Janet Haven

Tomorrow morning I'm heading off to Uganda to attend Africa Source 2, the fourth in a series of week-long technology workshops for NGOs masterminded by the Tactical Technology Collective. If AS2 is anything like its predecessors (India 2005, Namibia 2004, Croatia 2003), I'm expecting the next week will be a mix of sixth grade Scout Camp, a super-condensed semester at a tech university where the teachers are the leaders in their respective fields (and are relentlessly charming to boot), and a cocktail party with 120 very engaging guests, mostly from across Africa. I'm not at all sorry to be piling my malaria pills, international yellow fever innoculatoin certification, raincoat, sandals, sundresses, and bug repellent into a duffel tonight. Bet you wish you were going.

Aside from meeting a whole lot of interesting people and playing around with some new open source tools in the coming week, I'm also looking forward to learning more about Uganda. Looking at a map of the country, it strikes me how many challenging neighbors Uganda has: a landlocked country, Uganda is surrounded by Sudan, DRC, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Kenya. I currently live in a landlocked country surrounded by historically challenging neighbors: Hungary is bordered by Romania, Ukraine, Slovakia, Austria, Slovenia and Serbia. A country landlocked by many neighbors is inevitably a difficult place to be; you're forever looking over your shoulder at the strife brewing on the other side of the border checkpoint. Or, in Uganda's case, in the northern regions of the country as well, where the government's struggle against the Lord's Resistance Army drags on as one of Africa's longest-running conflicts. Other things I know about Uganda are few: the country voted in July last year for a multi-party system, and a presidential election is scheduled for Februrary 23rd. The incumbent president, Yoweri Museveni of the National Resistance Movement, seems to be leading in the polls; he is trailed by the Forum for Democratic Change leader, Kizza Besigye. Not so surprising that Besigye is behind; he's spent most of the last two months in a maximum-security prison on charges of rape and treason. Not surprisingly, his supporters call the charges politically motivated.

These are the kinds of things I know about Uganda from the news. However, two recent reads have cautioned me to, well, write about something else, something below the usual radar of tragedy, war, and corruption. The first, which I came across yesterday via the Velveteen Rabbi, is an intended-to-be-short-lived blog by Teju Cole, a Nigerian American currently visiting family and friends in Africa. The blog itself is beautiful and spare in design, image, and prose. Teju wrote this a few days back:

The most important thing to know about Africa is that it is normal. But no one who depends on American media for information can come away with this impression.

The most powerful lies can be those of omission, and this is the kind of lie the West tells against Africa every day. Africa is all game reserves and refugee camps. When last was a glittering African financial center- of which there are many- broadcast on American television? When was the last time you saw images of a middle-class African family at a shopping mall in their country, or of young people in a university, or in a restaurant, or on a normal city street?

And a few days before that, I came across (via Ethan Zuckerman) a piece in Granta by Binyavanga Wainaina called "How to Write About Africa". The article begins:

Never have a picture of a well-adjusted African on the cover of your book, or in it, unless that African has won the Nobel Prize. An AK-47, prominent ribs, naked breasts: use these.

Read it, it's funny. And cringe-making, if you've ever written a word about a place that you feel is more exotic that your usual locale.

I'm going to try and do some writing from Uganda, depending on connectivity and time. I'll be writing mostly about the technology workshop I'm at and the people I meet there, which I think is both fascinating and admirably normal -- but I'll be keeping the admonishments of Cole and Wainaina in mind as I do.