Abidjan still is – it has more traffic lights, all working than the whole of the rest of Africa put together, huge, I mean huge Lebanese run French supermarkets). Every main village in the whole country (yes, right to the edges) has electricity, street lighting, a well built school etc), but it has politically created ethnic divisions that didn’t matter at all when they were prosperous, and a distinction between ALLOGENES (really foreign foreigners like Burkinabe labourers, drivers, cooks, nannies – a true Abidjanais doesn’t do a stroke of work, like a Khartoum Arab) . ALLOCHTONES (people from the north working in the cocoa plantations in the south who foolishly thought because they were in their own country that they had gained some rights to land etc) and AUTOCHTONES (native natives ‘wha’s like us?’) who massacre the former every so often.

Travel woes are not just in Britain of course. several of my friends trying to either visit me here (from Accra), travel within the country, or in the case of Tim’s friend Samba trying to get back to Freetown through Guinea, all experience the most horrendous time at road blocks (barrages) which completely plague this country. militias, army, police, customs, vaccination, rebels, goverment all strangle the country.

Having said that it is well organised I must add that what they call ‘rackets’ (in French) , mainly consisting of shake-downs, protection money, heavy road blocks demanding huge sums so crossing the country can take two days (on perfect tarmac roads) and five times your bus ticket, are all pretty well organised too. Your average road block, even on the motorway, has militias, police, customs, health, market taxes and you have to get off your bus or out of your car and file past all of them, who all check your papers, and all demand something from you. The bigger bus companies try to simplify it by collecting money from you as they set off from Abidjan and trying to pay off the road blocks all at once. If you come from the Ghana border, you have to choose the right taxi. An ordinary one will take you all day, and you might end up getting forcibly vaccinated twice even if you have your yellow card in order. Or, a friendly policeman directs you to another one which just happens to belong to him, you pay twice the rate (or the real rate if you prefer to put it that way) and get whisked to Abidjan in three hours.

Not unique to here of course. In Mandera if you are a Somali Somali, you pay ten thousand to go to Nairobi and never get off the bus. If you are a Kenyan Somali you pay two thousand and are subject to humiliating checks all the way. You pays your money and takes your choice (or should that be the other way round?).

.

Of course in an NGO vehicle you get stopped a bit less (though not in the rebel north even if you have the two Laissez-passers necessary).

Nevertheless, I have chosen to fly when I can on the ONUCI (= UNMIS) and PAM (WFP) free flights. So lots of helicopters and surprise 15 minute visits to towns both north and south en route. Off today to the west to start the first bridging schools (that’s what my project is about) of accelerated education to get formerly displaced kids back into normal schools, though they are over age. A very NRC activity with certain Barry type flourishes! 700 kids to start with. Also an ethnic minefield, since, why were you displaced, why are you coming back? Why is NRC encouraging these people to come back? See above.

Finally, a friend of mine has written to say that e-mail messages are going into his sperm.

