Footing beside the Nieuwe Meer

I've recently returned from a short business visit to Holland. I arrived before dawn after a cramped, uncomfortable and sleepless overnight flight from Entebbe (via Nairobi), but was fortunate enough to be able to get an early check in to my hotel. After the obligatory shower following a long journey, I decided against sleep in favour of taking a walk and getting some fresh autumnal air into my lungs.

Is there anything more therapeutic than "footing", to give walking its Kampala slang name? I don't know if it's a function of simply breathing outdoor air, or the joy of being closer to nature, or, as Ian McEwan describes it in his aptly-named novel, Amsterdam, the "gentle release of endorphins" brought on by vigorous footing, or indeed a function of all three. Whatever it is, for me it is one of the most primal and precious of pleasures. Even in the flat lands - the nether lands - of the landscape around Schipol airport.

I footed along the quiet banks of the Nieuwe Meer for a good hour or so in watery sunlight, revelling in late autumn colour and the birdlife of my childhood. I counted a remarkable 21 different bird species, including chaffinches, jackdaws, magpies, coots, mallard ducks, pied wagtails, and a few winter visitors like greylag geese. Best of all was the sight of a pair of whooping swans in flight, presumably on their journey from the breeding grounds of the far north of Europe to their winter home further south.

One of the bizarre aspects of footing in richer countries is how few fellow-walkers one meets. In my 90 minutes along the Nieuwe Meer, I only encountered about ten other walkers, four of whom were with their dogs. The absence of pedestrians was even more pronounced during my recent visit to Canada, where - astonishingly - on the 20 minute mid-morning walk from the hotel to visit my sons, through a fairly densely-packed residential area of Burlington, Ontario, I did not see a single fellow-pedestrian. In most of Africa, of course, pedestrians abound and I have become so accustomed to crowded pavements that the emptiness of rich and densely-populated countries always comes as a surprise.

The positive power of capital

"The positive power of capital" is the slogan of the giant emerging markets private equity firm Actis. For all the justifiable criticism of unfettered global capitalism, private sector investment remains the most effective means of driving economic growth.

Earlier this year, we were fortunate enough to have two wonderfully professional and hard-working volunteers, Paul Fletcher and Swarupa Pathakji, join us through a programme managed by the excellent Edinburgh-based organisation Challenges Worldwide. Paul's principal assignment was to study five original AAC investees from the date of investment, with a view to assessing their prospective financial returns and the impact that each investee has had on its stakeholders to date, and publish the findings.

The publication is available through the Pearl Capital website www.pearlcapital.net/new_impact_investment.html and is well worth a read, especially by anyone who doubts the positive power of capital to create wealth and opportunity.

Tabasco sauce

During last week's ANDE conference, I asked our waiter for some chilli sauce to spice up my dinner, but met with a blank look. I had forgotten that in the USA you don't ask for chilli sauce, you ask for Tabasco. What greater success is there for a brand, when its name replaces the name of the commodity itself?

To my surprise and delight, my neighbour at dinner told me that the manufacturer of Tabasco sauce was still an independent family-owned business. And, so it is. This is the 5th generation of the McIlhenny family business from Avery Island, Louisiana. Sometimes, it seems as if the whole world is controlled by faceless transnational corporations, but in fact family-owned businesses still employ many more people around the world than public companies and governments combined. And long may it continue!

Africa, in particular, has a disproportionate number of micro- small and medium-sized enterprises, generally individual or family-owned. The plethora of small local brands makes it quite difficult for internationally -recognised brands, like Tabasco, to gain a foothold on the continent. By way of illustration, I have long had my own favourite brands of hot sauce across East & Southern Africa. For a long time, my absolute favourite was the fiercely hot Nali, from Malawi, and whenever I am fortunate enough to be able to visit the "warm heart of Africa" I make sure to return with two or three bottles of Nali. Since taking up residence in Uganda, however, Nali has been supplanted in my affections by the consistent excellence of Pearl's Garlic and Chilli sauce, manufactured in Kasese by Reco Industries (though the Little Ritz - the diner across the road from our Kampala offices - offers a ferociously-hot unbranded chilli oil, said to originate from Rwanda, and well worth sampling in extreme moderation).

