The bright continent Breaking rules and making change in modern Africa

Review by New York Times Review

WHEN MY FAMILY MOVED to Accra, Ghana, in 1990 just as I was about to start high school, we landed in a country whose G.D.P. was less than one-quarter the size of Delaware's, despite its plentiful deposits of gold and other precious minerals. A military dictator had ruled it for almost a dozen years. Poverty, hunger and disease stalked the countryside. It felt like a place cut off from the rest of the world. If we wanted to call my grandparents in Wisconsin or Addis Ababa, all five of us would squeeze into a phone booth at the post office. We didn't have a home phone, and the waiting list to get one was decades long. When I returned to Ghana as a correspondent for The New York Times in 2005, I found a thriving democracy that had peacefully handed power between rival political parties. Everyone seemed to have a chirping cellphone. Ghanaians who had made it in the West as software developers, bankers and doctors were flocking home to set up businesses, building beach houses on the Atlantic coastline and launching Afrocentric clothing companies. Today Ghana is on the cusp of becoming a middle-income country - not too shabby a leap in less than a quarter of a century. Despite what we read in the news about war, famine and corruption on the continent, anyone who looks beyond the headlines knows that this trajectory - from brutal misrule and abysmal poverty toward democracy and prosperity - has been the lived experience of most Africans. And so Dayo Olopade's "Bright Continent," as its title suggests, is a corrective to Africa's image as a dark, hopeless place. In fact, it is home to several of the world's fastest-growing economies and more than a billion would-be consumers, an increasing number of whom are reaching toward middle-class status. It is also home to a huge chunk of the world's natural wealth, though that accounts for a smaller sliver of the continent's overall growth than most people think. Africa's gains have come not because of Western largess or painful structural adjustment programs set out by the likes of the International Monetary Fund, Olopade argues, nor are they the work of governments. They are largely the fruit of Africans' efforts to help themselves, through creative means that sometimes involve breaking the rules. "It turns out we have been throwing a party in an empty ballroom," Olopade, a Nigerian-American journalist, writes of Western-led efforts to aid Africa. "One of the biggest problems with the world's longtime orientation toward Africa is a preference for interactions between governments, or between formal institutions, when the most vibrant, authentic and economically significant interactions are between individuals and decentralized groups." She excavates a hopeful narrative about a continent on the rise, "a libertarian celebration of hustling, hacking and free-form development." The best solutions, according to Olopade, are local, developed by people closest to the problem, not bureaucrats in Washington or Brussels: the South African gynecologist who operates out of two shipping containers stacked together, the Kenyan family who take over an abandoned plot of land to grow vegetables to eat and sell. Central to Olopade's thesis is the concept of kanju, a term that describes "the specific creativity born from African difficulty." It is the rule-bending ethos that makes it possible to get things done in the face of headaches like crumbling infrastructure, corrupt bureaucracy and tight-fisted banks unwilling to make loans to people without political connections. Many countries have these kinds of hacks and workarounds. In India, the term is jugaad, and it has had its moment in the sun as a business school concept. India runs on this informal hacking of the system that makes life and business possible. But the problems India is facing after a decade of spectacular growth reveal the limits of jugaad, and contribute to my unease with the premise of this book. Basic problems like educating millions of people, giving them safe drinking water and making sure they have food cannot be solved by hacking the system; change on that scale requires changing the system. "The Bright Continent" resists broad-brush solutions when imposed from outside, and is largely dismissive of the role of governments in transforming the continent. But transformation tends to come when people push powerful institutions to change. Take the example of Kayode Fayemi, the governor of Ekiti, the home state of Olopade's family. Fayemi is one of her story's heroes for his efforts to stamp out corruption and make government more effective and accountable. He ran for governor in 2007, but the election was flagrantly rigged. For three and a half years he fought in the courts to get that false result overturned. He didn't try to work around a corrupt system; he forced the system to do its job properly. Eventually he prevailed and was sworn in, and his example has given hope to other would-be politicians that they can fight and win. The book is full of TED-talk-ready phrases. Countries are not rich or poor, developed or underdeveloped, they are "fat" and "lean." With their shoddy infrastructures, lumbering bureaucracies and corrupt politicians, many African countries are not failed states but "fail" states