New Friends of Africa – Almost Here?

Chambi Chachage

They
come and go. With
friends like these, as Oyekan Owomoyela once called them, Africa never
lacks new stories about it. After all, old friends and foes of the continent
affirmed, sarcastically, that there
is always something new coming out of Africa.

This
time around a not-so-new friend has blogged a provocative post: New
Africa – almost there? The Puzzled Boss Lady, for that is the name of her blog, is described as “Nordic
attempts to understand a changing Africa.” Its blogger, Iina Soiri, is the new
director of the respectedNordic
Africa Institute (NAI).

The
blog post opens with exciting news about Soiri’s return to “Arusha after moving
out of Tanzania three years ago.” The self-described “modern nomad and Africa
expert who during two decades trekked from one coast to the other on the
African continent” goes on to tell us, satirically I presume, that after “all,
since then there has only been good news from the continent: Africa Rising,
African Miracle, New Economic Boom in Africa, Now it is Africa’s Turn, New
Africa! And Tanzania has been one of the best performing countries, I hear
– it’s all so new, and you will not recognize it anymore!”

Then
the satirical plot is lost along the way. For some of us who – three years ago – had been to what Soiri describes as “Kilimandjaro [sic] airport” that “shines clean
and calm” with “no chaos, no queues, no hassle” when she arrive, there is
nothing new about all this – it is a common experience especially when you
arrive with KLM at night. One can even bet that observing that immigration
“officers have computers, finger print machines and foreign currency to give” a
foreigner “change while paying visa” hardly warrants this surprise: “Great!
That’s New Africa for sure, I observe happily.” Here one is also assuming that
when our friend arrived in Tanzania a couple of years back to work for the
Finnish Embassy in Dar es Salaam, she got her visa at the Kilimanjaro
International Airport in Hai and not at the Julius Nyerere International
Airport in Dar es Salaam.

There
follows a barrage of what hardly, or did not, work at all – a hotel “room that
does not open with the modern key card”, a wireless connection, a safety
deposit. “Better get some service even in this New Africa”, so our friend
“think and go downstairs” for at “least the elevator works.” Down there at the
counter she encounters “many smart looking ladies” and hence recalls: “Oh, yes,
I have heard this; plenty of young educated people in the New Africa. This must
be ‘the demographic dividend’, ready for opportunities to change the
continent.” Yet nothing really works out in Soiri’s favor, well, except for the
“smiling’” ladies charming her “with a patient smile.”

Thereafter
comes the story of the worrying fire alarm, unpicked phone calls, locked elevator
doors and, once again, “smiling ladies.” We are then told of a “new modern
toaster” that burns her bread, of an omelet that never came and about getting “some
Kilimandjaro [sic] chai with a shy smile that compensates.” What is more
puzzling, particularly for some of us who finds it very easy to access mobile
services in Tanzania, is her following account: “We go outside to look for
pre-paid sim-card. Those must be plenty available, as mobile technology is ‘connecting
people’ in this New Africa. Out of the many colorful shacks we enter the
third one before getting lucky – but you normally need to register and wait for
three days to make it operational. We do not have three days – but perhaps the
ever patient Africans have?” ‘There
is no hurry in Africa’ discourse disguised in a question?

Thus
comes Soiri’s conclusion after yet another round of old wine in a new bottle: “Finally
we get to the Arusha International Conference Centre, where the meeting is just
about to begin, but the hall is empty. ‘What else is new in Africa’, I
think and turn to the smiling young men, who serve me a cup of nice hot chai.
And keep on waiting, we are almost there. This is what I call Good Old Africa,
and I like it.” Of course she does.

These
sentiments are not so new. They stem from a discourse that is as old as the
adage on ‘Out of Africa.’ No wonder some of her readers share them also. “After
just returning to TZ – have felt pretty much the same – not that Mozambique was
really ahead in all this”, one
of them affirms. Probably one of the most articulate supports of this
position comes from a member of Wanazuoni: Tanzania’s Intellectuals. He
writes:

Possibly I was not wearing my black hat when I read
the piece, but I actually wonder whether we all read the same article
or not. From the description given, I think I recognise the hotel and
can agree with the author’s experience. It is a 3 possibly 4 stars hotel and it
is to be expected that everything should be working as expected. In my few
days stay there Wi-Fi didn’t work for a number of days, the technical staffs
were not that technical at all, and the technicians who fixed the problem came
after three days. All in all, it is not like I need this blogger’s experience
to be true to substantiate my life’s experience in Tanzania. I know that many
of us have been desensitized to these issues that we take them for granted (I
found my peers in school and university amazingly adjusted to unnecessary
difficulties), but for some of us they really get inside our skins: some issues
we tolerate, some issues make us smile (no place like home), some issues (say
experiences with daladalas) make us enraged with murderous intent, many issues
make us want to simply leave the country. But things that we do for love! The
rebuttal is needed- probably it is needed to inform me how rosy my life is
compared to how I perceive it to be, probably it is needed to make me see that
the money I regularly spend to compensate for services whose availability
should be taken for granted is money well spent, probably it is needed to
make me forget how ruthlessly efficient I find other peoples’ ‘systems’ to
be when I meet the other world. I might need a very strong injection
of that anesthesia though… (Charles Makakala
Jr)

That defense resonates with another recent provocative,
albeit convincing, article on A
Culture of Low Expectations, By Okey Ndibe. Yet it hardly let Soiri off the
hook of Afropessimism. It is not surprising then that she has provoked what Abiola
Irele has thus referred as the primary dimension of what is now
regarded as Afropessimism: “In its polemical
stance, then, African discourse presents itself as a thorough-going
deconstruction of the Western image of the Native, the Black, the African.” In
Tanzania NAI had been supportive in such deconstruction through the annual Mwalimu
Nyerere Intellectual Festival Week during Carin Norberg’s directorship
(2006-2012). However, with blog posts like these, this task remains
daunting. But maybe it is about time that we abandon this seemingly Sysyphean task of responding to them and just expend our time and energy reconstructing Africa. In any case, as someone who has once failed miserably in an attempt
at satire, I can only hope Soiri’s attempt was, deep down, simply an irony gone wrong as one of her readers seem to suggest below:

This post is a little bit
confusing to me. I can’t quite figure out whether you are using irony to drive
the point that all this talk about the rise of Africa is meaningless. But then
the “I like it” part betrays it all (Elias
Munshya wa Munshya)