A passing resemblance

Every now and again, people tell me that I look like somebody famous. I usually prefer to turn this around, and so agree with them that the somebody famous does indeed look a bit like me. Here are a couple of the more complimentary examples.

Much as comparisons to Edward Norton and Franco Nero are most welcome, I think all this really goes to show is that middle-aged men with receding hairlines and sporting goatees all look pretty much of a muchness.

Here's another less flattering likeness. Noel Edmonds hosting the game show "Deal or No Deal". Cut his hair short and he's a dead ringer for me. When this likeness was made, yesterday, it was suggested that not only did Noel look like me, but that his mannerisms and general way of speaking was also just like me.

It's nice to know that there are still a few career options open.

Diverse perspectives, shared objective

Pearl Capital Partners' latest fund, African Agricultural Capital Fund, has recently been the subject of a case study published by the Global Impact Investing Network. It can be downloaded by visiting http://www.thegiin.org/cgi-bin/iowa/resources/research/424.html

We are very proud to be featured in this case study, which reflects the considerable effort that went into the design and implementation of an investment fund with explicit financial and social goals. Too often, social and developmental objectives are dressed up in a mixture of florid language and random indicators, rather than being defined in detail and, crucially, built into the governance mechanisms of the fund.

We recently made our first investment through the AACF in a family-owned and managed Kenyan floriculture business, Wilmar Flowers. Wilmar is unusual among floriculture business in that it uses groups of smallholder farmers for flower production, as opposed to the industry "factory farming" standard of acre upon acre of plastic greenhouses where the chief factors of production - irrigation, temperature, nutrition and pest control - are controlled with the utmost precision. As a result of our investment, Wilmar will increase its number of smallholder producers, further develop its product range, and become a leader in an alternative method of flower production.

Slavery is alive and well and living somewhere near you

In the excellent Bury The Chains, Adam Hochschild chronicles the beginning - and ultimate success - of the 19th century abolitionists. Led by the tireless Thomas Clarkson, this tiny group challenged the powers of the day and, ultimately, achieved their goal - the abolition of the slave trade in the UK. Hochschild ends his history with a quote from the charismatic American anthropologist Margaret Mead. "Never doubt that a small group of committed people can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."

The legacy of this small group lives on in what is the oldest UK NGO, Anti-Slavery International. But did they really change the world? The truth is that there are countless people around the world who live in slavery, almost certainly more now than at the height of the translantic slave trade. We might call it something different now, but the reality is that these people have been deprived of their freedom. I quote from the Anti-Slavery International website:

Millions of men, women and children around the world are forced to lead lives as slaves. Although this exploitation is often not called slavery, the conditions are the same. People are sold like objects, forced to work for little or no pay and are at the mercy of their 'employers'.


Slavery exists today despite the fact that it is banned in most of the countries where it is practised...... .....Women from eastern Europe are bonded into prostitution, children are trafficked between West African countries and men are forced to work as slaves on Brazilian agricultural estates. Contemporary slavery takes various forms and affects people of all ages, sex and race.

 Common characteristics distinguish slavery from other human rights violations. A slave is: 

• forced to work -- through mental or physical threat;
• owned or controlled by an 'employer', usually through mental or physical abuse or threatened abuse;
• dehumanised, treated as a commodity or bought and sold as 'property';
• physically constrained or has restrictions placed on his/her freedom of movement.

As ever, poor countries provide fertile ground for this most hideous of trades. A few weeks ago, the columnist Joachim Buwembo, writing in the East African, deplored the increasing number of young Ugandan women who were being recruited to take up jobs in the Middle East and Asia - many of whom were, in fact, being trafficked into, at best, bonded labour or, at worst, into sexual slavery. He asked why there was no control over people engaged in this trade, no effort being made through public information campaigns to educate society of the risks entailed in accepting job offers in other countries.

He might also have commented on the desperately sad stories published about a week ago in many Ugandan newspapers that identified 23 Ugandan citizens who are currently on death row in China after being convicted of drug trafficking. It is a widely-quoted statistic that more people are executed annually in China than in the rest of the world put together. The Chinese government refuses to disclose precise numbers of executions, but they are generally believed to exceed 2,000 per year.

