It's been awhile since I've pulled together a round up of interesting articles that have passed my way, so I'll take a breather from lobbing complaints about Gaddafi and talking about Mali to point out what some other people are saying.
Basically the antithesis to the scare article that came out a few days ago. The article points to the fact that with four undersea cables touching down by the end of the year in Kenya, it will go from a country of minimal bandwidth, to a major player in the internet markets.
Pretty cool silos designed to irrigate Sudan. Much better than just having a tank with a pump sitting somewhere. They also portend a future design focus on renewable energy platforms as public art, much like how the parabolic trough became mainstream through using it as a set piece in the film, Gattaca. HT A Bombastic Element
The good news is that PayPal has launched in South Africa. The bad news is that like most companies doing business in Africa (even South Africa), there is a great deal of trepidation to the venture and it isn't nearly as good a setup as in North America or Europe. And then they'll claim that it was a failure due to the African market being untenable because you know, they tried. Go figure.
Normally I stick to technology here, but Gaddafi has finally hit a sour note with me as I read his latest ramblings:
...Nigeria should follow the model of Yugoslavia, after previously saying it should be divided into two - along the lines of India and Pakistan.
I assume that he's backpedaling because using the India/Pakistan split for the model of dividing Nigeria in to separate countries would be suicidal. The Yugoslavia reference is just about as stupid given that that breakup cost a quarter million lives and is still not a solved problem 15 years later. Part of the thing that made the Yugoslavia breakup "easier" than what happened in India is the fact that there were pre-established borders for the countries wishing to separate. This is not the case in Nigeria. You can't just draw these arbitrarily as no one will ever be happy with the result. And maybe it should be mentioned that Muslim and Christian populations live side by side in most areas of Western Africa as was much more the case in Bosnia Herzegovina than anywhere else in former Yugoslavia. Thus you end up with bloodshed and what is basically a failed unity government when you try to split things up.
It should be noted that one of somewhat stabilizing (as well as heavily nationalizing) forces in former Yugoslavia was the concept of a singular, national language for all the breakaway states. While Croatian, Serbian, and Bosnian are all basically the same language, people still unified behind a single national language, even though there are three very distinct dialects in a place like Croatia.
If one were to apply this type of thinking to Nigeria, take a look at this language map of the region. Those would be some pretty twisted up looking countries and it would still solve nothing.
Joshua Goldstein wrote an article a couple of weeks back about Craigslist not being able to scale in Africa; meaning, why is it not growing? For those unfamiliar with Craigslist, it is has gotten to be the de facto matter in which people in major cities in the US list and find classifieds. It started in San Francisco, which is where it has one of its largest user base. It's ugly as all hell, but functions incredibly well with its ugly simplicity.
The thing with Craigslist is that they open up a new section in a new city and just let it spread organically. No marketing, no big push. This has worked well given that in San Francisco is an extremely transient bunch of people who seem to only live there 2-3 years and are then off to another place to find themselves or whatever it is they need to do. With them goes the usage of Craigslist and thus it gains ground within that new city these former San Franciscans move to. It's had a trickier time of getting a foothold in Europe given that there aren't nearly as many people from the US moving there as there are San Franciscans moving to say New York or Los Angeles. And then of course, there is Africa, where it seems to have had next to no success to date.
So, here's the thing, I bumped around Mali for two weeks. One of the things that took up a pile of time in the trip was trying to get rides to various places whether outright paying or trying to share with someone. The story was usually the same in that either people had booked a car and guide with an agency for an exorbitant sum or we tried to talk up some local (i.e. fixer) to put us in contact with people for a nominal fee. We were then hoping that we would find someone with a vehicle who had two empty seats that would allow us to split the exorbitant car rental fees (about $50 USD per day with no AC and gas not included.)
None of this came about. For those who haven't traveled to Mali and visited Mopti or Bandiagara (the gateway towns to Dogon Country) you haven't had the pleasure of experiencing the very rotten outer layer of tourism in the region that gets in your way of seeing the quite spectacular sites. Guides want upwards of $50 USD a day, per person to do something that you don't even need them for as you really don't need a guide to visit Dogon Country. They also bug you incessantly as it appears every 2nd person is a guide trying to scam you. That being the case and this being the 21st, I propose a startup. It would start in Mali, but it could grow anywhere else it wanted, although only methodically. Basically, it's a system for people to find exactly what my wife and I were trying to find: other like-minded people traveling in Mali.
