I’ve just returned from Zambia, where my
colleague Ivy O’Neil and I started off the seventh cohort in our Masters in
Public Health Promotion. We have enrolled another 26 students who, in the two
weeks we were there, completed the first module.
This is our tenth year of working in
Zambia, and we have now enabled over 100 Zambians, all of whom contribute to
public health, to go through our Masters programme which we teach in Lusaka,
using Chainama College facilities. The degree awarded is a Masters from Leeds
Metropolitan University, and I’ve written about the advantages and disadvantages
of doing a Masters ‘at home’ as opposed to travelling to Europe or elsewhere. See
http://www.scirp.org/journal/PaperInformation.aspx?paperID=23517
These ten years have seen many changes in
Zambia, with the capital expanding every time we visit. The roads around
Chainama College and the well-heeled Arcades Shopping Centre (only opened after
our first visit in 2003), are now lined with new banks, swanky office buildings
and hotels, showing that business is booming. The roads themselves are far
busier with newer looking private cars. This was my twentieth spell in Zambia
over those ten years, and for the first time, we had one or two students in the
classroom using the latest iPads, and able to connect to the Internet within
seconds. This will help us to deliver more electronic teaching to supplement
the important face-to-face learning. Of course, the Internet is still not fully
reliable, whilst there is also a lot of variation in health workers in their
knowledge and ability to use IT.
However, Africa really has leap-frogged the technology, and leads the
world for example in mobile phone use. This is resulting in other innovations
in a continent where electricity supply is not reliable or is simply
unavailable. So, one Australian company is about to release in East Africa a
mobile phone charger, charged by the sun and portable enough that people can
carry it in their pocket (see illuminationsolar.com). Samsung started its first solar powered Internet
school in 2011 in South Africa, putting in roof solar panels that can power all
the electronic equipment inside the school. Samsung has also launched an
Engineering Academy to train technicians and service experts within Africa.
There is already what the Ghanaian
economist George Ayittey has called the ‘Cheetah Generation’, adaptable, innovative
African entrepreneurs who are using technology and concepts such as
‘crowdsourcing’ to develop their own solutions to problems in an environment
where governments do not seem able to make life better for ordinary people. One
example of this type of crowdsourcing – pooling ideas from experienced and knowledgeable
people – is the project called Africa Rural Connect, which supports young
farmers in Africa. (See http://arc.peacecorpsconnect.org/)
Yes, there are still major problems in
Zambia and in the rest of Africa, and our new class spoke of the repeated (and
preventable) outbreaks of cholera, whilst the rains brought misery to those
living down the many un-tarred roads in Lusaka, meaning inches of mud. I
visited Central Lusaka Prison again, where conditions are still dire. There are
also issues to face regarding the boom in Africa’s economies and the influx of
investment and ‘aid’ from countries like China and Brazil. Are they going to
‘help’ or merely increase the ‘aid mentality’ and allow Africa’s resources to
flow out of Africa to places other than Europe and America? Our students also
discussed the changed nature of communities, with it being clear that they, as
the new middle class, usually lived in homes with security fencing, electrified
in some cases, and where they did not know their neighbours.
On my last evening, I watched Bafana Bafana
play Cape Verde in the opening match of the Africa Cup, at a Lusaka pub, the
Kalahari Club. It wasn’t a great match, but it was great to see a small nation remain unbeaten by South Africa.
Zambia are the defending champions from the
last tournament, the final one to be held in an even year, in 2012. That tournament
was held in Gabon, near to the site where Zambia’s best players were all killed
when their plane fell into the sea in 1993. 2012 was, therefore, a special
victory. To be honest I think they will
have a hard time repeating it, especially against the likes of Ghana or Cote
D’Ivoire, or the hosts, South Africa. Zambia’s French coach, Herve Renard agrees
that Zambia are not likely to win.
Africa’s Cup of Nations is a reminder of
how intertwined Africa is with Europe. Once again, for its football industry, Europe
has mined African talent. Just over half the 368 players in the tournament are
on leave from their European teams. All but two of Cote D’Ivoire’s 23 squad
play in Europe; Didier Drogba is playing in probabaly his last Cup of Nations, but has gone to
China - Shanghai Shendua - to play out the remainder of his career, but
many major other Cote D’Ivoirian stars are playing in England – Yaya Toure,
Kolo Toure, Abdul Razik with Man City, for example. This is the reason why the
African tournament has been moved to be
in odd years, so as to be in different years to the World and European Cups.
The light hearted nature of a football
tournament is a welcome relief from some of the other conflicts which burn away through parts of the sub-continent and which draw in European
intervention. While I was in Zambia, French air power arrived in Mali. This is
after a long period where Mali’s problems appeared to be ignored, a country
seen for a while as a model of democracy. In March 2012 an officer trained in
the USA seized power in a coup, whilst in northern Mali, various jihadist
groups and ethnic groups including Tuaregs, who were armed by the previous Libyan
regime, are making war to force separation from the south. This week, the main separatist group, the MNLA
decide to join the Franco-African forces and so will be fighting its former
Islamist allies. The politics and history of this region are extremely complex,
and beyond any easy comprehension by outsiders. This point should serve as a
warning to American/European powers keen to intervene.
The conflicts in Mali might have made our
newspapers because people are vaguely aware of Mali – its music and culture –
but there is also conflict occurring in the Central African Republic, and this
has not made the western media. Louisa
Lombard, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California at Berkely has
described the CAR as “a laboratory for international peace building
initiatives”. She argues that the model promulgated by the UN, of ‘DDR’ –
disarmament, demobilization and reintegration - of armed groups to help them
return to normal civilian life isn’t working. She suggests that western states
try to fix the supposed deficit in an African state’s inability to provide
services for its citizens by providing cash and skills. However, her research
shows that the fighters against Francois Bozize’s regime (he himself seized
power in a coup in the CAR in 2003) did so because they were poor, if they
became rebels they would gain from disarmament programmes, and the government
had failed to provide basic services such as roads, schools and primary health
care. Her conclusion is not only that
DDR doesn’t work, but it makes the situation worse, yet the western powers keep
using it. I guess the lesson is that European involvement in Africa is often
misguided and is always going to make a complex situation even more complex.
It’s something that my colleagues and I
think about a lot. We do believe in what we are doing in Zambia and The Gambia;
we hope we are contributing to positive ‘development’ and so helping to bring
more health justice to Africa.
Africa still remains as the recipient of
western ‘help’ in the popular imagination – on my way home I ran into some
fellow passengers on the European leg of my journey. They had been in the USA
and when they knew I’d been in Africa, they commented that their granddaughter
had been to South Africa “to show them how to grow vegetables”. After hours of
snow-caused delays, I didn’t have the energy to explode, or at least to try to
put a different view to these proud grandparents. The idea of a young girl who had
probably never grown anything in her life going to a foreign land to show
seasoned agriculturalists how to grow vegetables was preposterous, and I mused
on what her grandfather would say if an African appeared on his allotment to
tell him how to improve his onion crop.