Quite apart from one's opinions on capital punishment (which should be universally abolished) and the international trade in drugs (which should be immediately liberalised and brought within the scope of public regulation), where are the public information campaigns in Uganda informing Ugandan citizens of the risks presented through acting as mules for drug traffickers? In Uganda, which has remarkably soft penalties for drug trafficking (I stand to be corrected, but I believe the penalties for conviction are either a short prison sentence or a fine equivalent to about $1,200), I suspect that people are generally completely unaware of the risks they are taking by transporting packages on behalf of others, and will do so willingly in exchange for a free air ticket and an opportunity to make a little bit of money and maybe, just maybe, offer some hope for the future.

Poverty is a terrible thing.

A good education

I was recently invited to speak at the Kisubi Seminary, close to Entebbe, on the importance of studying Latin. The whys and wherefores of the invitation are another story: suffice it to say that I managed to find the correct left-hand turn off the Entebbe Road and found myself heading for the seminary, tucked away on a wonderful site bordering Lake Victoria.

Kisubi is generally considered to be the heart of the Catholic church in Uganda. It was here that in 1880 Fr Lourdel and Br Amans arrived in a canoe from the Tanzanian side of the lake and pitched camp. Legend has it that one of their tent pegs took root and grew into the Mapeera tree that still stands on the shores of the lake close to the seminary. (The word Mapeera is, incidentally, a corruption of the French "mon pere", and was the name given to Fr Lourdel by the Baganda. )

On arrival at the Seminary, I was first shown into the staff room for a cup of tea, before being taken upstairs to the refectory (Latin - reficere), where I was greeted by the entire senior school, numbering about 250 boys, and introduced as the man who was a living example of the continuing relevance of Latin in the modern world. I wasn't quite sure how to take this introduction - was it intended to present me as a living relic, a throwback to the past? - nor was I able to dredge up too many specific reasons for studying Latin. So I decided that I would try to build a connection with the boys by telling them about my journey from a Catholic education at the Salesian College in Farnborough, Hampshire, to managing East African investment funds from a base in Uganda, and then reflect upon the nature of education as both a process and an outcome rather than as a set of outputs.
To start off, I quoted from Einstein "Education (Latin - e + ducare) is what's left behind when one has forgotten what one learned at school". After a moment or two there was a pleasing ripple of laughter and chatter. I illustrated this by asking the boys whether they thought I could still solve complex trigonometric problems, or describe the lifecycle of a fern, or define the meaning of "valency". Of course I couldn't, I told them. I then went on to tell them about Wittgenstein's final remarks in the Tractatus, where he uses the metaphor of the ladder to express the its function. It is to be used in order to climb on it, in order to “see the world rightly”. But then, it can be discarded having served its purpose of developing our brains to a level at which we can deal with complex propositions and uncertainties and think independently. I also quoted from Cicero - with the priceless benefit of being in classical latin - Nescire autem quid ante quam natus sis acciderit, id est semper esse puerum, and asked them whether there was anyone who could translate it. One bold boy stood up and, to his great credit, got the gist of it. Loosely translated, it means to know nothing of what happened before one was born is to be always a child - which admittedly is really more about the study of History than of Latin. And I talked about the particular importance of classical Latin to the Catholic church, being the medium of transmission for Christian teaching from the early days of the church some 2,000 years ago.


After a few more stories and anecdotes, and some questions from the floor, I took my leave. I don't think the boys were particularly convinced or impressed, but they were well-mannered enough to give me a short round of applause and a considerably longer prayer of thanks. I was then treated to dinner in the staff room, before being presented with some gifts and escorted to my car. I felt rather wistful, leaving this delightful little cloistered world of education, of ideals, and the future and re-entering the fray of the present on the Entebbe Road into Kampala......


Speaking of delightful little cloistered worlds, I was glad to receive an Old Member's invitation to the Eights Week lunch at Corpus Christi College, to be held at the end of May. An opportunity to re-live the days of cheering on the Corpus boat while consuming gallons of Pimms, before stumbling back to a bed-and-breakfast somewhere on the Iffley Road and waking distinctly crapulous (Latin - crapulosus) the next day. In the 30 years that has passed since my university days, I'm sure the traditions of Trinity term remain largely unchanged: May morning beside Magdalen bridge; cricket in the University parks; croquet and student drama in college gardens; eights week; and end-of-term college balls. Traditions die hard, and the world is all the better for it.

