This is the third installation of Context Africa, a new series that will highlight projects that go above and beyond daily news to tell a story of a place in its context and create an ongoing dialogue about what it means to tell contextual stories in Africa. See also, Jina Moore’s Q and A about forgivness in Rwanda from last week, and Nicholai Lidow on Sliding Liberia.

Rob Crilly is working on a new book project on the always contentious topic of Darfur. Rob’s a stellar journalist whose live tweets during Bashir’s indictment justify the service’s existence. He strives to understand the place, its context, history and future in more than soundbites, more than 600 words, more than angry internet comment forums.

When not riding donkeys across vast stretches of Jebel Mara, he can be found at Java’s in Nairobi filing for the Times, Christian Science Monitor, and other sundry outlets.

His book, tentatively titled “Saving Darfur,” will be published this November.

Interviewing an SLA commander, Ibrahim Abdullah al “Hello”, in En Siro, north Darfur

When and why did you start going to Darfur?

My first trip was in late 2005 after a year trying to get a visa. I’d started the application in November 2004, which was a few months after the world had woken up to what was happening. Sudan had reacted by closing down and most of the reporting was coming from the camps in Chad. None of the Nairobi press pack was getting visas.

How has it changed between then and now?

Everything has changed and nothing. Then the war could broadly be characterized as rebels against government. A poorly equipped African Union force was struggling to protect itself, much less civilians. And I met thousands of new arrivals in the sprawling aid camps.

Since then the dynamic of the conflict has shifted several times over. The worst of the fighting this year has been within and between tribes. The monthly death toll is much, much lower. The peacekeepers are wearing the blue hats of the UN. But in some ways nothing has changed. Thousands of people are still on the move and millions are living in miserable aid camps. The peacekeepers may have changed their hats but there is still insufficient security for people to go home.
How can you as a journalist add complexity, nuance, and context to this over simplified conflcit without losing readers? Or maybe you’re okay with losing readers?

As a journalist it is very difficult to convey the sort of complexity I’ve seen in a 600-word story. There is just not the space. Putting it down in a book is my way of trying to open a discussion about what the conflict – or rather conflicts – are all about.

As far as I am concerned, there would be no point in writing a complicated book about Darfur’s complexities. I don’t want just Africa watchers or Sudan scholars, who already understand its problems, to read it. OK, I’m not going to kid myself that it will top the bestseller charts, but if I can just get a few of the people who listen to George Clooney or who have read Nick Kristof to pick it up, then I’ll be pleased.

The idea is to recount some of my journeys through the region, and keep it as a fast-paced journalist’s eyewitness account. The nuances will come through people I meet and things I have seen – the Arabs living in aid camps or fighting alongside the rebels, the peacekeepers sent on a doomed mission, Chadian rebels in Sudanese towns. Through them I can go beyond the simple black and white analysis of popular perception.

There will be more academic and exhaustive accounts of whether this is genocide, the role of the International Criminal Court, humanitarian interventions and so on. But I hope mine will explore the impact of all these things on the people that matter – the people of Darfur.

United Nations human rights investigators collect account of recent government bombing in the rebel held town of Madu, north Darfur

Can you tell me about your publisher, Reportage Press?

Reportage Press is a newish publisher that specializes in books by journalists. Now is not a good time to be trying to get a deal to write a non-fiction book but Reportage has a real commitment to publishing books that might not get a look-in elsewhere. Yet another book on Darfur, and one that sets out to explore some of its complexity, might struggle to find a home but it’s great that publishers like Reportage are putting this stuff out there. It’s also run by a former journalist and has tight turnaround times, which makes it the right sort of atmosphere for me.

One incredibly contentious issue is how to report the death toll in Darfur and which numbers should journalists trust. Any thoughts on that?

Journalists are in a tough position when it comes to conflict death tolls. We are expected to offer certainty in a situation where there is usually little agreement. For most of us the fallback position is to quote a respected authority, in this case the UN which uses 300,000 as the death toll. This is probably at the upper end of accepted estimates.

Similarly in trying to write about Darfur, it is difficult to get accurate and informed information – especially when writing stories from outside. Aid agencies and the UN cannot say much publicly (for fear of being expelled – although that strategy has clearly failed) and the Save Darfur Coalition has sometimes been caught out exaggerating death tolls and incidents of government violence.

