Domestic abuse discussion, northern Ghana (Cheryl Rettig)

Research clearly shows that people prefer to buy products and services in their own languages.1 This is the reason that so many businesses have undertaken translation and localization projects to transform their websites and documents from English into the native language(s) of their target markets. This seems like a pretty basic concept, but unfortunately, one that has not been adopted by many non-governmental organisations (NGOs) attempting to provide information that has the potential to save millions of lives.

For many years, numerous NGOs in Africa have been producing materials largely in English or French, based on the assumption that everyone now speaks the  languages once imposed by colonial administrations. The result of this logic is that many documents, manuals, reports, websites, posters and pamphlets are often in a language that many people can’t understand. This mistaken belief  – that everyone in Africa speaks English or French (and to a lesser extent Portuguese) – has significantly reduced the effectiveness of numerous projects, including disaster relief, education, nutrition and gender equality programmes. There are many people across Africa who speak neither English nor French, and if they do, it is often their third or fourth language. The people who do speak English or French fluently often comprise the elite minority who are highly educated and live in urban areas. But the majority of Africans live in more rural areas where local languages and dialects are often spoken.2

Lori Thicke, co-founder of Translators without Borders (TWB), provides several examples of the need for African NGOs to have materials translated into local languages. For example, in Thange, Kenya, most villagers speak Swahili and barely understand English. But the large poster encouraging healthy practices to reduce the spread of HIV is in English, along with the village’s sole health manual. Another eye-opening example took place when Thicke traveled to Kibera, the largest slum in Kenya (and the second largest slum in all of Africa) with a delegation from Translators without Borders.3 Approximately one million of the world’s poorest people live in Kibera and it was here that the need for translation into local languages is particularly urgent.

On their visit, TWB had the opportunity to speak with 15 young girls working in the commercial sex industry. The girls also hold the honored position of being ‘peer educators’ in their community. Their responsibilities include educating other women living in the slum on important health issues, including family planning, nutrition and the prevention of AIDS and other sexually transmitted infections (STIs). These young women are in the unique position of being able to reach other people in their community much more effectively than any ‘outsider.’ But there’s just one major problem. Language barriers and the resulting lack of information are killing people and destroying lives. This is especially evident in light of the number of people with HIV, the number of girls dying from unsafe abortions, the high rate of female cutting and the number of children orphaned by AIDS.

Peer educators are therefore justifiably frustrated with the lack of written health materials in the languages of the women in their community. One said that most of the women they work with speak and understand very little English, but that English is actually the language of over 90% of the written materials they have access to, resulting in a huge lack of understanding of the health practices that could save lives. Brochures in English often get tossed to the ground because recipients can’t understand the information they provide. As a result, these young women have asked Translators without Borders to train their entire group to be able to translate the brochures into local languages so they will be better able to communicate with the people they are trying to educate. They fully understand that access to materials in local languages can prevent diseases and STIs.

Domestic abuse discussion, northern Ghana (Cheryl Rettig)

Thicke, too, endorses the direct relationship between access to knowledge and access to health: ‘knowledge is incredibly powerful. Knowledge ensures better health and longer lives, it reduces maternal mortality, it empowers women, it saves children from dying unnecessarily, it improves economic opportunities, it lifts people out of poverty, it encourages protection of the environment…’4 A closer look at Thicke’s statement reveals that many of the Millennium Development Goals hinge on the relationship between knowledge and health. Thicke stresses that without translation, worldwide access to knowledge, including the knowledge that can save lives, is impossible. And without global access to knowledge, the lofty goals of universal access to education and gender equality, as well as reducing poverty, maternal mortality and childhood deaths from preventable diseases, are also impossible.5

Thicke summarises the requirement to provide access to health information in local African languages in an interview with The Huffington Post’s Nataly Kelly: ‘in poorer regions, the information that people need, crucially, like how to protect themselves against AIDS, malaria, cholera and so on, is locked up in languages they don’t even speak. Ironically, the people who need that information the most – information about health, science, technology and so on – have zero access to it because of the language barrier.’6

Since there are so few translators of African languages, TWB has focused on capacity building through mentoring local translators to be able to better provide translations in local languages. One of these projects is in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), a country that has been decimated by years of war, resource exploitation, systemic sexual violence and rampant disease. There are so many aid organizations working in the DRC and a project like this has the potential to provide the NGOs with the translators they need to communicate vital information concerning health, education, nutrition, sexual assault, etc.

The Rehydration Project, an organization that provides easy-to-understand and practical advice on preventing and treating diarrhoeal diseases, clearly illustrates the value of information in local languages right on their website: ‘Information available in the local language is much more effective than in a foreign language. This is true for engineering and construction projects (such as digging water wells), and agricultural projects (such as how to irrigate the land). But it is particularly important in healthcare. In many areas in the world people do not only die from diseases, but also from the fact that they do not have basic information about how to stay healthy and what to do to prevent disease.’8

However, disease prevention is not the only urgent need. When I was in Ghana working for a women’s rights NGO, I learned first-hand the need for people to have materials in their local languages that focused on domestic violence. Even though the official language of Ghana is English, there are dozens of languages and dialects spoken throughout the country. The number of languages spoken, particularly in the northern, rural parts of the country, posed specific problems to my organisation. Even though we had access to local interpreters, when we spoke with women who were survivors of domestic violence during interviews or training sessions, it was clear that many of the women had questions that could have been answered through materials such as brochures, posters or pamphlets in their native language. These materials would also have helped spread messages of equality that could have contributed to curbing domestic violence in their homes and communities. In this way, women who have access to NGOs could share vital information with those who do not. The importance of NGOs having materials translated into local languages so they can better communicate with the people they are trying to help cannot be stressed enough. Without information and materials in local languages, NGOs will be unable to facilitate necessary changes in healthcare, education, disaster relief, environmental protection and gender equality.

Cheryl Rettig is a freelance writer with wintranslation and has completed international human rights internships in Haiti, Ghana, India, Israel and Palestine and Washington, DC. She has also written extensively on commercial sexual exploitation of women and children, torture, sexual violence in conflict zones and gender equality. To see more of Cheryl’s work, please check out “Women Search for Justice” at http://womensearchforjustice.blogspot.com. 

By Isa-Lee Jacobson

If I’d known what the next three years would be like, would I have taken it on? Who knows? Hindsight is a curse and isn’t that the point: that we don’t know what the future holds and so we’re given the choice to plunge headlong into the Great Unknown or stare fearfully on the edge of the precipice, too paralysed to move? When in doubt, isn’t it always best to just leap?

South Africans have an undeniable connection with Zimbabwe. It sits uncomfortably on the borders of our consciousness, pointing a finger down south. On one hand is the accusation against South Africans that we were apathetic when ours was the one voice that could have cried out, ‘Enough’ to Robert Mugabe, and on the other hand is the fear of many South Africans that South Africa ‘will go the same way’ as Zimbabwe. This means that South Africa, too, could land up with a greedy power-hungry dictator who will care nothing for the general population and will rape the land, leaving the economy defunct.