It would be small at first, but being that the target users would initially be foreigners who have access to and use the internet a great deal more than anyone in Africa, you would have a fantastic user base. There would be a target audience who also like to travel and have the money to travel. This site could then grow and eventually expand in to other areas, such as if a car of folks from Mali are heading to Côte d'Ivoire and had space for two people, they could find each other beforehand as opposed to the flagging-someone-down-on-the-road method that I actually had to do as the buses are tragic.
I'm a bit all over the map with this idea as I'm very excited about it, but simply don't have the time to make it any kind of a reality. But, for someone who wanted a hot idea with legs that could eventually give Craigslists a run for its money if it were to ever get a foothold in Africa, it's definitely something to consider. I think folks could even get seed funding for it and I'd be willing to introduce anyone with a solid plan to what connections I have to make it work.
Anyways, think about it. They have already come, so build it already!
I'm not happy. No, the bed at this hotel in Bamako was great last night, as well as the pool, and the breakfast. No complaints there and in fact, beyond the bus and transportation situation, I've been enjoying Mali a great deal. It's this article written by Belgian journalist, Franz-Stefan Gady, about the looming threat of a "Cyber Weapon of Mass Destruction" as "Darkest Africa" gets online that has fouled my mood.
To be short, blunt, and honest, this article is bullshit. I'm a Croatian national and so I've been following the accession of Croatia in to the EU with a good deal of attention seeing that it could happen in January of next year. As this possibility gets closer, the xenophobic news gets greater as news articles focus on everything bad about Croatia (and let's not even talk about Turkey's possible accession--ooooh scary developed Muslim country...) People are scared of change and scared of outsiders, especially those writing for some sections of certain British journalism outfits. As has been the case historically, it's much the same for Africa.
I mean, there are so many generalizations in this ridiculous article that I really don't want to waste time addressing each one. It's obvious that the author read some extremely general statistics of African internet penetration and computer usage to concoct this broad stroke, op-ed representation of a lurking, unseen threat from the "Heart of Darkness". Honestly, it sounds a lot like the same things said about AIDS and Africa.
But, let's just mention a few things. First of all, while there is a lot of old equipment looming around, there is also a lot of new equipment. The Africans I know aren't stupid when it comes to electronics. They know what a good operating system is, what a good browser is, and especially what a good phone is. They upgrade things whenever possible. Sure, there are a number of internet cafes who have old, crap machines lying around, but this is also the case in a great wealth of cafes outside of Africa.
On another note, technology in Africa has the tendency to leapfrog the feeble, dragging steps that plague the "developed" nations. For instance, the Orange internet connections throughout all of Mali are via WiMax. "Huh, what's WiMax?" many a DSL or cable internet user in North America would ask. It works great here and it bypasses the need for painstaking land connection deployment. I see it taking off in a great many African countries over time. It's going to be 5 years or more before we see this deployed properly in the US. So, on that note, I think that Africans have more to fear from older technology outside their continent than the rest of the world fearing Africa. It would be ironic if at some point in the near future, Nigeria had to block IP addresses from the United States.
I think that the biggest and most glaring issue with this article is that if one is to assume that there are unpatched, susceptible machines in Africa, won't access to faster internet allow them to download the patches needed to fix the issue? Won't faster access to information allow people to find out more about the threats to their machines? Won't faster access allow Africans to most likely undercut the inflated web development rates earned by those in places like Silicon Valley which means that scare tactics will need to be used in sloppy journalism pieces to keep them from being part of this economy. Oh, wait.
Overall just a bad article and something that should never had been published. If you want to talk about the real Cyber WMD, I see it on two fronts. The first is in Apple computers which, have lulled their users in to a false sense of security with their machines. Some day a virus will come along that will spread like wildfire when Macs are vulnerable to it. And this will happen. It's just a matter of time. The other front is the smartphone. Dear lord, there is no security on them whatsoever and as they get more and more connected to the net, the threat index goes up exponentially. Gady ("eumerican"), instead of pointing fingers at a continent which I wonder if you've ever set foot upon, how about looking in your pocket instead...