that do not provide the basics to their citizens, with "the basic understanding that you are on your own." THESE INSIGHTS START OUT sounding clever, but by the time kanju is referred to as a "killer app" they have begun to grate. This is neither wholly a reporter's book (its tone is too boosterish) nor a business book (it is too well reported). Indeed, it is something in between. Things like close family ties, necessity-driven innovation and ingenuity are a source of strength, Olopade writes, and gives countless examples. But in each case, the opposite can also be true. Family ties are a tremendous source of strength in many African societies, but family ties can also hold people back. In places where so few people have jobs, one earner must support many mouths, making it impossible to save anything. A journalist I know in the Central African Republic once told me that he hasn't been able to save any money, send his children to university or start a business because every spare bit of cash goes to a needy relative. For my friend, family was a drag on his upward mobility, not a boost. In the end, Olopade endorses NGOs, but chooses ones that are more closely connected to the needs of people. These are small-bore efforts, aimed at solving a particular problem. The African Leadership Academy, started by a Ghanaian named Fred Swaniker, is praised, but it takes only 100 students a year. This book doesn't really address the question that nags many scholars and analysts. Rapid growth in Africa has not been accompanied by rapid expansion of employment opportunities, which means that many people, especially the young and least educated, are left to hope that a rising tide will lift their boats. Precarious employment in what is known as the informal sector is what most young Africans can expect. The textile factories and steel mills that built middle classes from Europe to the United States to China and beyond are nowhere on the horizon in most African economies. More broadly, as Fayemi's experience shows, the most thoroughgoing change in any society is almost always political. Giving people a voice through their elected officials to transform their societies is the most empowering change of all, but in Olopade's world, government is a millstone to progress, not its engine. LYDIA POLGREEN is deputy international editor at The Times and a former correspondent in western and southern Africa.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [April 20, 2014]

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Nigerian-American journalist Olopade's first book rebuts the view of Africa as mired in poverty, war, and failed aid projects, and instead offers a hopeful perspective. Olopade looks past the arbitrary boundaries of sub-Saharan Africa's colonial legacy and re-maps it according to categories of Family, Technology, Commerce, Natural, and Youth. Instead of dwelling on political shortcomings, corrupt leadership, and stunted infrastructure, Olopade embraces the spirit of kanju, a Yoruba word for hustle ("the specific creativity born from African difficulty") that bolsters a vibrant informal economy ranging from fake license plate sellers in Lagos to Kenya's M-Pesa system of mobile phone-based payments. She assails foreign aid dynamics that provide Africans with donated used clothes, for example, which disrupts local manufacture and "privileges Western convenience as much as the intended recipients." Despite a multitude of examples of inventive responses to sociopolitical obstacles, Olopade tends to frame her pro-technology vignettes with buzzwords that sound like a Silicon Valley startup's pitch for venture funding. She also leaves virtually unaddressed the effects of latter day economic colonialism in the form of massive Chinese investment, and the ongoing impact of war and political insurrection. The African continent is certainly brightening, but not quite at the pace Olopade ambitiously tries to portray. 21 b&w photos and charts. Agent: Howard Yoon, Ross Yoon Agency. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

In her debut book, Nigerian-American journalist Olopade finds qualified cause for optimism about Africa's future. Distinguishing "lean" from "fat" economies, the author, a Knight Law and Media Scholar at Yale, observes that Africa is perhaps uniquely well-prepared for a future marked by scarcity. In a time when global food needs are expected to rise by 70 percent by 2050, "African agriculture holds an obvious value proposition for the rest of the worldone that defeats local poverty and hunger at once." In other words, making of Africa a world breadbasket will both enrich the continent and keep people from starving. Yet, as she notes, there are numerous structural impediments to effecting this green revolution, not least the lack of irrigated farmland and of the technology needed for irrigation, to say nothing of larger problems such as inefficiency and corruption. African nations, she argues, can overcome these difficulties. For example, she cites the case of the region of Somalia known as Somaliland, which, against all the odds, has in the last two decades "held four peaceful rounds of elections, established a central bank, printed its own currency, and built an elaborate security apparatus." Announcing a distaste for the word "development," Olopade writes persuasively of the need for Western-style aid that is adapted to local customs and institutions, allowing for a mix of traditional and modern, market-based solutions to address challenges such as the lack of credit and the uneven distribution of resources. For all those challenges, she argues, the various "maps" of Africatechnological, commercial, agricultural, naturalall point to a wealth of possibilities to help "build wealth, strengthen formal institutions, and aid the least fortunate." A refreshingly hopeful argument, well-grounded in data and observationof considerable interest to students of geopolitics, demographics and economic trends.