It seemed that the gods had ordained that I would go to Zimbabwe. In mid-2008, the outbreak of xenophobic violence hit Cape Town. The targets were largely Zimbabwean. Since the demise of the country’s economy after the land invasions began in 2000, streams of well-educated, hard-working Zimbabweans had been taking jobs away from badly educated South Africans. It was bound to blow up. They weren’t the only targets, but when I went out to the halls in Khayelitsha, the poverty-ridden shack-land 35 kilometres outside Cape Town, the overwhelming majority of those displaced were Zimbabwean. At the time my friends at Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) were dealing with the crisis and I volunteered. After that I brought my camera. I got to know some of the people in those halls. Despite everything, none of those people were going back home. They would rather live cheek by jowl with people who hated them than go back: just how awful must life be in Mugabe’s Zimbabwe?

At the very same time a friend from the US came out to South Africa and told me that my old friend Douglas Rogers was writing a book about his parent’s backpackers lodge, Drifters. Lyn and Ros had been forced to succumb to some pretty unorthodox methods in order to keep Drifters going and I thought, ‘Wow, great documentary’. I had started to feel that the film I wanted to make was not about Zimbabweans in South Africa, but those that had chosen to stay in Zimbabwe. What makes someone leap across that horrendous border, with its reputation for bribery, rape and lions now accustomed to human flesh into a country where you will be hated, while others stay and make do? Lyn and Ros had adapted to the new unknowns: with no backpackers the rooms had been used by fatcats and their mistresses from the local town, Mutare, then by local opposition leaders who used Drifters to hide from Zanu-PF henchmen before the 2008 election and then by diamond dealers looking for a quiet place to do illicit deals after the huge diamond find down the road. And so it was that I contacted Doug for the first time in a long time. By now he was married and living in Brooklyn, New York with his wife and child and his book, The Last Resort was a few months from being published. Doug loved the idea, sent me his early draft and in March 2009 I went to Zimbabwe for the first time in twenty years.

The first time I went to Zimbabwe it was 1988, I was still at university and we weren’t quite aware of how close we were to the end of apartheid. Zimbabwe was our ideal as students who were politically active or, at the very least, against the apartheid regime, and an extraordinary concert was about to take place. Tracy Chapman, Sting, Bruce Sprigsteen, Peter Gabriel and Youssou  N’Dour were to play at the Human Rights Concert in Harare. It’s incredible to think now that only a year and a half after I made that 2,000 km car journey to Harare, Mandela would be released. At the time South Africa was a pariah state and we were making a pilgrimage to what we desperately hoped our future would be. It’s also astonishing to consider that the same stadium that looked so slick at the time would be considered about as dangerous to enter twenty years later as the country would be – and under the very same leader. The Chinese had built a collapsible white elephant as their gift to the God, Mugabe.

The journey I made in 2009 was very different. I was scared. I needed to bring a camera into Zimbabwe and get the tapes out, and Mugabe’s government is well known for hating all media who don’t tow the party line. My friend at MSF warned me that, despite appearances, Zimbabwe was a police state. In a way, a far more frightening reality. And she was right: you arrive at a neat, clean, albeit pretty basic, airport. No one tries immediately to extort money from you or arrest you, but being in that line at passport control is still deeply unsettling. The question on the ‘arrival’ form (which is obligatory to fill out), ‘What is your reason for being here?’ signals your entry into a world where lying and obfuscation are simply the norm. In this world no one can behave as they wish and all normal moral paradigms have shifted so far out that it is hard to imagine them coming back in line – and that’s the line you yourself must tow.

My first shock came soon after the arrivals hall and might seem fairly inane, but it wasn’t to me because it made me feel utterly helpless. This would be my first real introduction into a world in which I would never fully know how to operat. It took place when I walked up to the seemingly normal-looking Europcar counter. Harare International Airport is unusually dark because of the power cuts, but otherwise it seemed to operate just like any other airport. I’d even managed to book my car online. However, in 2009 there were no credit card facilities and the car hire company needed US$2,000 in cash in order to release their car. I had come on a look-see, borrowing money from my brother for the ticket, believing this was a documentary I needed to make. I certainly didn’t have $2,000 in my pocket. I had $200. The friendly man behind the counter, who might or might not have become used to this as he was utterly phlegmatic in his approach – but then so are most Zimbabweans – took me to his manager. And so the nice white manager, seeing my stricken expression, took that $200 and gave me the car. I would get it back when I returned the car. But now I would have to borrow money from Doug’s sister, who I was staying with and yet had never met. With this experience I was immediately hurtled into the world of ‘make a plan’. In this world, people help complete strangers. But it is also a world where you can never tell when someone might turn against you. It leaves one feeling wary, uneasy and permanently on guard.

‘How are things looking here?’, I asked the guy who had helped me get from the Europcar counter into my Citi Golf. ‘Things are looking up’, he said with a smile, but not much conviction. Zimbabweans are an optimistic lot, but within two years I would see the optimism wane and be replaced with a sense of defeat and complacency.

Driving out of the airport one is struck by all the classic signs of dictatorship: the signage paying homage to the dictator, homage to his struggle for liberation and to the length of time he has managed to remain in power through whatever means he deemed necessary. And then there’s the road from the dictator’s house to the airport that is in good nick, but every other road is plagued with potholes, dead street lamps and traffic lights as defunct as the economy. Borrowdale, near Mugabe’s fortress palace where a French journalist was arrested for getting a little too close, is an oasis of calm. At the time, with a cholera outbreak, the people of Borrowdale had their own boreholes and drinking water in bottles imported from South Africa.

I am used to living in Africa.  I enter into Khayeliitsha and then hop back to my world for a glass of sauvignon blanc and spaghetti vongole at La Perla restaurant with its retro décor and view of the Sea Point Promenade. Far be it for me to judge or cast aspersions on the privileged white minority of Harare. But still I did wonder what keeps them there. After all, they don’t have to brave the man-eating lions. They can just hop on a plane to Johannesburg and even if they’re sick of the vagaries of Africa or don’t want to deal with the crime, they can just continue on from Oliver Tambo International (provided their luggage hasn’t been stolen or rifled through) to pretty much anywhere in the world.

Attending Doug’s book launch in Harare at the end of 2009, I met friends of his from school who had stayed behind. One friend who attended was a farmer – well, he was until he’d been kicked off his land the day before. The book launch, you must understand, wasn’t exactly advertised. In fact, Doug was never sure whom the book would affect and we could not be sure if the drunken uninvited guest who was there that night might be attending on behalf of the notorious Central Intelligence Organisation (CIO). When I asked a friend of Doug’s who works in insurance in Harare (that’s an article in and of itself) why he stayed, he said it was ‘for the lifestyle’. I nodded politely. I simply didn’t get it.

It has been a conundrum since Hamlet first uttered the words ‘to be or not to be’ to know ‘whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles and, by opposing, end them’. Most Zimbabweans aren’t opposing much, but then Hamlet was dealing with an Oedipal Complex (though, of course, no one knew that then) and Zimbabweans are dealing with a ruthless dictator, so it might be absurd to be comparing the issues. But it helps to highlight the very real contrast between living in a First World country where there’s a semblance of normality (even though your mother has married your uncle) and living in a Third World country where anything goes. I learned on that trip to admire the MDC (The Movement for Democratic Change) enormously. While I was there, their leader, Morgan Tsvingarai, lost his wife in an accident that was certainly meant to be an attempt to assassinate him. The MDC are a brave and tireless lot and while it might not seem obvious to the rest of the world that they’re ‘taking arms’, they take their lives into their own hands every time they get on the road. Mugabe’s hit men love to use the roads as a means of murder.