Often though our job is to simplify the incomprehensible into themes that readers can understand: to go from the specific to the general. In the case of Darfur, this has often meant that we have picked up the Save Darfur analysis – Blacks or Africans against Arabs – as our narrative.

So I don’t agree with everything Mamdani says but on the other hand I agree that the broad Save Darfur movement has had a huge impact on the way journalists cover the story. Their advocates are often the only one who can be reached for a comment, for example. And who’s going to turn down an interview with George Clooney? We should have been a little more skeptical of the analysis we were being fed.

Given that a lot of the book will be about your travels, can you give us a preview or a juice anecdote or two about traveling and working in Darfur?

The most dramatic occasion was sitting in a government office in El Fasher as Janjaweed gunmen attacked the town’s market all around us. The man I was meeting raced to the door to escape, stopping only to remove his tie and leaving me sitting at his desk. It took me a moment to realize that not many Sudanese men wore ties. It would have marked him out as a government official, making him a target. A second later it dawned on me that his office was probably not the healthiest place for me to be either.

Al Siir and his taxi. Together we have been in dozens of scrapes, two accidents and one hole.

If what’s happening isn’t bringing us any closer to a solution, is there something that would?

A lot of the pressure for change is coming from outside, from a Save Darfur movement that has polarized the debate. The first step has to be taking some of the heat out of that debate to make it easier to engage with Sudan and also the Arab world, which has largely kept quiet so far. Then the next step is looking for solutions from inside Sudan, in building bridges between the tribes which have become caught up in the conflict. Some of this work is already happening but gets overshadowed in the rush to vilify Khartoum. Then the top tier is to improve relations between Chad and Sudan, another key driver of conflict.

There are no silver bullets. And many of the right processes are in place. The problem is that pressure is too often focused in the wrong places – getting peacekeepers in, the ICC – so that the international community expends all its energy, and political capital at the Security Council, on things that won’t end the conflict.

Last week Context Africa was all about responsible tourism, post conflict, and surfing in Liberia, the week before about reconciliation in Rwanda after horrendous crimes.

This afternoon, I’ll post an interview with Rob Crilly about his new book project on the always contentious topic of Darfur. Rob’s a stellar journalist whose live tweets during Bashir’s indictment justify the service’s existence. He strives to understand the place, its context, history and future in more than soundbites, more than 600 words, more than angry internet comment forums.

When not riding donkeys across vast stretches of Jebel Mara, he can be found at Java’s in Nairobi filing for the Times, Christian Science Monitor, and other sundry outlets.

I was excited to read a the book that set a “new standard by which all correspondents might approach other forgotten wars.”

Bryan Mealer’s All Things Must Fight to Live: Stories of War and Deliverance in Congo was all at once more than I expected and more of the same.

He begins:

There were journalists, aid workers, diplomats, diamond dealers, assorted opportunists, and third world peacekeepers…when we arrived, there was always the same war. Many came simply to test themselves against the brutal country, and I’ve learned there is nothing wrong with that. What mattered was the kind of prints you left behind in the red dirt. Five centuries of those bootprints now packed the soil and snaked into the trees, so many they bled into one enormous trail that hid below the camouflage and slowly choked the land.

But get down close and you can see.

One of those trails was mine.

When I first read this book about a month ago, I was enthralled with the story Mealer told. I finished the book in a couple of days, cherising chameos by colleagues whose paths crossed with Mealer’s, and reading it with awe, envy and an eye towards understanding.

There are a few great books about Congo that I know of: King Leopold’s Ghost and In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz at the forefront. The first here takes care of colonial eras, then next of Mobutu’s reign.

Mealer picks up where they left off, but in a differnet genre. The title promises war and deliverance, but I felt there was a lot more war than deliverance. Ultimately, I think that’s as much about Congo as it is about Mealer.

In the first half, he writes about his original forays in Congo, convering news in Ituri and then later in Kinshasa. In the second half, he seems tired. Tired of Congo, tired of traveling, tired of noise and bugs and heat and bad food and bad nights. The writing, which shines in the first half, falters in the second. It’s tired. The book becomes less about Congo and more about Mealer in Congo.

I thought of Michela Wrong’s words in an essay I linked to just a few days ago, about young male journalists writing about Africa:

You deliver a manuscript that is all about you, with Africa as a picturesque backdrop to your macho derring-do.

And then I thought of a comment on my blog post about the contruction accident on Tuesday. And I thought of one of the comments:

From the tone of the post, I felt the journalism/photography took precedence over the tragedy, which to me is even sadder.

