Wangari Maathai

I have been reading Wangari Maathai's (WM's) biography, and it reinforces some of the ideas I've been reading in Michela Wrong's book, as well as the book about the Mau Mau rebellion.

Here are two really good videos from PBS that provide an introduction to WM and her Green Belt Movement.

Video 1

Video 2

More goes here...

Leaving for DC (then Kenya) in two weeks... should we take the train?

It's early on a Tuesday morning, and I'm experiencing that "day before Christmas" (or Hannukah) phenomena that makes it difficult to sleep because of the expectation for the next morning. In this case, it's a morning flight to Washington, DC, on Tuesday June 30 with four students from Cary Academy. The five of us will be joining a group of six students from The Potomac School, plus two students from DC-area schools Sidwell Friends and Georgetown Prep, plus one student from Dana Hall in Boston. A parent of one of the Potomac students will join us as well, as will Sarah Coste, a teacher from Potomac, and Ken Okoth, a native of Kibera, Kenya. Our group will consist of 13 students and four adults. Plus our drivers. Plus two interns from Washington, DC, and two from Kenya, who will be working with the computer labs we help set up.

Ken is the leader of our trip, and as I've noted, the opportunity to travel with and learn from him is the prime motivating factor for me in taking this trip away from my wonderful son, Ben, who is going to turn two years old in a week.

Three years ago, I traveled on a similarly exciting voyage to Ethiopia with a group of 13 adults and 17 students from a collection of DC-area schools -- both public and private.

That trip lasted about two weeks. We flew into Addis Ababa, the capital, spent five days at one rural site (Save the Children), then came back to Addis Ababa for a day, and then we spent five days at the next site (Project Mercy), and then headed back to Addis, and headed home.

Here are some of my reflections from that trip, which broadened my world view and helped me put life in a bit more perspective.

This trip will be a bit longer -- closer to three weeks -- and should provide for more meaningful reflection and deeper connections with the students at the Red Rose School. We will be in Nairobi for most of the trip, getting to know the Red Rose School and other schools and sites that Ken has arranged for us to visit in and around Kibera (click for a link to an interview Ken did on NPR).

We'll also be helping set up computer labs and preparing to teach in meaningful ways at Red Rose in the mornings during the second week of our trip (the first week is for getting to know Red Rose and Nairobi and Kenya and Africa -- then we go on a brief safari experience (Fri-Mon) and then from Tuesday to Friday, we will be teaching in the mornings at Red Rose.

Getting back to our Tuesday morning flight up to Washington, DC, where we will meet our other 12 traveling companions ... I had initially proposed that we travel by train. It would have been about a seven hour trip, and it would be somewhat appropriate because of Nairobi's history. The city came into being around 1900 as a way station between the port of Mombasa and the Lake Victoria city of Kisumu. See the map at left and see this article from the BBC for more details about the railway.






According to that article from 2001, it may be appropriate that we did NOT take the train in the US. While the train once represented an amazing engineering feat for 1900, it has been superseded in today's fast-moving world by air travel. In fact, the BBC article notes that
"In recent years, the line has been making heavy losses and passenger services are no longer being run. Kenya Railways itself has lost passenger confidence after a series of freight and passenger rail accidents."

Indeed, when presidents from Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania went in 2001 to Kisumu to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the completion of the rail line, none of them took the train to get there -- two flew in and one took alternative ground transportation. Here's another quote from the article:

"Kenya's President Daniel arap Moi was joined by Tanzania's Benjamin Mkapa and Uganda's Yoweri Museveni, both of whose countries have benefited directly from the line to Lake Victoria.
But in an indication of the serious problems now besetting the line, none of the leaders actually used the train to arrive in Kisumu - Mr Moi and Mr Museveni both arrived by air while Mr Mkapa came by road."

Now, I quoted from the article because I'm guessing most readers of this blog will not have heard of Tanzania's former president, Benjamin Mkapa or Uganda's current president, Yoweri Museveni.