On two trips I followed the highly intelligent and engaging Pishai Muchauraya, now a member of parliament in the (not intentionally) ironically named Government of National Unity. Because he used Drifters as a hide out, he is part of the story I chose to follow. The old backpackers lodge is a microcosm of Zimbabwe, with the story bringing together white farmers who have been kicked off their land, diamond dealers, political activists and land invaders. It is a story waiting for a happy ending, the death of the evil king, without knowing whether the heirs in his court, clamouring for their piece of the spoils, might be even worse.

Each time I go back, I worry. The first trip set me up for a number of trips that would always feel dangerous. I drove the two hours back from Drifters to Harare on that first trip with the news of Susan Tsvinagarai’s death still echoing in my head. I had been at a soccer match with one of the diamond dealers from Drifters, Fatso. He’s a wonderful man, who is inventive, resourceful and smart, just doing what needs to be done to feed his family. He asked me how I was getting back to Harare and I said I was driving alone. He nodded thoughtfully, pausing before he said, ‘You should be ok’. It did not reassure me at all.

I made it back to the comfort of Borrowdale and left Doug’s sister’s place at five o’clock the next morning, looking forward to getting on the plane to Jo’burg. On the way to the airport in the half-light of dawn with a car filled with shot tapes and camera gear, I was stopped at a roadblock. My own heart almost stopped at the same time. I am not a morning person at the best of times but the night before I’d tossed and turned over images of Zimbabwean prison cells and so I was particularly anxious and not thinking straight. A very young, gun-wielding soldier came up to me demanding to see my driver’s licence, which I handed to him. A South African driver’s licence is valid in Zimbabwe but he told me it was not. I had to make that plane and I had to avoid my car getting searched. It took me a while to see through the fog of anxiety to the calm light of day. ‘Would you like a gift?’ I asked tentatively, never having negotiated a bribe before, no matter what they say about South African cops. This confused him. I realised I was being too obtuse and, instead, handed over a R50 note which was worth about US$5 then. (South African currency is widely used in Zimbabwe, even if it isn’t the official currency, and Zimbabwean currency…well, that’s the stuff of legends and fairy tales.) His whole face lit up and he thanked me enthusiastically. I got out of there like a bat out of hell. At a party, after I got back to South Africa, someone working for MSF berated me for offering a bribe. Alone, unsupported by a massive international organisation, I refused to even enter into an argument. It is the moral fine-line that I crossed in order to get myself out. The sad truth is that the line gets blurred and what we risk by staying on the ‘correct’ side of it becomes so overwhelming that there is no debate to be had about what the ‘right’ thing to do might be.

At Jo’burg airport I almost kissed the ground. Shaken and exhausted, carrying all my tapes with me, I crossed the newly renovated Oliver Tambo International airport, where the toilets actually flush, and headed for Vida e Caffe for a decent cappuccino. Could all this go? Could South Africa follow the same fate? Ah no. The relief of being home would stay with me until the next visit, the next time I faced the journey into the inferno.

Even now, as I write, I wonder if this is clever. I wonder if I’m jeopardising my next entry into the country. Am I somehow endangering Pishai or Doug or his sister or his parents or Fatso? How do I live with myself if I am? Ultimately, we either choose to stay on one side of the precipice, or simply launch ourselves into the abyss and, with some sense of moral responsibility, do the best we can.

Isa-Lee Jacobson is a filmmaker from Cape Town, South Africa. She is presently making a film in Zimbabwe called The Last Resort, based on Douglas Rogers’ memoir by the same name. For more about her films and work please visit www.flyingfilms.co.za orwww.thelastresortdocumentary.com. For more about Douglas Rogers’ book by the same name please go to www.douglasrogers.org.

‘Our memories… are like a river cut off from the ocean. With time they will slowly dry out in the sun, and so we drink and drink and drink and we can never have our fill.’ (Dinaw Mengestu, The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, 9.)

James Joyce played one of my first literary tricks on me. In his canonical short story ‘The Dead’ (1914), the eponymous dead character Michael Furey is definitely the most alive: alive in his animation of the story’s other characters, alive enough in their memory so as to provide a catalyst for the events that the story holds. It would ultimately be a lesson that would serve up meaning again, in my long and far wanderings away from curriculum literature, some hundred years after it was first penned. This is no less true in Dinaw Mengestu’s debut The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears (2007) and Teju Cole’s second book, Open City (2011), two self-declared novels whose American pages, complete with the amnesia and autonomy that help define contemporary urban life, throb with the African cities that they have ultimately fled and lost.

In The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears (2007) the Ethiopia of Sepha Stephanos is animated in the Washington city of his wanderings. Here, in his tiny shop selling the stuff of American lives (diapers, milk, cigarettes, candy), an outdated map of Africa becomes the cartography on which three African immigrants plot and revive their memories of ‘home’. It is on this map that memory and loss become conjoined to reveal a complicated and perhaps cruel nostalgia:

‘Kenneth walks over to the map of Africa I keep taped on the wall right next to the door. It’s at least twenty years old, maybe older. The borders and names have changed since it was made, but maps, like pictures and journals, have a built-in nostalgic quality that can never render them completely obsolete. The countries are all color-coded, and Africa’s hanging dour head looks like a woman’s head wrapped in a shawl.’

In the same way that the men remember their fathers by their scars in fear that they will forget them, memories of home are choreographed around mnemonic games that involve naming African coups and their associated dictators. This map of Africa is peopled with more than thirty coups, suggesting an excess that stands in stark juxtaposition to the limitations of the memory it is devised to test: ‘No matter how many we name,’ Stephanos remarks, ‘there are always more, the names, dates, and years multiplying as fast as we can memorize them so that at times we wonder, half-jokingly, if perhaps we ourselves aren’t somewhat responsible.’

While the cruelty of what the men recall of their continent and their ironic complicity in perpetuating such a history is carefully rendered ‘half-jokingly’, descriptions of personal loss are palpably elegiac. ‘The cuff links, a holdover from my father’s days in the Ethiopian government, had the old Ethiopian flag with the Lion of Judah and his crooked crown on it. They were the only things of my father I had left’, describes Stephanos, whose father was murdered during Ethiopia’s Red Terror.

Yet among what Stephanos has lost in his Ethiopian past is what he has found in America:  A triangle of African immigrants represent his American family. Together they are Joseph (‘Joe from the Congo’, who waits tables), Kenneth (‘Ken the Kenyan’, an engineer) and the narrator, Stephanos, who ‘didn’t need a nickname to remind [his boss] that [he] was Ethiopian’. Having met 17 years ago while they were working at the Capitol Hotel, the dependable meetings between the three men provide the book’s internal structure and are responsible for many of the literal descriptions of what the title indicates may well be ‘beautiful’: The red second-hand Saab that Kenneth buys, the $10 shots that the men drink on a Friday night (‘because that’s what people do at the end of a hard day’). And so Stephanos observes his life being coded with the superficial domestic rituals of American life. Robbed of some of the rituals of immigrant life – of sending money home to his mother and brother in Ethiopia, not because he can afford to, but because he is in America ‘and because sending money home is supposed to be the consolation prize for not being home’ – his mother’s returned and supplemented cheques represent a reminder of the symbolic abundance of the familial home that he has lost. Descriptions such as these also jar us gently into remembering that this, like Open City, is a novel that intends to defy stereotypes about African immigrants.

