Haiti

Unedited Ramblings 
Last Sunday New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote an opinion article that has caused a quiet outrage. Commenting on the horrific earthquake in Haiti that killed over 50,000 people, Brooks suggested it’s mostly the Haitians, not nature, that should be blamed.

Brooks controversially suggested that Haitian culture (thus black culture, if you wish to stretch it) is given to underachieving. Also that it’s averse to planning, so Haitians build sloppy houses that crumbled like a pack of cards when the quake struck.
Maybe he has a point, because we have to acknowledge that if the earthquake had hit quake-prone cities Tokyo or San Francisco, 50,000 wouldn’t have been killed. Maybe 150. Reason? They build houses to withstand quakes, and are better prepared for emergencies.

Like many Third World cities, Port-au-Prince has the same problem you would find in Nairobi, Kampala, Lagos, or Cairo: Thousands of people living buildings that are unfit for human habitation because a corrupt official took a bribe, closed his eyes, and issued an occupancy certificate.
Brooks is not the first, nor will he be the last, Caucasian commentator to argue that Third World cultures, and black ones in particular, are inefficient.

Controversial (and even detestable) as his point might be, we have got to that point where the Brooks of this world can no longer be countered with argument alone. That is even before one considers what Pat Robertson said in reference to Haiti's misery, saying that the Haitians have a pact with the devil in regard to their fight to end slavery from the French in the 18th C.
We need a shining example of a black country that is a shining example of economic success, efficiency, and innovation, in the world. It stands to reason that is we are as good as everyone else (which we are are), it is time for us to show it - we should do as well as everyone else.




What do white people that have no interest in Africa for example know about Botswana? Mauritius? Gabon? Gambia? And some other 'black' (black even sounds evil to many) countries??


Remember the the comments about black people in the aftermath of the Rwandan Genocide?? How we are so savage as to butcher ourselves on a whim??

Well, today most people of sane minds are marveling at the shining star that is Rwanda. Interesting that natural is not racist, or is it??

I am reminded of Hurricane Katrina, the Tsunami in Asia, the floods in Philippines, the earthquake in Tokyo as you mentioned

fLOODS killed many in China recently, (in that country, they prudently don't allow western media to sway opinion that way the media is doing to Haitians, who in the wake of the earthquake are now portrayed as a violent lot, bent on looting. Now the priority there is SECURITY rather than emergence relief.

And of yes, it is christmas time foe the good old aid workers.

No. It is not the shining example of a black country that we need, (it will never happen if the standards are set elsewhere)
We instead need many black people to bring us on the information highway, we need strONG black media, to tell our own stories. and to resist the idea of understanding ourselves based on other people's conceptions and impressions of us.

AN Important meeting I dream of having one day

Having a meeting with a plate of chicken. “Hello, Chicken. Glad you could make it to this function. Let me introduce everybody. On  your left are chips and next to chips is coke. They are going to be accompanying you on your mission. You will have plenty of time to get to know them better. We have scheduled a mingling session for later. Heh heh. Now that we are all here, let’s get right into it. The venue for this afternoon’s festivities is my mouth. And Speaking of getting right into it…”

Cowism and Umoja: Choosing between two hard ideologies for the EAC

BY GEORGE KAGAME

Forty years ago or some, Tanzania established itself as a country of umoja, meaning unity. Umoja was also a popular brand of rubber slip on sandals, we called them Sapatu and in Rwanda they were known as Kama'mbiri.

Sapatu was a measure of pride in East Africa in the 80s, in some communities the thing was worn strictly indoors, as it was considered distasteful to walk about in "things of the bathroom outside the house."  In this community the wearer afforded normals shoes so as to render the sapatu an exclusively indoor attire, like an under pant. It was considered shameful to wear sapatu in public in some areas.

