Sex May Sell Social Causes, but Abstinence Makes them Work

This week, a group of high school students from my campus are going into Washington DC for a youth Conference about the conflict in Darfur. I will be speaking with them before they go and knowing how delicate people's perceptions are of the region and how the media tends to slant the conflict, I know I need to be smart and savy with what I have to tell them.

However, the one message I feel like I can tell them without reservation is that Darfur is not cool and it is not something to get involved in if you need Leonardo DiCaprio to tell you to do so. In fact, the Save Darfur campaign has led way to many students and young leaders to get the wrong impression about how they can help.

Last week, the LA Times wrote a piece about people trying to raise money and awareness about certain causes by performing tasks like climbing mountains or running really long distances to try and media attention. The problem is that while these people are doing this for their causes, barely anyone is noticing. Click here to read the story. It got me thinking of all the ridiculous things that youth are convinced to do in order to raise money & awareness for Darfur and other SSA causes.

Much alike the people in the Times article, these students end up working very hard, but not so smart. Oftentimes, they spend more money than they will even make back in their efforts. By putting together sleep-outs, protests and ad campaigns they are trying to create awareness, but not necessarily beneficial education and advocacy around these issues. While I realize that awareness is the first step, in talking to many of these students that they have a very surface level understanding of both what is actually going on in Darfur, but even more damaging a very artifical grasp of what social change looks like.

Students are taken in by the sex appeal of a romanticized protest or novel idea that while creative, oftentimes proves to be ineffective. Rather, their focus should be on proven methods of affect. Raising money to pay powerful lobbiests to lobby on behalf of Darfur and not the tobacco industry, working on political campaigns to get Darfur on the radar of politicians seeking office and most importantly in the classroom. More of their peers will listen if they are listening to things in the classroom beacuse that is where youth will associate their learning. People are less likely to listen to a bunch of rowdy students just trying to get on the news and more to interpersonal interaction that takes place in a simple classroom discussion.

No, it's not sexy; no, it's not going to get you on the news; and no, it's going to be as personally rewarding as you want it to be. But if you're in it for those reasons, you're probably going to hurt the causes you are fighting for more than you are helping them.

People who run marathons and climb mountains to raise awareness for their causes are missing the point. You need people to care because they care about the issue and not because they need something shiny to look at. These causes should not be sexy nor should they require anything other than the truth to get people to care about them. In the end, sex may sell, but abstinence may be the best way to help the causes we truly care about.

Save Yourself

If you haven’t read it yet, you should really pick up Uzodinma Iweala’s critically acclaimed novel, “Beasts of No Nation.”

But before you do, you can whet you appetite with his opinion piece in this past weekend’s Washington Post, entitled “Stop Trying to ‘Save’ Africa.”

Iweala’s point here is not new. William Easterly’s piece, “The West Can’t Save Africa” appeared in the Washington Post eighteen months ago, right before his book about the same subject matter came out: “White Man’s Burden.”

The sad thing is that no matter how many times people are told they just don’t seem to get it: Africa doesn’t need to be saved anymore than any other continent in the world. Why don’t you think Al Gore’s environmental campaign slogan is "Save Antarctica?" Or perhaps the Democrats should run their 2008 campaign on, “Save North America.”

When it comes to the US, we don’t ever think we need be saved. We are, of course, hard-working and self-sufficient Americans. Therefore we should know how to save ourselves. So why don’t we feel that way about Africa? And who are we to try and save other people when we can’t even save ourselves?

I share Iweala’s frustrations. But what are our solutions going to be?

Maybe every time a US college student tries to give us a “Save Darfur” pamphlet, we should give them back a pamphlet that says, “Save our nation’s misguided college students.” I’m not quite sure how effective this tactic will be, but then again, how effective are they in getting people to really care about Darfur? Signing a petition and convincing themselves that they’ve done their part to “save” the poor Africans seems like more of an instigator of bad politics than it is a help.

It’s natural to want to help people. Saving people, however, seems egotistical & condescending. Personally, I think that I have a lot to offer to Africa and the rest of the world, probably more than most people do. However, there is a clear distinction for me between being a savior and being an important part of the struggle.

Critics of Iweala may ask: does it really matter? After all, if money and advocacy is going to charitable organizations to help, shouldn’t the ends justify the means?