Another of the novel’s ‘found’ immigrants is Judith, a white woman who buys the house next door to Stephanos in Logan Circle, and in so doing threatens to interrupt the neighbourhood’s apparent internal racial cohesion. With her comes her 11 year-old daughter Naomi, whose friendship with Stephanos is the novel’s most tenuous and tender. Together they read The Brother’s Karamazov for hours, the Russian epic imbued with the tragic loss that Dostoyevsky suffered while writing it. The tension that Mengestu maintains, between the narrative of loss enacted by two fatherless children reading a novel penned by an author who has just lost his son, and the regenerative possibility of hope in the families that immigrants find and make is reiterated no less during these reading sessions. It is present in the powerful way that Stephanos claims Naomi, with her ‘skin tone closer to mine than her mother’s’, and the performance of intimacy that these readings allow ‘sometimes while I read, Naomi would lay her head against my arm or in my lap and rest there, wide awake and attentive, until forced to move. It was just enough to make me see how one could want so much more out of life.’

From being the only area Stephanos could afford, Judith’s arrival is proof to Stephanos that ‘wealth and power were not immutable, and America was not always so great after all.’ Judith’s presence, and that of the workmen renovating the house she has just bought, become a metaphor for the supposed betterment of the area that her presence signals. Her arrival is also the catalyst for the new deli counter that Stephanos installs in his store, and by extension, his life. And yet the hope that urban regeneration is supposed to signal is rendered as a knock-knock joke, a coda of the book’s earlier cruel humour: ‘[G]uess what?’ … ‘Some white people just moved in’/’Where?’/’Next door.’/’Next door to who?’/’Me.’/’He’s lying.’/’I’m serious.’

With Judith’s appearance in the neighbourhood, women called ‘Velvet’ and ‘Chocolate’, who used to be Stephanos’ regulars, disappear, foreshadowing Judith’s own disappearance and reiterating the novel’s structural motif of marking arrivals and departures. But Stephanos’ experience is such that he is still able to place their removal on a continuous trajectory. Without the shroud of American amnesia, people cannot simply disappear to Stephanos: they are killed, they immigrate, they are forced to move away. These women have not ‘vanished not into thin air, but into a different space or reality, as if they had all collectively taken flight and migrated to another climate.’

Teju Cole’s Open City plays, too, albeit beautifully, with the motif of migration. When dominant culture is superimposed on original culture, it often produces the blurring of cultural boundaries, an inside and an outside, Tsitsi Dangarembga’s ‘nervous condition’ of uncertainty about who you are. This negotiation, Fanon has oft remarked, in turn results in the attempt of trying to live as two incompatible people at once, a phenomena that is sometimes attributed to diasporic and postcolonial subjects. Cole, however, draws us into the ‘miracle of natural migration’ in the opening paragraphs of his novel. The perspective of the geese that he watches, ‘wondering how our life below might look from their perspective’, comes to look something very much like Open City. This is not a novel about trying to live two lives at once, but of one person’s grounded synthesis of the many places and times he has embodied geographically and temporally: ‘Those disembodied voices remain connected in my mind, even now, with the apparition of migrating geese.’

At the centre of this novel is a half-Nigerian, half-German narrator, whose heritage is as removed from the centre of his identity so as to be described as a ‘detail of my background, that I was Nigerian…’.  The novel is not driven by plot, but style, as Julius, who is in the final year of his psychiatry residency, wanders from one of his physical ‘centres’, his home in Harlem, around New York (and, briefly, Brussels), recording the lives of others:

‘These walks, a counterpoint to my busy days at the hospital, steadily lengthened, taking me farther and farther afield each time, so that I often found myself at quite a distance from home late at night, and was compelled to return home by subway.’

We travel, too, through the women of his past: To the mother he has become estranged from, the romantic relationship that has ended with his girlfriend Nadège (‘hope’) and the oma (grandmother) he feels displaced from. We also travel through the African immigrants and emigrants, the men, that people his present: a Liberian imprisoned in Queens; a Haitian shoe-shiner; a fiercely opinionated Moroccan student whom he befriends in Brussels.

While Julius is undoubtedly a detached viewer, an individual in a city that is ‘open’, his solitary existence does not feel lonely for the close company we keep with him. He wanders through his adopted city thinking about critical theory, connecting to the complicated compositions of classical musicians such as Mahler, bearing witness to the art of Velázquez. Julius’ New York streets resonate with books by Barthes and references to Tahar Ben Joulloun and become the sounding board for his opinion on The Last King of Scotland.

True to the genre that Beaudelaire initiated and which Georg Simmel and Walter Benjamin subsequently adapted, as a novel depicting a solipsistic flaneur at its heart, Julius does suffer from the anxieties of modern urban life and a preoccupation with autonomy. Anxieties over the loss of his pin number at a cash machine, and the subsequent confiscation of his bank card lead to a hopelessness; the anger at being laid claim to by a taxi driver who is ‘African, just like you’ finds its counterpoint in the overwhelmingly peopled and yet solitary existence that urban ‘migration’ – commuting – sometimes requires:

‘The sight of large masse of people hurrying down into underground chambers was perpetually strange to me, and I felt that all of the human race were rushing, pushed by a counter-instinctive death drive, into movable catacombs. Above ground I was with thousands of others in their solitude, but in the subway, standing close to strangers, jostling them and being jostled by them for space and breathing room, all of us reenacting unacknowledged traumas, the solitude intensified.’

The book’s style – rendered almost as Cole’s diary – a lyrical, interconnected reverie, is what salvages Julius from the overwhelming sense of loss that marks Stephanos’ life. The record of a feeling as intransient as Julius missing his oma brings with it the promise of a trip to Belgium and the memory of his grandmother’s visit to Nigeria; and with that the impression of his family’s tour of the palaces of the Deji in Akure and Ooni in Ife is in turn rooted in a walk that lands Julius outside the American Folk Art Museum. And thus a new paragraph delineating the Museum’s artifacts begins, the long history of the interior of Yorubaland bearing at its heels.

And so, among other places, impressions of Nigeria are inscribed into the crevices of New York City. Without the autonomy that urban American life demands, the streets that Julius walks could not become alive with the palimpsest of personal experience. The city becomes a canvas for the tour Julius ultimately leads us on of his interior life, in which he connects the interior to the exterior, the quotidian to the divine, the personal to the public: The cripple on the 1 train that Julius encounters, dragging his leg from car to car, is the result of the Yoruba belief about the drunken demiurge Obatala, drinking heavily as he mis-fashioned humans out of clay; bedbugs antagonise like the memory of Basra bombs being discussed in Yoruba by two women in burqas, a detail that Cole suggests connects them to the ‘women in black gowns… beat[ing] their breasts’ that he sees on the news. The riverlets of Stephanos’ fractured memory map may well not be connected to the ocean of his home, but in Open City, Julius inevitably connects them to each other.