While in other communities,  the sandals were 'sunday' shoes, the other days of the week were spent thumping the earth bare foot, most times in scorching heat. Thank God it was not winter.  A picture of a kid wearing a pair of Umoja, and a smiling face smeared with vaseline jelly is a monument in my home town of Busunju todate.

Tanzania strictly and officially practiced Umoja both as a popular footwear as well as a political ideology but somewhere in the late 1990s something went wrong, socialism aka Umoja alias Ujaama was abolished.But while Umoja was successful in Tanzania, (they never had tribal wars, spoke a local national language that is soon becoming the official language of Africa and had a stable government on top of a coastal city, those bastards!!), Tanzania really was not much different from other Umoja adherents in its footwear reincarnation.

As a result of the success of Umoja in later years I shared a room at university with a Tanzanian journalist currently reporting for The Daily News. As would happen in our universities, each country had a group that brought together students from one country into a single association, this association participated in drama and theatre performances representing their countries at cultural galas. Rwanda was a leading contender in most of these cultural galas.

After one performance by a Rwandan dance troupe, the UN as the Tanzanian journalist who traced his lineage to Rwanda called himself,  said his country had only learnt about socialism in textbooks while Rwanda had in it their DNA and dances, he found it particularly hilarious that the dances resembled the movement of cows.

Then we would speak of people doing 'good things in the world', when we talked of vegetarians he said Rwandans care for the environment, thats why they dance like cows! "We have also learnt this by textbook," he would say. The cow was important in Rwanda that the business of eating meat was despised by the 'highly cultured' of the day.

A cow would be left to age gracefully and if seen to be incapable of living anymore it would be bartered for beans and sweet potatoes by neighbouring crop farmers. As a monument to the cow, the Kinyarwanda dance was crafted to actually resemble the movement and make up of the cow in the community. The UN said Rwanda practiced Cowism. Before Send A Heifer and Land O' Lakes thought about it, "they also learnt it from the textbooks," he said.

It is ironic that the cow, the way we know it in East Africa, has defined the story of Rwanda. The country is small but perhaps because on large parts of all its comprising hills,  a cattle ranch could coexist amidst crop farming ranches. Crop and animal have been central in the scope of the story. Sometimes and in foresight, the interest of the two could  override each other, but largely the two got along quite well. Someone later broadened the scope of "got along quite well" or simply changed its meaning and then things got of of order.

The business of the cow and its importance was in its recent replenishment officially a program at the current Ministry of Agriculture. It goes under the auspices of Girinka. Among its tenets is that each household with a given income capacity was given a cow as income support  for families, but with immediate and urgent emphasis to those in abject poverty. At the time of the cow story getting to the newspapers, the cow givers had 'dished' the cows to people who were relatively well to do and could afford their own cows after-all.

The recent cow story comes just before the report on the land squabbles in the Eastern Province shows up in your face.

If you are not familiar with the land, note that, in the Eastern province it took President Paul Kagame’s personal intervention in resolving matters connected to unequal distribution of land.

In large parts of the province, senior security officials had acquired large portions of land making many peasants landless and reducing them to squatters. Currently there are, according to the ministry of lands, 7.5 million plots of land in the country serving a population expected to be above 10 million now.

Cowism has its dangers, as seen with Girinka just as are many its benevolence targets; "a chosen group of one.."  And if you think Land and cow was a mess, read about the scholarship loans and how they are managed. One highly placed journalist at the Focus wrote: " Numerous allegations are that whoever gets loans from SFAR do so only a) after lengthy periods of pleading and begging, b) if you are his personal friend and c) if you are one of his girlfriends."

Superstition and witchcraft

Is superstition king in Africa? You bet. Even I am scared enough not to give details, but I will tell the story. There is a rich East African farmer, and four years he went to his farm which at the edge of a forest. He thought he saw armed men deep inside the forest, and thinking they were protecting illegal loggers he crawled to the edge of the forest and peeped over to see.

