roads of stone

This poster called as I walked from the station, reminding me that it’s time to wrap up my series on Kenya.

My visit last summer left me with a whole lot to say about the country, about Africa, and our attitudes to the continent and her people. I sat down to write, and the project found life of its own. Today I’ll outline some highlights, final thoughts and reflections.
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What can we do to help the people of Africa?

Should we visit, as tourists? Is it enlightenment, or voyeurism, when tour companies arrange sightseeing trips to the ghettoes of Nairobi?

The problems are so massive that it’s easy to admit defeat - to assume that if governments can’t sort the problems, then aid agencies and individuals don’t stand a chance.

I don’t share that view. There’s a lot we can do, and here are some suggestions.
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‘Say No to Corruption,’ read the badge on the immigration officer’s sleeve at Mombasa airport. Drawing our attention to the issue, right from the moment when we entered the country.

Kenya’s president from 1978 to 2002, Daniel arap Moi, was widely detested for corruption and political oppression. During his term, Kenya slipped from the 133rd to the 155th country in the world in economic prosperity. There might not be that many more countries.

Moi’s successor, Mwai Kibaki, was elected on an anti-corruption ticket – hence the badge campaign in Mombasa. But when I asked Kenyans during our visit what they thought of Kibaki – they were unanimous. ‘He’s the same as all the others,’ they said. ‘Corrupt, just like the rest of them.’

Yesterday’s declaration of Kibaki as victor in the Kenyan elections, despite a string of exit polls indicating firmly that he had lost to Raila Odinga, serves only to confirm that view.

Corruption. It might be Africa’s biggest problem. Certainly it’s the one trotted out by people who don’t want to help the continent. ‘There’s no point giving money, or aid,’ they say. ‘It’s unlikely to end up with those who need it.’

But this trip, I began to understand corruption, just a little. Not the kind of barefaced electoral swindle which threatens the whole practice of democracy, but rather the day-to-day variety. The siphoning off the top of just a little, and then more and more goods and money, so that finally they don’t arrive at all.

Why do people do it, and how can they so mindlessly deprive the needy ? That’s something I’d never come close to comprehending before.
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The loss of one parent is traumatic enough, for any child. The loss of both must be almost unbearable.

At home, it happens rarely. But in Kenya, it happens a whole lot more.

The reasons ? Simple enough. There isn’t enough food to go round. There’s little medical care to speak of. Just about everyone has to battle with malaria, and malnutrition. Sickness and diarrhoea from unclean water dispatch thousands more, every year.

But that’s only the surface of the problem. Because there’s a huge medical problem in Africa. AIDS. It’s killing millions here.
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Cool grey skies hang their high curtain above the savannah this morning. Scarcely any flash of colour. Just pale grassland, reaching as far as the eye can see, the horizon broken only by the gentle rise of distant hills and the lonely spread of a guardian acacia tree.

We rumble on, the tyres of the Land Rover clawing restlessly at the gravel. A shroud of pink is forming slowly in the east, where an invisible sun is lightening the underbelly of rippled cloud like some low energy lightbulb down a lonely corridor – weak and inept at first, then adding detail with every second.

Dawn on the Masai Mara – daybreak over one of the last wildernesses on Earth.
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STOP PRESS:

I’m very excited to report that this article has been selected as The Rising Blogger post of the day for 24th September 2007.

* * * * *
‘… so often I had felt irritated with people who arrived here, lived in “little Europe” or “little America” (in luxury hotels), and departed, bragging later that they had been to Africa, a place in reality they had never seen.’
Ryszard Kapuscinski - The Shadow of the Sun: My African Life.

* * * * *

The sun is low in an African sky and my subcutaneous fat and I are running down the road.

The Indian Ocean lies behind me now, and with it the easy lifestyle of the North. The beach hotel. Comfort. Contentment. Ignorance.

And in front of me ? Adventure, uncertainty. Guilt. A touch of fear.
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Africa.

The night air presses hot and thick outside the windows. The ancient bus groans and heaves itself another mile along the road. It’s four a.m.

A slim throw of light weaves ahead, as we slalom around endless potholes, the creaking chassis of the bus vibrating stiffly with every bounce of broken shocks.

And beyond our beam, it’s only darkness. As black as pitch – there is no distant orange streetlight glow here; no twinkling, reassuring glimmer of a distant homestead to break the gloom.

The rain is falling softly now, sluicing insistently down the windscreen. There are no wipers on the bus. But after a while, the drops somehow reassemble a filmy view of the road in front, and it doesn’t matter any more.

This is the main East African coastal highway – but don’t imagine any shiny roadsigns to announce that fact. No white lines, nor other traffic, either. Just deeply pitted, decaying tarmac. Puddles and blackness stretching far ahead.
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My dream had come true – a request to write a journal editorial about Africa, and it had arrived on the same day that Bono edited The Independent, too.

‘May I say without guile, I am as sick of messianic rock stars as the next man, woman or child.’ Those are Bono’s words from 16 May, but substitute ‘geologists’ for ‘rock stars’ (they’re almost synonyms, after all) and perhaps you’ll soon agree.

The African geology conference in London earlier this month placed the wonders of the continent firmly at centre stage. I’ve been fortunate to witness something of African geology from Cape Bon to the Cape of Good Hope, and my geological travels have revealed many highlights in between, from the souk in Tripoli and the coffin shop in Tema, Ghana (Planned City at the Centre of the World) to the snow-capped High Atlas peaks rising beyond Marrakech.

And one of my most formative experiences as a geologist and a politically-conscious human being was a summer spent on a diamond prospect in the darkest Karoo.

So what have the musings of a messianic rock star like Bono to do with life as an explorationist?
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