Two tribes

Every weekend, I try to fit in a couple of exercise sessions at the American Recreation Association gym in Kampala. It's a quiet gym, often unoccupied, which gives me the opportunity to listen to BBC World Service while cross-country skiing or walking briskly on an inclined treadmill. And, during one such session earlier this month, I was lucky enough to listen into an interesting 30-minute BBC documentary covering the annual Royal Economic Society meeting, focusing on the future for the dismal science.

As an exercise in pontification and speculation, there was much to admire: in particular the chutzpah of the speakers in their rebuttals of the suggestion that economists (if not to blame for the financial sector meltdown) ought to have detected warning signs in advance. Yet the most interesting features of the discussion were the omissions. There was, for example, little mention of the unrelenting growth of the financial sector, especially in terms of its ever-increasing share of total profits derived from business activity at the expense of employees dependent on salaries and wages. Or the incorporation - through globalisation and the increasing economic power of China and India  - of a huge amount of cheap labour into the global economy. Taken together, these facts can only lead to one conclusion: namely that the exploitation of the global workforce by the owners of the global capital markets is accelerating at a rapid rate. Yet, Marx was absent from the discussion.

Since the collapse of the Soviet empire 20 years ago, the stealthy march of capitalism now dominates the entire globe. Its leaders - whether by design or by accident - have discovered the power of the media to colonise and dominate the mind. They have muzzled alternative political views through the marginalisation of the "loony left" and the rubbishing of Marx. They have poured scorn on the study of the liberal arts, and replaced education with the training of workplace skills, once the responsibility of the employer to deliver. We are now engaged in a race to the bottom where the losers are the poor. There are now some signs, especially in south-east Asia and continental Europe, that growing inequity is leading to social unrest (see the pictures in this BBC link http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-17904743 ) but the strangle hold over the media and the systems for political command and control is becoming ever-stronger.

And what are the implications for Africa?  Well, despite the good news being peddled by many African governments which focus on economic growth rates, little is being said about the distribution of wealth. I suspect that the GINI co-efficient (which measures the unevenness of distribution of wealth) is rising in most countries. And, of course, Africa's abundant natural resources are up for sale to both old and new sources of capital....... It's hard to see how inefficient African economies can compete in global markets, except by reducing the only cost under their control: the cost of labour. Add an ever-increasing supply of school-leavers to the supply of labour, and the message becomes clearer: either accept a very low-paid job, or don't enter the labour market and go back to the land.

Received wisdom suggests that George Orwell's timeless satire, Animal Farm, is a satire on the corruption of the communist state in Russia - and the parallels are easy to draw. But Orwell himself refused to endorse this conclusion. I re-read this great book recently, and was struck by its simple treatment of the triumph of greed over innocence and idealism, and of the corruption that power brings, and of the sameness of people in power. Its immortal final sentence reads: the creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which. A couple of years ago, Lucy Oriang wrote a thoughtful column in Kenya's Daily Nation. "There are" she wrote "only two tribes in Kenya: the rich and the poor." She might as well have been writing about the whole world.

Glowinkowsi on leadership

The qualities that create a good leader are hard to define. We bandy about words like "charisma" and "vision" and "gravitas", but, when pressed, we find the definition of these qualities both elusive and highly subjective.


I was fortunate last week to attend a fascinating presentation by the highly experienced UK-based human resource consultant Steve Glowinkowski (pictured) on leadership. Glowinkowski was visiting Kampala to train and accredit a new East Africa-focused HR consultancy firm, The Leadership Team, in the use of a proprietary diagnostic tool for the assessment of the organisational climate within organisations.


