how to write about africa

David Evans1 Comment

This is absolutely brilliant; it made my night.  Read Binyavanga Wainaina’s whole essay in Granta 92.  Here are a few passages I identified with.

Always use the word ‘Africa or ‘Darkness’ or ‘Safari’ in your title. Subtitles may include the words ‘Zanzibar’, ‘Masai’, ‘Zulu’, ‘Zambezi’, ‘Congo’, ‘Nile’, ‘Big’, ‘Sky, ‘Shadow’, ‘Drum’, ‘Sun’ or ‘Bygone’. Also useful are words such as ‘Guerrillas’, ‘Timeless’, ‘Primordial’ and ‘Tribal’.

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. If you must include an African, make sure you get one in Masai or Zulu or Dogon dress.

In your text, treat Africa as if it were one country. It is hot and dusty with rolling grasslands and huge herds of animals and tall, thin people who are starving. Or it is hot and steamy with very short people who eat primates. Don’t get bogged down with precise descriptions. Africa is big: fifty-four countries, 900 million people who are too busy starving and dying and warring and emigrating to read your book. The continent is full of deserts, jungles, highlands, savannahs and many other things, but your reader doesn’t care about all that, so keep your descriptions romantic and evocative and unparticular.

Make sure you show how Africans have music and rhythm deep in their souls, and eat things no other humans eat. Do not mention rice and beef and wheat; monkey-brain is an African’s cuisine of choice, along with goat, snake, worms and grubs and all manner of game meat.

mention near the beginning how much you love Africa, how you fell in love with the place and can’t live without her. Africa is the only continent you can love — take advantage of this. If you are a man, thrust yourself into her warm virgin forests. If you are a woman, treat Africa as a man who wears a bush jacket and disappears off into the sunset. Africa is to be pitied, worshipped or dominated. Whichever angle you take, be sure to leave the strong impression that without your intervention and your important book, Africa is doomed.

And so much more!  That’s why we recommend reading books by African writers.  Lots of recommendations here (plus a few offenders).

Hat tip to Blattman, the one blog I take time to read in the field (I’m in Tanzania, by the way).

airport (non)observations

David Evans2 Comments

In the last 48 hours, I have been in four airports: Washington Dulles, London, Nairobi (Kenya), Dar es Salaam (Tanzania).  As I wandered around these airports, I felt like I should have some witty observation about airports.  Or – short of that – like I should be gathering some data.  What kind of data would be interesting to gather in airports?  Ideas are welcome.

 

Since I don’t have any insights like Pico Iyer would, I’ll share this quote in the front of an Iyer book that a friend lent me:

 

“Philosophy is really homesickness: the wish to be everywhere at home.” – Friedrich Nietzche

 

I don’t know anything about philosophy,* but this idea of being everywhere at home seems deeply appealing.

 

* I know this because on the plane, I tried to read philosopher Nancy Cartwright’s Hunting Causes and Using Them on my flight and – even though it is about intersections between philosophy and economics – I mostly had no idea what she was talking about.

 

Hat tip to Blattman for getting me thinking, not about the presentation I’m giving in 14 hours.

book review. At Large and At Small: Familiar Essays, by Anne Fadiman

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My sister gave me this for Christmas, and over the last six months my wife and I read this aloud.  How can I not love a book with an illustration like the one above on the cover!  My thoughts:

a beautifully written, thoughtful mix of experience and research; like chatting with a bright and engaging friend

I have felt that I will read any book that Anne Fadiman writes; this confirms that conviction.

What’s a familiar essay? Fadiman doesn’t give a precise definition in her preface, but she characterizes the genre: “The familiar essayist didn’t speak to the millions; he spoke to one reader, as if the two of them were sitting side by side in front of a crackling fire…. His viewpoint was subjective, his frame of reference concrete, his style digressive, his eccentricities conspicuous, and his laughter usually at his own expense. And though he wrote about himself, he also wrote about a subject, something with which he was so familiar, and about which he was often so enthusiastic, that his words were suffused with a lover’s intimacy” (p. x).

These essays live up to the genre: most start with one or more personal stories, which Fadiman uses as a starting point to speak about a subject more generally. The form is the only common theme of the book; the topics are wonderfully eclectic: insomnia, the American flag, coffee, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

I enjoyed each of these essays, from Fadiman’s fascinating history of the mail system (yes, really) to her reflections on what she calls “the culture wars” (questions like: should the life of the writer affect our valuation of the work? should we value literature for some inherent esthetic value or because of what it teaches us?) to her thoughts on…ice cream. [Only the last essay didn’t grab me.]

Ultimately, Fadiman brings wonderful prose and delicious diction to any topic. I love her vocabulary’s propensity to send me scurrying repeatedly to my dictionary – “oleaginous,” “solipsistic,” “insouciance,” “omphalos” – artfully meshed with an informal, unpretentious style. (She cleverly hides her sources in the back without footnotes, so you can enjoy the book as a leisurely conversation but then know where to learn more.)