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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1 Orientation The search for the Nile River took two thousand years too long. The idea of searching is itself crazy: as far as human primates are concerned, the flat pan of water stretching from eastern Uganda to the vast Delta of Egypt has always been there. And yet the first foreign correspondents in Africa -- white men from Europe -- were caught in an amazing race to "map" the river from tip to tail. Their tales of travel on Africa's waterways and into its dense forests sailed back to newspapers in 1850s London, Brussels, and New York. Sending word of new tribes in Ethiopia, or safe passage to the interior lakes of central Africa, these men laid the foundation for a tradition of sensationalist writing about Africa. It was Henry Morton Stanley, in his 1878 account of his travels in the Congo, who coined the term dark continent. The misunderstanding began before Christ. Herodotus's fifth-century map of Africa left the cradle of civilization looking like an afterthought. (Later, the Mercator Projection sold Africa literally short.) He wrote, "I am astonished that men should ever have divided [Africa], Asia and Europe as they have, for they are exceedingly unequal. Europe extends the entire length of the other two, and for breadth will not even (as I think) hear to be compared to them." For the next millennium, the northward-flowing river puzzled European cartographers. A Greek merchant named Diogenes began a rumor that the source of the Nile lay among the so-called Mountains of the Moon, somewhere in the wilds of "Nubia." As trade suffused the continent's west coast, existing tribes and landmarks were inked with the exquisite penmanship of eighteenth-century European trade schools. But it was not until 1858 that John Hanning Speke "discovered" that the longest river in the world begins not on the moon, but at Lake Victoria. As news of the White Nile's source rippled through Europe, Major R. E. Cheesman, the British consul to Ethiopia, remarked, "It seemed almost unbelievable that such a famous river . . . could have been so long neglected." Like Herodotus, Cheesman unwittingly exposed his Western bias. After all, the Nile bridges languages and climates, north and south of the Sahara. It has fed and ferried millions of people since the days of Moses. At the time of Speke's trip, the population living and trading near the source of the Nile numbered almost three million. It might have been easier for the frantic searchers to ask locals where the big river began. A few might have advised them: here. The search for the Nile charts the divide that has defined modern African history. Despite centuries of contact (based largely on slave trading), ignorance long governed Western encounters with what was seen as an impenetrable unknown -- Josef Conrad's "heart of darkness." So it was not without precedent that European powers, led by the Portuguese, French, British, and Germans, decided to carve up the African continent using maps and borders of their own creation. At the Berlin Conference in 1884, they drew boundaries that had never existed on the continent, scrumming for natural resources from tobacco to peanuts to gold (oil would soon follow). Their borderlines preserved the gap between foreign perception and African reality that has been difficult to close ever since. More than a century later, Google showed up. Since 2007, the American Internet giant has opened offices in Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa, and Uganda and begun translating its most popular American applications to Africa. Maps were a top priority. Google's team of digital cartographers fanned out across the continent, knitting African streets and cities into the fabric of the World Wide Web. The Americans spared no extravagance: a fleet of red Toyota Priuses mounted with cameras circled cities in South Africa to localize Google's "Street View" project -- just in time for the 2010 World Cup. Like the ancient geographers in search of the Nile, the modern Google mappers imported a Western notion of mapping and navigation. They were well-meaning, but unaware. As anyone who has taken directions in Africa can tell you, a different kind of orientation prevails. In a developed country, a charming female robot might read out clear directions to a numbered street address. In Africa, however, here's what you get: If you are approaching from the Tuskys roundabout, stay on Langata Road till you have passed the entrance on Langata Road that would get you to Carnivore. Take the first right turn off Langata Road after this point. Drive down Langata Road for approximately half a second, and take the left turn