Orientation

A New Map of Africa

The search for the Nile River took two thousand years too long. The idea of searching is itself crazy: as far as human primates are concerned, the flat pan of water stretching from eastern Uganda to the vast Delta of Egypt has always been there. And yet the first foreign correspondents in Africa — white men from Europe — were caught in an amazing race to "map" the river from tip to tail. Their tales of travel on Africa's waterways and into its dense forests sailed back to newspapers in 1850s London, Brussels, and New York. Sending word of new tribes in Ethiopia, or safe passage to the interior lakes of central Africa, these men laid the foundation for a tradition of sensationalist writing about Africa. It was Henry Morton Stanley, in his 1878 account of his travels in the Congo, who coined the term dark continent.

The misunderstanding began before Christ. Herodotus's fifth-century map of Africa left the cradle of civilization looking like an afterthought. (Later, the Mercator Projection sold Africa literally short.) He wrote, "I am astonished that men should ever have divided [Africa], Asia and Europe as they have, for they are exceedingly unequal. Europe extends the entire length of the other two, and for breadth will not even (as I think) hear to be compared to them."

For the next millennium, the northward-flowing river puzzled European cartographers. A Greek merchant named Diogenes began a rumor that the source of the Nile lay among the so-called Mountains of the Moon, somewhere in the wilds of "Nubia." As trade suffused the continent's west coast, existing tribes and landmarks were inked with the exquisite penmanship of eighteenth-century European trade schools. But it was not until 1858 that John Hanning Speke "discovered" that the longest river in the world begins not on the moon, but at Lake Victoria.

As news of the White Nile's source rippled through Europe, Major R. E. Cheesman, the British consul to Ethiopia, remarked, "It seemed almost unbelievable that such a famous river ... could have been so long neglected." Like Herodotus, Cheesman exposed his Western bias. After all, the Nile bridges languages and climates, north and south of the Sahara. It has fed and ferried millions of people since the days of Moses. At the time of Speke's trip, the population living and trading near the source of the Nile numbered almost three million. It might have been easier for the frantic searchers to ask locals where the big river began. A few could have advised them: here.

The search for an omnipresent river was not merely inefficient; it charts the dynamic that has defined modern African history. Despite centuries of contact (based largely on slave trading), ignorance and hubris long governed Western impressions of what was seen as an impenetrable unknown — Joseph Conrad's "heart of darkness."

So it was not without precedent that European powers, led by the Portuguese, French, British, and Germans, decided to carve up the African continent using maps and borders of their own creation. At the Berlin Conference in 1884, they drew boundaries that had never existed on the continent, scrumming for natural resources from tobacco to peanuts to gold (oil would soon follow). Their borderlines preserved the gap between foreign perception and African reality that has been difficult to close ever since.

More than a century later, Google showed up. Since 2007, the American Internet giant has opened offices in Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa, and Uganda and begun translating its most popular American applications to Africa. Maps were a top priority. Google's team of digital cartographers fanned out across the continent, knitting African streets and cities into the fabric of the World Wide Web. The Americans spared no extravagance: a fleet of red Toyota Priuses mounted with cameras circled cities in South Africa to localize Google's "Street View" project — just in time for the 2010 World Cup.

Like the ancient geographers in search of the Nile, the modern Google mappers imported a Western notion of orientation. As anyone who has taken directions in Africa can tell you, we're running a different kind of software. In a developed country, a charming female robot might read out clear directions to a numbered street address. In Africa, however, here's what you get:

If you are approaching from the Tuskys roundabout, stay on Langata Road till you have passed the entrance on Langata Road that would get you to Carnivore. Take the first right turn off Langata Road after this point. Drive down Langata Road for approximately half a second, and take the left turn right before the petrol station next to Rafikiz. Drive down this road for half a minute. When you see Psys Langata on your right, take that left.

Confused? These are real — and typical — directions for Nairobi, the Kenyan capital where I lived while reporting this book. Of course, Nairobi and many other cities in Africa have roads and districts with formal names, and some buildings with assigned numbers. But even in the most cosmopolitan cities, the address is beside the point.

Locals use businesses, billboards, bus stops, and hair salons as a dynamic, alternative framework for navigation. We rely on time, relative distance, egocentric directions (right or left), and shared knowledge. In Khartoum, the North Sudanese capital, one prominent local landmark is a building where a Chinese restaurant used to be. In the six months until it was repaired, I gave directions to my home based on a particularly cavernous pothole. Frequently, the final direction is "just ask someone."