This is Fadiman’s third book: The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down was Excellent but very different (a classic work of medical anthropology), and Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader – the bibliophile’s manifesto – had the benefit of a common theme. In that sense, this was slightly less compelling than those two but marvelous just the same. She also edited and wrote the first essay for Rereadings: Seventeen writers revisit books they love, a collection of other people’s essays about re-reading books they loved as children; I enjoyed that very much as well.

I recommend it. [My wife and I read this aloud to each other; I highly recommend that, too.]

the best advice i’ve seen for obama’s choice of running mate – FIXED

David Evans2 Comments

Jon Stewart and his Senior Black Correspondent give us the best ideas on who would make a great running mate.  (Note: this has a tiny bit of crass language and some flatulence.  But it’s wicked funny.)

Vodpod videos no longer available.

 

 

Who said Jon Stewart wasn’t a journalist?

Africa Reading Challenge review: Challenge of the Barons, by Lekan Are

David Evans2 Comments

My thoughts on this angry battle cry of a Nigerian novella.  (I love a battle cry that takes place in the halls of academia… once in a while.)

searing critique of aid to Africa tied to services from the donor country, wrapped up in university faculty intrigue

I was at a tiny bookshop in Banjul, the Gambia, picking up novels by African writers when the bookseller showed me this slim volume and said, You wouldn’t like this one! Why not? Because it speaks out against you guys. (I work for an international aid agency.) How could I resist?In 158 pages, Nigerian writer Lekan Are tells a story exemplifying how aid can hurt the people it is intended to help and pad the pockets of the most incompetent from the donor countries. Dr. Onaola Jungu, our protagonist with a PhD in horticulture, accepts the offer to move from his native Nigeria to the fictional country of Kato,* where he will be chair of the Department of Horticulture at the University of Serti.

However, when he arrives he finds the university faculty largely populated by poorly qualified Americans and other ex-pats, hired only because of strings attached to American aid to Kato. Dr. Jungu is unjustly deprived of the promised chairmanship in favor of an American and is made a mere professor. The rest of the book details the intense battle between – on the one side – Jungu and his African colleagues, who seek to improve the education environment and perform research that will help the country, and – on the other side – the American “experts” (and a few African cronies) battling to protect their special interests.

The book is heavy handed, the right and wrong are too stark, and the prose is clumsy.

BUT the story engaged me throughout (except the long account of the dog dying), and many of the critiques ring true. An absurd amount of American foreign aid (much more than most other countries**) is still “tied,” meaning that we “give” to poor countries but only in the form of American goods and services. Lekan Are paints a picture of just how inefficient and counterproductive that can be.

* It’s always a bad idea to move to a fictional country, unless it’s Brigadoon and your true love lives there.

** The Center for Global Development’s Commitment to Development Index states that 57% of our aid is tied to American goods and services, which puts us at 20 of 22 in that category (just above Greece and Japan).

 

 

 

economics book review: Super Crunchers, by Ian Ayres

David Evans1 Comment

Every time I see an audiobook of an economics book, I feel kind of obligated.  Here are my thoughts on this one:

Freakonomics 2: enjoyable survey of interesting research with real-world impacts

Ayres demonstrates how statistical analysis of large datasets is affecting the way the world works in a broad range of applications: credit card companies, sports teams, wine critics, development economists, medical practitioners,* law enforcement agencies, schools, etc. “Freakonomics didn’t talk much about the extent to which quantitative analysis is impacting real-world decisions. In contrast, this book is about just that – the impact of number crunching” (p13).

As an economist, some of the work is familiar (for example, the research Ayres and Steve Levitt did on the value of the vehicle-recovery device LoJack or the Poverty Action Lab), but Ayres gives a good introduction for the uninitiated. And he covers such a broad range of applications that I learned a great deal.

Like other research surveys (Freakonomics, The Tipping Point, Blink, Stumbling on Happiness), I view these books mostly as surveys of interesting research. Each has a central thesis (Ayres’ is that traditional intuition and expertise will be – or already has been – replaced by computing power and will have to learn to complement that power rather than compete with it) which may or may not be convincing, but the books tend to be good rides because so much of the surveyed research is interesting. (For example, I’ll be studying more about Direct Instruction – a scripted way of teaching reading that may be useful in my own work – based on this book; and the model Ayres expounds of how private firms learn from iterative experimental trials may apply well to some of the agencies I engage.)

As far as Ayres’ thesis goes, I find him relatively convincing (computers with lots of data do predict many things better than people**) but despite his many caveats, the tone should probably have been more humble. He doesn’t – for example – explore the issues brought by Taleb in The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, how traditional statistics may be worse than useless in financial markets where a single, completely unpredictable bad shock can wipe out years of carefully predicted investments.