Over many years, Glowinkowski has focused his attention on researching and understanding the factors that drive high-performance organisations, and to condense his theories into a few paragraphs would do them a great disservice. Suffice it to say that leader behaviour is a key element of determining organisational climate, and that the most effective organisational leaders are those who demonstrate behaviour which is at the same time "directive" (ie communicating a clear vision and set of priorities) and "concerned" (ie focused on understanding how best to motivate and reward staff at all levels of the organisation). In turn, this behaviour would help in the development of a organisational climate in which staff, inter alia, felt empowered to take responsibility and in which recognition and rewards were closely linked to performance

While listening to Glowinkowski's presentation, I was struck by how interesting it would be to apply this thesis to entire countries, rather to discrete organisations. I often read articles in the East African press lamenting failures in political leadership. These articles have often seemed to me to be craven efforts by the writers to attribute poor economic and social performance to deficiencies in political leadership, when actually many issues could be massively improved through individuals taking more direct responsibility for action, but, applying Glowinkowski's theories, it suggests that leader behaviour will disproportionately affect the national climate. Certainly, when looking at East Africa as a whole, it is clear that high-level corruption has a corrosive effect on national climate, and that tolerance of (and indeed participation in) corruption by political leaders has broken the links between individual effort, performance and reward which are so essential to a positive climate.

I recently heard the likely Republican presidential candidate in the USA, Mitt Romney, talking about his political values. He spoke powerfully, contrasting his belief in what he called the "culture of opportunity" with what he represented as President Obama's sympathy for the European "culture of entitlement". Sadly, in many countries which are substantial recipients of foreign aid, the sense of entitlement to assistance further corrodes the establishment of a climate in which performance and reward (ie opportunity) are strongly correlated.

Another of the key variables that Glowinkowski aims to measure is the individual tendency towards "incremental behaviour" (ie building on what has been done before) and "radical behaviour" (ie seeking new ways of doing things). To drive change and create Romney's culture of opportunity, we all need a healthy dose of radicalism.

20 years too late

Uganda's in the news again, due to the extraordinary reaction to Invisible Children's You Tube video, Kony 2012. Most of the people I know in Uganda are bewildered. Northern Uganda has been more or less peaceful for the last 10 years, since Joseph Kony's rag-tag band of thugs disappeared into across the Ugandan borders into central Africa, so why now?

I thought Kony 2012 was pretty awful. Voyeuristic and mawkish by turns, tasteless in its use of Jason Russell's son as a holy innocent, and, quite frankly, another patronising example of the way in which Europe and America love to portray Africa as Conrad's Heart of Darkness, except with black Kony replacing white Kurtz as "the worst". Let's be honest here. To elevate Kony to the evil stature of Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot is absurd. Kony was a failed local political leader who, unwilling to admit defeat, took to the bush with a group of poorly-educated supporters (which, in an insult to armies everywhere, he called the Lord's Resistance Army). He then began a lengthy sequence of violent crimes in Northern Uganda, including murder, rape, and child abduction. His activities destabilized and impoverished the region. A terrorist without any coherent agenda, yes. A thug, yes. A pyschopath, probably. But a systematic mass murderer like Hitler, Stalin or Pol Pot, definitely not.

Having said all that, if this video accelerates the capture and trial of criminal Kony, then it will have achieved something that, to their enduring shame, the international community, the African Union and national governments have failed to do for the past 20 years or more. 20 years too late for a lost generation in Northern Uganda.

Protein and the price of virtue

There's nothing quite like the smoky scent of meat, chicken or fish being cooked over a charcoal brazier. Often, on the drive home from work in the evening, I pass through Kabalagala and Kansanga, where my nostrils are assailed by goat or chicken muchomo along the roadside. Deep fried whole tilapia is also widely on sale.

But there's something very unusual about the Ugandan market for animal protein. As a general rule, the price of animal protein ought to correlate closely with the cost of producing (or catching) that same protein. The main driver for the cost of production of animal body weight is, not surprisingly, the cost of feed inputs, and the industry generally measures this through the Feed Conversion Ratio. How many kilogrammes of animal feed is required in order to produce one kilogramme of animal body weight.

The smaller the animal, the lower its feed conversion ratio. This is not exactly surprising. Large adult mammals have to consume large quantities of feed simply to maintain their body weight. Think of elephants, for example. Apparently an adult elephant needs to eat an extraordinary 200 kgs of vegetable matter per day! Blood temperature also affects the amount of energy required by an animal in order to maintain weight. Hardly surprising, therefore, that fish are the most efficient converters, requiring a mere 1.7 kgs of feed per 1 kg of body weight, followed by chickens, at about 2.2 kgs, pigs at 4.1 kgs, with goats and cattle (like these splendid long-horned Ankole cows) coming in at about 10 kgs of feed per 1 kg of body weight.

