Africabeat

Arrived in Beijing last night, jetlagged.  Woke up at about 3:30am.  Took this photo at 6:30, about an hour and a half after dawn.  (Read Ernest Hemingway while flying over Siberia, and strange things begin to happen to the number of clauses you’ll allow in a sentence.)

Beijing, morning, July 24, 2008

As the sun rises, the gray just gets brighter.  It may be out later, as
it was when I arrived around sunset yesterday, a round and a sort of
desaturated yellow-orange, but with no power to change the permanent gray of the sky.

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The Batwa people were traditionally hunter-gatherers.  In Eastern Congo, they lived off what the forest provided, until prolonged warfare and the creation of national parks ended their way of life.  Neglected by the government, shunned by other ethnic groups, the Batwa live on the margins of Congolese society.  They have no knowledge of agriculture or animal husbandry.  They have never participated in a cash economy.  They live in temporary villages in constant fear of being driven out by real estate developers or the government.  They build their houses out of sticks and leaves and die of things like too much rain.  There are about 3,000 living in the area around Goma.  They want dignity, they want a way to live as others live, but how?  No one can simply give that to them.

In August, I met an American girl in Kigali with a friend named Morgan, a student at the Université de Goma.  On a whim, I went to eastern Congo, ostensibly to climb a volcano and see some gorillas, all  because Morgan knew a guy who knew a guy who could get me a good rate. Morgan also happened to be one of the most extraordinary individuals I’ve ever met–a law student, an eldest son, the founder of his own NGO, and a good guy to have around the next time Mt. Nyiragongo erupts–and so on a second whim, I made a promise I intend to keep to Morgan and 3,000+ people. Needless to say, I never did get to see the gorillas. 

In a series of posts, learn about the Batwa, the support Morgan’s NGO needs to help them, and how I hope to mobilize that support while avoiding all those pitfalls of aid I love to critique, but to which I can offer no easy solutions.

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Last week, Dubai World, Dubai’s investment holding company, announced it will invest $230 million in Rwanda’s tourism industry. Dubai World plans to build a five-star tented park at the base of the country’s famed gorilla preserve at Volcanoes National Park, an airstrip and hotel at Akagera Park, and a tea estate adjacent to a proposed four-star hotel at Nyungwe forest. 

The Rwanda Investments and Export Promotion Agency (RIEPA) is aggressively courting ICT and tourism investments as part Vision 2020, an ambitious plan to transform Rwanda into a middle-income country by the year 2020. 

When I was in Kigali last summer, I spoke to some officers at RIEPA about Vision 2020, and they showed me these really beautiful sketches of luxury cabins, best described as castles of glass, perched over a lake.  I believe they had commissioned an American architecture firm to do the drawings.  "All we need is an investor," they said.  It was one of the many moments during my three weeks in Rwanda where I thought, "Damn, I can’t help but admire the sheer audacity of this government’s dreams."

Looks like audacity is paying off.

Here’s some info on the Dubai World investment in French and English.

See also: Notes on Rwanda, Democracy & Authoritarianism

China Dialogue, a bilingual, Chinese/English blog on China and the environment, has two recent posts on the environmental impacts of China’s investment in Nigeria and Angola’s oil industries.  And I’ve got commentary.

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Many have criticized China’s involvement in Africa on environmental grounds.  Read some of China’s critics and defenders.

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