Nairobi put on a good show Saturday night at the annual MTV Africa Music Awards. There was more talent (Nigeria's D'Banj, Kenya's own Nameless), style (tight dresses, shiny sunglasses), celebrity (Akon, Wyclef Jean) than this city usually sees. I can't judge how it looked on TV but inside the hall it was a pretty great party.
As the host, Wyclef brought his A-game, a pleasant surprise to those of us accustomed to big stars coming to Africa and putting on lackluster performances (I'm talking about you, Ja Rule, and you, Mos Def). Wyclef even went topical, at one point bringing a chef onstage to talk about Kenya's current food crisis.
What's the one thing Kenya needs to stave off a food disaster, the chef was asked. "Seeds," he responded, as the crowd cheered. Kenyans need help growing more of their own food, he went on. They don't want handouts.
Then Wyclef looked into the camera and made a plea to viewers -- to donate to the World Food Program. The massive U.N. agency that provides food handouts by the megaton to crisis zones, and is sometimes accused of distorting local agricultural markets and criticized for buying the bulk of its food from American farmers. The exact opposite, I think, of what the chef intended.
Wyclef is a smart guy, thoughtful, deeply committed to the plight of his troubled homeland of Haiti. He got this one wrong. Then again, I'm not sure how many people in that rocking, booze-soaked concert hall noticed.
There was good news yesterday from UNICEF, which reported that the number of deaths worldwide of children under 5 years old has dropped by more than one-quarter since 1990. The new estimates show a 28 percent decline in under-5 mortality, from 90 deaths per 1000 live births in 1990, to 65 in 2008.
That means that about 8.8 million kids died before their fifth birthdays last year -- still tragically too many, but the lowest figure on record, as The New York Times noted.
How did it happen? UNICEF attributes the gains to simple, cheap interventions: widespread immunization campaigns against measles and other diseases, mosquito nets to prevent malaria, Vitamin A supplements. A rise in breastfeeding has also helped prevent diseases from drinking dirty water.
One of the best stories comes from impoverished Malawi, which had one of the highest rates of child mortality in the world. In 1990, one in five Malawian children didn't make it to their fifth birthday. Today that number has nearly halved.
The news isn't all good, however. In four countries, all in Africa, the under-5 mortality rate went up. Two are Chad and Congo, conflict-ridden and desperately poor places where governments provide almost no services and aid agencies struggle to keep up. A third is South Africa, which has a gigantic AIDS crisis fueled by a government that long denied HIV was a problem.
The fourth laggard, however, might surprise you. It's Kenya.
Why is Kenya on a list with war zones and derelict governments? One of the largest UN missions in the world is housed here, as is the largest US humanitarian office in sub-Saharan Africa. The political situation has deteriorated sharply, but even one year ago, according to statistics I compiled using a nifty tool on the UNICEF website, the child mortality figures here were depressing:
I haven't studied the issue enough to make more than a guess. But the answer has to lie somewhere between Nairobi's gleaming Westgate shopping center and the raggedy-clothed children who beg for pennies on the next block. There is plenty of money in Kenya, as the prices as Westgate's Benetton store will tell you. But the government seems utterly uninterested in the well being of its people, especially the poorest of the poor.
Yesterday the aid agency Oxfam released a damning report on urban poverty in Kenya. Nairobi’s population is expected to double to 6 million by 2025, yet three in five Nairobians live in slums, most without clean water or access to health care. "The Kenyan government has repeatedly
ignored the growing magnitude of the urban crisis," Oxfam wrote.
Children in Nairobi slums are now some of the least healthy in the country. In some parts of the city, infant mortality rates are double those of poor rural areas, and half of young children suffer from acute respiratory infections and stunted growth. Acute child malnutrition is a growing concern.
Plenty of cities in the world face massive inequality. Kenya's problems are not unique. Yet the country is moving backward compared with its poorer African neighbors. The fact that more children die in Kenya today than do in Tanzania, Ethiopia and impoverished Malawi is a stunning thing to contemplate.
The British arm of Doctors Without Borders (MSF UK) has launched a provocative new advertisement that's worth a look.
