Dear readers,
I write this newsletter once every month or so. It features my reflections on the deployment of creativity to making the world’s economic systems (and by extension social and to some extent political systems) more inclusive and, therefore, fairer. That sounds like a tall order – and it is!
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I’ve just returned home to Cambridge, MA, from a two-week long Kenya immersion with my family, mostly leisure with some work tacked on to both ends of the trip. We visited conservancies and other wildlife locations in north central Kenya and the Masai Mara, and the coastal regions on the Indian Ocean near Mombasa and, of course, Nairobi. The capital city itself was in tumult triggered by youth protest against the government’s economic policies and, allegedly, corruption, but more on that below.
I’m going to share a bit of what I learned in this short post through the lens of watching rural Kenyans adapt to climate change, as it’s an issue in which I’ve been immersed in other contemporary emerging markets (eg India, Brazil). The actual adaptations might be familiar to inveterate travellers in the developing world; sadly, so will some of the societal schisms that I’ll argue bedevil more efficient attempts at climate adaptation.
To prepare for my two-week immersion, I spoke to several students and working professionals from East Africa, several in residence there, as well as with academic experts to whom I’m fortunate to have access.
Most pleasurably, I also read incessantly. First, I devoured Weep Not, Child by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, a moving meditation on the wrenching effects on Kenyan families of the Mau Mau 1960-62 uprising against British rule. I complemented that with Elspeth Huxley’s Flame Trees of Thika, documenting memories of a British girl’s childhood in Kenya around 1910. The novels offered vignettes of impressions by colonists and the colonized. As is impossible to avoid in a setting like Kenya’s, both narratives dwell on the tribal origin of the various protagonists. These books echoed my own far more extensive knowledge of India as a British colony, with the colonizers playing divide-and-rule (in India’s case across local smaller rulers, and linguistic and caste-based affiliations). My good friend the historian Caroline Elkins has documented the British perfecting what she calls their Legacy of Violence in a recent prize-winning book. The sun really should have set a lot sooner on that empire!
For a more contemporary turn, I also read Michela Wrong’s It’s Our Turn to Eat, a page-turner that documents the ultimately failed effort of an insider-turned-whistleblower trying to curb corruption in Kenya. Sobering indeed! Even though set in the 2000s and about Mwai Kibaki’s administration, several decades after the earlier novels, corruption centers around tribal affiliations that endure. I dwell on the tribal issues because they may well haunt Kenya’s efforts to adapt to climate change as well.
It’s true that there had just been unusually heavy rains in Masai Mara, but in general the weather was not unusual for the time of year – a pleasant ‘winter’ in this country that straddles the equator. Much of what I saw, therefore, I interpreted as gradual adaptation to climate change over years, maybe decades. I’m conscious that these types of adaptations are not unique to Kenya – rather one sees them across the developing world – yet these are harbingers of local attempts from which we can learn. They’re done with minimal infrastructural support and with scarce capital availability.
Our first campsite, in Laikipia county, was 85% powered by solar energy. With the advent of battery technologies and increasingly available methods to plug renewables+batteries into grids of all sorts (see AES and Siemens’ Fluence Energy for large scale grid batteries globally for example, and Selco Foundation’s solar solutions for lower-resource environments in rural India), it's a question of time before the residual generators can be eliminated.
The campsite was simple, yet impressive. For example, natural cooling structures were used in lieu of fossil-fuel refrigeration. Vegetables stayed fresh during the day by inhabiting a walk-in cavity with anouter shell circulating water in a closed loop, creating a cool ambience on the insides. Right next to this was a composting station that, over the course of a few months, provided a generous amount of organic chemical-free fertilizer for use in a spacious herb garden. Astutely identified foliage in the vicinity were able to repel insects – no chemical Deet involved!
We spent time at a nearby Samburu village in the neighboring county. The Samburu are a sub-tribe of the Maasai. People familiar with the look-and-feel of a poorer village setting in the developing world immediately appreciate the spare conservation ethos of the setting. Fifty people in this village lived in five similarly compact and modest mud-and-thatched roof huts each constructed within a day and able to withstand most weather exigencies related to heat and rains, though not occasional trampling by rampaging elephants! (I am embarrassed now that our home in Massachusetts for four people has capacity greater than that needed for two such villages!)
