African Insights Blog – February 2005

Listening for the Sounds of Africa:

In my youth I used to listen to shortwave news in the evening when reception was best. I would get updates via the BBC, Swiss and Austrian Stations, Radio Moscow and, of course, various German stations; all of them putting me in touch with the world both near and far. Oh-- I almost forgot, there was the AFN Network, the US Armed Forces Radio in Germany, and even though I did not speak English at the time, I enjoyed listening to the music they played!

In those days, I would be resting in my bed, listening to hours of news via shortwave radio, especially when I came down with scarlet fever and was confined to my room for months. It was then that I learned something of the art of listening to the news and just letting it soak in, making mental notes; taking in history as it was being made. I became a news buff and today I am an avowed news-aholic, especially regarding news from Africa.

Before the Internet, my favorite news source was the shortwave radio stations from around the world. I was always on the lookout for a better Grundig Shortwave Radio that would put me in touch with news that one could not hear or read locally.

When I went to Africa, my Grundig radios came along (three left my suitcase in a mysterious manner at Jomo Kenyatta Airport). I would spend many a night in Nairobi, Kampala, and Kigali, or at the UN camp in Lokichoggio underneath a clear African night listening to BBC or Voice of America, Deutsche Welle, or some other far off place that brought news from afar and often about the very place where I was at that moment in time.

Nowhere else in the world did I find a deeper interest for the latest news as amongst the Southern Sudanese. Everyone, who was someone, had a shortwave receiver. Morning coffee, showers, breakfast, all accompanied by BBC World Service bringing the latest updates from around the world, Africa and including what was happening in the Sudan.

I am still listening to radio from far away, but now I do it via high speed Internet access allowing me to listen to radio programs about Africa or from Africa. The sounds are great! On BBC I can listen to musical presentations from Kampala, or a play written by a retired an in Nigeria. It is a far cry from my scratchy Grundig reception but times are changing. Today I can listen to the sounds of Africa while sitting at my computer or in my bed with my laptop, reminding me of those early days of my news addiction. It is a delight to hear the ideas and input of Kenyan, Ugandans, Ethiopians, all while sitting near my computer or simply doing my chores and hearing some new song with a haunting melody that reminds me of driving through the majestic Rift Valley of Kenya, or coming down toward Lake Victoria from the Highlands.

It is good to listen to African sounds, African voices, and African ideas. Maybe, just maybe, all those who want to “fix” Africa and its problems, maybe all those with their so-called “solutions,” have not been listening to Africa and its people.
Just recently, Sir Bob Geldof, of Live Aid Africa fame, made some comments about why President Museveni should not run for a third term. Geldof said that his admiration for Mr. Museveni's fight against poverty and Aids had now been lost.

"Get a grip Museveni. Your time is up, go away," Geldof said at the launch of the Commission for Africa Report, which is supposed to map out how best to raise living standards in Africa.

Ugandans took offense and thousands protested Sir Geldof in the streets of Kampala and rightfully so. It seems that most of the time the West comes with “Father knows best” advice, but does not take the time and effort to listen. After all, the Western mindset assumes that Africa had no history until the colonial powers came to enlighten the uncivilized savages of the continent by bringing “civilization.” It would be quite a shock for many of those so-called discoverers to discover that the oldest human beings have been found in East Africa and that history started in Africa.

As European nations colonized Africa, anything African was considered inferior to European ways. Some used religion to subjugate the African people causing Jomo Kenyatta, the first President of Kenya to say, “The missionaries came with the Bible in their hand and we had the land. They taught us to pray with our eyes closed, and then when we opened them, we had the Bible in our hand and they had the land.” (One will not encounter many atheists in sub-Sahara Africa. Africans have embraced Islam and Christianity. In fact, African Christian Churches are now evangelizing the West by starting churches in the USA and Europe.)

If one looked more closely, when those early explorers, missionaries and merchants set foot on Africa, there was not just a loss of land. A greater loss had begun much earlier to the Mid-East and East, but the Europeans used Africa as their manpower resource to staff their plantations in the new world of North and South America with African slaves. The nations of the Caribbean and the Americas imported millions of slaves from all over Africa, causing a people drain the world had never seen before or since. Africa not only lost millions of its people to the slave trade, people from many different tribes and kingdoms, that had existed for centuries before, but Africa lost with its people, its heart and soul, its self-respect. Africa was subjugated by other powers at home and abroad from Charleston South Carolina to Rio de Janeiro. No one listened to the cries of Africa for years to come, Africa cried from its soul, but its cries were ignored.

If you look at how the present states of Africa came into being, many of the present problems have to do with the way the map was drawn at a table in Berlin far from Africa. Far from the tribal lands and kingdoms such lines would separate, far from the families that were now part of different nations. Certainly no one was listening to Africa back then.

As I write this newsletter, Tony Blair’s Commission on Africa is publishing another European report on Africa. A lot of good things have been said and written by Africans and non-Africans alike, yet if you would ask people on the streets of Africa, you would find a bit of skepticism. They have seen many important people come to Africa to write reports, take pictures, give interviews and fly back home without listening to the average person on the streets of Africa’s cities.

Africa will not change, unless one listens to Africa, listens to what is really needed instead of our Western solutions based on a world model that does not take Africa’s needs, resources, and of course its people into consideration.

When one listens to Africa, one hears that the world needs to buy the products of Africa at a fair price, eliminate Western subsidies to American, European, Canadian farmers in order that the African farmers who receive no subsidies can compete in the world market on a level playing field.

I pray for the day that the riches of Africa’s earth will no longer be extracted by foreign companies and processed in the West or East. I hope for the day that African leaders will no longer take out the billions of dollars and put them into Western banks, but instead take that money and invest it in Africa s schools, industries, factories, and its people and their well-being.

Africa does not need Western pity, but Western respect. Change in Africa will take time. It has taken the West many years and a few wars to live in peace; it will take a few more years in Africa. Changes are taking place on a daily basis in Africa. Democratic elections are taking place everywhere, we only read about those things that go sour. The cell phone is revolutionizing Africa. Farmers are using it to check on the present prices of their crops, people are staying in touch. Email at the Internet cafes of Africa is keeping Africans in touch with relatives; the wealth of the Internet comes to Africa through those screens throughout the larger cities in Africa.

Countries like Uganda are prospering with an annual growth rate of over 6 percent. New shopping centers are popping up yearly and the Ugandan middle class has choices. Africa is changing from within.

Africa is reclaiming its soul, decolonizing its heart and mind, and the day will come when Mother Africa will be made of nations that are listened to and have the respect as an equal at the global table. I hope I live to see that day.

Today I listen to the sounds and happenings in Africa from a distance, I listen to the heart of Africa via the letters I receive, the news I read, the literature of African writers, and I like what I hear, I enjoy listening to Africa. Try listening to Africa; it might give you a whole new perspective as to what Mother Africa is really like…jon

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Last updated: 09 July 2010

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