But in an internet world, we can click on those links and get some basic Wikipedia information about both men. The third man, Daniel arap Moi, is no longer president of Kenya -- though he was the second president (after Jomo Kenyatta) and also the longest-serving president in Kenya's young post-colonial history. He ruled for 24 years -- from 1978 to 2002.

In 2002, Moi's party was voted out of office and the current president, Mwai Kibaki, took over. Kibaki stood for re-election in 2007, and he barely won a highly contested election against Raila Odinga, the son of one of one of the founders (and the first vice-president) of Kenya.

Getting back to the BBC article about the train (remember the train? we almost took the train up from Cary to Washington, DC), this railway from Mombasa on the coast to Kisumu on Lake Victoria has been a really big deal in Kenya's -- and indeed, in the region's -- history:

"The railway from Kisumu on Lake Victoria to Kenya's Indian Ocean port of Mombasa opened the East African interior to world trade [in 1901]. "

The train line cuts right through Kibera, as you can see in this picture from Flickr:




The other thing that opened the East African interior to world trade was quinine, an early anti-malarial drug which I just learned came initially from Peru, and was then grown in the Dutch plantations of Java, which was producing 97% of the world's quinine supply by the 1930s.

When we take our anti-malaria pills, we should consider that for most of human history, people in this region of the world have been afflicted with malaria, and that disease prevented western "colonists" from penetrating the interior of Africa until the 1900s.

Speaking of malaria, did you know that

Each year, there are approximately 350–500 million cases of malaria,[1] killing between one and three million people, the majority of whom are young children in Sub-Saharan Africa.[2] Ninety percent of malaria-related deaths occur in Sub-Saharan Africa. Malaria is commonly associated with poverty, but is also a cause of poverty[3] and a major hindrance to economic development.

Pasted from <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaria>

Here's a map showing countries where malaria is endemic as of 2003. And here's the caption from the map:

Malaria generally occurs in areas where environmental conditions allow parasite multiplication in the vector. Thus, malaria is usually restricted to tropical and subtropical areas (see map when you click the link below) and altitudes below 1,500 m. However, this distribution might be affected by climatic changes, especially global warming, and population movements.

Pasted from <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Malaria_geographic_distribution_2003.png>


And here's an article from National Geographic about how malaria is moving to higher-altitude areas of Kenya where it's never been seen before:

Now because I was on the National Geographic site, I used the search function, and came across this useful thumbnail sketch of Kenya which relates back to how, before the railway (remember the railway?), Nairobi -- where we'll be spending the bulk of our time -- was just a watering hole for the Maasai.


Here's a quote:

The site of modern Nairobi was a watering hole for Maasai pastoralists until 1899, when British engineers building a railway from Mombassa to Uganda chose it as a supply depot. Nairobi's relatively cool climate and abundant game made it a favorite of hunters and British travelers. The settlement became a colonial capital and the manufacturing and commercial center of East Africa. After independence in 1963, the city served as a headquarters for the safari trade and for scientists seeking fossil evidence of early man.

Pasted from <http://travel.nationalgeographic.com/places/cities/city_nairobi.html>

Now I've been writing for about 40 minutes, ostensibly about the railroad (remember the railroad?), and here are a just few of the topics that have already come up in connection with our trip, if you have been clicking the links and paying attention :)

• Malaria and healthcare in general
• Global warming and its effect on Malaria
• Kenya as a headquarters both for the earliest fossil records of mankind (see the Leakey family) and for safaris
• Kenya's role as the economic and political capital of East Africa (connected to the railway)
• The political history of Kenya leading up to the contested (some would say "stolen" -- think of Iran's elections right now) 2007 election.
• Tribal divisions in Kenya (Luo, Kalenjin, Kikuyu, Maasai)
  

Now, here's a long quote that does a nice job of summing up Kenya's political history, which you were introduced to very briefly earlier in this ridiculously long blog posting... The quote comes from a Washington Post article written by a professor of history at Harvard, Caroline Elkins, who is also the author of a book I have been reading about the Mau Mau rebellion from 1952-1960 -- a rebellion which led the British to depart from Kenya, ending nearly a century of colonial rule. Here's the quote...

