…the theft of my laptop, phone, camera, money, ID, bank card, journal (of the “response to Trial Justice” kind, not the “dear diary” kind), clothes and shoes. Oh, and a friend’s copy of Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia (to that friend, who doesn’t yet know about his loss: my apologies).

The loss of my beloved iBaby will set back the blogging a bit, but I’ll do my best to keep posting fairly regularly…I’m working on a couple of pieces that I hope to have up soon.

Lots of love, and remember to lock your doors.

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In college I worked on a divestment campaign to get my university to withdraw its investments from companies that do business in Sudan. The (highly simplifed) reasoning behind divestment is that withdrawing money from companies that are directly or indirectly helping the Sudanese government perpetuate genocide will put pressure on them to stop working in Sudan. The resulting loss of money will help stop the atrocities in Darfur, both by pressuring Khartoum to change its actions and by removing the funding for the genocide.

The International Crisis Group recommends divestment as an effective way to work towards long-term peace and security in Darfur. Six U.S. states and a number of universities have already taken steps to divest. On Tuesday U.S. Senators Sam Brownback (R-KS) and Richard Durbin (D-IL) sent letters to the governors of the remaining 44 states, urging them to “[divest] their states’ public pension funds from companies that assist or do business with the Sudanese regime.”

When I worked on the university campaign, I ran up against a number of vehement protests from other usually like-minded activists. They were concerned that divestment would hurt both Sudanese citizens and the organizations doing the divesting and that it wouldn’t prove effective. The Sudan Divestment Task Force argues against these claims, but I’m still interested in what you think.

Is divestment a viable course of action to stop human rights abuses in Darfur? Do its benefits outweigh its possible negative consequences? Will it work?

College activists, conflict experts, Sudanese citizens, economists, people who happened to stumble across Jackfruity today: leave your comments in the box — I look forward to the discussion.

Posted in conflict, u.s. politics | Leave a comment

Several weeks ago I was discussing my interest in Aga Khan with a friend of mine over a couple of rounds of waragi-and-tonic. This friend works for the Daily Monitor, the more independent of Uganda’s two main newspapers. He informed me, somewhat conspiratorially, that Aga Khan owns the paper.

I filed this piece of information away somewhere in the back of my brain with the waragi and let it sit there until yesterday, when I decided to see if it was true.

First resort: Google, the Omniscient God of Search Engines. I typed in “aga khan daily monitor” and was shocked/thrilled/somewhat disappointed to see that, aside from a couple of news articles about Aggie’s recent publicity stunts, the first result listed was none other than yours truly.

Hello, I’m Jackfruity, and I’m an Aga Khanoholic.

Even more determined to demystify the connection between Aggie and the Monitor, I did a little more research. It turns out the paper is part of the Nation Media Group, a conglomerate that owns a variety of newspapers, magazines and radio and television stations throughout East Africa. It was founded in 1960 by (surprise!) our friend, the Aga Khan Foundation for Economic Development, and His Highness the Aga Khan now owns 43% of the company’s share.

This knowledge forces a choice between Museveni’s biases and Aga Khan’s. There’s really only one way to make such a monumental decision. Allow me to present the Official Jackfruity Aga Khan/Museveni Comparison:

Category	Museveni	Aga Khan	Winner
Headgear			tie
Parentage	cattle herder	Shia playboy	Aga Khan
Public endorsement	Joseph Kony	Kurmanbek Bakiev	Aga Khan (lesser of two evils)

Aga Khan it is. Glad that’s settled.

Posted in aga khan, museveni, ugandan media | Leave a comment

I quit my job this week (not the one with the peanut butter life saver — no worries, my life is still in good hands). I left for several reasons, but the last straw was a conversation that went something like this:

Me: You can’t rely solely on international volunteers to make this work. You need to recruit Ugandan volunteers as well, or even more heavily.

Director: But Ugandan volunteers are not as good as international volunteers.

Me: Why not? None of the international volunteers here right now have teaching degrees, but you’ve turned down three Ugandans who wanted to work here who all have teaching experience.

Director: But Ugandan volunteers are not as good as international volunteers.
His monomaniacal, unsubstantiated claim that the qualified Ugandans who have been clamoring to work for the organization are “not as good” as inexperienced college students from the U.S. was, shall we say, mildly unsettling. Earlier this month, Angelo Izama wrote on the sub-Saharan African roundtable about what he calls modern shamba boys. He laments what he considers to be the prevailing attitude among Africans, and especially African leaders, that they are inferior to the West:

“The shamba boy mentality is built on a conspiracy of history and circumstances that make it acceptable for our leaders to play second fiddle to their white masters and others whiter than them including Asians and Chinese nowadays. This complacency replaces their responsibility to become their own masters….”
Wendy Glauser also claims that “many Africans embrace a collective inferiority complex. Their governments are backward, corrupt and care only about power. Their people are tribalist, selfish, war-loving. This perception, like Canada’s public perception of itself, is one-sided and simple-minded, devoid of the complex current and historical international forces that determine the behaviour of a society and its government.”

Vividly illustrating the claims of these two authors is Dennis Matanda, who states that “Africans are not inferior to whites” but also writes that “Africa is not a cursed continent and neither is it ravaged by disease and poverty. The poverty you have is at the top [in the heads of the leaders so to speak] and the only rampant diseases are dental ones where the leaders have large holes in the back of their teeth.” He goes on to say that all African leaders are “mad” and that Africans are, as a whole, “lazy.”

Izama argues that the only way out of this attitude is for Africans to take charge of their own problems — “to find that desire to stop serving others and begin serving ourselves.” Glauser seconds this opinion, suggesting more indigenous lobbies and better African investigative journalism. Matanda offers no solution.

My two cents? The impending failure of the organization I just left is directly proportional to its leader’s reliance upon Western volunteers to swoop down and save it. I would argue that the persistence of many “African problems” is related to a belief that, eventually, donor money or foreign troops will come. This belief in the supremacy of Western aid, I think, makes many Africans less likely to take the steps needed to pull themselves out of poverty, disease and war. It’s an endless, self-perpetuating cycle of dependency: I want the West to save me, so I do nothing. I do nothing, so the West sends help. The West sends help, so I believe I am incapable of solving my own problems. I believe I am incapable of solving my own problems, so I want the West to save me.

Breaking out of this cycle is possibly the single most difficult challenge Africa faces today. Unfortunately for those of us who work in the realm of “humanitarian aid,” there’s not much we can do to help (kind of defeats the purpose, doesn’t it?) except stand by and encourage those we meet to take charge of their own futures.

Posted in afrobloggers, aid and development, ugandan culture | Leave a comment

…for (most of) the frustration I’ve felt since I came to Uganda, re: what I’ve called the “absolute lack of literature in this country.”

There have been times when I would have killed (well…maimed, perhaps. Or at least complained, loudly and prolongedly) for a single good novel that wasn’t airmailed from the States. A good, browseable bookstore? In a city of 1.5 million people, there’s only one. I had almost come to the conclusion that, for most Ugandans, reading anything but the newspaper was anathema.

As is becoming the pattern this week, I was sorely mistaken.

My immense thanks to Baz for pointing me to mataachi inc. The writing on this blog is beyond exceptional — as Baz says, it’s incandescent. An even bigger plus? Mataachi’s profile lists both Yeats and Gogol among his favorite authors.

Long, happy, contented sigh.

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