What he saw shocked him to the bone. There were many armed men around. A little inside in a clearing, was a witch doctor (whom the farmer knew) in feather cap and leopard skins standing over a bare-chested figure. The witch doctor was sprinkling “magical potions” over the kneeling man. The kneeling fellow was the most powerful in the land!!! And there he was being sprayed probably with chicken blood mixed with crocodile teeth and mountain gorilla testicles powder!

This should not come as a surprise. According to a report by the Pew Research Centre released last week, roughly one in four Christians in sub-Sahara Africa believes sacrifices to spirits or ancestors can protect them from bad things happening.
The report, published April 15, said: “Sizable percentages of both Christians and Muslims - a quarter or more in many countries - say they believe in the protective power of juju (charms or amulets).

In Tanzania and South Africa – where 60 per cent and 87 per cent of respondents respectively claimed to be Christian – more than half the people surveyed (60 per cent and 56 per cent respectively) said they believed that sacrifices to ancestors or spirits could protect them from harm. (See “Tolerance and Tension: Islam and Christianity in Sub-Saharan Africa”, at http://pewforum.org/docs/?DocID=515).

In Uganda, a minister who is a very Born-Again Christian who wants gays and lesbians to be hanged, adulterers to be stoned, and critics of the government (he believes President Yoweri Museveni is God’s messenger) to be tortured, did a U-turn when it came to witchcraft. Child sacrifice is rampant in Uganda, and when it seemed to be getting out of control, there were calls for tough laws against witchcraft. The minister, however, came out and said a tough law that imposes the death penalty for extreme juju was too harsh. So to him, sacrificing children was a less than cheating on your husband or wife, consensual gay and lesbian sex.

If you a child living with albinism, you can be killed and eaten in full sight of the police and they will not intervene. There was that horrible story in Tanzania two weeks ago when a man raided the house of the single mother who lived next door to him. She had an albino child. He frightened the hell out of her, leaned down, chopped off the arm of the child, and walked out calmly with it!

How crooked feet can make for an epic end of year story

BY GEORGE KAGAME

I was thinking of an epic write up to end 2009 and start 2010 with some sort of unique foresight but before I could think of anything to write I checked this paper’s hypothesis of the past as well as outlook for the new year. I started terribly in the exercise by reading first, Betumire Pan’s “Let’s Explode the Myth of ‘Baringa’!”

While giving a concise explanation of Baringa, a Kinyarwanda verb for a certain type of shadow dance, the writer almost captures the meaning of a related word (Mbariga) in my first language.

Mbariga in this case means a person’s feet face sideways instead of facing in the direction straight of the body. When such a person walks the strides resemble a flat ground broom, the feet are like wings! In fact there was legend in my neighbourhood that people with Mbariga never walked, they were always flying. They were also said to face difficulty in walking and keeping in straight lines. As such when an individual lost direction or knocked something to the floor while walking about, a person with Mbariga would be blamed or they would be reprimanded with the statement; “Stop walking as if you have Mbariga.”

Baringa and Mbariga aside, Betumire does a wonderful job by starting his ‘explosion’ with the idea that most people in the media predictably, are currently giving their treatise of the past decade, and as such there is no need for all of us to take more ink and pages of the paper talking about last or new year. His cynicism ensured that my own take on the end of the year was thrown to the dustbin of the computer. 

The computer itself is what I had come to consider as the centre of my “end of year analysis” as it is the single most important idea and object that defined the decade. Yes, the good old computer brought me the third street Nigerian movies, the internet, mobile phone, DVD, reality television and most importantly UTAKE.

Had it not been for Betumire's note I was going to fill this space with more mambo jumbo of facebook, google, Obama, Tiger Woods, Lewis Hamilton  and all newsy crap, but no, Mbariga is important and it also needs some coverage. This is because the ailment is not given serious thought by officials in planning sectors. But problem is that Mbariga is not so controversial and while one is writing about such topics as Mbariga, it is generally advised that they listen to such songs as:”These are the times” by Billy Joel. Because frankly, what is so inspiring to write about Mbariga?