And yet, in Uganda, beef is the cheapest meat on sale, followed by goat, pork, chicken and fish, in that order. Of course, there's an explanation: beef and goats forage for their food so it is, effectively, free, apart from the costs of herding and paying vet's bills. Pigs and chickens are often fed on household waste or home-blended feeds. And fish has become a premium product due to over-fishing in Lake Victoria. Nevertheless, it is hard to escape the conclusion that there is a considerable business opportunity for efficient livestock and poulty farming and aquaculture, and for a more professional animal feeds industry.

On a more humorous note, I was recently reminded (by a billboard in Muyenga advertising a local Ugandan magazine) of Proverbs 31, 10: "Who can find a virtuous woman? For her price is far above rubies."

The glamorous Kampala socialite and Beyonce-wannabe Zari Hussein (pictured) doesn't seem to subscribe to this ancient wisdom. According to a local magazine, Zari proclaims herself to be worth at least 300 cows, a reference to her lavish kwanjula (traditional wedding) in late 2011 where her bride-price reportedly included 300 head of cattle. Now, using the feed conversion ratio above, and assuming a conservative body weight of 500 kgs per cow, that comes to a total nutrition requirement of a colossal 1,500 MT in feed. The equivalent in chickens would have required a delivery of 75,000 chickens or 330 MT in feed. Yet it would have cost the groom a good deal more to supply 75,000 chickens than the 300 cows. Bizarre.

Either way, Zari's bride-price was still fairly inexpensive in comparison to the rubies of the proverb. Unlike most things in life, it remains impossible to place a price on virtue.

Far from the Madding Crowd

I was very happy to watch the classic 1967 film of Thomas Hardy's Far from the Madding Crowd on TCM last night. The closest I had been to Hardy in recent years was the 2011 film of Posy Simmonds' cartoon strip heroine Tamara Drewe (characters and story inspired by Far from the Madding Crowd), entertaining in its own way, but with none of the raw passion and drama of Hardy's novel.

Besides the grand scale of the story and the excellence of the four principal actors, John Schlesinger's direction and Nicolas Roeg's wonderful cinematography and use of the Dorset countryside make the film a joy to watch. Its slow pace and intensity of emotion, especially in Boldwood's tragic obsession with Bathsheba, made me appreciate the extent to which the breakneck speed and special effect of modern cinema is destroying it as an artform.

I was also very interested in the depiction of late 19th century agriculture in England. Many scenes from the film are very reminiscent of the manual farming techniques used by the vast majority of African smallholder farmers, except that oxen and heavy horses appear to have been used much more for soil tillage. Experts estimate that less than 10% of agricultural land in Africa is tilled using animals. Given the widespread ownership of cattle in East Africa, it used to baffle me why the use of animal traction is not more common. Recently, I found a plausible explanation in John Reader's excellent history, Africa: Biography of a Continent. He attributes this apparent mystery to the harshness of the East and Southern African environment. As temperatures increase during the dry season, both forage and water for cattle become harder to find. Cattle therefore are at their weakest when the planting season begins at the onset of the rains, and simply do not have the strength to provide enough power to till the rock-hard ground. Contrast this with the pre-mechanical era in Northern Europe, where fields could be ploughed at the beginning of winter using well-fed animals, ready to be manually sowed in springtime.

The Lady with the Dog

It's time for my annual eulogy to Anton Chekhov. While I was returning from Lilongwe to Nairobi last Thursday, I eschewed Kenya Airways in-flight entertainment in favour of a book of Chekhov's short stories. Is there a better writer of short stories? I haven't found one yet. The Lady with the Dog is a perfect example, available online at http://chekhov2.tripod.com/197.htm. Bittersweet, tender, and beautifully-observed.