I wrote, in reply:

@bsk – I fear you may be right about the tone, but I think on my side I was trying to comment on how journalism handles tragedy. As a photographer covering this kind of thing, I don’t have the ability to spend time investigating the construction company practices or speak to people at length about their losses. I have to get in, get photos, get out, file photos, as quickly as humanly possible. AP hires me because they know I can accomplish this task.

In this post, my goal was not to make my work more important than the tragedy, but to account an experience and maybe shed some light on tragedy and the media. I’m sorry this made you even sadder than the deaths of seven people, but I really hope that’s an exaggeration.

At some point, there has to be balance between the author and the subject. Without the author’s presence, some readers who are disconnected from the subject will only be futher alienated. With too much of it, a reader who didn’t purchase a memoir wants his money back.

I’m not sure where the line is, but I think for the most part, Mealer does a good job tightrope walking.

Mealer stayed in Congo on and off for several years. While that’s not as long as Michela Wrong, it’s long enough to see fresh faces come and go, a journalist from New York who has a business card that is a metal dog tag, and violence junkies who have been to every hot spot on the planet.

It’s also long enough to form a real and meaningful relationship with his translator and fixer Lionel, who he tries to convince that Fela Kuti is way better than Phil Collins, with only marginal success. It’s long enough to reach remote places and transform them from dots on a map to places with details and description.

And he kept going back, even when there was more war than deliverance.

A friend who did some work in Congo (and incidentally reviewed Mealer’s book) blogged recently, from New York,

I finally understand that thing I’ve read about in books, where hardened correspondents talk about the desperation they feel to return to the completely screwed places they’ve covered when things take a turn for the worse. It means something different when you know how that place looks in real life, and something gnaws at your gut, beckoning you back.

But for now, I’m here. I’m here, wishing to be there. Which is something those 100,000 people would probably think the stupidest thing they’ve ever heard.

In a way, I’m glad she’s not there. Things aren’t good. And when things are the way they are right now, stories like her piece on cattle theft or chikudus are less pressing to publish, and less possible to report since movement is heavily restricted.

On an accident scene and in a war zone, the possibilities for the kinds of stories you can tell are restricted by concerns about safety for yourself and the people who answer your questions and the immediacy of what’s happening around you.

I think Mealer is a great writer and a great journalist. And I hope he goes back to Congo – again – at a time when he can tell another kind of story.

This book wasn’t on my original African Reading Challenge list, and I wrote this review for PlusNews, but, there was one thing I wanted to discuss here that didn’t really fit with that review.

First, a bit from my review:

In a new book, Genocide by Denial: How Profiteering from HIV/AIDS Killed Millions, Dr Peter Mugyenyi tells the story of the AIDS epidemic in Uganda from its frontlines: hospitals, orphanages, graveyards, witch doctors’ homes – everywhere but from a drug supply cupboard.

Mugyenyi was one of the founders of Uganda’s Joint Clinical Research Centre for HIV/AIDS (JCRC), which pioneered the provision of life-prolonging antiretroviral (ARV) drug treatment in Uganda in the mid-1990s.

The book is a personal account of “throw[ing] a bucket of water into the towering inferno” of Uganda’s HIV epidemic at a time when the country could do little more than look on as its people died slow and preventable deaths.

After doing his medical training in the United Kingdom, Mugyenyi returned to Uganda to find a mounting death toll from AIDS. Every day he watched parents burying their children and children burying parents. The drugs that could save his patients’ lives were available, if they could only afford them. “The vast majority of my patients died not just of AIDS but of poverty,” he writes.

The vast majority of my patients died not just of AIDS but of poverty

In the early 1990s the first generation of protease inhibitors [anti-HIV drugs designed to suppress virus replication] cost US$14,000 per year per patient, at a time when most Ugandans earned less than a dollar a day.

Mugyenyi had to turn away thousands of patients, including some of his own relatives, because the life-saving medication was so prohibitively expensive; neither his relatives nor his many other patients could understand why, if there were drugs for their condition, they could not get them.

In his narrative about Uganda’s battle for affordable AIDS drugs, Mugyenyi recalls details that are almost unimaginable in today’s world of $10-a-month ARVs: how at the height of the epidemic people started planning funerals as soon as their relatives began coughing; and how Kampala’s ubiquitous pork eateries gained popularity as people sought to avoid the weight loss associated with ’slim’ disease [a local euphemism for HIV/AIDS].
MORE…..