The answer to me is unequivocally no. Because even if campaigns like “Save Darfur” succeed in raising money and awareness, it is also prolonging the two and a half century old American problem of manifest destiny - Americans and wealthy western nations are not any better than anybody in the developing world. Rather, we are only more developed because we stole the resources, exploited the people and destroyed the communities of the areas of which we are now trying to “save.” Africa would not be in the condition that it is in today if it wasn’t for colonization and slavery.

While the words “manifest destiny” are no longer used in our daily vernacular, they are still ingrained in daily American belief. While Americans are not destined to be the world’s premier superpower, we still believe us to be. We think it’s our responsibility to “save” the rest of the world by promoting our cultural and ideological influence. Rather, it is these same practices that seem to be plaguing the people we want to “save.”

If there’s one thing that I’ve learned about working with my colleagues in Africa, it’s exactly what Nelson Mandela argues: ask not what you can do for us, but what you can do with us. Development should be about partnerships and not about misguided notions of manifest destiny. And so before people try to “save” others perhaps they should be trying to save themselves from thinking this way. In the meantime, the next time I go back to Africa, I’m going to see if I can get African college students to start wearing shirts that say, “Save America’s Youth.”

The ABCs of ICTs

I joined facebook this morning.

It’s something that I have been resisting for years since its inception. While I saw the benefit for social networking, I could foresee it aiding in the downfall of everyday face-to-face communication and true friendships, not those artificial friendships created by collecting as many people as you can onto your Friends Page. I am not denying that it is still doing this on a micro-level, but on a macro-level, I am starting to see the greater benefit of an online community that crosses borders, both geographical and ideological.

Information Communication Technologies (or ICTs) are the new thing in development. My friend, Josh Goldstein, is at the forefront of this being a graduate student at Tufts’ Fletcher School of International Relations and working at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. He knows more about ICTs than I do, but from what I’ve learned from him and have learned myself, it is clear to me that ICTs are a key component to the impending success of the developing world.

Nicholas Negroponte’s ambitious One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) Initiative is a perfect example of the global breadth of ICTs. In his vision, Negroponte and his team envision every child in every developing nation to have access to their own personal laptop that has been created to be water, wind, sand…basically, anything-proof. Moreover, these laptops would have the ability to connect to each other on a wireless network and so if one of these laptops would be able to secure an internet connection, all the children in the village would be able to link into that laptop as a server and all gain connection to the rest of the world.

Currently, only about two percent of people in the developing world have access to the internet. If every child in the developing world gets one of these laptops, the accessibility rate would jump to near one-hundred.

Now critics, including Bill Gates a while back, will ask, why ICTs and not ARVs (anti-retroviral drugs, used to stymie HIV/AIDs and prevent the passing of the disease from pregnant mother to unborn child)? Would not the money used to create all these billions of laptops be better used by governments and private donors to cure deadly disease like HIV/AIDs and malaria, or help to feed the hungry or provide clean drinking water to the rest of the world?

This may be true, but this also may not be feasible when it comes to implementation strategy in places with little to know infrastructure and information dispersal plan. For instance, when well-meaning Hollywood activists tried to give out free mosquito nets to people in rural villages in Sub-Sahara Africa (SSA), many people did not know what they were for and ended up using them as fishing nets or simply throwing them away. However, when they were being sold at a subsidized cost, everyone who bought them ended up using them the way they were intended to be used because of the information they received from the shopkeeper and others around them who were able to tell them what their investment was for.

Moreover, ICTs may be the key element in fighting disease and eliminating the devastating effects of extreme poverty. ICTs may represent the proverbial horse to the cart of extreme poverty. Take the following example.

ICT does not only mean the internet. It also means communication tools like cell phones, which seem to be a hotter than the weather when it comes to SSA. While not everyone has them, they are far more accessible than the internet is. Moreover, because of the general lag in developing nations in picking up technology, there are few LAN lines (the type of communication technology before cell phones when we had to rely on miles and miles of telephone poles and wires to be able to make phone calls) in SSA. SSA jumped straight to cell phones, thereby eliminating lots of wasted wiring and general capital that would have been needed to be spent to create such a system. Nowadays, cell phones have created a general communications infrastructure that is helping the developing world by passing information along from person to person at a incredible speed that has never been seen before.

Farmers are able to text message other farmers about a fair price to sell their crops for at the marketplace, communities are able to disperse important information about town meetings our contaminated water in their village, activists can take pictures from cell phones and immediately send them across the world to show the atrocities and everyday suffering of SSA in a matter of seconds – all of this and more because of something we, Americans, take for granted everyday in cell phones.

