Africa is awkward because it has skipped so many stages in technological and industrial development. It's jumped from point A to point F, except not quite all the way. It's like an adolescent who was just experienced a dramatic growth spurt and doesn't know how to use its new post-puberty body.
What has taken place between the British colonization and the information age has left Africa in a dangerous situation. Its cultural shift and its technological shift are out of sync.
The aesthetic here is ever-ironic. You'll see an old man walking alongside the highway in the hot sun, barefoot, wearing an "Edina High School Swim Team" track jacket. You'll see young guys working on farms, toting their tiny battery-powered radios, rapping along to 50 cent, who is an even bigger idol out here than Barack.
The infiltration of Western culture through African media manifests itself in many ways, but the most disturbing to me is the shift it has caused in agriculture. Over the past 5 years, farms that used to be self-sustaining, effective producers of organic vegetation and livestock, have been turned into sugarcane plantations. The difference is that now people farm to make a bigger profit off selling these exportable cash crops. Rather than make less money by selling their produce on the market, but be able to live off their land independently from the system, as they had been doing fruitfully for generations.
In my father's lifetime he's seen people's diets shift from being full of fruit and vegetable varieties to depending on the staples - rice, corn-flour-based ugali, and the like, for means of survival. Malnutrition is a new problem, and it's continuing to grow.
Within entire villages which had never even had landlines, people are now using cell phones. They buy them cheap, and bring them into town to have their batteries charged. It's amazing. With this money, they buy clothes with (bootleg) name brands that they recognize from the music videos they were able to view on a TV in town or searched up in a distant internet cafe. More and more folks are participating in the race to "modernization," and tradition and sustainable living habits are being left in the dust.
But for a country that is said to be 15 years behind the rest of the world in terms of development, Kenya doesn't resemble a place of the past. If anything, it looks and feels post-apocalyptic. It feels not like a country that is working toward "civilization", but rather one that is cleaning up after it.
It is not difficult to imagine Kenya's reality as a very real possibility for the future state of the world you and I know as Americans. Here, it is not difficult to see the immediate effects of overpopulation, pollution, media monopolization, disease, and political corruption. Here, you are surrounded by the evidence, day after day.
I don't sit here feeling as though I am in a 'developing country', so to speak. I feel like I am experiencing the consequence of an overdeveloped world. But I'm also seeing that, because of their perseverance and resourcefulness, these are the societies that will be best equipped to go on surviving in light of the energy crisis they will inherit from us.
So what's the solution here? Young activists I've talked to are still searching for the right kind of revolution to be prescribed to this weird new political illness.
I attended a Protestant worship service in Lugulu this Sunday, and was interested by the passage which the pastor chose from Corinthians:
"The weapons with which we fight are not of the flesh. The weapons with which we fight are not of this world."
He, of course, meant God. But I hear it differently. I hear it say that we can't make this world a better place if we can't elevate our consciousness to reach beyond our own immediate cost and benefit analyses. I hear it say that it doesn't matter who owns the guns if the guns are still in human hands. Shoot.
In the end of 'Dreams from My Father', Barack Obama wrote of a historian he met in Kenya named Dr. Rukia Odero who spoke to these issues,
"You know, sometimes I think the worst thing that colonialism did was cloud our view of the past. Without the white man, wo might be able to make better use of our history. We might look at some of our former practices and decide they are worth preserving. Others, we might grow out of. Unfortunately, the white man has made us very defensive. We end up clinging to all sorts of things that have outlived their usefulness. Polygamy. Collective land ownership. These things worked well in their time, but now they most often become tools for abuse. By men. By governments. And yet, if you say these things, you have been infected by Western ideology."
I think it's going to take cooperation between generations to heal Africa's cultural and developmental gaps.
Barack also reflects his own views (with very masculine syntax) on his experience in Kenya at the end of the book,
"Oh, Father, I cried. There was no shame in your confusion. Just as there had been no shame in the fathers before you. No shame in the fear, or in the hear of his fathers before him. There was only shame in the silence fear had produced. It was the silence that betrayed us. If it weren't for the silence, your grandfather might have told your father that he could never escape himself, or re-create himself alone. Your father might have taught those same lessons to you. And you, the son, might have taught your father that this new world that was beckoning all of you involved more than just railroads and indoor toilets and irrigation ditches and gramophones, lifeless instruments that could be absorbed in the old ways.
You might have told him that these instruments carried with them a dangerous power, that they demanded a different way of seeing the world. That this power could be absorbed only alongside faith born out of a hardship, faith that wasn't new, that wasn't black or white or Christian or Muslim but that pulsed in the heart of the first African village and the first Kansas Homestead -- a faith in other people."
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