Call me Mzungu

White visitors to East Africa will very quickly understand the meaning of the word "mzungu". For a long period, I assumed that it was a direct reference to skin colour, but in fact it is derived from the linguistic root zungu, which in most Bantu languages means to wander about aimlessly. A comment, then, on behaviour rather than skin colour. Not so surprising, when one thinks back to the apparently aimless wandering that characterised the early European exploration of the African interior.

Regardless of its derivation, there is no doubt that mzungu now means "white". A day seldom goes by when children in my neighbourhood (who must see me almost every day) shout "mzungu" as I drive past. It is common currency on the street and in the media. And mzungus (more properly bazungu) themselves use it playfully when referring to one another.

Much as it can be irritating at times, I was surprised when a Ugandan friend asked me whether or not I thought it was a racist expression. After a few moments' consideration, I replied that I thought it probably was. My reasoning was that just as in the same way that the English use of the word "frog" or "kraut" were derogatory slang expressions for French and German people, so "mzungu" probably fell into the same category. When I expressed this view, my friend disagreed, on the grounds that we had very different histories, and that I fundamentally misunderstood what racism is.

I was reminded of this discussion by a radio item covering the English football race-row furore when a former black Premier League footballer expressed his view that there is no absolute definition of racism: rather, it depends on the context of the event and the perception of the person to whom the event is addressed. That is to say, if I believe that it is racist, then it is racist. At the time, this seemed absurd to me - surely there needed to be an objective, rather than subjective, test of what constitutes racism.

Having thought about it in more depth, I am beiginning to understand. Racism is, in essence, an unpleasant form of bullying or harassment, which depends on context, on history and on individual perception. Just as bullying or harassment is generally directed by the strong to the weak, by the haves to the have-nots, so racism is directed by the majority to the minority, by the settler to the colonized, or by the slaver to the enslaved. While mzungu therefore might be a racial expression, to speak of it being racist could only be true under very particular circumstances of the abuse of power by the majority.

There are variations on the T-shirt pictured above, my favourite of which is "Don't call me Mzungu". I wouldn't want to wear it, though. Since my discovery of the derivation of the word, I feel very happy to be thought of as an aimless wanderer through life.

Chipolopolo: reasons to be cheerful (part 4)

Earlier this month, I made a visit to Malawi. Not long ago, I wrote with pleasure about how much progress seemed to have been made in this lovely country, so it was with no little disappointment for me to witness a considerable deterioration in the Malawian economy over the last year or more. Malawi is suffering from a shortage of foreign exchange, partly as a result of the suspension of aid by some bilateral donors, and partly because of a structural imbalance in trade. In scenes reminiscent of Zimbabwe at the turn of the century, long queues of cars at filling stations provide visual confirmation of shortages in fuel supplies, while the increasing divergence between official and "parallel" (ie black market) foreign exchange rates threatens further destabilisation of the economy. One would have thought that politicians should by now have learnt that seeking to fix exchange rates in all but the most short-term of circumstances is an exercise in futility.

As always, despite all its problems, visiting Malawi was a pleasure. There is a gentleness and quiet courtesy about the country which has great charm. For once, the national tourist statement "the warm heart of Africa" is an entirely accurate description. It was therefore with some surprise that on a quiet evening at Pedro's Lodge in Blantyre, I heard a big shout echo across the city. Experience from Kampala suggested that shouts like that correlate very highly with a goal being scored in a soccer match and, sure enough, I quickly learned that Zambia had taken the lead in the semi-final of the Africa Cup of Nations. Malawi and Zambia are neighbours and friends, and the whole of Malawi was very much supporting the Chipolopolo (Copper Bullets) of Zambia in the competition.

Not only did Chipolopolo go on to beat Ghana, but in a dramatic penalty shoot-out they also went on to win the final and become champions of Africa for the first time. That they should have deservedly beaten the two teams widely expected to win the tournament, Ghana and Cote d"Ivoire, and generally played the most attractive football throughout the three weeks of competition are themselves worthy of great praise, but what makes Chipolopolo's success all the more worthy of celebration is that they achieved their victory in Libreville, Gabon, where 19 years earlier the entire Zambian national football team perished in a plane crash.

Their achievement should delight the whole world, and serve as a reminder to cynics everywhere that, every now and again, fairy tales come true.