It's known simply as "Boy" and it began airing last month in movie theaters across the UK. It's a one-minute wide shot of a bullet-riddled concrete house where, as a series of short titles gradually informs us, an MSF doctor is treating a wailing 5-year-old boy whose family has just been the victim of a vicious militia attack.
Watch the ad here:
The spot was created by McCann Erickson, a major British advertising firm, which has worked for MSF pro bono since 1995. Two independent theater advertisers, Pearl and Dean and Digital Cinema Media, are running the ad for free before movies rated suitable for people older than 15.
Figuring the ad would spark debate, MSF UK has been open about wanting to do something different:
It is our attempt to make a deliberate move away from some
traditional charity advertising which can tend to focus on images of
starving children. We have deliberately left the child nameless and not identified the
country in order to protect his identity and to encourage viewers to
realise that violence of this sort occurs beyond just the borders of a
single country.
Some of the blogosphere's response has been scathing. The Road to the Horizon says that replicating a war zone in a studio and a faking the child's cries are in terribly bad taste, and Aid Watch says that it plays on tired stereotypes: "In the absence of detail, this 'no place' becomes 'every place' in Africa, the terrifying Dark Continent."
I can't agree with the first point; it's an advertisement, and a clearly stylized one at that, not a documentary. I take Aid Watch's point, although the broad generalities of the violence in the ad also occur in war zones from Sri Lanka to South America.
A friend of mine, who works for a different aid agency, wrote on Facebook:
Some
are saying it is 'aid porn'; I think it hits the mark. It shows what is
really happening in many war zones worldwide, the utter despair and
tragedy, ...and
yes, the need for funds for emergency response. I don't think, though,
that a similar ad would be appropriate for long-term development
fundraising.
There are generally two types of charity ads, and I salute MSF for
avoiding (1) the starving-baby cliche and (2) the
genre I loathe much more, which is We Save Dark-Skinned People. This kind of ad glorifies the aid worker for his courage and selflessness -- we have to live on PowerBars and get our clothes dirty, you know -- while making the tragedy itself a total afterthought. This is truly aid porn, and for a particularly galling example, check out MSF's own "t-shirt" ad.
After an advertising website, Osocio, called the new "Boy" spot "heartbreaking video with bad copy" and said "the call to action doesn’t have any connection with the rape and murder," dozens of people posted responses. One person said that MSF, rather than moving away from "traditional charity advertising" that features starving babies, have produced "an image of
a child suffering in an even more upsetting way than a photograph of a
starving child (by using audio)."
To me, however, "Boy" isn't as exploitative as the pictures of starving children, or as grotesquely worshipful of the aid workers -- precisely because we don't see faces. And for what MSF is trying to do here, which is raise money for its efforts worldwide, we don't need to know where this particular disaster is happening. The fact is, this kind of militia violence occurs in war zones across the world.
This kind of ad is designed to shock the viewer, and I have no doubt it'll be a slap in the face to a comfortable, well-fed moviegoer who just wanted to enjoy "Transformers" on a Saturday night. My main question about the ad is this: I don't know how much money you make by shaming middle-class people into thinking they're inadequate -- or at least not as brave as an aid worker: Yes, the doctors at MSF are heroes, as are thousands of charity workers around the world. No, you are not a hero. You are wrist deep into your tub of buttered popcorn.
In the end, the ad might be as offensive as it is stirring.
In elementary school, I loved playing the "Oregon Trail" computer game, which put you in the shoes of 19th century Americans setting off by covered wagon to settle the wild West. This was meant to be an educational game, providing timeless lessons about class issues (the banker from Boston always set off with the most provisions, although the carpenter and farmer had skills that were more valuable to survive the nasty journey) as well as the importance of good nutrition (this was how most kids of my generation learned to spell "dysentery.")
Video games have come a long way since the eight-bit, Apple IIC days of my youth. But the latest offering from Serious Games Interactive, a Danish maker of educational computer games, is ambitious on several levels.
"Global Conflicts: Child Soldiers" takes you to northern Uganda, with the task of bringing an end to the two-decade insurgency by the Lord’s Resistance Army. Our hero isn't a James Bond-like spy, CIA hitman or South African soldier of fortune -- he's a human rights investigator.