Mbariga is a minor natural physical disorder at the lower end of the human body and happens when the feet face a parallel direction to that of the body which they carry. It can be corrected with gradual practice such that the feet face straight ahead of the body, just like a poor alinement of the teeth can be made good by the devices placed in the mouth whose name I don’t know. But because the feet are hidden away in closed shoes or in dirt, their problems are not taken with the aura of other ailments on other part parts of the body. And as if speaking for the less fortunate parts of the body,Tanzanian hip hop artist Professor J raps in his song Nazeeka; " "Ukitaki ku'juwa muhimu wa matako jaribu kukaa'ria kichwa." Loosely translated If you want to know the importance of a bum try sitting on your head.

 I 'suffered' from the Mbariga disorder myself exactly 10 years ago and can witness recovery from the thing. The cure of Mbariga, if there’s anything like that is walking. Walk, walk, walk and just like the way the actor of Forrest Gump runs in the movie, walk with out end until the feet start to face straight like other normal feet.

So with this ailment I spent many days and sometimes nights walking. I would walk to events, to class, to town, to the market and sometimes to community ceremonies. Other times I invited myself to all the ceremonies that happened to be in the chosen line of walking on any given day and time.

One time, like so many in my neighbourhood I was in a national stadium where some important people had organized a prayer crusade to usher in a new millennium. The world was reportedly ending at some second of that night and the Son of God was returning. And even if the important people never publicly mentioned it, the prayer crusade was organized such that if Jesus was coming back to mother earth that night, he would find ‘us.’ (US being me, the crowd of the neighbourhood plus the important people in prayer.) Does the guy have to come in the night by the way?

There had been concerns about a millennium bug that was eating into all kinds of machinery and computer chips and at some second some of these collapsed, but we the humans made it through.

So as Billy Joel sings in his melody:“This is the time to remember/'Cause it will not last forever,/These are the days to hold on to /'Cause we wont although we'll want to./This is the time/The time is gonna change./ You've given me the best of you/ And now I need the rest of you.”

The colour of grief

During the month of April in Rwanda it is common to see a purple cloth wrapped on people's left arms, in their necks, and pockets. purple is the colour of death in Rwanda, IN some cases as is often during the month of April, a white cloth cris crossed by purple on many caskets containing the remains of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi.

But it is not just colours, I once stayed with a people who took the howling of dogs/wolves meant some disaster, in most cases death. "Emisege," they were called, although as we were later to learn the term also meant another term. I was left thinking about disaster recently.

The other day I wore a pair of black jeans and a black shirt. When I was masquerading around the is just walking about in the corridors aimlessly,
Then in my housemate opened the door to her room and saw me passingby. She was surprised and utterly shocked. "Oh my God," she reacted in horror. I was confused in the moment as to what had shocked her and quickly realized it was my attire and the prominence of black.


I was thinking today as I listened to Prof J's song "Nazeeka" where he says "if you want to know the importance of the bum try sitting on your head."

"Ukitaki ku'juwa muhima wa matako jaribu kukaa'ria kichwa."

I don't know why this song, a Tanzanian urban hip hop thing that is completely unrelated reminds that while people are still struggling to find the colour of love, we were quick to know the colour of death.

Pub talk: The Citi, the Commonwealth, and the good times

BY GEORGE KAGAME

Majukumu: Just the other week the famous Performance Contracts were undergoing their annual assessment in the parliament under the watchful eyes of the leaders, snoops, elders and well wishers. All these stake-holders were keenly following mayors and district officials present their performances for 2009 and setting the next step in the march to Vision Venti Venti.

Performance Contracts were following shortly after or is it before, the Itorero ceremonies. Among other things, the national Itorero or Itorero ryi'Gihugu is a national dance troupe, sort of a Champions' League of dance and drama, but with a more modern catch than just your theatre! By the way, do you go to the theatre? Do you have a theatre in your town? Do you know any local playwrights or 'plays'?, I don't mean just the Uranana. What is your idea of leisure beyond Primus and the cow dances?