Mangoes for sale

Taken yesterday by the roadside on Malawi's M1 between Dedza and Lilongwe. 100 Kwacha per dish of ripe mangoes (that's about 40 US cents). Wherever you travel across the continent, there will be similar roadside stalls during the mango season.

And yet, in Malawi's supermarkets, all you can find are cartons of imported fruit juice and sweetened juice drinks. The value chain is broken.

Africa and the ICC

The International Criminal Court is raising a hell of a storm across Africa. There are current investigations and/or indictments in Uganda, Sudan, Ivory Coast, DRC, Central African Republic, Kenya and most recently Libya. The fact that most of its current energies are focused on Africa has led to a disturbing discourse, promulgated by the powers-that-be, that the ICC is in some way "targeting" Africans.

This is very sad. It seems to me that it is an entirely good thing for people everywhere that there is an independent body able to investigate alleged crimes against humanity and bring charges against parties involved. And it also seems to me that we ought to be able to put narrow-minded nationalistic concerns behind us and wholeheartedly support the ICC's aims and activities.

To those, therefore, who complain that the ICC is anti-African, the logical response is to say that in fact it is pro-African, as it devotes so much of its time and resource to investigating alleged crimes on the African continent, and seeks to bring justice to the African victims of these crimes. It is also worth pointing out, as an aside, that the ICC is intended to be a court of last resort, which investigates and prosecutes only where national judicial systems and processes have failed, and that instead of complaining about the ICC it would be better by far to complain about the weaknesses in many African judicial systems - and then do something about them.

But these arguments usually fall on deaf ears, for the very human reason that we can all agree about a good thing when it happens somewhere else. The ICC is a wonderful organisation - as long as it's not going about its business in my back yard!

Coffee's coming home

The slogan for the European Championship football tournament held in England in 1996 was "Football's coming home". Well, the global love affair with coffee is coming home to East Africa where, with the honourable exception of Ethiopia, consumption of the region's most famous indigenous export crop has been very low.

For many years, it was quite hard to get a good cup of coffee in East Africa, outside the major hotels, high-end restaurants and tourist lodges. Instant coffee prevailed, more often than not in the shape of the tasteless brown powder of the Africafe brand. Now, there are a slew of entrepreneurs establishing coffee houses and chains in the major cities across East Africa. The trend started with the hugely successful Java brand in Nairobi, followed by Dormans (also Nairobi), Good African Coffee (Kampala) and my own personal favourite, the beautifully-branded Msumbi Coffee (Arusha and Dar). Better still, coffee prices to the farmer for both arabica and robusta are shooting through the roof, providing farmers with the incentive needed to invest in replanting their coffee fields with higher-yielding seedlings. The picture above shows a coffee nursery in the prime coffee-growing area close to Kilimanjaro.

Five years ago, I attended the East Africa Fine Coffee Association (http://www.eafca.org/) annual conference in Addis. It was a cheerful and friendly event, which provided plenty of opportunity to enjoy the traditional Ethiopian coffee ceremony and discuss the prospects for the industry in the region. Back then, only the most optimistic could have foreseen the market growth in the region and the price growth on international exchanges. I'm very sorry not to be attending this year's EAFCA renewal back in Addis, where coffee aficionados will again be coming home under far more celebratory circumstances.

The Haven in Jinja

Here's a nice shot of the Pearl Capital Partners advisory team, taken this Saturday on our annual staff retreat. We went to the Haven, a lovely place on the west banks of the Victoria Nile near Jinja, overlooking the rapids.

Just like the Norman Carr Cottage in Malawi, the Haven manages to be a delightful place to stay without standing too much on ceremony. Everything is good: both the location and the home-baked bread are both among the best in Uganda. There's a pool table, a volleyball court and no need of a swimming pool with the river right below. The cottages are comfortable and the staff pleasant and efficient.

It is to be recommended to any visitors to Uganda in search of a haven for a few days. Excellent.

New Year with Bebe Cool and friends

What to do on New Year's Eve? This is a difficult question for non-Party-goers like me, so I was delighted to see that the Jamaican duo Chaka Demus and Pliers were playing at the Speke Resort in Munyonyo, just round the corner from my Ggaba home. This passed my various tests for an enjoyable evening out: nearby (therefore little risk of Kampala traffic jams); outdoors (slightly lower noise levels combined with fresh air and easy escape routes); and professional musicians playing real music (rather than the lip-synching that passes for live music at many Ugandan shows).