Open City ends inevitably on a pessimistic note, the author noting the number of birds that have died throughout history, disoriented by the fierce torch that guided ships into Manhatten’s harbor from the Statue of Liberty. And yet while the arrival of those birds in America has been marked not by liberation but death, through the pages of this book we are inevitably reminded of the span of their flight through different histories and lands. As such, they can’t help but come alive. If The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears bears witness to the project of reading, then Open City is about the project of writing. ‘But a book suggests conversation: one person is speaking to another…’, writes Cole, ‘so I read aloud with myself as my audience, and gave voice to another’s words.’ Both novels ultimately forge communities of belonging from their lonely wanderings though a city’s strange streets.

Benedict Anderson has suggested that nations are often the products of those who have left the country and who ‘fondly fund at long distance future recreations of idealized memories of their past.’[1] Both The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears and Open City are replete with the poetry of loss and cadence of shadow that allows what is not entirely present to come alive while imbuing the lives of those who have not entirely arrived with the formations that will animate their stories for times and peoples still yet to come.

It is widely agreed that the speed and growth of cities is a very real and present issue.  The megacity in particular – African cities like Lagos and Cairo, with more than 10 million people – evoke imagery associated with rapid urbanisation: the proliferation of crowded slums, the chronic shortage of amenities and the choking fumes from un-roadworthy vehicles in seemingly endless traffic. A snapshot of urban life looks something like this:

• One out of every three urban dwellers lives in slum conditions – 1 billion people.
• The urban population increases by 200, 000 people every day, more than 70 million people a year.
• Forecasts for 2050: 70% of the world’s population will be urban, which amounts to 6.4 billion people. In addition, the towns and cities of the less-developed world will make up 83% of urban humanity.[1]

Many of the world’s largest cities – Buenos Aires, Calcutta, Mexico City, Seoul – actually have more people moving out than in, and few are close to the size that was predicted for them in the 1970s.[2] Only six megacities grew at rates consistently above 3% per year between 1975–2005. Of these six, only Dhaka and Lagos are expected to continue to grow at rates exceeding 3% a year. The others experienced mainly moderate or low growth.

Cue the middle born – the medium city. She boasts a reasonable population of 500,000 or less. Think Arusha, Gaborone, Kisumu. Just over half of the world’s urban population continues to live in such settlements. Yet the archetypal medium city in Africa (and indeed the global South), remains underserved in housing, transportation, piped water, waste disposal and other services.

“We cannot recall a case in which a small city was the focus of an editorial lamenting rapid urban growth or the lack of public services. Nevertheless, the combined size of such cities makes them very significant presences in developing countries.”[3]

The role of medium cities in absorbing urban population growth cannot be understated.  They offer both advantages and disadvantages.

The chief advantage is that, in comparison to megacities, necessary actions are, in principle, easier to undertake.  They also may have more flexibility in terms of territorial expansion and can attract investment, particularly from the private sector.

In many cases however, they have fewer human, financial and technical resources at their disposal than their sprawling megacity siblings. In many cases, their residents are no better off than those in the rural areas they left behind.

Larger cities slowly increase their slice of the urban pie over time, but, for the foreseeable future, the medium cities will predominate.  The real story therefore is the absolute size of the increments – the size of the slices of pie, which are a much more dominant factor than total number of inhabitants in the neglected middle born.

Vera Bukachi is a consultant at Arup International Development. She is also a research engineer at UCL, looking at water management in rapidly urbanising cities. She loves Africa, photography, quirky jewellery and Jaffa cakes.

In the media the predominate visual image of water shortages and drought in Africa tends to depict the rural context. While there is no doubt that images of a woman at a dry well or river bed or photos of emaciated cattle do reflect the lives of many people in rural areas, less represented is the range of challenges that people that live in cities and urban areas experience when it comes to fulfilling their water needs.

Serious drought affected the Horn of Africa in 2011 (Wajir, Kenya) (source: http://knowledge.allianz.com/)

Ana Kajumulo Tibaijuka, Executive Director of UN Habitat, highlights this issue, saying that whilst most development aid for sanitation projects is allocated to rural areas, the majority of poor sanitation-related deaths and diseases actually occur in expanding cities. This is despite the fact that only between 2–12% of sanitation-related foreign aid is spent on urban areas.[1]

Africa continues to be the most rural continent in the world, with only 39.9% of the continent’s population living in cities and towns. However, it is predicted that in the next three decades more than half of Africa’s population will be living in its rapidly-expanding urban centres.[2] The population of Dar Es Salaam (Tanzania), for example, is expanding at a rate of 10% a year. On average the African urban population is growing at almost 5% a year, the highest rate in the world.[3] Some of this increase is due to natural population growth in urban areas. However, a significant proportion of this growth can be attributed to rural-to-urban migration, which is predicted to continue to be a major factor in future expansion.

Rapid urbanisation increases the difficulty in meeting basic needs, including the provision of safe water and adequate sanitation. Whilst population growth in cities exacerbates the problem, increases in the demand and pattern of use of water can put further pressure on resources as can be seen by the fact that although the world population has doubled globally since 1950 the use of water has tripled.[4] Increase in water use seems to be associated with higher standards of living. Associated with this is a reduction in the consumption of grains and an increase in the consumption of meat, whose production requires a greater use of water. It is likely that this trend will also be seen in African cities in the future. Coupled with the growing need for water for domestic use is the growing demand for water for agricultural purposes in Africa, much of which is required for exported goods. Currently in Africa 85% –86% of water is used for for agricultural purposes, 9% for community use and 6% for industrial use.[5]

The lack of safe drinking water and sanitation is a major problem globally, as is reflected by several initiatives established to tackle the issue. UN Millennium Development Goal (MDG) 7, Target 10 aims to ‘reduce by half the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water by 2015.’ The African Water Vision 2025 has a more ambitious target of reducing the number by 70% in the same time. An additional target was added in 2002 by the World Summit on Sustainable Development to ‘halve by 2015 the proportion of people who do not have access to basic sanitation.’ At the time the millennium goals were established, over 300 million people in Africa did not have access to safe water and over 500 million were without adequate sanitation. Current data shows that the world is on track to meet or even exceed the MDG for safe drinking water. Progresses in sanitation however, has been much less effective. If the current rate of progress continues, the sanitation target will not be met in Sub-Saharan Africa for another 200 years.[6]

The scale of these figures makes it hard to relate them to people’s daily lives. A few statistics provided by the charity WaterAid serve to highlight the issue worldwide:

• 1.4 million children die every year from diarrhoea caused by unclean water and poor sanitation.
• Diarrhoea kills more children every year than AIDS, malaria and measles combined.
• Half the hospital beds in developing countries are filled with people suffering from diseases associated with poor water, sanitation and hygiene.

A disproportionate number of people affected by these diseases live in cities. This can be attributed to a highly concentrated population and the fact that people are often in contact with human waste.

Global statistics often fail to provide a nuanced understanding of the different contexts that often co-exist in any one city. UN statistics on the ‘improved’ provision of water and sanitation for example, suggest that since the setting of the Millennium Development Goals in 2000, 94% of all urban populations in Africa have improved water provision and 84% have improved sanitation.[7] Problematically however, these statistics combine water access data from the richest and poorest residents into a single average – an approach which may blur the reality of the different urban contexts from which they were drawn.