Far from leaving behind democratic institutions and cultures, Britain bequeathed
to its former colonies corrupted and corruptible governments. Colonial officials
hand-picked political successors as they left in the wake of World War II,
lavishing political and economic favors on their proteges. This process created
elites whose power extended into the post-colonial era.
Added to this was a distinctly colonial view of the rule of law, which saw the British leave behind legal systems that facilitated tyranny, oppression and poverty rather than open, accountable government. And compounding these legacies was Britain's famous imperial policy of "divide and rule," playing one side off another, which often
turned fluid groups of individuals into immutable ethnic units, much like
Kenya's Luo and Kikuyu today. In many former colonies, the British picked
favorites from among these newly solidified ethnic groups and left others out in
the cold. We are often told that age-old tribal hatreds drive today's conflicts
in Africa. In fact, both ethnic conflict and its attendant grievances are
colonial phenomena.
It's no wonder that newly independent countries such as Kenya maintained and even deepened the old imperial heritage of authoritarianism and ethnic division. The British had spent decades trying to keep the Luo and Kikuyu divided, quite rightly fearing that if the two groups ever united, their combined power could bring down the colonial order. Indeed, a short-lived Luo-Kikuyu alliance in the late 1950s hastened Britain's retreat from Kenya and forced the release of Jomo Kenyatta, the nation's first president, from a colonial detention camp. But before their departure, the British schooled the future Kenyans on the lessons of a very British model of democratic elections.
Britain was determined to protect its economic and geopolitical interests during
the decolonization process, and it did most everything short of stuffing ballot
boxes to do so. That set dangerous precedents. Among other maneuvers, the
British drew electoral boundaries to cut the representation of groups they
thought might cause trouble and empowered the provincial administration to
manipulate supposedly democratic outcomes.
Old habits die hard. Three years after Kenya became independent in 1963, the Luo-Kikuyu alliance fell apart. Kenyatta and his Kikuyu elite took over the state; the Luo, led by Oginga Odinga (Raila Odinga's father) formed an opposition party that was eventually quashed.
Kenyatta established a one-party state in 1969 and tossed the opposition,
including Odinga, into detention, much as the British had done to him and his
cronies during colonial rule in the 1950s. The Kikuyu then enjoyed many of the
country's spoils throughout Kenyatta's reign.
The Kikuyu's fortunes took a turn for the worse when Daniel arap Moi, a member of the Kalenjin ethnic minority, assumed dictatorial power in 1978. He managed to hang on for more than two decades. Western Kenya enjoyed the economic benefits of state largess until Moi was voted out of office in 2002, at which point the pendulum again swung back to the Kikuyu, led by the incoming President Kibaki.
Fears of ethnic ascendancies, power-hungry political elites, undemocratic processes and institutions -- all are hallmarks of today's Kenya, just as they were during
British colonial rule. This does not excuse the undemocratic behavior of the
current Kenyan president, nor that of his opponent Odinga, both of whom are bent
on seizing power and neither of whom is necessarily a true voice of the masses.
Nor does it excuse the horrific violence that has unfolded throughout the
country or the appalling atrocities committed by individual Kenyans. Rather, it
suggests that the undemocratic historical trajectory that Kenya has been moving
along was launched at the inception of British colonial rule more than a century
ago. It's not hard to discern similar patterns -- deliberately stoked ethnic
tensions, power-hungry elites, feeble democratic traditions and institutions --
in other former British colonies such as Pakistan, Zimbabwe and Iraq that share
similar imperial pasts. In retrospect, the wonder is not that Kenya is
descending into ethnic violence. The wonder is that it didn't happen sooner.

Caroline Elkins is an associate professor of African studies at Harvard
University and the author of "Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's
Gulag in Kenya."