Taxis are not the most common thing to find in the smallish town of Segou (about 200km East of Bamako.) I assume that it's due to the operating cost of them, but whatever the case, there are few. In their place is what I took to calling the "RickCycle" which has risen to supersede the hallowed ground that taxis are oft to haunt.
For some reason, it seems to me that I've seen these in a great many places, but here in Mali, they take your ordinary, cheap Chinese motorcycle of 250cc or what have you and they chop off/weld on a back carriage to it that has a solid axle from who knows what. The transmission is then tweaked to instead of having it attach to a sprocket to drive the chain to the back tire, it then has an articulating joint with a driveshaft going to the new rear axle.
The plus side is that suddenly a what was once a motorcycle is now a RickCycle that can carry up to six smallish or four normalish people. The down side is that the speedometer doesn't work, it rides pretty rough, and has a maximum speed of maybe 15-20kph. Naturally they don't re-gear the transmission so given all the new weight, it makes for some clunky, heavy clutch shifting.
Pretty cool though and damned cheap. To go 15km to a neighboring village was just 500 CFA ($1 USD). Obviously it wasn't the fastest trip in the world, but the fact that I got the same driver two out of three rides made it an endearing trip if nothing else. Check out Aboubacar and his gleaming piece of machinery below. If you're in Segou and see him, hop on. He's a nice guy and really honest as I saw that the locals were paying the same as I did.
For anyone who reads my writings with regularity, you know that I love trains. So it was naturally the case that I happened upon the main Bamako train station in the center of town. It's quite a regal building that, like many former Colonial stations in Africa, has indeed faded from its past glory. It's not entirely these stations' fault given that they and the lines connected to them were originally built solely to extract from the countries in which they were placed. They weren't like the stations and lines you find in Europe that were built to transport people and promote commerce.
This station was one of the rare exceptions though as it is actually a minor station that exists on a much larger line connecting Dakar in Senegal to Niamey in Niger. Quite a feat really and quite a crucial line to transport goods faster than the Niger river could. Various chunks of this service have fallen apart of the years and it was a sad moment when reported that the line had ceased running altogether from Dakar to Bamako in the middle of last year due to an accident in Eastern Senegal that killed five. There is no projected time as to when it will start running again, although those who are adventurous can take the train from Bamako to Kayes (the "pressure cooker") in the far west of the country and then continue on bus to Dakar.
I stumbled upon a guy who actually wasn't a full of crap, hustler guide and was able to tell some of the history of the station. The disuse he blamed on the Colonialists not maintaining it though. Given that Mali celebrates its 50th year of independence from France this year, that argument holds little water with me, although management by the Belgian firm, Vecturis has probably done very little to improve the rail.
I am an idealist and I wish that the train would run again some day as the bus rides around Mali are absolutely horrendous and having a train option would be great as the fact that bobbing down the Niger to Timbuktu can compete with taking the bus leaves a lot to be desired in land routes.
Bamako is severely lacking in bars and cafés. Coming from Côte d'Ivoire for this visit, it has taken a bit to get used to as the Malian culture doesn't seem to focus around this aspect of casual life as it does for the Ivorians. What you do see are a group of guys sitting around a small street stove that is boiling a pot of tea that they then serve, drinking with this slurping sound that quite honestly drives me a bit nuts, but seems to be the only way to drink tea here as it's quite hot once poured.
While my wife and I were rummaging through the many excellent jewelry shops just West of the center (I highly recommend checking them out if in Bamako), I noticed that the owners of one shop understood very well how convection works in fires. Obviously having grown tired of fanning the flames, which I know is quite a bother when I'm firing up in the barbecue back home, they decided to use a forge.
Now, I'm not quite sure if this forge is generally used for jewelry making, but I only saw it used for tea making. Essentially, it's a raised bed of coals that sit above an air path that has air forced in to it by a blower they picked up from lord knows where, that they crank with a re-purposed bicycle wheel. In a word, it's a genius as it works exceedingly well. For those familiar with how a forge typically works, they've greatly improved upon the hand-pumped bellows. It heats up the coals and thus, the tea, incredibly fast.