For chilli devotees, there is even an index - the Scoville Index - which officially measures the relative hotness of chilli varieties (as defined by their detectability to the human palate in parts per million). According to Wikipedia, the current accolade for the world's hottest chilli cultivar goes to the well-named Trinidad Scorpion Butch T pepper, though as far as I am aware, chilli sauce manufacturers are not yet obliged to provide an indication of their Scoville scores on their labels.

For my palate, however, no commercial preparation matches the flavour and aroma of my own very simple harissa, a simple blend of African birds eye chillis, garlic, mint and olive oil. Magnificent! Maybe it's time to start branding and bottling it.

Still No Exit

KADS next production will be No Exit, to be staged at the shortly-to-be-opened reincarnation of the Latino Club in Kampala in early November.

I really hope that we get good audiences for this quite astonishingly brilliant and disturbing play. While its depiction of hell may be far less physically terrifying that the punishments meted out in Dante's nine circles of hell, the three traitors ruthlessly expose each other during the course of the play and at its end we are in no doubt that they are eternally frozen - not in Dante's ice - but in the timlessness of their claustrophobic room.

It's not for the faint-hearted, and all the better for that!

Empire of Illusion

I've been reading a fascinating book by Chris Hedges entitled The Empire of Illusion. Well-written, acute and scrupulous in quoting sources, it is an excellent addition to critical analysis of the modern United States of America. Its chapters include a rather-too-detailed description of modern pornography, which might suggest a degree of prurient interest if Hedges' revulsion was not so apparent, under the title the Illusion of Love, and a profoundly depressing analysis of the assault on education, in particular the liberal arts, entitled the Illusion of Knowledge, before culminating in the concluding chapter, the Illusion of America.

Heaven forbid, he even dares quote from the famously-impenetrable Adorno in his analysis of the role of popular culture , though I think Marx goes unmentioned - presumably Hedges' publishers drew the line at mentioning that particular spectre of the past. When Marx, and his magnificent historic insights, was still taken seriously, Adorno and his colleagues in the Frankfurt School in the 1960s tried to reinterpret Marx's theories in the context of the modern world. Adorno's interests were in the impact of mass media on consciousness and individualism. Just as in Huxley's futuristic fantasy Brave New World, Adorno argued that popular culture was designed to turn people into passive consumers, content even in the most miserable of economic circumstances, and that advanced capitalism had in effect subverted the possibility of rebeliion and revolution as foreseen by Marx.

The book finishes with a splendid analysis of the moral and political bankruptcy that ultimately destroys empires from within. In a paragraph eerily reminiscent of the collapse of the Libyan regime earlier this year, Hedges writes that empires fall because "they all were taken over by a corrupt elite. These elites, squandering resources and pillaging the state, are no longer able to muster internal allegiance and cohesiveness, and their empires died morally. Their leaders, in the final period of decay, had to rely on armed mercenaries because citizens would no longer serve the military. They descended into orgies of self-indulgence, surrendered their civic and emotional lives to glitter, excitement and spectacle of the arena, became politically apathetic, and collapsed."

In fact, the book doesn't quite end there. Even Hedges (or perhaps his publishers) cannot quite manage to resist the compulsory happy ending. Instead, he talks of the enduring power of love to transcend the forces of the establishment. A couple of years ago, I went to see the remarkable special-effects film Avatar, which was utterly spoilt by its ending, in which the noble savage, living in harmony with nature, triumphs over those who use technology to plunder her resources. A likely story: certainly not one that aboriginal communities in the Americas or Australasia would recognise. The truth is that when empires collapse from within, it takes generations for them to emerge from the chaos and dark ages that follow. So why can't film-makers and writers tell the truth? At least Hedges' book tells us why, even if it fails to remain true to itself.