A 2008 report from the 2^nd African Ministerial Conference on Housing and Urban Development provided information on 43 African cities, claiming that 83% of the population in urban areas lack toilets connected to sewers. This issue can be further broken down to establish differences (and similarities) between different types of urban areas. Infrastructures in established, older residential areas are subjected to decay, but people living in newer, high-density areas face a multitude of challenges. In Nairobi for example, 60% of the population live in high-density areas that occupy just 5% of the city’s land. The challenge of providing water to some of these areas is further compounded by the lack of relevant infrastructure. In Mahira, a section of the Huruma area in Nairobi, there is 1 toilet with 10 units and 2 bathrooms for a settlement with 332 households and 1,500 inhabitants.[8]

Studies of individual cities such as these highlight the fact that the problem is much greater in these urban areas than the official national or regional statistics might suggest. One hundred and fifty million African urban residents – 50% of the urban population – do not have adequate water supplies and 180 million (roughly 60% of the urban population) lack adequate sanitation overall.

To meet the growing demand for water associated with the population growth in cities such as Nairobi, water is often transported from regions far outside the city limits (sometimes up to 600 kilometres away). Difficulties in accessing water are therefore often accompanied by issues of affordability. It is estimated that more than half of the urban poor in some countries are denied access to municipal water supplies and are dependent on private vendors. Low-income urban dwellers sometimes pay up to 50 times the price paid by higher income earners for their water.

Rainwater harvesting projects, such as this one in Ethiopia, provide one source of water in urban areas. (source: www.waterworld.com)

The involvement of community-based organisations seems to be having some success in tackling the water issue in Africa’s urban areas. The report from the UN-Habitat 2^nd African Ministerial Conference on Housing and Urban Development states that ‘public/private partnerships that prioritize small scale community level involvement are a cost effective way to solve the immediate problem of the urban poor.’

The potential of water in Africa: The Great Lakes seen from above (source: New World Encyclopedia)

The need for clean water and adequate sanitation will continue to be a major challenge in African cities for many years to come. Until the problem is tackled, it will continue to be a major contributing factor in poverty and in limiting socio-economic growth as a result of restricting food production and industrial development. Whilst more than 300 million on the continent live in what are described as ‘water scarce environments’, Africa as a whole could be said to be water rich. With 17 large rivers, 160 major lakes and only about 4% of its renewable water resources currently being used, the potential for hydro electricity is enormous. The major problem seems to be a lack of investment to access these potential sources of water and power. The report African Water 2025 claims that US$20 billion per year is needed to tackle the issue of under investment. They also call for more effective management of water resources and the reduction of pollution and deforestation, both of which have an impact on availability and access to water. What is encouraging is the existence of the African Water Vision 2025, and what appears to be the start of a coordinated approach and strategy to tackling the issue at the regional, national, city and community level.

Written on the Wall (Zanzibar, 2009, Jenny Doubt)

One of the most influential factors on the AIDS epidemic in Africa is the massive rural-to-urban migration that is taking place in its midst. As such, urban metaphors have often been used to describe the spread of the HIV/AIDS virus. Along with the actual mechanisms of the city: ports, long-distance truck journies, the decline in subsistence farming, the rise in economic migration and international demands for the demise of the import tariffs, the ‘super highway’ in some respects best begins to illustrate one response to the oft-asked question about why the virus has been so particularly devastating in sub-Saharan Africa.

In her The Invisible Cure: Africa, the West and the Fight against AIDS (2007), public health specialist Helen Epstein provides a literal explanation for the derivation of this metaphor, which is worth reproducing here at length:

‘It’s not that African people have more sexual partners, over a lifetime, than people in Western countries do – in fact, they generally have fewer. However, in many African communities, both men and women are more likely than people in other world regions to have more than one–perhaps two or three – overlapping or ‘concurrent’ long-term partnerships at a time. A man may have two wives, or a wife and a girlfriend, and one of those women may have another regular partner, who may in turn have one or more other partners and so on. This ‘long-term concurrency’ differs from the ‘serial monogamy’ more common in Western countries, and the casual and commercial ‘one-off’ sexual encounters that occur everywhere. But long-term overlapping relationships are far more dangerous than serial monogamy, because they link people into a giant network that creates a virtual superhighway for HIV.’[1]

Engaging with the debate on AIDS in Africa revisits so many of the themes that postcolonial literary studies first started tendering: mapping, appropriation, exoticism, orientalism and the power imbalances that dictate who can speak for whom. AIDS returns us to debates about the exoticism and sexualisation of the African body, and ultimately to one of the most fundamental questions at the heart of the physical postcolonial project – the reclamation of land that has been appropriated. It is this struggle that Guevera and Fanon so powerfully bring to the fore. Renaming places and geographies in the colonial context has often been considered an act of appropriation and power, whether one is translating power away from its people or whether they are reclaiming it anew in the postcolonial context.[2]

The most influential political-economic explanation for the spread of AIDS in South Africa is routed in a circular patter of male migration that extends back through apartheid and colonialism: from the gold mines to the same-sex hostels that mine workers lived in to the rural homesteads to which men returned to infect their wives. This explanation for the South African spread of the virus is grounded in the historical regulation of the African male body. African men were pushed into migrant labour through the discovery of diamonds at Kimberly (1867) and gold in Johannesburg (1886).[3] Early apartheid era restrictions on African access to urban areas, coupled with the rise of a stable African labourforce meant that the townships grew quickly during the apartheid era. And with the growth of townships and the constant demand for a labourforce in the mines, in particular, African families were forced to reconfigure. This meant that African men were forced to spend the majority of their time away from their rural families, and often started second families in their township residences.

This explanation for the spread of the virus was projected forward by the Zulu-language feature film Yesterday (2003), which describes the experience of a young rural woman who is infected with HIV by her husband, a miner, who was himself infected away from their homestead. Her struggle to care for him as he dies is primarily characterized by their ostracization by their community. The film is coded in terms of location: from her rural homestead, to the mine that she travels to in order to find her husband and the space outside of her community, where her husband dies. These spaces are also recreated in the documentary film A Miner’s Tale (2001)[4], which describes the life of an economic immigrant, Joachim, who works in the gold mines in Johannesburg and lives with his companion, Maria, with whom he has fathered children, in Soweto. He then travels back to Mozambique to visit his first wife Rosita and now-adult son Mica, and wrangles with the local sangoma and the AIDS counselor’s advice about how to handle his HIV-positive status on his visit. Does he perform his duty as a husband and give his wife more children and in so doing, risk infecting her? While both of these films depict and were created in the post-apartheid era, it is the colonial cartography of land dispossession and migrant labour that dominates both the literal and imaginative maps of the epidemic that they depict.[5] Both films clearly describe who is being ‘left behind’ in the post-colonial geography of the new South Africa.[6]

from A Miner's Tale

East Africa shares so many of the cultural and economic values that make the HIV superhighway so devastating in South Africa, notwithstanding the fact that many of the economic migrants that the South African mines attracted were peopled by Tanzanian men, striving to meet the tax regulations of the British in the late nineteenth century.[7] And yet – especially in the Uganda that Epstein describes – their national AIDS policies have often been praised by international agencies for their early response and intervention in epidemic. In 2003 Uganda had the only declining HIV prevalence rate, which can partially be attributed to the government’s response in the early 1990s and has otherwise been linked to ‘ordinary, but frank, conversations people had with family, friends, and neighbours, not about sex, but about the frightening, calamitous, effects of AIDS itself.’[8] To illustrate the effects of government-led responses to the epidemic, Epstein describes a chance meeting with a car driver in Kampala who asks her about the ‘V3 loop’:

‘I had similar conversations with a construction worker, a group of high school students, a hairdresser, and the man who mopped the floor of the lab. I had to confront questions about mutation rates, opportunistic infections, and why some people didn’t get infected even though they seemed to be having a great many sexual relationships. Nowehere else had I found people so inquisitive and well informed about AIDS. In Kampala, everyone talked about AIDS.’[9]

As a contrast, the award-winning South African poem ‘Nobody Said AIDS’ (2007) describes the silence and shame surrounding the emergence of the epidemic: ‘Then they died of TB/ in 1996/TB? … Healthy men died of/ Pneumonia, Flu, Cancer,/TB?,’[10]

The landscapes of contemporary South Africa and East Africa are beginning to bear witness to their respective national AIDS policies. While projects such as Steps to the Future make use of South African streets and highways in order to carry prevention and education campaigns into local spaces otherwise shrouded in silence, the very streets of Tanzania curate a much louder and literal response than its now very well-travelled metaphorical counterpart:

'Roadside 1': Dar es Salaam, Tanzania (Hannah Gibson, 2010)

 

 

'Spread the Message': Dar es Salaam, Tanzania (Hannah Gibson, 2010)

 

'Roadside 2': Dar es Salaam, Tanzania (Hannah Gibson, 2010)

'Aids is Here': Mombasa, Kenya (Jenny Doubt, 2010)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

References:

[1] Helen Epstein, The Invisible Cure: Africa, the West and the Fight against AIDS (London: Penguin Books, 2007) p. xv.

[2] Which, of course, should not be confused with Fanon’s retranslation.

[3] Mark Hunter, Love in the Time of AIDS: Inequality, Gender, and Rights in South Africa (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2010). 38.

[4] Production Company: Cool/Uhuru Pictures, Dirs Nic Hofmeyr and Gabriele Mondlane. Premiered on World AIDS Day, 2001. See Steps for the Future: http://www.stepsforthefuture.co.za/films.php.

[5] Benedict Carton further describes how labour migrants have overturned traditional patterns of respect for men in his ‘Locusts Fall from the Sky: Manhood and Migrancy in KwaZulu-Natal’, in Changing Men in Southern Africa, ed. by Robert Morrell (Scottsville: University of Natal Press, 2001), pp. 129–140.

[6] Hunter, 101.

[7] Epstein, 53.

[8] Epstein, 134.

[9] Epstein, 21.

[10] Eddie Vulani Maluleke, ‘Nobody Ever Said AIDS’, in Nobody Ever Said AIDS, ed. by Nobantu Rosebotsa, Meg Samuelson and Kylie Thomas (Cape Town: Kwela Books, 2004), p. xx. (18:49–51; 62–64).

Many countries have started cities from scratch, including Dubai’s island cities, the logically-named Brasilia, the capital of Brazil, and even Nairobi, a rail depot selected as the administrative city of Kenya by the British.  While new, shiny cities are planned across China, Korea and the Arabian Gulf, another potentially new city has been proposed in the recently independent country of South Sudan.

Called Ramciel (or Ramshiel, depending on spelling), the new capital of South Sudan has re-emerged after independence as a purported government scheme, formally announced as a long-term plan on 2 September, 2011.  Previously the pet idea of a very few government ministers, rubbished by a surveying company that advised that the allocated land was entirely unsuitable, and then put to one side – apparently – in the excitement over independence, it seemed unlikely to bear fruit.

But now the Southern government has announced plans to complete basic infrastructure around Ramciel – whose location is very vague, and whose size has been a subject of debate – within the next five years.  The location is already shrouded in destiny by claims (unreported before independence?) that Ramciel had apparently been selected by the late John Garang himself, the guerrilla leader and first President of the South who has become one of the few common national symbols, and whose face covers the new currency.  The idea of a clean slate is extremely attractive in light of the current capital, Juba, being a rapidly-expanding warren of endless NGOs, new squatter towns of returning refugees and jerry-rigged construction work.  Like the parliamentary area of Delhi, built in classical style by Lutyens, the artistic impressions of Ramciel delineates a functioning, established and credible seat of government and centre of state that is often sorely lacking in Juba.  It even has a Facebook page.

As James Okuk at the Sudan Tribune has pointed out, the question of why to move the capital is well-covered.  There have been legitimate concerns over the rapid expansion of Juba onto land traditionally  owned and used by the local Bari communities; while the Southern courts are not up to speed with new legislation, a new judiciary and a huge caseload, land claims continue to be riddled with corruption, problems with documentation, arbitrary seizures and squatting.  Juba is also firmly in Equatoria state in the south of South Sudan, while Ramciel is central, which might ease some of the frustrations over the monopolising of infrastructure and investment.

However, as Okuk points out, the question of ‘how’ to relocate – and, as an aside, whether relocation is even necessary – hasn’t been properly asked.  There are huge amounts of investment in Juba already, including an entirely new road layout, embassies and factories, let alone the tarmac put down and the statue of Garang erected for Independence Day.  How the huge and constantly growing number of citizens of Juba, their homes and land rights are to be relocated is a major unasked and unsolved issue.  These criticisms – as with the criticism of the actual site’s unsuitability and remoteness – have been raised by opposition leaders, but not by the government itself.[1]

This is an authoritarian solution to a diplomatic problem; it’s already been pointed out that local Bari council leaders have offered further land around Juba.  Proper local politics, investment in good land tribunals and judicial training, and re-investment in official land titles would be sensible but boring.  Even the President has told officials to ‘feel at home’ in Juba for another twenty years.  For a poor country with a short-term oil bonus and massive ambitions, the idea of just ‘starting again’ to avoid these issues is a cop out and a distraction tactic.  ‘New cities’ like Ramciel are old politics.

Nicki Kindersley is a PhD student at Durham University, studying the political activities of Southern Sudanese migrant communities in Greater Khartoum.  She blogs at Internally Displaced (http://internallydisplaced.wordpress.com).

‘Only Me’: The death of the author in Mary Kingsley’s Travels in West Africa

While she insisted that she was ‘not bent on discoursing on [her] psychological state,”[1] Mary Kingsley confided to a friend that she ‘went to West Africa to die.’[2] Written and published at the height of European colonial expansion into Africa, Travels in West Africa (1897) was a refreshing contrast to contemporary discourse of exploration, which relished in demonising the Dark Continent.  While she was influenced by, and eventually became part of, Victorian colonial conversation, she took great pains to distinguish herself within it. She wrote ‘only on things that [she knew] from personal experience and very careful observation,’[3] and insisted on an informal, ‘unscientific’ style of prose. When she does appear in her narrative, it is mostly as a comic figure, not as lord of all she surveys.

Travels in West Africa by Mary Kingsley

Travels in West Africa changed the way Africa – and Empire – was written. Kinglsey’s irony, self-parody and humour subverted the trope of ‘Spinster Abroad,’ and attacked imperial ideology’s supposed moral and religious justifications for conquest as dishonest and dishonourable.  The protagonists of her travelogue are West Africans, not an exaggerated heroine of her own imagination. Kingsley challenged the canon by sacrificing herself to the narrative.