As a player, you will work for the
International Criminal Court and will be sent on an assignment in
Uganda, where you will meet the feared leader of the rebel
Lord’s Resistance Army, Joseph Kony. The game focuses on
topics such as child soldiers, human rights and war-crimes.
Previous games in the series have included "Global Conflicts: Palestine"
and "Global Conflicts: Latin America." When they say "Serious Games," they're not kidding.
Rock, Paper, Shotgun, a blog for PC gamers, has a bit more detail: You're looking for Kony, but along the way you meet people liekMonica Atto, an IDP prepared to forego personal justice in the interests of the
peace process (an idea popular among Acholis, as I and others have written). You also meet Dalson Oyo, who had his hands, ears, nose and lips chopped off by LRA rebels, and wants Kony hunted down and killed.
I was afraid the game would be exploitative or trade on stereotypes. But "Grand Theft Auto: Eastern Congo" this is not. Gamer Tim Stone offers a strong endorsement:
In pure game terms Global Conflicts: Child Soldiers has various
failings. As an educational device however, it’s pretty extraordinary.
Of the hundreds of NPCs I will doubtless meet over the next twelve
months, I can’t imagine any will fix my attention, or burn themselves
into my memory more effectively than Monica or Dalson.
Interestingly, northern Uganda is now also the subject of a comic book and an upcoming film due to star Uma Thurman. This long-running human tragedy, often overshadowed by the horrors in Sudan and Congo, is suddenly getting some serious attention.
Yet more journalists are fleeing deadly, targeted attacks against them by the militias of Somalia. Among the latest to reach the safety of Nairobi was Radio Shabelle journalist Ahmednor Mohamed, who also worked for the past several months as McClatchy's stringer in Mogadishu. Armed men came to Ahmednor's house following the assassination earlier this month of his former boss, Mukhtar Mohamed Hirabe, the onetime head of Shabelle and now the fifth Somali journalist to be killed this year. Ahmednor, a 29-year-old father of two, feared for his life.
He was McClatchy's fourth stringer in the capital in the past three years, and now we'll be needing a fifth.
Our first stringer, Mahad Elmi, was among two journalists assassinated within hours of one another on a terrible day in August 2007. A second stringer fled to Tanzania. A third, Ahmed Ali, escaped an asssassination attempt in a busy marketplace in December 2007. I'm pleased to say that the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi granted Ahmed a visa this year to reunite with his wife, who is an American citizen, and young baby. They are living happily in the Midwest.
There is no doubt that Somalia is the most dangerous place in the world right now to be a journalist. So it's both tragic and unsurprising that, as government officials describe a state of emergency in the country, reporters are fleeing in huge numbers. The Committee to Protect Journalists reports that 15 journalists from various news outlets are suspending their work out of fear for their safety.
Ahmednor tells me that only one English-speaking journalist is left among the major media outlets in Mogadishu, making it that much harder for on-the-ground news to reach reporters based in Nairobi. Many of my colleagues and I have come to rely on Somali journalists in Nairobi to work the phones to report on what's happening in Mogadishu.
Ahmednor, who's worked as a reporter for nearly a decade, told me that Islamist extremists with designs on toppling the government had ordered Somali journalists to refer to them as "mujahedeen," a term that means "holy warrior." (Some of these same people now plan to punish four suspected thieves by cutting off an arm and a leg from each one, a grotesque perversion of Islamic law.) To maintain their objectivity, the journalists refused. It's the right thing to do, but it cost Hirabe his life -- and may cost the lives of other brave Somalis who are just trying to their job in the midst of chaos.
By the way, Ahmednor's flight from Somalia to Kenya might not have been comfortable -- he had to sit in the back of a truck with dozens of other refugees for several hours -- but it was entirely predictable. Three days after he phoned to tell me he was fleeing, he was in Nairobi. Technically, this is illegal, because Kenya has closed the border with Somalia. Kenya says this is to keep Islamist extremists from coming in, but what it's really done is made it harder and more dangerous for legitimate refugees like Ahmednor to flee safely.
No matter. Their truck driver avoided the main road through eastern Kenya and drove through trees and thickets, bribing a few police officers along the way. The passage cost about $140. It's as regular as Kenya Airways.