What I wanted to add, I will quote directly from the book, about the combination of two topics I write about too often: orphans and misguided attempts at aid.

Setup: well meaning aid workers trawl the slums looking for AIDS orphans to help, many of whom are staying with relatives and extended family members. The aid workers provide blankets, school fees, and other assistance to the orphans – just the orphans.

What these well meaning benefactors did not immediately realize were the dire circumstances endured by all children in the home. They all lived and shared the same miserable conditions. The added burden of orphans in their destitute family had made their dire situation much more miserable. All the children spent nights huddled together trying without success to keep warm in the dilapidated dwelling as they all had no blankets. Reportedly only two of the children were now going to school… It does not take much imagination to visualize what the atmosphere in the shanty home must have been like after the departure of the naive donors.

See more of my PlusNews reporting:

Using mobile phones to fight AIDS
Marriage, the new frontier in HIV prevention
Dating is so hectic, I put a personal ad in the paper
Overcrowded Prisons heighten TB risk
The government is only looking after straight people
Change brings new risk for the Karamojong

(The list goes on and on – a good portion of the PlusNews reporting from Uganda comes from the Scarlett Lion laptop.)

(And yes, the red background behind the book cover pictured above is indeed my dining room table.)

Finally, since I definitely signed up a long time ago….

Not that much has been written by Western journalists about Eritrea. Michaela Wrong decided to write all of it. While I thought her tome “I didn’t do it for you: How the West betrayed a small African nation,” was interesting and informative, it was way too long – like a Horn of Africa marathon that never ended.

Parts of it were fascinating, especially the chapter on Kagnew, an American military base just outside the capital Asmara. Wrong shows just how bad Americans in other parts of the world can be, from innocuous farting contests to children born to an Eritrean prostitutes and American fathers who could not be identified and would never take responsibility for their well-being.

Perhaps more books aren’t written about the Horn because the level of government surveillance and disruption there functions as an effective deterrent. (But then again, that also applies to other countries that have lots of books written about them.)

I’m glad Wrong wrote this book because I’m glad to have it on my shelf as a reference and now have a better baseline of knowledge, yet I wish I could recommend it more whole-heatedly as there are so few alternatives.

Anyone else know of better books on Eritrea? Let me know.

The long awaited book club arrives.

The onus is on me to pick the location, I guess, and I was thinking Iguana, but that’s so not central. So I have to fall back on the default Mateo’s. We can discuss a different place for next time….

I’m guessing there will be a blogger or two there, since the only way this has been discussed is via blog, so maybe we can also talk about meeting during a different part of the month next time, not so close to BHH. (I’ll miss it, again, next month. Is the media establishment at large conspiring to make me constantly go up country on assignment during BHH?)

27th Comrade – this is on the day of the month dedicated to you. I think this means you should come.

Haven’t been on blogger much this week, and next week, I’ll be upcountry, so expect the paucity of posts to continue (though I will probably do another one today… try to take off the weekend).

But, I promised a book club/book swap, and I intend to keep that promise. I propose:

We will all bring a book, and then swap. We can discuss the possibility of all reading the same text for subsequent meetings. If you’ve already told me you want to attend, then I have you on a list. If you are hearing about this for the first time or suddenly have the desire to part with an Aristoc purchase, feel free to let me know and I’ll add you to the list.

The New York Times has a funny article today about the high-brow literary set in NYC not dating people who read books of which they disapprove:

Naming a favorite book or author can be fraught. Go too low, and you risk looking dumb. Go too high, and you risk looking like a bore — or a phony. “Manhattan dating is a highly competitive, ruthlessly selective sport,” Augusten Burroughs, the author of “Running With Scissors” and other vivid memoirs, said. “Generally, if a guy had read a book in the last year, or ever, that was good enough.” The author recalled a date with one Michael, a “robust blond from Germany.” As he walked to meet him outside Dean & DeLuca, “I saw, to my horror, an artfully worn, older-than-me copy of ‘Proust’ by Samuel Beckett.” That, Burroughs claims, was a deal breaker. “If there existed a more hackneyed, achingly obvious method of telegraphing one’s education, literary standards and general intelligence, I couldn’t imagine it.”