Unlike the rest of the community who spoke Kiswahili and other local languages, the lanky Samburu headman spoke excellent English as he had been formally educated until early middle school. He explained that the tribe’s nomadic existence – funded by maintaining a herd of cattle and by educating western tourists like us – required them to move every couple of years in search of pasture, especially given climate change’s effect on shifting vegetation patterns and human encroachment. (Safaris, for other good they might do, are implicated here.) This required frequent dismantling and reconstitution of the camps and the huts in their entirety.
The climate science community in the developed world has begun to wrestle with the knotty problem of ‘managed retreat’ from rising sea levels, but ‘begun’ is the operative term. Progress has been limited in dealing with the complex political economy of urban settings. In contrast, the Samburu have a streamlined matter-of-fact approach to managing both ‘retreat’ and ‘advance’ as needed. It’s worth noting that both nomadic tribes like Samburu and more settled ones like the Kikuyu have been retreating and advancing for generations (the Cambridge scholar John Iliffe’s classic The Africans gives a sweeping overview of how humans have engaged with the environment and enlightened me on a particular aspect – the evolution of nomadic and settled life, as well how it compares to the often easier task of foraging in what was sometimes a nutrient-rich environment).
The tribesmen also were now trying to replace their increasingly emaciated cattle with camels, as another form of climate adaptation. Camels are not indigenous to but had been brought from the Arabian peninsula some decades ago, and appeared anecdotally to be shepherded primarily by Yemeni migrants. (A colleague saw them being herded down Waiyaki Way in Nairobi just this past month!) Camels could survive long droughts and lived longer than cattle, thus providing more milk and meat, parts of Maasai staple diet. The headman ruefully admitted though that this form of adaptation to longer droughts and limited grazing was proving increasingly expensive as demand for camels had outstripped supply, leading to what he saw as usurious price rises.
Through these two weeks, tribal affiliation emerged in several conversations. Whether it was our guide through safari, or the Samburu headman, or the chauffeur we hired to get through Nairobi traffic or the displaced Maasai tribesmen forced by climate change to migrate to beaches near Mombasa to peddle trinkets, inevitably they, voluntarily and unsolicited, peppered the conversation with the adulation of their own tribe and stereotypes of the others. (Die weiße Massai – a fascinating book now on my bookshelf by the Swiss-German author Corinne Hoffman who, while vacationing in Kenya, married and had a family with a Masai tribesman against all odds – portrays one social consequence of such migration)
How does such a society move beyond piecemeal (even individually impressive) adaptation efforts – whether the Laikipia country campsite conservation, or that of the Samburu villagers or others – to more system-wide adaptation? What happens to cooperation across tribal boundaries (think, for example, of the current conflict between herders and farmers, as they battle for control over land in which each is interested)? My conjecture was that such divisions stymie cooperation. Caroline Elkins’ historical perspective is more nuanced – she pointed out to me that the same.
African tribes cooperated at the turn of the 20th century before the colonists arrived and the latter’s divide-and-rule policies disrupted those arrangements. How did the tribes cooperate before the colonial era? Perhaps this fraying of that social fabric is another invidious consequence of colonial arrogance?
As we departed Nairobi, the youth street riots were continuing. The press observed that, in the mélange that is the city, tribal affiliations were of limited consequence among urban youth. Is that a silver-lining of the circumstances that birthed these protests – that a young population is ready to look ahead, not at aspects that might have bedeviled progress?
I am crious how you came to choose the title of this post and if someone were to just read the title, what would they think Africa represented. Would it allow them to appreciate the richness of the books you read or the efforts of adaptation you saw.
An article where you spoke about why people in Bhopal drive on the wrong side of the road bought similar questions to me. I would have appreciated a deeper inquiry into how the traffic signals and the historic cities of India were designed in different times by different groups of people and perhaps cities in India need traffic solutions of their own.
Being from a ‘Developing country’ and having been a student at Harvard, I have seen firsthand how such depiction feeds the loop of how people view and understand the so called ‘developing socities’.
Curious to hear your thoughts maybe in the next newsletter.