Will the Machine Stop?
E M Forster’s short story ‘The Machine Stops’, written in 1909, tells us about a future where, in effect, almost all human beings live their lives inside what we now call the Internet.
Every person on Earth lives alone in an identical room under the surface of the Earth, having collectively abandoned the surface and its messy ‘humanness’ for the predictability and comfort of what is, in all ways except name, a vast and universal hotel where all services, and all life’s needs, are delivered in the rooms. At a command, a bath rises from the floor or music plays or the enormous maintenance and repair system, out of human sight, and apparently now out of human control, responds.
Through a console (Forster’s word), each person in his hexagonal cell (think prison, as well as bee-hive) is in permanent communication with the rest of the world, by sound and vision, unless they choose to isolate themselves, by specific action, as the default position of this Internet is ‘On’. The main character, Vashti, ‘knew several thousand people’. Forster comments, ironically, ‘in certain directions human intercourse had advanced enormously’.
When the story starts, the manual for operating the room (and the console) has taken on the status of a Holy Book, just as the Machine also, in many minds, has become deified. Some people have even developed personal rituals and taboos surrounding the Book.
Physical travel now happens only rarely and with great reluctance; the door out of the cell has fallen into disuse for most people. A transport system of underground railcars and intercontinental rocket-planes survives, but the trains and planes often move empty. Only to fulfil ones reproductive duty (also organised by the Machine) does one travel any great distance and then only once or twice, and then only with permission mediated by the machine.
People, it seems, do recognise the existence of their mothers, but they rarely meet. Contact through the Machine is enough for most people, but not for Kuno, who has decided that he wants to meet Vashti who is his mother. He tells her he sees ‘something like you on the plate [screen], but I do not see you’. She goes to visit him across half the world but the visit is sterile and the journey disturbing.
People feel they are happy and it’s implied in the story that those very few dissatisfied are somehow dealt with, possibly exiled to the surface, where Kuno eventually also goes, through an ancient airlock, out of curiosity, to see the stars, and is briefly both poisoned and exhilarated by fresh air.
‘Ideas’ (might we now call them ‘memes’?) rule – and have to be ‘interesting’. They sweep in minutes round the world, just as quickly fading away. Vashti gives a ten-minute lecture on ‘Music in the Australian period’ ranging from the pre-Mongolian epoch to the ‘great outburst of song that followed the Chinese conquest’. She has an audience, she has a chat-room like response and then everyone’s interest sweeps to the next thing, which, it is certain, will be another commentary or second-hand recounting, but about nothing experienced first hand. Even as she flew over the Himalayas and the oceans she ‘got no ideas’, and closed the windows.

All is fine until … the machine stops. This happens slowly; images on the plate become fuzzier, sounds less sharp. The repair mechanism slows and finally the recycled atmosphere itself deteriorates.
The final scene in the story is of all the people stumbling out of their cells into the dark and barely used corridors as the atmosphere fails to refresh, lights dim, systems run down and then ‘the unexpected terror, silence’ replaces the permanent hum they had barely been aware of.

