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| Nairobi |
Nairobi is a good place to be an international
correspondent. There are regular flights to the nearest genocide, and there are
green lawns, tennis courts, good fawning service. You can get pork belly, and
you can hire an OK pastry chef called Elijah (surname forgotten) to work
in your kitchen for $300 a month.
If you work for one of the major newspapers, or television
and radio services, chances are you live in Nairobi or Johannesburg. To make
your work easier, you need, in your phone, the numbers of the country directors
of every European aid agency: Oxfam, Save the Children. To find these numbers
is not difficult: chances are these guys are your neighbours, your tennis
partners.
If your spouse has arrived in Kenya and does not have a
job, soon he or she will be fully networked and earning lots of
pounds/euros/dollars, making sure the babies of Africa are safe, making sure
the animals of Africa are kept safely away from Africans, making sure the
African woman is kept well-shielded from the African man, making sure the
genitals of Africa are swabbed, rubbered and raised into a place called
awareness. Because you are a good person, who believes in multiculturalism, and
that politicians are evil.
You are a child of the human rights age. A post-cold war
child. In this age, which has no ideology, brown and black places are flat
issues: how far from gay freedom is (fill in African country)? In this age, all
local knowledge is carried by aid organisations. These organisations speak
human rights, and because they do so, we know that they are good, objective and
truthful. So, if a foreign correspondent needs to know what exactly is going on
in Sudan, their weekly lunch with the Oxfamy guy will identify the most urgent
issues.
Since, in your world, big history died with the Berlin
wall, there is only little history left to report on Africa. Little history is
full of many small flares of wonderfulness and many small flares of utter
horribleness that occasionally rise in a flat and benign world: a little boy in
Malawi made his own radio. An actual radio. He has a good smile. Osama bin
Laden or one of his peeps bombed trains, planes and innocents – and you slept
safe that night, all of the flat world slept safe that night.
There are five or six places that have not been fully
pacified inside the vision of the world as run by the victors of the cold war:
North Korea, Gaddafi (that has been dealt with), Somalia, Afghanistan, the
women of Africa, and the poor poor people of China, slaving away under the most
terrible conditions doing confusing things like refusing to evolve into Europe.
Big places where history is still alive – like Russia, China, the Middle East –
are to be feared and demonised. Why can't the Egyptians vote for a nice, safe,
British-trained economist who once worked for the World Bank?
In the 80s, your newspaper probably had correspondents in
many African countries. Now there are two: west Africa, and east Africa (Horn).
Or one: Africa, based in Johannesburg. In the 80s, the world's future was not
secure. Some African countries were on one side of power, some on the other
side of power. They could not be ignored. As nobody had won, the big powers had
to fight for the hearts, minds and minerals of all. All an African president
needed to do was suggest that he was crossing over and have love and Smarties
dropped over his house by Nato planes. Margaret
Thatcher visited Zimbabwe. Robert loved her.
In 1991, Africa ceased to exist. The world was safe, and
the winners could now concentrate on being caring, speaking in aid language
bullet points.
If there was a new map, Africa would be divided into
three: 1) Tiny flares of horribleness – Mugabe, undemocratic, war, Somalia,
Congo; 2) Tiny flares of wonderfulness – Mandela, World Cup, safari.
Baby4Africa! A little NGO that does amazing things with black babies who squirm
happily in white saviours' hands because they were saved from an African war.
My favourites are clitoraid.com and Knickers 4 Africa – which
collects used panties for African women; 3) The rest. Let's call this the
"vast grassroots". This part of Africa is run by nameless warlords.
When the warlords fall, these places are run by grassroots organisations that
are funded by the EU and provide a good place to send gap year kids to help and
see giraffes at the same time. Grassroots Africa is good for backpacking
because it is the real Africa (no AK47s to bother you, no German package
tourists). The vast grassroots exists to sit and wait for agents of
sustainability (Europeans) to come and empower them.
But what cannot be said is that history came surging to
the present. Market capitalism is shaking, and all of a sudden the vast
grassroots has oil and copper, and willing, driven and ambitious hands. The
continent is ripe for new partnerships, new capital – new strong handshakes.
China is no angel – but we are, for them, an essential part of the way the
world will be. They are in it for their future, not ours; we are in with them
for our future. We are real to them, and we have a platform to talk.
It is not a surprise that, in these days, there is a vast
and growing new middle class across the continent: the British, American and
European media houses have lost us. Our own are booming, and we are finding
deals with CCTV (China) and al-Jazeera. We fly Emirates and Kenya Airways. We
make deals with those who see a common and vibrant future being a platform for
engagement.
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