Seed Tribe

Earlier this week, I attended a workshop to discuss the future financing of Africa's seed industry, convened by the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa and held at one of Nairobi's swankiest hotels, Tribe, located next to the Village Market in Gigiri. While Tribe is an extremely stylish venue, no question, it fails the gestalt test in that its constituent parts make up much more than its whole. Everything is beautiful - yet together it somehow lacks a coherent theme. The venue aside, the workshop itself was outstanding.

Some six years ago, nobody was interested in investing in Africa's seed sector, so the presence of at least six representatives from actual or potential investors was very encouraging. Increasing populations, increasing food prices and long term investment in the breeding of crop varieties specifically suited to a range of different topographies have created an environment which may break the low input/low output cycle in African agriculture.

But attractive industry fundamentals don't automatically result in attractive investment opportunities. Managing a seed business is difficult and fraught with risk. It involves the maintenance of "breeder seed" - the parental material from which hybrid seed is itself produced. It involves uninsurable agricultural risks (drought, disease, pests, etc), regardless of whether it is produced by outgrowers or on owned farm land. Especially for hybrid seed, maintaining appropriate isolation during crop flowering to avoid genetic contamination is a challenge. Once the seed crop is harvested, it needs to be transported for sorting, drying, processing and storage, with attendant logistics and processing risks. Because agriculture is seasonal, all this has to be done some 5-8 months before the seeds are actually sold to farmers, which in turn leads to a cash flow challenge during the holding period. And then, seed companies face the universal business challenge of managing their large number of small agro-dealer debtors.......


Growth, too, brings its own business challenges. An owner-manager can generally manage a small business without too much managerial support, but as his/her business grows, s/he must invest in recruiting new managers, the development of business administration systems, internal controls and the delegation of authority.

Given all these risks, it often amazes me that there are people out there who want to take up this challenge and deliver improved seed to Africa's farmers. But there are, and they are a remarkable group of astonishingly determined and unsung heroes. During the conference, Aline O'Connor Funk, consultant to AGRA and a former seed business owner-manager in the United States, shared with us the tag-line of the American Seed Association. "First, the seed". It would take a brave person to disagree.

My memory of 9/11

It's hard to believe that it's the tenth anniversary of the assault on New York and the World Trade Centre. People of my parents' generation used to say that they could always remember what they were doing on the day of JFK's assassination in 1963. I suspect 9/11 will have the same impact for my generation.

I was at home in Harare, at number 25 Brentford Road, close to Ballantyne Park. In August 2001, after a particularly gruelling travel schedule, shuttling between the UK, Malawi, Tanzania, Kenya and Zimbabwe, I came down with a very painful and debilitating attack of shingles. Because I was struggling to recover, the CDC medical adviser, the redoubtable Dr Paul Clarke, advised me to have specialist medical review in the UK.

As chance would have it, my UK flight was scheduled for about 9 pm on the evening of 9/11, when the news broke at about 4 pm Southern African time. I was busy packing my bags for the flight. The BBC website bore the extraordinary and unthinkable breaking news that first one and then a second aircraft had crashed into the World Trade Centre. I remember switching on the TV and seeing the first footage before setting off for Harare's airport in a taxi.

The mood on arrival at the airport and in the BA departure lounge was sombre. Together with the other passengers, I watched events unfolding on CNN and Sky TV. A lot of alcohol was being consumed in silence. Later, as we boarded the BA flight to London (one of the last flights before many airlines grounded their planes), I found myself sitting next to an Algerian-born female journalist. We chatted for a while, anxiously, both slightly drunk, before lapsing into silence as the cabin lights were dimmed and the plane thundered down the runway. Oddly - perhaps because of the alcohol or because of my illness - I had the best night's sleep on a plane that I have ever had.