I love tea and so of course I took the chance to try the Malian take on boiling the magic leaves. Mother if it's not strong. It's like an espresso shot in each of those small glasses. It's highly bitter as well which is most likely why they sweeten the bejesus out of it. It's still good though, in the way that Turkish coffee is good and this touch with the forge makes it all the more cool.
On my first day in Bamako, I went for a walk up around the bluffs that look down upon the town. I was mainly just going for a stroll as it looked like a nice place for a view over this infinitely sprawling town of two million inhabitants. It also happens that in the caves that are splattered heavily across these bluffs there are apparently cave paintings from the earliest humans to live in the area that Bamako now occupies.
After a couple of failed attempts to scale some rugged paths in sandals, I finally came to an easy way to get up to the top. With the caves in the distance, I came to the top of a ledge and found sprawling before me new home construction that was being partially built from the rocks quarried out of the bluffs by hand. I was thankful that it was by hand to this point because if it had been mechanized, the whole top of the plateau would probably be gone.
It's sad that this chunk of history is being removed just to make room for yet more one story homes in Hippodrome Deux. I believe that the caves below the Presidential Palace a bit to the West are still intact, but still, while I realize that this must appear as "just some rocks", they're not replaceable rocks that are being transformed in to homes that will likely be razed in the coming decades as they're being built quite fast and cheaply.
This type of thing annoys me as I'm constantly seeing it everywhere in the world as we convert more of the planet in to more human beings and more space for human beings. From the coasts of Spain and Croatia to the Sacramento Valley where I grew up in Northern California, it's everywhere and really, it has to stop. We have to learn how to contain our sprawl and the impact of said sprawl. Anyways, Eco-Geek rant over. On to finer things in Mali.
Buses hate all that is me.
On a trip seven years ago, I was taking a bus from Zagreb, Croatia out to the coastal town of Split. This was on the old road, so it was an eight hour drive (new road is five.) Somewhere around hour six or so, the bus pulled to the side of the road, sputtered, die, and then the engine exploded in a ball of flames. Luckily, I lived to tell about that.
Two years ago, I was taking bus from Belgrade, Serbia to Sarajevo, Bosnia Herzegovina. The bus was doing fine until it lost a radiator hose which was thankfully repaired mid-ride so that I made it in to Sarajevo tired and late, but on the same bus and without serious threat to my well-being.
These experiences all seem like child's play now that I have experience what Sean at Journey without Maps calls, The Most Miserable Bus in the World. Yes, the crappy-bus bar has been set high in this latest experience and I hope it will remain the pinnacle of personal bus crapdom for me, lest one bus run over me, back up, run over me again, and then shoot me dead.
It all started with my wife and I throwing caution to the wind and thinking we could circumnavigate the most hellish part of this bus trip by not taking the route from Abidjan up to the border. That can take from 1-2 days by itself due to the buses not wanting to drive through Yamoussoukro at night due to the fear of roving bandits in the area.
So, we got up at six on Friday morning and mooched rides through various friends of friends who were knowing people going north and we eventually bounced our way to to Korhogo and spent the night at a friend's house there. This part was all well and good, hauling along at 100kph with air conditioning and avoiding the slowdowns that come with the damnable checkpoint "greasings".
Well-rested, we set out from Korhogo the next morning to take the Sama Transport bus from there up to Sikasso in Mali where we thought we'd spend the night as the trip took so long. The bus was scheduled to leave at eight and we were pleasantly surprised to have it leave at 9:30. The trip up to the border was mostly uneventful. Slow would be the primary tag to attach to any article about it though as the bus stops at literally every wide spot in the road to take on more passengers, drop off others, or pick up letters that people are sending. Ah yes, if you want to send something via express mail in Côte d'Ivoire or Mali, you use Sama.
After getting a quick, painless stamp at the Malian border, we then went to customs. I wish I had brought a chair. That took something like an hour as the inspection officers wanted to look through every single part of the bus, come up with a tally and then negotiate the "donation" they were to receive, as our driver put it. I also learned a new word on this particular Saturday which was the "donne-donne" as in the "give give" which is what some kids told us when we asked where the driver was. "Oh he's at the donne-donne."
