The Last Africans

This painting hangs on my sitting room wall. The image does not do it justice. It is beautiful: an untitled impressionistic oil painting of a nomadic group of people in Northern Kenya. I bought it about 14 years ago at a small exhibition in Nairobi entitled "The Last Africans".

My main memory of the Last Africans exhibition is a brief and impromptu introductory speech delivered by my friend and and former colleague, Matthias Schmale. Matthias was a compelling speaker, not least due to his sincerity, and he took this occasion to speak eloquently about his sadness that the era of the pastoralist and nomadic life practiced across most of the African continent was coming to an end: that the traditions and modus vivendi of the Turkana, the Karamajong, the Rendille, the Samburu and, most iconic of all African pastoralists, the Maasai, were dwindling into scattered tourist exhibits amid the farms, settlements and towns created through population growth, the march of technology and urban development. His lament was not romantic: it was for the impoverishment to us all brought about by the reduction of cultural diversity.

My reading matter over the past week has been a collection of papers selected by Nigel Halford of the Rothamsted Institute in UK, entitled Plant Biotechnology. For a non-scientist, much of this book has been extremely difficult to understand, but I was keen to try to improve my understanding of transgenics/genetic modification and its impact. Included in the anthology is a short paper published by researchers from the University of Cape Town on the potential for inserting a "water-efficiency" gene into maize, the staple crop for most of East and Southern Africa. The authors are in no doubt that this would be a positive move, as it would allow the cultivation of maize to spread into areas hitherto too dry for farming.

In this connection, recent press publications in Kenya have reported that considerable applied research in WEMA (Water Efficient Maize for Africa) is underway - with the potential to open up new low rainfall areas in Kenya for the cultivation of maize. Kenya needs it: the Prime Minister, Raila Odinga, recently forecast a shortfall of about 1 million tonnes (30% of Kenya's annual consumption requirements) due to patchy rainfall. This is nothing new: 8 years out of 10 Kenya struggles to grow enough maize for its burgeoning population - mainly due to reliance on rainfall for water requirements, depleted soils, and the widespread use of poor quality planting material.

Advances in agricultural technology over the last 100 years have supported massive population growth. Through effective selection and breeding programmes, plant breeders have produced ever more productive crop varieties. The Haber-Bosch process for utilising atmospheric nitrogen has provided the necessary source of nutrition for these varieties. And now, transgenic technologies offer the potential to accelerate conventional plant breeding through the production of uber-crops capable of resistance to herbicides, drought, soil salinity and who knows what sort of adverse conditions. But these advances carry a cost. One wonders what the consequences of WEMA's introduction will be for Kenya's pastoralists and biodiversity as the area under cultivation of maize expands.

Clinging on in ever more marginal areas, the pastoralist way of life appears to be an inevitable casualty of the modern world. As Einstein, in his wonderful 1949 essay entitled "Why Socialism" observed "The time—which, looking back, seems so idyllic—is gone forever when individuals or relatively small groups could be completely self-sufficient."

'Twas ever thus

This wonderful cartoon satirises French society just before the French Revolution – more than 200 years ago. The clergy and the nobility are riding on the back of the peasant. Words alone will never communicate as effectively as this simple picture, though Rousseau’s claim that “Man was born free, but everywhere he is in chains” comes close.

I was reminded of this cartoon when I read a very interesting article by Lucy Oriang' in Kenya’s Daily Nation. I quote: “There are only two tribes in this country [Kenya] – the rich and the poor. The difference lies in who pays taxes and who doesn’t, and who gets shot in the back by a policeman and who gets a security detail at public expense. It has nothing to do with your mother tongue.” (Her reference to taxes is, I presume, aimed at Kenyan parliamentarians who have opposed a proposal that MPs’ allowances (which are very substantial) should be taxed).

Of course, this analogy of the two tribes is not unique to Kenya: it persists, to this day, all over the world. In fact, it is now much worse than it was: there are many more people who live in bondage and slavery now than at the height of the Atlantic slave trade. What does seem to be missing, however, are campaigns, movements, politics and leaders who propose alternatives to our way of life. Even the recent financial turmoil, which has provided us all with a graphic demonstration of the impact of unalloyed greed, consumption and inequality at both a household and an institutional level, has not yet thrown up alternatives to the ways in which we are organized and governed as societies. Why is this? Was Francis Fukuyama right when, in his book The End of History, he presented the thesis that Western Liberal Democracy is the final form of societal organization to which all societies will ultimately conform?

In East Africa, the overwhelming majority of the population is poor: smallholders eking out a living on small plots of land given over to subsistence cultivation; the urban poor living in low quality housing with poor sanitation, struggling to make ends meet through petty trade or casual employment, or worse. The contrast between rich and poor is more stark than in wealthier European and North American economies. But there are other forms of injustice, inequality and dispossession which have developed and which contribute towards impoverishment of the majority. I am thinking here of the fragmentation of family life, the burden of personal debt, the de-skilling of populations who purchase ready-prepared dinners, who rely on mass media for their entertainment, who dispose rather than mend and recycle, and who are now coming to a slow but steady realization that their way of life is unsustainable….

This cartoon is just as accurate now as it was then. Sadly, it’s hard to believe that we will ever change.