This book was lots of fun to listen to, not least (unintentionally) because Ayres loves giving irrelevant but amusing descriptions of his researchers. The examples below are all economists:

“Ashenfelter is a tall man with a bushy mane of white hair and a booming, friendly voice… No milquetoast he” (p2).

“Even now, in his forties, Larry [Katz] still looks more like a wiry teenage than a chaired Harvard professor (which he actually is)” (p65).

“Esther [Duflo] has endless energy. A wiry mountain climber…” (p73).

And of course you know this is the Freakonomics family because of the Levitt-love scattered here and there: “There is a new breed of innovative Super Crunchers – people like Steve Levitt – who toggle between their intuitions and number crunching to see farther than either intuitivists or gearheads ever could before” (p17).

I listened the unabridged audiobook narrated by Michael Kramer (not Michael Kremer – quoted in this book on p74), published by Books on Tape (6 CDs). Kramer does a good job except when he tries an Australian or British accent.

* For an excellently written description of evidence-based medicine and more, read Atul Gawande’s Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance.

** One of the most striking findings comes from the meta-analysis (1996) of two psychologists, Meehl & Grove, who look at 136 studies comparing human judgment to equation-based judgment. In only 8 of the 136 studies was expert prediction found to be appreciably more accurate than statistical prediction.” Overall, experts got the predictions right 66% of the time whereas Super Crunchers got them right 73% of the time. And the 8 in which experts did better weren’t concentrated in any particular field. From looking at the paper myself, I found that 64 of the studies favored the Super Crunchers whereas 64 found the two methods roughly equal. Noteworthy. [In the book, p111 and p232; or just read the original paper at here.]

Africa Reading Challenge review: Wizard of the Crow, by Ngugi wa Thiong’o

David Evans5 Comments

I enjoyed pretty much all of this book, which is saying something for a tome of 765 pages.  That said, it took me months to finish (which has been my previous experience with Ngugi).  My thoughts:

rarely lags, many laughs: Thiong’o hits the mark

Ngugi has here written a weighty but engaging tale of … well, it’s a little hard to describe. There’s an African dictator, three sycophantic government ministers (so sycophantic that one had his eyes surgically enlarged to be able to spot the Ruler’s enemies, another his ears…), a traditional healer, an activist, an opportunistic businessman, a wife fed up with beatings, condescending representatives from the “Global Bank,” and Much, Much More.

Having worked in and read about African countries for a number of years, many of the players seemed familiar: for example, the former revolutionaries co-opted into the ruling party reminded me of Richard Leakey, the Kenyan opposition politician who lost credibility by joining the ruling party.

In short, I really enjoyed this piece: part farcical satire, part magical realism (as the Ruler blows up like a balloon and begins to float – yes, really), part political activist’s anthem, and occasionally just a drama. In the drama occasions, I usually wished for more farcical satire, but still, I highly recommend this book.

I’ve read three novels by Ngugi wa Thiong’o: The River Between, Petals of Blood, and this one. This is definitely the most fun (okay, it’s the only remotely funny one). I’d recommend Petals of Blood for a much more serious and depressing account of post-colonial disillusionment with local leadership. Another novel that I found illustrative of post-colonial African politics was Chinua Achebe’s A Man of the People.

Note on content: the book has a bit of strong language and lots of absurdity.

advice to students visiting a developing country for the first time

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Tyler Cohen and then Chris Blattman offer some great advice to aspiring researchers visiting poor countries.  I endorse their comments and can add little, but here’s the little.  (The above is some of the finest street food I’ve had recently, in Sierra Leone: if I can see you cook it, I’ll eat it.)

  1. Attend a religious service if you have the opportunity.  In many of the countries I work in, religiosity is much higher than in the USA and so experiencing this can be very revealing.
  2. Buy and read a local newspaper.
  3. Even short of learning the local language (which is excellent advice but not always realistic for a short visit), make the effort to learn greetings and simple phrases in local language(s) [not just the colonial language].  This garners an immense amount of good will and can open doors.
  4. Buy a good map of the country and ask people where they are from. 

Oh, and don’t accept soda on a bus, don’t walk around downtown Nairobi early in the morning, don’t walk around the bus station in Aruba at night, don’t leave love letters lying around your hotel room…

a fresh definition of multi-party democracy

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I just finished Wizard of the Crow, a 765 page satire by Ngugi wa Thiongo.  The Ruler of the fictional Aburiria introduces his political philosophy of multiparty democracy:

There are no moral limits to the means that a ruler can use, from lies to lives, bribes to blows, in order to ensure that his state is stable and his power secure.  But if he could keep the state stable through sacrificing truth rather than lives, bending rather than breaking the law, sealing the lips of the oustpoken with endless trickeries rather than tearing them with barbed-wire and hot wax, if he could buy peace through a grand deception rather than a vast display of armored behicles in the streets, which often gave his enemies material for propaganda, it would be the sweetest of victories. (p703)