Once crossing the border, we were puttering our way along in minor passenger transport and mail delivery courier stops until we reach Sikasso. So, here's the funny thing about Sikasso, according to the ticket guys in Korhogo, there is no transfer to another bus in Sikasso to reach Mali, to which I retort, oh yes, there is very much a transfer to another bus in Sikasso to reach Mali and the really really cool part is that they oversell that bus so you have to scramble to get on it. Or you can then wait for the night bus of which the first one of which leaves at 22:00. Not having it in us to fight through the line for the oversold tickets, we took one quick glance Sikasso and opted for the night bus.
The night bus left at a quarter past 22:00 which was pretty good. The driver drove like a maniac and had to listen to his music through the bus sound system at full volume, so sleep was out of the question, but rolling discotheque was very much in the question (or the answer?) Whatever, it was going to be alright as forward momentum to Bamako was the goal and that was happening. Of course somewhere around 1:30 we came across a massive line of trucks and quickly came to a dead stop.
It turns out in the course of all this driving, a strike had occurred that the Malian truckers (or more their bosses) called. They had decided that buses were part of it as well (they weren't) and thus about 5km East of a town called Bougouni, they stopped our miserable bus. The strike was about the fact that the government had reduced the maximum weight that trucks can carry (a good move considering what happens often) and so they had been striking for four days prior to our arrival at the point of blockage.
No amount of negotiating by the bus drivers (there were more than just us stopped) could get up through and so we did what you do when stopped in the middle of nowhere at 1:30 in the morning--you sleep on the ground next to the bus. That was an adventurous night filled with strange dreams of Malian women walking past me dressed in their brightly colored clothes as well as the feeling I was in a zoo as I believe that every single person who walked by shined their flashlight or mobile screen at the beleaguered white guy sleeping on the ground.
At 6:00, everybody got up and we decided to get the hell out of there, walking past the blockage point, hitching a ride to the nearest town, and then taking yet another bus that did eventually get up to Bamako in the middle of the day. In a private car, from Korhogo, Côte d'Ivoire to Bamako, Mali, the trip takes a bit less than six hours. As it went for us, it took 30.
While the strike was unfortunate, these things can happen. You get snarled up in them rightly or wrongly, but you move on. It's more the issue of Sama Transport that I take issue with. They are Satan. Actually no, they're worse than Satan as you know Satan's rules when you're headed "down under".
In short, Sama is a horrid company, but unfortunately they're the main choice you have to take to get around and they seem to have a monopoly in Côte d'Ivoire as well as Mali. The only other options are scooting along in shared taxis between towns or to take very expensive flights. From Abidjan to Bamako is $500 and it's an hour flight. Needless to say, if I have to fly back, I will if the choice is that or spending another night sleeping in the savanna next to my otherwise illustrious "direct" bus. Sean, I am a fool to not have heeded wise words.
I learned a number of interesting facts over the last weekend at BarCamp Abidjan, mostly from the Google Africa team that was there. It turns out that despite being spread across multiple countries on the continent, their staff totals 23 people. Most of these seem to be working in outreach and communication of Google brand projects, but there are a few in the mapping department as well.
Maybe there are some coders too, but I didn't meet anyone who fessed up to being a hardcore coder. I got the gist, based on the conversations about the various Google products that seem to be targeted towards the African market that these are developed in the famous 20% time of other staff in other countries, which means they're not developed by those using them firsthand. In general, this isn't the worst thing in the world as you can apply a good deal of theory and construct artificial testing environments (code wind tunnels if you will.) But I can tell you that actually living in the market your application is working to serve shows you endless shortcomings as well as unknown strengths. Google needs more coders in Africa.
To that end, I learned a very interesting and potentially brilliant setup in that CEO Eric Schmidt wants there to be the same percentage of developers in each country of the world as those countries stack up for internet users in the world. I don't know what the current amounts are of coding staff in the US, but under this plan, only 40% of Google's development staff would eventually be in the US as 40% of the current internet users are in the US. It's quite a genius tack that I applaud and hope will eventually become a reality... especially in Africa. This also goes a long way to explaining why there are only 23 staff here as African internet users are less than 1% of the total in the world. They could still use a few more hires though.