Reading ‘the Machine Stops’ again recently prompted me ask how right and prophetic E M Forster was. Are the roads we have followed and the world we now live in similar to what he predicted?
Certainly 97 years later, in 2006, we float in a sea of data and information of which a large amount is not accessible directly by our senses without tools or instruments. I can read a book or a print-out, but unaided I can’t read a CD or a flash disk, and now my new laptop can’t help me read a floppy disk, of which I still have quite a stock.
Like Vashti I can watch the FIFA World Cup, or something like it, in Germany and, yes, through various electronic devices I can communicate with huge numbers of people.
Yet, in 2006, it’s not really about slavery to computers. The computer is still more of a servant than a master to most people, though it can be alarming to consider how much autonomy we have given these servants, and how we have come to trust systems, like bank computers, electronic voting systems, air traffic control, or databases, or automated medical tests which are not ‘transparent’ to us.
In a recent general election in Uganda the whole national result passed from the constituencies through the laptop of one technician who had set up the national network. I know him, I believe I trust him but I am relieved that the ballot papers are publicly counted at the polling station at the end of the voting day before they are entered into the electronic system.
In a similar vein, it’s not in being confined to cell-like offices or inward-looking malls, or rooms without outside windows or the spread of tele-commuting. An outdoor life remains a desideratum in the West at least; sport, physical culture and tourism ensure that we don’t stay at home all the time and life in the open air is still available to most of the world’s population, albeit obligatory to many, like refugees and displaced people in Darfur.
It’s not in being restricted to fixed or limited means of communication. The portability of elegance of the mobile phone, a true thing of beauty, especially when compared to the clunkiness of the Internet on PCs, was not foreseen by Forster. The democratisation and personalisation of transport, whether Easyjet in Europe or buses in Africa, and the concept of mass tourism, were also not predicted by most writers of Forster’s day.
No, it is more about wondering how disconnected we are becoming from the sources of what keep us going, economically and physically, socially and intellectually. How many of us in the ‘developed world’ know where our power, our water or our food and, importantly, our information come from? Does it matter?
As the Millennium midnight approached I fantasised (as did Ray Bradbury in the fifties about the then nascent national telephone networks) that someone high up (in Microsoft?) might use a single switch – or virus -- which would take control of everything or switch us all off at once, a premise in not a small number of modern techno-thriller films.
Would the effect have been so devastating? Those who embrace intelligent fridges (that tell you when the milk goes sour and order new milk for you) and those who live at the top of a skyscraper would certainly have been affected, as I was in my eighth floor flat in Kinshasa when the power (which also supplied the water pumps) went off.
Some would be locked in or out by their electric security systems (don’t ever believe ‘fail safe’). Over-computerised medical machines might collapse with quite a lot of flat-lining. Quite a number would be turned away at their banks because ‘the lines to Bangalore are down’.
However, much of the world would be less affected. I am based in Entebbe on Lake Victoria, where because the lake level has fallen, we have electric power only every second day. I normally work in small towns in Eastern Congo and Southern Sudan (huge areas, by the way, not small corners of the world) both of which are recovering from war and isolation. These towns have no municipal water supply; if you want electricity you get a generator (with fuel at nearly £1 a litre).
Such areas would quite welcome the Machine, one would suspect (just as my A level literature students in Kenya thought that, given the hardships of rural life, Brave New World was a jolly good thing).
Since globalisation with its return of most complex economic activity to the developed world, even batteries for our radios which used to be made locally are imported, as are light bulbs and bicycles, so to that extent, we are in thrall to the world economy.
Our pastor in Sudan would tell you the same. He needs glasses to read (yes, also a ‘tool’ to access information!) and relies on well-wishers to send them to him from the west or outposts of the west like Nairobi or Johannesburg. The second hand computer that was donated is also languishing since there is no power supply. On the other hand mobile phones have been of immense use and they are slowly penetrating to the smaller towns. One simple example of their value has been a local organisation called Foodnet who send out the prices of commodities in the main city markets every morning, thus helping the rural farmer immensely by cutting out the middle man.
Since globalisation many things that were made here, like batteries, light bulbs and bicycles, along with the skills needed to make them have all disappeared -- along with some of our youth who believe they will do better in the west.
It’s not a rural idyll though. There is the issue of fuel which is imported, over long routes from the Middle East. The mobile phone has to be charged, the operating theatre needs air-conditioning, the newspaper needs to be printed so the generator needs fuel. Solar power has not lived up to its promise; it has never become cheap enough for ordinary people to use. The latest wind-up/solar radio, beloved of aid workers, costs 8 times as much as the little Chinese battery radios you can buy anywhere.
Then there is medicine. The internationals are trying to stop the local factories making generics. My own blood pressure tablets can cost ten times more if I can’t get generics. For people with AIDS the price difference is simply life or death.
In tropical Africa outdoor activity is as common as indoor activity. The open veranda or the garden is the best place to be in the early morning or evening. Here, we know exactly where our food, water and electricity come from. If the water does go off, we don’t just telephone an office to find out but we go along the water-pipe to the source or the leak, or ask the woman on the bicycle who passed there this morning if anyone is working on the pipe. Since mine is a world where the power does go off without warning and since I can make a very good estimate of my risk, I prepare. I keep extra water in the house, and torches and a lot of batteries. I make hard copies of everything. If my work is bringing in enough money I could have a small generator, or very expensive solar lighting.
Further, I usually have someone around in my house or my compound: a refugee student from a neighbouring war who does my garden for his college fees and so he can have a place with light where he can study in the evening. Another, as a night-guard when I live in the areas where human violence is a greater danger than that from animals, from car accidents or from bad drinking water. Indeed, visitors from the labour-deprived world, comment that I have a cook, implying that I exploit her; I counter that the only difference is that everything my cook does for me is visible, and this includes slaughtering the chicken for lunch. The exact same tasks are done for people in the west, but behind closed doors.
It is difficult to imagine the Machine stopping having quite the same effect on me and my neighbours.

Barry Sesnan, Goma 2002 and Entebbe 2006