Anthropologists would call Nairobi streets a "high-context" environment. Such navigation is a holdover from a time when centralized systems were absent (which, as we'll see, is often still the case). More importantly, a high-context route from point A is no proof that point B doesn't exist — it just means you need a different map to find it.

The same goes for modern Africa. Whether you're working for an American tech giant struggling to standardize navigation, an entrepreneur from Brazil looking for new business opportunities, a French tourist in search of adventure, a nonprofit trying to improve lives, or a curious global bystander, you probably don't have a very good map of life south of the Sahara.

In fact, it amazes me how little the world thinks of Africa. I mean this in terms of time and of reputation. As a first-generation Nigerian American, I have personal reasons for paying attention; but what we all think of Africa when we do is very revealing. In 2010, the United Nations celebrated the tenth anniversary of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) — eight ambitious targets, from fighting HIV transmission to improving education around the world. To mark theoccasion, the UN sponsored a poster design competition. The winning entry juxtaposed power (leaders of the Group of 8) and poverty (young Africans in line at a refugee camp). The work may be clever graphic design, but the tagline is heartbreaking. "Dear world leaders: We are still waiting." A panel of UN judges validated the biggest lie in modern history: that poor and passive Africans exist only in the shadow of Western action.

If you've read other "development" books, it's easy enough to get that impression. Even as popular discourse begins to question the logic of foreign assistance to the region, the conversation remains focused on how "the West" can improve its performance. Familiar voices on the development beat write prescriptions for everyone from the leaders of the G8 to the infantry of the World Bank to the heads of landlocked countries like the Central African Republic. Though many have spent decades examining the various ruts and bottlenecks in economic growth, it is rare to hear about what ordinary Africans are already doing to help themselves.

This book changes that. As a reporter, I follow the advice of philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein: "Don't think, but look!" The continent needs to be seen and heard, not imagined and then ritually dismissed. Because when you talk to real people in Africa — shopkeepers, day laborers, executives, or educators — and commit to telling their stories, once-hidden strengths come to light.

The story is as simple as walking to work. Once, my mother and I took an early-morning flight from Kenya to Uganda. We woke before the sun. Riding in a car to the airport, we saw dim shapes come into focus on either side of us. "Where is everyone going?" my mother mused. The figures streaming toward the city center were neither child soldiers on the march, nor mothers queuing for bed nets; they were thousands of ordinary people walking to work. Hundreds of millions of Africans do this every day, waking before dawn to provide for their families.

Nearly every day that I wrote this book, I saw Gladys Mwende working the soil in an open field next to my apartment complex. Technically, she had no right to do so. After moving to Nairobi from the smaller Kenyan city of Machakos, Gladys, her husband, Benson Muthame, and their six children found themselves occupying the abandoned colonial home outside my window. It's a pretty stone and tile structure with two floors of rooms for all the kids — aged ten months to thirteen years. Only its punctured windows and rotting wood cornice reveal that its best days are decades past.

It was bizarre to see this facsimile of rural African life — cooking with firewood, toting water, raising chickens — at a busy intersection in Kenya's largest metropolis. But the land is what matters. As unpaid caretakers of the plot, the family treats its urban farm as though it were a ranch in the Great Rift Valley that keeps the world in coffee, tea, and flowers.

In the spring, they planted rows of maize, careful to leave out the patches of land overshadowed by palm and mimosa trees. While Benson worked as a security guard, the kids who could walk helped Gladys seed and weed the maize, beans, and a shocking stand of sugar cane. Throughout the rainy season, I typed interview notes, read up on national development policies, and watched the green shoots grow. By midsummer, the stalks were taller than all of us. At first harvest, the family roasted a few maize husks to sell to commuters at dusk. Cooking my own dinner, I could make out wood smoke amid the exhaust fumes from the bus stop that doubled as a sales floor. But mostly, Gladys told me, they plant to eat, and eat to live.

Michelle Obama would be proud. I marveled at their nerve: the family has no official rights, supports, or farming expertise but like millions of subsistence farmers in Africa, found a way to make one acre count for something. Their quiet commitment is a direct rebuke to the UN poster, and a great example of the bold opportunism that makes Africa's development trajectory so different and exciting.

It's also a reminder of how easy it is to misjudge Africa. Stumbling off a crowded bus or flagging a motorbike taxi, thousands of daily commuters miss this secret garden. To adjacent homeowners, the land is an abandoned eyesore. To government planners, it's an instance of criminal trespass. It took a sustained look — from my bird's-eye perch — to see the land as an essential family asset.