For those who grew up before the cell phone era, think about how hard it was to be able to find someone on a crowded train station or movie theater where you had decided to meet them at a certain time. And if they were running late, they had no way of telling you. Or how now cell phones can take pictures, connect you to the internet and play movies, music and videogames. Now think about how valuable those resources could be in connecting people in a place where it takes an entire day of walking to get from one village to another to disperse important information. Having such an infrastruture in place would aid in the other bigger problems like preventing the spread HIV/AIDs, et al by creating a means to distribute information to everyone about health education, access to healthcare, and opportunities to get tested or ARVs.

But cell phones are just one of the many affordable items that can help ameliorate the efficiency and effectiveness of information dispersal and communication in SSA. Moreover, there is much potential not only intra-community, but also inter-community.

And this brings us back to facebook. As of now, most people are connected through facebook within their communities in the United States. But now that facebook has opened its doors to anyone in the world who wants an account, people in SSA can now create accounts and link to others in the US and elsewhere, including their own communities. For now, the more valuable of the two connections will be to those abroad as locally there is not a wide of an internet user base as there is in say the US, though eventually there will be.

Very little of SSA is on facebook, blogger or youtube. But by putting themselves out there to make connections to people in the West, the rest of the World will one, grasp a better understanding of SSA and two, be able to share information and resources with their counterparts in SSA. An example of such an exchange taking place is with a Cameroonian filmmaker and all-around entertainer named Zigoto who is now on facebook and can put his films, music and ideas out there on the web. As a result, people in the West will be able to recognize his talents and download his music and videos. While people in Cameroon are not able to necessarily afford his music and videos, the people in the West definitely can. However, the West would never be able to know of Zigoto without the power of ICTs connecting them to a struggling Cameroonian artist.

Clearer examples of this is taking place today with micro-finance websites which allow people to lend money to people in the developing world by looking at profiles online and finding a prospective client. The client then works through a middle man (usually the NGO running the site) to get the money, use it for their business, make the money back and return it to the lender, sometimes with pictures of their success to thanks the lender.

However, the later example relies heavily on a third party. The bigger potential lies in simply having the people of SSA put themselves out there on the more popular sites like facebook, myspace, blogger, youtube, etc. where they will be able to connect directly to their counterparts of the West. Now with me on facebook, my friends in the US can now link up with my friends like, Zigoto, in Cameroon. Rather than keeping our networks confined to our spaces in the US, we should be seeking to expand our communities to include those of SSA and the rest of the developing world. We can always pretty easily call each other or see each other face to face in the US, but to communicate with someone in SSA is something that make community tools like facebook really worthwhile. By taking advantage of ICTs, including these “community-creating” websites, people with access to the internet both here in the US and in SSA will greatly be able to benefit.

Cameroon...or the Moon?

Stepping off on the plane into an airport lacking the air-conditioning that I have grown accustomed to was the first sign of the new world that I had entered for the next two weeks. While this was my third trip to Africa in three years, I never seem to be quite prepared for the humidity and heat that hits you in the face like a wall of sweat and dirt each time you arrive.

They call Cameroon “Africa in miniature” because of how diverse the population and environment is. However, despite its similarities to many other parts of Africa, there are few similarities to the United States outside of the capitalistic culture and mass marketing that the West has tried to infuse into Cameroonian culture. I can’t say that is hasn’t worked, as much of the youth can be found wearing the same Kobe Bryant jerseys and drinking the same imported beer that any young American would be wearing and drinking these days. However, the culture itself is so different that oftentimes I would not even feel as if I was on the same planet.

Everyone greets you as family, even if they have just met you for the first time. And at first, you might be dubious of this - thinking that this is just their sly way of earning your trust just to ask you for money later. But after two weeks of sharing meals and being invited into their homes, it is clear to see that this is just how people are in Cameroon. The cynicism that I may have had in thinking that these people would be out to get me was simply part of my western indoctrination for the past 24 years to be paranoid that those with less may actually be coming back for what they deserve from their western counterparts - whose empire has been built on the lives of Africa's (though, in actuality all of our) ancestors.

At each NGO, governmental or cultural official, or random place, I cannot even tell you how many times we were asked to take a “family picture” with us, Americans, as part of it. If I was to call all the pictures I took in the US, a “family picture,” I would probably be getting funny looks from people who are thinking to themselves, “I hope to God that he’s not part of my family.” However, in Cameroon, we are all family, despite our differing cultural background or how much money we may have in our pockets.