Imperial authority had always been a masculine pursuit, but had become so dominant to be accepted as universal. Kingsley highlighted the hypocrisy of that rhetoric, which did not speak for women, and excluded Africans almost completely; proving to us that the ‘civilising mission,’ was fundamentally misguided.

Janelle Rodriques is a first-year PhD candidate for the School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics, University of Newcastle (UK), researching representations of Obeah (an African-inspired Caribbean religious system) in twentieth century West Indian fiction. Her interests include African/Caribbean religious expression, the conflicts between orality and textuality in cultural production, resistance literature and literature of the Diaspora.

In 2011, fifty secondary school students, between the ages of 11 and 17, from ten public schools (not to be mistaken for the British public school system) across the city of Lagos were selected to participate in the first phase of a social photography project titled ‘Archiving Lagos’. This phase of the Archiving Lagos project is designed to collect and document images of Lagos, and the lived experiences of young people living in less affluent suburbs of the city.

Lagos, the commercial capital of Nigeria has an estimated population of 17 million and is rapidly changing. The massive regeneration work taking place in the city, that will come to define the democratic government of the current governor, Babatunde Fashola, is being well documented. This narrative of progress, however, exempts the voices of a significant portion of the population of Lagos, particularly, the voices of those living on the margins of our society. Postcolonial scholars, and those interested in the theories they espouse, will agree that the danger of a single-sided collective narrative of progress is that the narrative of the dominant group will come to stand for the whole. Archiving Lagos was designed to provide the multiple perspectives required for a more wholesome historical narrative in years to come. The project was entirely funded by donations from private individuals and small businesses in the city. Authorization to work with students across the city was granted by the relevant Lagos State Education District Offices.

The challenges of creating a photo diary of life at the margins of Lagos were diverse. Many of the fifty students I worked with had neither owned nor used a camera prior to the start of the project. Decisions had to be made on the types of cameras to use and how to ensure their safe return; which ten public schools would qualify for the program and, which five students from each school would qualify. In the end, logistics determined the five schools on mainland Lagos and the five schools on Lagos Island would represent the whole. The irony that logistical ease was the determining factor in the selection process is not lost on me, as I am sure nationalist historiographers, who privilege elite narratives and culture would note.

An orientation and photography training session was scheduled for the morning of the 6^th of October 2011 and the students were picked up from their schools in a bus from the fleet of the Lagos Bus Rapid Transportation system (BRT), and driven around Lagos for about two hours. Many had never travelled on the BRT, so this was a way to introduce them to the new urban regeneration efforts taking place in their city. It was also a way to set the scene for the orientation and training that was to follow at Freedom Park in Lagos.

Freedom Park is in itself a project of the city’s urban rejuvenation. Sited on the old colonial Broad Street prison grounds, which only three years prior was a derelict squatters haven in the heart of Lagos, the beautifully transformed space now includes a garden, a museum, an art gallery, two outdoor performances spaces, and a food court.  None of the participating students knew of or had visited the park before and this provided them with an opportunity to experience something of the ‘new Lagos’. At the training session, the students were taught basic photography techniques and were subsequently handed individual disposable cameras, pens and notepads. They were given the following instructions: take pictures that capture your everyday experiences of life as lived in Lagos, and document your reasons for capturing different images.

As scheduled, four days later, forty-eight of the fifty cameras and forty-seven notepads were returned to the museum. Over five hundred images were recovered from the returned cameras. Whilst all of these images have now been archived, thirty-five of them were chosen for an exhibition to showcase the students’ pictures a month later.  The pictures for the exhibition were selected based on two selection criteria: the depictions of clearly discernible messages in the photos taken, and the strength of students’ corresponding support statements.

In my opinion, the most striking of the thirty-five exhibited pictures is a photograph of high school students in their classroom taken by a Michael Solomon. Solomon captures the smiley faces and cheery countenance of his colleagues in the ways they posed for his camera, and in their playful attempts to hide their faces from the snapshot. Behind the student, a large concrete wall with graffiti draws the eyes in. I make out the words ‘give’, ‘home’ and a sketch of a bunny’s head. I see ‘JSS3d’ long before I figure out that this was, or might have been the classroom for third year students of the Junior Secondary School program at the high school. The students’ tightly arranged chairs and tables look newer in contrast to the classroom walls. Boldly inscribed on the furniture were the words, ‘LASG FURNITURE’.

I had heard that two years ago, the Lagos State government had commissioned local carpenters to build classroom chairs and tables to replace the existing old and damaged furniture in public schools across the city. These students were obvious beneficiaries, but what was the point of updating the furniture, I wondered, if the walls were left in their old unkempt state? Or, should my question be, if the furniture were the property of the State government, whose property were the school walls? Solomon’s picture was by no means the best picture in the exhibition, but it provides an insight into the state of uneven spatial development fast characterizing the urban regeneration of Lagos. In his simply, but apt caption for his picture Solomon writes: ‘Even here, we learn’.

Photograph by Michael Solomon – State Senior High School, Lagos

Solomon’s caption resonates with a personal experience of gaining knowledge in the most awkward of spaces. When I initially designed the Archiving Lagos project, I conceived of it as a way to build up content for the museum at Freedom Park. I had proposed that the museum be registered also as a research centre, a little detail, which justifies a museum funding and/or hosting projects like Archiving Lagos. This was so important as I had learnt, combing through archives in London, on behalf of the Freedom Park project, in the summer of 2010, that the only way to give a near accurate account of a peoples’ histories is to have the people tell their own stories.

I am not unaware of the pitfalls of the phrase ‘accurate account of histories’, and its connections to the discourse of power, but that is a discussion for another day. So, as I sat in the basement of the British National Archive, at Kew in Richmond, starring at the treaty that was supposed to have ceded Lagos to the British colonial government in 1861, I could not help but notice the neat row of Xs that signified the consent of Oba Dosumu, the then King of Lagos, and his trusted chiefs. I know from very well documented colonial history of Lagos, that the king and his chiefs were unable to read or write in English. Who, then, consented to the treaty on their behalf? Sitting in that dark basement at Kew, on a rather beautiful summer afternoon, I came to the realization that I may never have the answer to my question. For as long as museums and archives in the West continue to house more historical data on Lagos than we can find in the city, Lagosians will always have a single-sided narration of their past. Even here, in a basement, at Kew, in Richmond, I learn.

Back in Lagos, the Archiving Lagos photo exhibition received some media coverage in the city. It was covered by a national newspaper, and aired for two consecutive weekends on the main news channel in Lagos. The students’ photographs were hailed as inspiring, and attention was called to the ways these pictures contribute to the idea of the Lagos megacity dream.  For me, the works of these young photographers extend a long tradition of social photography. Their pictures reflect the ever-growing divide between the rich and the poor in the city of Lagos, and they advocate for change both in the images they capture with their cameras and in their supporting statements. But, crucially, they have successfully documented an aspect of life in Lagos in 2011. My hope is that some lucky museum curator, perhaps a hundred years from now, in the basement of a national archive in Lagos, will access these pictures and learn something of the city’s past from a socio-economic group whose stories are often obscured from historical narratives of growth and modernization.

Bukola Aluko-Kpotie, a Doctoral candidate at the University of Texas in Austin, is the curator of the Archiving Lagos Project.