Sharing these hidden triumphs is the best way I know to respond to the depressing top-level narratives that have held the region back. It's why, like many Nigerians before me, I've become a writer. Stories can help to challenge the bad news occupying a thin column in a Western newspaper, or scrolling across the lower edge of a cable news broadcast. The stories in this book fight what I call "formality bias" — the assumption that a rundown house is just that, or that a formal address is the only way to get from point A to point B.

Too often, global institutions, led in part by the UN, as well as macroeconomists, philanthropists, and journalists like me, look away from the figures walking to work, the green shoots in an urban clearing, or the potholes and kiosks that can provide useful orientation. Instead, we focus on Africa's formal organizations and its formal solutions. How many schools have you built? How many mothers died last year? Was the election free and fair?

It turns out we have been throwing a party in an empty ballroom. One of the biggest problems with the world's longtime orientation toward Africa is a preference for interactions between governments, or between formal institutions, when the most vibrant, authentic, and economically significant interactions are between individuals and decentralized groups. I've found that informal arrangements like Gladys and Benson's tend to organize daily life — and when it comes to "development," these arrangements sometimes achieve more, better, or faster results.

Take the example of Ushahidi, the Kenyan nonprofit that sprang up in the aftermath of the nation's contested 2007 presidential election. Torn along ethnic lines, supporters of incumbent Mwai Kibaki and challenger Raila Odinga tangled in rural towns and in main cities for weeks. Some 1,200 people were killed and more than 350,000 displaced by the violence. Throughout, the television and radio stations failed their mandate — streaming numbing Muzak while blood ran in the streets. For a terrifying moment, one of Africa's most stable democracies seemed poised to fall off a cliff into chaos.

First by blog, then by e-mail, then in person, a team of Kenyan techies began working on a mapping application that allowed citizens to report violence using their cell phones. Thousands of data points shared using Ushahidi — which means "witness" in Swahili — produced a map with real-time, geo-specific information that sped the effort to restore order and provide relief services.

Since then, Ushahidi has traveled the globe in a multitude of other contexts: monitoring unrest in Gaza and elections in Sudan, Liberia, and South America, following the 2009 swine flu epidemic, tracking oil from the Deepwater Horizon spill in the United States, and helping survivors of the 7.0 magnitude earthquake that leveled Haiti in 2010. Both Bill and Hillary Clinton have honored the Ushahidi effort. When Kenya voted on a new president in 2013, a spinoff product, Uchaguzi (meaning "election"), served as a check on governmental action and citizen behavior.

When Nigeria voted in April 2011, Ushahidi was there, too. I spent the month in Lagos — worried. Like Kenya's 2007 vote, Nigeria's prior election was marred by widespread fraud, cheating, miscounting, and delays of game. As the new vote drew near, the civil society organization known as Reclaim Naija reached across the continent for help. Ushahidi was a natural partner, but as its creators consistently stress, the model only works when citizens actually report trouble. And to do so, they need the right phone number.

Ngozi Iwere, the spitfire activist who ran the joint effort, had spent years working on HIV prevention and other health communications strategies in Nigeria. When it came to publicity, she knew exactly where to start. Rather than embarking on a large-scale TV or newspaper campaign, Reclaim Naija enlisted the tailors, the butchers, the car battery chargers, the furniture makers, the masons, the mechanics, the hair stylists, the street vendors, and the men who drive motorbike taxis. As it turns out, many trade organizations meet regularly, collect and pay dues, and chatter constantly about politics. To these communities, Iwere and her team passed on a populist rallying cry (in pidgin English): "If you see any mago mago or wuru wuru as you dey register or vote, report to Reclaim Naija!"

"It's the most brilliant marketing strategy I've ever seen," said Linda Kamau, a Ushahidi developer who traveled from Kenya to help the Nigerian group with their deployment. The motorbike taxi, or okada as it's known in southern Nigeria, carries dozens of passengers daily — a fine perch from which to share reporting protocols in case a ballot box is snatched. (Hair stylists have an even more captive audience.)

The okada driver is an odd poster child but represents the new face of development practice — working from the inside out. Previous waves of foreign interventions have been deductive — working from the outside in. They have invested time and money to engineer "networks" of "stakeholders" in "the field" who will promote a prescribed message or enact a binary plan. Like Eurocentric cartographers, many have missed the preexisting platforms that are not only more adaptive, but free of charge.