I'm spending a few days in the refugee camps of Dadaab, Kenya, which now have the distinction of being the world's largest refugee settlement, home to some 200,000 271,000 people, most of them having fled from Somalia. On my last trip to Dadaab, in 2006, I'd met some bright young Kenyan aid workers, many of whom walked around the main guesthouse wearing giveaway aid-agency t-shirts bearing unintentionally hilarious messages. True to form, this week I ate lunch with a tall, broad-shouldered Kenyan man whose shirt read on the back, in big letters, "Breastfeeding is the best option."
One day I sat in on some interviews with long-time refugees -- most had arrived in the early 1990s, fleeing the start of Somalia's civil war -- who were hoping to be resettled in the West. (The U.S., for example, takes in about 70,000 refugees every year under the official Refugee Resettlement Program.) With the situation in Somalia continuing to deteriorate, these people have been waiting for such an opportunity for years, and they took it extremely seriously.
One woman arrived on time for her interview despite being nine months pregnant and what doctors might call "about to explode." She sat through about 15 minutes of her interview before the American caseworker realized that the woman was sweating profusely and taking short, panting breaths. "It's OK," the Somali woman said through the interpreter. "I just felt this pain two minutes ago and it went away."
It took a few more moments of questioning before the caseworker determined that, in addition to the contractions coming two minutes apart, the woman's water had broken earlier that morning.
That was the end of the interview. The caseworker called for a car to take the woman to the refugee hospital. It took several minutes to arrive, and in the meantime we watched as the woman lay with her two other children in the shade of a small tree, looking to be in pain. I couldn't believe she'd made it through the bus ride to the interview, let alone the interview itself. But she believed that if she tried to reschedule her interview, her long awaited chance to escape the refugee camps might be lost.
In the end, the caseworkers convinced her that delivering her baby on time was more critical, and that the interview could be postponed. In a few days, after the child is born, the woman will come back to resume her interview -- and her newborn baby will be added to the case file.
In Alexandra township outside Johannesburg, I was interviewing 26-year-old Rosinah about her youngest brother, Vuyani, for a story that formed part of our series this month on the 15-year anniversary of the first democratic elections in South Africa. Rosinah was telling me how their mother passed away several years ago after becoming infected with HIV, and it fell to the siblings to raise Vuyani.
"We're a child-headed household," Rosinah said.
This was not, strictly speaking, untrue. But the children in this case, Rosinah and two older brothers, were in their 20s when their mother passed on.
Not to diminish the Ngxalaba family's difficulties -- which I came to understand after spending several days with them last month -- but "child-headed household" is a term coined by the vast development universe of aid agencies, consultants, diplomatic missions and others to describe families where parents die and leave children raising other children. It's a way to measure how the fabric of society is torn apart by conflict, diseases like AIDS and other disasters. It's not a way you'd expect a family to describe itself in casual conversation.
Catch phrases and acronyms are part of any industry. But in Africa, the highfalutin, almost clinical development lingo used by aid workers -- let's call it charitese -- has a baffling and often amusing tendency to seep into the vernacular of regular people.
Covering the 2005 elections in Liberia, I interviewed a handful of villagers outside Monrovia and found that all of them were hoping for a vote that was "free, fair and transparent." In that order. It was a couple of days before I realized that this was the exact phrase that the small army of NGOs and election experts had been lecturing Liberians on for more than a year, and plastering on countless posters, t-shirts and other election materials.
Another time, in the slums of Nairobi, I heard a middle-school girl tell me, "I'm an OVC." This is charitese for "orphans and vulnerable children," but it is not something that a child should call herself, not least because it sounds like a television shopping network.
I've seen African grassroots NGOs with names like the "Organization for Capacity Building and Sustainable Development" -- combining two particularly common bits of charitese into one big string of meaninglessness. I've received multiple invitations to events discussing the fate of "the girl child," who faces all kinds of difficulties that the boy child does not. And I can't believe they paid someone to come up with the term "income-generating activities" -- you know, jobs.
This is mostly harmless, and often humorous, but sometimes get the nagging sense that these terms have been foisted onto Africans, who have no choice but to start using them, ridiculous though they do sound in conversation. The humanitarian world offers jobs, fills hotels and conference centers, and pays for things that some governments in Africa can't or won't do. So I fear that people fail to adopt charitese at their peril.