Another way to see how important family is in Cameroon is through food. On my first full day in Cameroon, I went to the US Embassy with the group I was traveling with for a security and cultural briefing. The cultural attaché of the Embassy, known affectionately as “Ya” (meaning respected mother), asked each of us to introduce ourselves by sharing with her something that we liked to celebrate. Most of the Americans I was with talked about insightful and poignant things like peace, progress, family, holidays, etc.

When it came to me, I ashamedly uttered: food. I celebrate food because I think it tells you a lot about the people and culture you are with. Not only the type of food, but where they got it from, how they chose to prepare it, how much time they put into making it, and most importantly to me, how it is eaten. Is it eaten with your hands? Do you sit around a round table to eat where you share food or does everyone get their own unique dish? Who gets to eat first? Do you have to wait for everyone else to get their food before you eat? There is so much to learn about a culture through their food and how they choose to eat it. And I must say that I learned a lot about Cameroon through their food, even as a vegan who couldn’t enjoy much of the fish and meat that Cameroon has to offer.

For one, much alike the Native Americans of the West, Cameroonians are known to eat just about anything (including the “street meat” – or as we are more familiar with road kill) and to eat the entire part of everything they eat, down to the skins of their meat and the eye of the fish. There is no wastefulness in their food. Another thing I appreciated was that all the food we were eating was local. Most of the vegetables and fruits that we were eating could be found growing in a field not far from where we were staying - unlike the overly processed, pre-packaged foods that we are used to in the US that come from across the country in huge trucks littering the air with absurd amounts of CO2 just so we can enjoy a pineapple.

However, the most profound thing about Cameroon that I learned about food came from our Cameroonian friend Synthia, who told me once over a paltry looking dinner, that “there’s always enough food.” In a country where most of the people seem to be living in extreme poverty, there is always enough food. Synthia would tell me that communities and families are always willing to feed each other in the villages despite not having much food because as she so eloquently and simply put it, there is always enough. This couldn’t be more true, yet in the cities in America, we never seem to have enough for the starving or homeless despite all the waste restaurants pour out at the end of every night or the insane amount of grain that the US government simply dumps out in the ocean after subsidizing our farming industry. It is a bitter irony that in a place that has such a higher rate of poverty that people seem much more willing to share their food with a wealthy American, even if it seems as if they don’t have enough for themselves.

While Cameroon is considered a developing country, I sometimes wondered if they are actually much more developed than we, Westerners, are. Cameroonians and Sub-Saharan Africans, in general, are much more developed than Americans when it comes to things like family, community, environment, survival skills, etc. There is a laundry list of inexhaustible, un-measurable social capital in Cameroon. Just because we cannot put a monetary value on it or count it like we would material goods or square feet doesn’t mean it’s not there.

The people in Cameroon work at what we in the West would consider a snail’s pace, but oftentimes with good reason. Generally speaking, Cameroonians seek to develop their relationships with each other first before they worry about developing their economy. Therefore, while Americans may want to brag about how developed we are because we can fit 250 songs into an i-pod the size of my fingernail, Cameroonians can brag that their community structure is so developed that if a thief strikes in a market, all the shop owners will hold him to justice before any policeman ever could; or that their family structures are so developed that any stranger coming into their home will have a enough to eat and a place to stay for the night; or that no matter who you are, Cameroonians have the time of day for you, even if they have to miss a meeting or a TPS report for you.

Moreover the weight of the ecological footprint of a Cameroonian must be at least ten times less than that of an average American, much like how our weight is much less if we were on the moon. A Cameroonian uses a tenth of the amount of water we would use in a single shower by only using enough cold water to rise, lather, and re-rinse, whereas we are used to long hot showers. Not to mention that they save their water to either fill their toilets or to wash their clothes. Another area where Cameroonians make much less of an ecological impact is in plastic and glass. The soda and beer industry in Cameroon reuses its glass bottles in the same way Americans used to with the milkman. However, whereas the days of milkmen have given way to convenience and wastefulness in the US, Cameroonians are still used to reusing the same bottle over and over again. Not to mention that any spare bottles are usually taken in to be cleaned and filled with homemade juices, spices, or collected peanuts to be resold on the street. At first glance, the streets of Cameroon may appear dirty, but given the amount of people who live there and that people generally simply throw their trash out on the street, it is much cleaner than the US would be if people had to do the same. Rather, there is very little trash created in Cameroon because everything can be reused for a different purpose.

