Inaction Reflection

Sitting in relative solitude at the heart of Senegal’s cotton growing zone after a whirlwind week of travel, the problems of conducting academic work in Sub-Saharan Africa remain at the forefront of my mind. It seems to me that the payoff from university-based research, reading, reflection, writing and re-writing for people and the planet is certainly only ever realized in the long run, if it is at all. I think that intellectuals engaged in such work here must have a zealous faith in the future value of their output. I believe strongly in my project, but also worry sometimes that my forward orientation can be encompassing to the extent that it desensitizes me to my surroundings. For example, everyday on the ‘cotton trail’ (as an old friend from Queen’s likes to call it) I pass amongst some of the poorest and most exploited people on Earth without engaging substantively in efforts to assist their conditions of life. It is not like I put on a pair of Bono’s rose-coloured glasses each morning as I venture out, but I do find myself gazing at the problems of the people I am not researching much like a tourist. The immediacy of poverty and despoliation in this place is hard to square with a multiyear project to inform policy or the next generation of thinkers. Even though I find it hard to rationalize inaction in the present, I remain committed to the ideal of academic inquiry and the objectives of my dissertation. That being said, I sometimes have skeptical moments about those things too. Occasionally I recall the fact that the pace of poverty eradication and economic redistribution measures is glacial even though libraries around the globe are stuffed full of studies on the factors that impoverish this region and its relationships with the rich countries. Keynes famously noted that in the long run we are all dead, and a lot of insights on those dusty shelves have gone unutilized while many African bodies have piled up over the years. Nonetheless, I see light in his quote. I read it as a call to action or an incentive to get busy. Keynes himself bridged the divide between action and reflection. Like him, I believe that there must be a space for both, and though I regret that I have lacked the former during my current research phase, I know that abstaining from action now serves a higher purpose. The results of reflection can inform debates about the formulation, adoption, implementation and evaluation of governance reforms and policy alternatives that aim to advance the principles of global equality and intergenerational equity. I look forward to the time when I will be able to engage as a public intellectual in those spaces with my findings in hand knowing that my inputs can help people.

----

As I waited outside Jomo Kenyatta International Airport last Monday for the Kenya Airways bus to take me to my hotel for the night, the first thing I noticed was that immigration had failed to stamp my passport. I had a receipt for my in-transit visa and figured that since I was in the hands of the airline there would be no problem. As our little group piled into the minibus I had some interesting discussions with a Chinese national off to peddle anti-malarials in the DRC, and an Ethiopian IT manager for Shell bound for Mauritius. An aged white Zimbabwean woman interrupted the latter conversation when she shrilly demanded that the driver take us to the Hilton. Much laughter ensued, followed by even more from me when my new Ethiopian friend noted that our destination was located next to one of East Africa’s biggest mattress factories. After arriving, expecting the worst at the register, I took note of a sign in capital letters: THE SKATING RINK CLOSES AT 11PM. At that point not even the 200 noisy French safari goers or ‘overlanders’ in the lobby could dampen my amazement. There I was at a hotel where from the top of the tower it was possible to wear a pair of skates while viewing African wildlife in the distance or the nearby industrial park. The mattress itself was fantastic and my good luck continued at the airport the following morning as I made it through immigration without a hitch. However, as there is no stamp in my passport and I seem to have misplaced my visa receipt – the only official proof I was there – it is possible that the entire experience was a figment of my imagination. All I can say for sure is that access to such luxury remains a dream for 80%+ of the people that call Kenya home.

Seated next to the window on the plane the following morning I bit into a cherished, fresh copy of the FT and tried to focus as the crew of Chinese labourers in the adjacent seats laughed it up. I stole occasional glances at the landscape below and was lucky enough to see Lake Edward and the Congo rainforest stretching into the distance. I took note of the time and a little under an hour later, after flying over an incredibly flat stretch of seemingly pristine forest, I looked again and saw the Congo River itself. The thing that struck me about the scenery around the river was that the forest seemed to have disappeared. Humanity was omnipresent. Subsequently I found myself putting down my French dictionary and thinking about the importance of the Congo’s trees for the planet and the well-known facts that forest is really not that big and is under pressure. My friends here in Africa know that I have been talking a lot about trees recently. Having planted a lot of them in the boreal forest back home – somewhere around 800 000 over the years – they are often in my dreams. Of late I have been considering ways of bringing them into my future work. Just to be clear, I have already rejected one such idea: the notion of going back to Northern Canada and digging up all 800 000. The findings of a recent “study” that The Economist saw fit to highlight can be used to argue that I should do just that to help prevent climate change. Scary stuff….

Later, after winging over the Niger and Volta watersheds and stopping briefly at Bamako to load up on carbon, copious quantities of beef were served with a pasta dish. As I ate it occurred to me that the Rift Valley Fever scare was much reduced. The story of the bovine and human outbreaks of the fever had been consistently in the news since my arrival in East Africa in January, and the meal drew my attention to the passing of time. At the airport, however, I realized that I apparently had not been here long enough to remember to bring essential disease-related things with me when I traveled, such as my international vaccination certificate. It was safely stowed in Kigali and I was next in line to explain my business to the authorities. Previously, possession of the little booklet had saved me from getting jabbed by a questionable needle filled with Yellow Fever vaccine when I re-entered Kenya from Uganda in 2004. Luckily immigration waved me through and in doing so gave me a great International Labour Day present. Keba Faty, the logistics coordinator for ENDA Tiers Monde and head of the household where I would be staying greeted me outside the airport. We embarked for his place near the market in the suburb of Ouakam and as I breathed in the fresh Atlantic air I soaked up West African sights for the first time. Bakeries and images of marabouts – leaders of Islamic brotherhoods – were everywhere and a new chapter in my research adventure had commenced.