What do you think? Am I being too hard on the NGOs? And what are your favorite examples of charitese?
The line outside the South African Department of Home Affairs office in Crown Mines, an industrial section of Johannesburg, began forming late last night and was well into the hundreds by the time I got there this morning. Immigrants from Mozambique, Malawi, Angola, Somalia, Uganda and -- most of all -- from Zimbabwe crowded the gated entrance as police officers barked at them to move away. On one of the coldest days of the year, women wrapped themselves in blankets and men blew into their fists in a vain attempt to keep warm.
Everyone was there for the same thing: a legal document certifying their right to be in this country.
South Africa is the youngest democracy on the continent but also its most prosperous by far, and since the fall of apartheid it's been a massive magnet for economic migrants and political asylum-seekers. The recent wave of deadly attacks on African immigrants was merely the latest manifestation of the difficulties that await people who come here. They also suffer indignities at the hands of South African authorities, who make it difficult for them to obtain legal papers and then arrest them or demand bribes if they're caught without them.
The Department of Home Affairs, the government agency that deals with
refugees, is woefully understaffed and rife with corruption. People wait for days or weeks to get their papers and then report being turned away on technicalities or for no reason whatsoever. Immigrants are in constant fear of the police. About five blocks from the immigration office this morning, I saw three officers harassing a shabbily dressed man who I can only assume was either on his way to get his refugee documents or had just been denied them.
While standing at the back of the line, I met Joy, a middle-aged mother of two from Zimbabwe who was trying to apply for asylum. She'd come to South Africa three months ago, illegally jumping the border across the Limpopo River. Her father, a noted opposition supporter in their home village, had been killed in the election violence. But it wasn't just fear that drove her south. "There's no food at home," she said. The week before she left, the economic crisis had emptied all the stores in her Harare neighborhood of cornmeal, the national staple. Her two young children went two days without eating anything at all.
In Joburg, she's found a job doing housework for three South African women in a middle-class black suburb. In a good week she can make about $100, which she uses to buy clothes or packets of rice to send back to her children and parents in Harare.
Her husband, who introduced himself as Wise, came here five months before Joy. He's a builder, but construction work is scarce. "Too many Zimbabweans here now to do that work," he said wryly. I believed him. In the past three days I've met Zimbabwean teachers, civil servants and even an IT professional who've found work on construction crews here. Zimbabwe may be crumbling, but its refugees are helping to build South Africa.
The good folks at World Vision just wrote to clarify that the man pictured in yesterday's post is not, in fact, a World Vision employee. I didn't mean to suggest that -- charities often hand out t-shirts to promote their messages -- but I realize that might have been unclear.
A World Vision officer wrote:
"Due to the volatile security situation in Naivasha World Vision has requested its staff to move into hibernation mode. The person in the T-shirt is not a World Vision employee. He could therefore be one of the community members who may have got access to the T-shirt at one of the Advocacy events supported by World Vision."
World Vision does important work in all eight provinces of Kenya. This guy hasn't gotten the message on his own clothing.
The latest trouble spot in Kenya is Naivasha, a lake town about 90 minutes from Nairobi that's a favorite destination for weekend getaways -- Nairobi's answer to Palm Springs, with a better climate. Naivasha has been quiet to this point, but it exploded over the weekend. I drove up there early this morning to see hundreds of Kikuyus -- members of the president's tribe -- wielding stones, sticks, machetes and wooden planks studded with nails, and threatening to kill rival tribes like the Luos (opposition leader Raila Odinga's group).
There was a lot of angry talk. But every young guy with a crude weapon tried to sound sane, even thoughtful, when questioned by one of the international journalists there. A 20-year-old named Peter Mwangi told the AP: "We want peace, but we (also) want to fight them. We don't want Luos here."
Peace through war. Interesting tactic. Then there was the guy in the middle of the mob below, in the white t-shirt, who told me that some Luos would die today. His t-shirt, from the Christian charity World Vision, says, "Building a Better World for Children."
Somewhere in Africa was written by McClatchy correspondent Shashank Bengali, who covered sub-Saharan Africa from 2005 to 2009. He's now based in Washington, D.C., as a national correspondent.