right before the petrol station next to Rafikiz. Drive down this road for half a minute. When you see Psys Langata on your right, take that left. Confused? These are real -- and typical -- directions for Nairobi, the Kenyan capital where I lived while reporting this book. Of course, Nairobi and many other cities in Africa have roads and districts with formal names, and some buildings with assigned numbers. But even in the most cosmopolitan cities, the address is mostly beside the point. Locals use businesses, billboards, bus stops, and hair salons as a dynamic, alternative framework for navigation. We rely on time, relative distance, egocentric directions (right or left), and shared knowledge. In Khartoum, the North Sudanese capital, one prominent local landmark is a building where a Chinese restaurant used to be. In the six months until it was repaired, I gave directions to my home based on a particularly cavernous pothole. Frequently, the final direction is "just ask someone." Anthropologists would call Nairobi streets a "high-context" environment. Such navigation is a holdover from a time when centralized systems were absent (which, as we'll see, is often still the case). More importantly, a high-context route from point A is no proof that point B doesn't exist -- it just means you need a different map to find it. The same goes for modern Africa. Whether you're working for an American tech giant struggling to standardize navigation, an entrepreneur from Brazil looking for new business opportunities, a French tourist in search of adventure, a nonprofit trying to improve lives, or a curious global bystander, you probably don't have a very good map of life south of the Sahara. In fact, it amazes me how little the world thinks of Africa. I mean this in terms of time and of reputation. As a first-generation Nigerian American, I have personal reasons for paying attention; but what we all think of Africa when we do is very revealing. In 2010, the United Nations celebrated the tenth anniversary of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) -- eight ambitious targets, from fighting HIV transmission to improving education around the world. The UN sponsored a competition to design a poster for the occasion. The winning design juxtaposed power (leaders of the Group of 8) and poverty (young Africans in line at a refugee camp). The work may be clever graphic design, but the tagline is heartbreaking. "Dear world leaders: We are still waiting." A panel of UN judges validated the biggest lie in modern history: that poor and passive Africans exist only in the shadow of Western action. If you've read other "development" books, it's easy enough to get that impression. Even as popular discourse has begun debating the logic of foreign assistance to the region, the conversation remains focused on how "the West" can improve its performance. Familiar voices on the development beat write prescriptions for everyone from the leaders of the G8 to the infantry of the World Bank to the leaders of landlocked countries like the Central African Republic. Though many have spent decades examining the various ruts and bottlenecks in economic growth, it is rare to hear about what ordinary Africans are already doing to help themselves. This book changes that. As a reporter, I follow the advice of philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein: "Don't think, but look!" The continent needs to be seen and heard, not imagined and then ritually dismissed. Because when you talk to real people in Africa -- shopkeepers, day laborers, executives, or educators -- and commit to telling their stories, once-hidden strengths come to light. The story is as simple as walking to work. Once, my mother and I took an early-morning flight from Kenya to Uganda. We woke before the sun. Riding in a car to the airport, we saw dim shapes come into focus on either side of us. "Where is everyone going?" my mother mused. The figures streaming toward the city center were neither child soldiers on the march, nor mothers queuing for bed nets; they were thousands of ordinary people walking to work. Hundreds of millions of Africans do this every day, waking before dawn to provide for their families. Nearly every day that I wrote this book, I saw Gladys Mwende working the soil in an open field next to my apartment complex. Technically, she had no right to do so. After moving to Nairobi from the smaller Kenyan city of Machakos, Gladys, her husband, Benson Muthame, and their six children found themselves occupying the abandoned colonial home outside my window. It's a pretty stone and tile structure with two floors of rooms for all the kids -- aged ten months to thirteen years. Only its punctured windows and rotting wood cornice reveal that its best days are decades past. It was bizarre to see this facsimile of rural African life -- cooking with firewood, toting water, raising chickens -- at a busy intersection in Kenya's largest metropolis. But the land is what matters. As unpaid caretakers of the plot, the family treats its urban farm as though it were a ranch in the Great Rift Valley that keeps the world in coffee, tea, and flowers. Excerpted from The Bright Continent: Breaking Rules and Making Change in Modern Africa by Dayo Olopade All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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