In living up to my “leave no trace” principles, I even brought my trash back to the US with me: a few empty water bottles and mostly trash I had brought into Cameroon to begin with: Luna Bar wrappers, empty plastic bags and a broken pair of sunglasses. Everything else I had bought in Cameroon didn’t come with packaging or has already found a new owner and a new use.

What is sad, however, is despite how resourceful Cameroonians seem to be, that much of their resourcefulness is in using products that are not Cameroonian. Rather, much of what Cameroonians spend their money on goes to industries owned by the West. Cell phones, Coke and foreign beer bottles, and Western fashion dominate the Cameroonian landscape and economy by freezing out local producers. Moreover, it is not uncommon for these foreign businesses to extract the natural resources of Cameroon, ship them away to be processed, and then back into Cameroon to be sold. So despite the efforts of locals being resourceful, they are fighting an uphill economic battle against emotionless, profiteering giants living oceans away from them.

I found myself still sweating as I stepped back into the comfortable, air-conditioned lobby of the JFK airport. Perhaps I was sweating not so much because of the heat, rather because I was a guilty American who had made more of an ecological impact in my 24 years of begin an American than any Cameroonian would in a lifetime. Moreover, on top of my 50lb back pack, I could feel the weight of the world on my shoulders to actually do something about what I now could see more clearly about the world I was living in.

I take a deep breath and look around at the hurried people with their soon to be thrown out soda bottles and fast food scurrying around in fast forward motion through the airport. It seems to me that everyone here could use a trip to the moon.

Confessions of an American African

I returned to the fast-paced, "pay no attention to anyone else in the world" madness of the US two days ago after spending two weeks in Cameroon - a place that I had to countlessly remind people was a country in West Africa and not a Caribbean island or city in North Carolina. The culture shock was not nearly as bad this time, being that I had already taken two trips to Sub-Saharan Africa (Uganda, specifically) within the past three years, but it was enough to remind me that after talking about starting a blog over and over again, that this time I would actually do so.

I've realized that starting a blog is a lot like trying to ask someone who you've just met out on a date. It's hard not only because of the effort and stress involved, but also because of the shyness that seeps into your mind when making yourself vulnerable to a complete stranger. But you do what needs to be done by talking yourself into it, rather than the usual talking yourself out of it routine. And that's where I stand now. I finally have gotten the gall to follow-through and the reason being that after two weeks in Cameroon with some of the most talented and inspiring youth of Cameroon and the US, I decided that I owed it to them, myself, and the world to tell the stories that need to be told and to fight the fights that need to be fought. And one of the most effective means of doing so is through words that can reach anyone in the world with a computer and internet connection in a matter of seconds.

The purpose of this blog is for me to create a forum for knowledge, discussion, and suggestion in the field of social change. I begin with this entry entitled, "Confessions of an American African," because at this present moment, Africa is fresh in my mind and also happens to be one of the major issues facing the world today that I feel needs to be discussed in great detail and consistency. Rather than being a fad of activism, it is a topic that needs to be addressed at every level of education, public discourse, and media on a regular basis that transcends the miniscule type at the bottom of a CNN news ticker or the token, one-paragraph story tucked away in the back pages of newspapers.

I am proud to say that I am an American African. I am an African first, and an American second. What this means is that I am first a brother to those who have sacrificed, given, and had stolen so much of what has created the US and the world today before I am one to a country built on the backs, brains, and blood of others. Africa is where life began and continues to be where life thrives. And while our African peers are dying of civil wars, hunger, HIV/AIDs, malaria, etc. at a decimating rate, the real rivers of life in the world flow from the overflowing wells of the African human spirit. For there is no where else is in the world as resilient and full of life as Africa. And while the US is full of material wealth and financial kingdoms, Africa is much richer in culture, family, and love. If you want to measure the world in such important life qualities, than we are all Africans first.

I will end my first posting by noting this: This month (July 2007), the popular US magazine, "Vanity Fair," published its first ever "Africa" issue - a major step towards socially responsible media coverage in mainstream magazine publication. However, littered between the intriguing articles and inspirational stories are advertisements for the same diamond and other industries that are coincidentally destroying Africa. While we may think of ourselves as being benevolent and well-read by purchasing such magazines, for such a magazine to truly be helpful, they need to publish it without the many advertisements paid for by the blood of Africans. It is only when we start to view ourselves as Americans Africans rather than simply Americans will we be able to see the daily injustices which we blindly and sometimes intentionally create so that Americans can succeed on the downfalls of Africa.