Pasted from <http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/04/AR2008010404300_pf.html>

Think of George Washington, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson -- the first three US presidents. That's kind of like Jomo Kenyatta, Daniel arap Moi, and Mwai Kibaki ... kind of ... the point is that as we head to Kenya it behooves us to learb such names as Raila Odinga, especially since, in the post-2007 election violence, there would be lots and lots of signs around Nairobi that said "No Raila, no peace" -- it helps to have a clue who Raila is if you want to understand the country and its graffiti.

(it's hard to insert photos using this blog, so please do me a favor and click on the link above and also go to Google Images and run a quick search for "No Raila no Peace" -- you will find some interesting stuff)


I will write more about Kenya's post-colonial history and how that history of ethnic tension puts the 2007 elections in context. But as you can tell from this lengthly posting (about railroads, right?), Kenya can teach us a great deal about the world.

In fact, Kenya is such an interesting place that a group called the International Reporting Project (IRP) recently chose to send 12 high-level US journalists to Kenya for 12 days:

Each year the IRP selects two groups of “Gatekeeper Editors” to travel to an
important country to learn more about critical global issues to help them
improve their news organizations’ international coverage.
"Kenya is an important country that faces critical challenges in health issues, economic development, land and environmental issues as well as national and regional stability," said John Schidlovsky, director of the IRP, which is based in
Washington at The Johns Hopkins University’s Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced
International Studies (SAIS).

Pasted from <http://www.journalismfellowships.org/gatekeepers/index.htm>

And our group -- which will assemble for the first time on the evening of June 30 -- will be traveling in the aftermath of some of the worst post-election violence the country has seen in quite some time. In December of 2007, more than 1000 people were killed (most estimates are in the 1300 range), and it's unclear who is responsible for the killing. The UN is putting pressure on Kenya's government to investigate, but it's unclear what will happen.

Kofi Anan, the seventh Secretary General of the UN (1997-2007), spoke in Geneva in March 2009 and he said that the issues facing Kenya in the aftermath of its election are issues facing a great deal of Africa:

The stresses and strains we are seeing in Kenya have a wider relevance.
I recall that, in 1998, as United Nations Secretary-General, I presented a report
to the Security Council on the Causes of Conflict and the Promotion of Durable
Peace and Sustainable Development in Africa.
The conclusions of that report, which covered Africa as a whole, are strikingly similar to the findings of the Independent Review Commission (IREC) and the Commission of Inquiry into the Post-Election Violence (CIPEV) on the underlying causes of last year's crisis in Kenya.
It focused on the dangers of the politicization of ethnicity;
non-adherence to the rule of law; reliance on centralized and highly
personalized forms of governance; inequitable development; corruption and abuse
of power; a winner-takes-all form of political victory and a perception that
certain groups are not receiving a fair share of resources.

While Africa and the world have changed considerably since that report was produced 11 years ago, it is clear that many of the ills that have been plaguing the continent for decades continue to thrive in Kenya and elsewhere. We must tackle these challenges once and for all.
I believe this is one reason why the world is paying such close attention to the way Kenya grapples with these issues -- just as ordinary Kenyans are closely watching how their leaders address their needs, and respond to their demands for real change.
While effective mediation resulted in the achievements enshrined in the Kenya National Accord, the true and enduring success of the dialogue will depend very much on the full implementation of the agreed reforms, the first real test of which will be the 2012 elections.

Pasted from <http://wanjuguna.blogspot.com/2009/03/kofi-anan-speech-in-geneva.html>

So again, we can use this trip to learn about all sorts of things…

Poverty is one issue (related to health care and malaria and ethnic tensions) and we'll see that close-up in Kibera. But I wanted to get a post out there looking at more of the historical and regional context of Kenya within Africa as a whole.

Here are some parting questions --

The main language in Kenya is Swahili. Where does Swahili come from?

What is Kenyan music like? Where does it come from? What does Kenyan hip hop sound like? What issues does it address? What issues are on the minds of Kenyan youth?

Does it even make sense to talk about "Africa" as though it were all one place? I mean it's a really really big place (please click the link -- very cool map)... and we're only visiting the Horn of Africa...

More questions to come (and shorter blog posts -- I promise).

But this should get you thinking...