So I was talking about the performance contracts event held recently in the Citi, percentages were read out, visions were set, questions were asked, answers were given and I can imagine it was a good time in many hometowns for Citimen . God times facebook reminds me!

Mambo'yetu: You see the pride in my hometown pub talk was  in watching one of us, speaking on national television with The Leader, who was seen to be  following with serious interest and even asking questions. Who are we to have a local boy speaking on television with such an audience. So the neighbourhood was in high spirits going into the christmas period. Welcome to the 2009 PLAN of our home towns.

We have heard unfortunately that one of us, a KalinaIngufu is on the run. Uhm, one wonders, this boy? we saw him a few days ago, he is/was the pride of the pub.

Is he not the one whose name means "a small man with power," now he even just went epic, this power thing I tell you!! He was about to be promoted and transferred to the party city of Africa, but as an appetizer, he was sent to a 15 day vacation to think about his next career step which was a perched office in the Lap Green conglomerate In the party city.

Well, while the 'little man with power' was preoccupied with evenings at FatBoys, Bubbles O'Leary and Just Kicking, Nakulabye, Bbunga and Kabbalaga, he decides to step down on the Cape, see whats up there. Then, don't say it. Whisper instead, INterpol is looking for him. Shyhhhh!!!!!!!

This boy, I think he was a bright spot in the vision at some point? Who is Eric Kariningufu?

Bwana'Mkubwa: Yes, earlier in their cycle of growth, the Citimen were dismissed by many not least their neighbours, they were called  baFella, war mongers, a bunch of thugs meant to destroy or create an empire. Yes, they were said to be creating an empire;  a "hegemony" as one mogul called it.

Eh, those people, remind them that now the Citimen are engaged in Keeping Peace in other places. Have you not heard? recently we have lost our sons killed by ambush attacks in Darfur. Have you met Darfur in the news?

It is a strange place up north and our fellow Citimen are very popular there. They walk around with guns and big bags on there backs. They are not back packers>

And remember just yesterday the Citimen were seen as a bunch of "dominators." Those neighbours, we laugh at them, they only tried to understand us in one scope, that  of two kinds of people who lived close to each other but never shared peace or love.

Yes, the empire was a big idea at sometime and at one point was called a " dynasty."  Woe to those people.

Our two sided street on the only road passing through Citi was lined with such avenues such as war, hatred, genocide and genocide ideology. But thanks to the new vision brought in by the new brand of Citimen to whom as a foresight, Kariningufu, like other alleged bad apples belongs.

The new crop of Citimen decided that the Citi brand had to change, if Citimen cannot get along properly, the new people said, they would open up Citi, let it be explored by other people, much more different, the Citiz would then learn how to make better of the relations between themselves on the single road running through our beloved Oh Citi. The avenues on our road had to change to cooperation, peace, stability, peace, cleanliness, peace, order and if one knows the Citi well enough, good food.

Citimen have now invited other people on our single street Citi. Our stretch now springs from Kampala, Dar Salaam and Mombassa, it is called the EAC. Oh yes, we are now open for business in Paris and Kinshasa. The Commonwealth is an added advantage of course. Oh yes, I am reminded that Rose Kabuye is currently charming up the streets in Citi, and we are open in Berlin too! We have some criticism too, but that is for days yonder.

Yes, there's a problem with being a new kid on the block, at some point the other members of the East African Community complained that Citimen were rushing them about reforms and targets. Citimen knew too well that the only people they had to impress were the good old Donors.

That is why at the time the EAC was reluctant we approached African Peer Review Mechanism, (APRM) and signed on, at that point the EAC had to play catch up with us. I tell you, we even managed to convince the World Bank. Look at the World Bank 2009 Doing Business Index.

Alright, we'll see you in 2010...