Chaka Demus and Pliers had a string of hits in the 1990s. My personal favourite was their reggae/rock n'roll rendition of Twist and Shout, but Tease Me, Murder She Wrote and She Don't Let Nobody were all great songs. So, for a mere 50,000 shillings (about $20 at current exchange rates) for the VIP enclosure, plus a fireworks display and a string of curtain raiser performances from up and coming Ugandan musicians, it sounded like good value. The key words here are, of course, "sounded like". I had forgotten that Ugandan promoters are at least as unreliable as promoters everywhere else in the world. This show was promoted by Moses Ssali (pictured above) a.k.a. Bebe Cool, one of Uganda's best-known and most popular musicians and son to the politician Bidandi Ssali, who stood unsuccessfully for the Ugandan Presidency last year. Bidandi's campaign slogan was "Trust Me": the electorate responded with less than 1% of the popular vote.

After spending an hour negotiating the three kilometres from home to Munyonyo (due entirely to rigorous searching of every vehicle entering the Speke Resort), we arrived shortly after 9 pm, by which time a few acts had started to appear on stage. The MCs for the show were two appallingly unfunny comedians, whose main joke line in between acts focused on the ways in which women from different Ugandan tribes behave during - how shall I put it? - moments of intimacy. Enough said! The intervening music wasn't much better, ranging from moderate to abysmal. But to their great credit, Ugandan audiences are in general very forgiving, and this one was no exception: happy enough with the entertainment on show and why not? Plenty of alcohol was flowing, the evening was warm and dry, with the promise of better things to come.........

As the clock approached midnight, and there was no sign of Chaka Demus and Pliers, I felt the first twinges of anxiety. Were they actually going to perform? The fireworks came and went, the old year was gone and the new year started, the MCs continued to heckle the audience, the audience gradually became more irritable at the delay, until Bebe Cool himself turned up and performed a few songs. It took until a little after 2 am for Pliers, or (at the risk of being excessively suspicious) someone claiming to be Pliers, to come on stage and announce that in fact Chaka Demus hadn't actually turned up. Pliers (or the man who claimed to be Pliers) then played four or five songs - which notably did not include any of the duo's most well-known hits - before finishing up at around 3 am. And was there any apology from the MCs or the promoter? Silly question, really. After all, apologies require respect for others, and respect for others is, on the whole, a commodity in short supply among Uganda's elite.

Being conned is hardly an auspicious start to the New Year. Oh well, at least Bebe Cool's still laughing. We all came, paid for our tickets, and he didn't need to pay the main act. Nice work if you can get it.

Open Sesame

Anyone familar with the story of Ali Baba in the Arabian Nights will remember that the password to the thieves' cave was 'Open Sesame". When I was first told the story, back in 1970s pre-McDonalds Britain, I had no idea what sesame was, but the globalisation of cuisine has changed all that. Now I know the delicious taste its seed imparts to middle eastern favourites like hummus bi tahini and baba ghanoush, among others, and the delicate flavour of its oil in many Asian dishes. I also learned that sesame is in fact one of the oldest crops cultivated by humankind, dating back to the Babylonian era. It was perhaps the most valuable oilseed in the ancient world because of its tolerance to drought, its high oil content (about 50% oil), the ease of oil extraction and its stability.

I didn't know much about sesame cultivation until my recent hot and dusty road trip to North West Uganda, where, along with cotton, it is an important cash crop. Sesame (usually called by its Arabic name of Simsim) is very often grown in tandem with cotton: it is drought-tolerant and withstands high temperatures. It makes an excellent rotation crop for cotton as it has different nutritional requirements and it suppresses two significant cotton pests, root rot and nematodes. Several of the cotton farmers we visited were also growing simsim, harvesting manually and allowing the cut plants to dry off in bales (pictured above) to reduce the risk of crop loss resulting from seed pod shattering while in field. In the USA, plant breeders have developed simsim varieties which are not prone to shattering, but these are not yet available in Africa.