David showed up in Uganda with “Theory of Justice,” and “Minimum Moralia,” among others, in his suitcase. I’m happy to report that one of the first times he had stomach problems, he threw up all over Adorno.

Thankfully, he’s read about as much of “Theory of Justice,” as I have. Which means none. Things are okay with us despite his initial book selection resembling a college syllabus.

But, as of now, my current book shelf is most definitely lacking. I get way too excited when Aristoc brings in something new.

There are a few book groups I know of in Kampala, but one is run by American Embassy ladies who frequently contribute books with a reading level of grade five and the words “cat” and “mystery” in their title, so I hear, and the other I know of meets during the day – not suitable for my working schedule.

So, I’d like to propose a book club: If you live in Kampala, have a book collection with things other than Adorno or cat mysteries, and would like to meet new people and read new books, let’s all gather once a month and do a swap of recently completed books.

Sound good? Drop me an email. And if you know other people who may be interested in joining in on this venture, feel free to forward this post.

In unrelated book news, the guys of StuffWhitePeopleLike just got a book contract estimated at $300,000.

I’ve been meaning to jump on the bandwagon for some time now, but hadn’t got around to blogging it yet.

SO… African Reading Challenge 2008: the idea, posted here, is to read six books about Africa. Rebekah, Pernille, Tumwijuke and others have already started, so I’ll follow suit.

(By the way, Mom, I hope this means you’ll help me out with a package from Amazon, since many of these books are not Aristock regulars.)

1. Waugh in Abyssinya: Didn’t even know that this existed until I followed a footnote in book #2, which I’m about half way through. Evelyn Waugh reported for the foreign press in Abyssinya, now Ethopia, for quite some time and I look forward to his wry observations.

2. I didn’t do it for you: Michela Wrong’s excellent piece about Eritrea. Already about half way through, so expect the review soon. (On a different note, though, the tag line for the book is “How the world betrayed a small African nation,” and a friend of mine, upon noting the cover, said, “Well, that won’t be biased at all.” But then again, bias isn’t always bad.)

3. Justice on the Grass: A book about the gacaca trials of three Rwandan journalists implicated in spreading propaganda before and during the genocide. (Fellow Columbia alum’s book, I picked it up at a bargain price while I was in New York.)

4. Che in Africa: Okay, stolen from Pernille, but sounds like a book I really really want to read. And the great thing about this challenge is other people’s lists, since I certainly didn’t know about this book.

5. Heart of Darkness: I know, I know, ridiculous that I’ve never read it. But what better time than this challenge to finally get around to it?

6. Blood River: a journalist tracks through the entire huge swathe of territory that is the Congo. Though I fear this may be some poverty porn, who am I to resist another journalist writing on Congo?

7. The Invisible Cure: A new treatise on AIDS in Africa, acclaimed by many a critic. Now that I’m going to be doing some work for PlusNews, this seems like a necessary volume.

So that’s my list. But I thought I’d also add a list of some other books about Africa that I’ve read lately if you’re looking for more fodder. (I’m not linking to all of them – my internet is way too slow – so you can do some googling.)

Emma’s War
What is the What
We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families
Aiding Violence
King Leopold’s Ghost
In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz
Shadow of the Sun
Half of a Yellow Sun
When the Crocodile eats the sun
Graceland
Machete Seasons
Freetown Ambush
Emergency Sex
The Graves Are Not Yet Full

Also, books NOT to read:

Anything by Alexander McCall Smith – stereotypical, badly written bullshit
In the Hot Zone – see my review here
The Zanzibar Chest – I should have known better than to pick up a book with an “antique” on the cover…

This is post number 100. I have been in Uganda for eight months now. I’ve spilled ink and captured images, stroked keyboards and pushed people’s buttons.

I’ve changed. Indescribably, but incredibly. And, as a Ugandan would say, It’s there.

How could I not? I’ve spent the past eight months with my eyes open to a different landscape, my body located on a different hemisphere, my self undergoing experiential fluctuations extreme as the Ugandan climate is temperate.

I’ve seen things I would never see back in the states: I would never interview a head of state, or hang out with a street kid, or be the intrepid person I’ve become. And I love being here for all these reasons. And I appreciate it for all its complexity.

Which leads me to you, 27^th, my most faithful reader (after you Mom, okay, and you David…Grant you’re up there too… and if Dad learned how to use a computer he’d be on the list also).

We’ve been arguing about poverty and representations of Africa on my blog for some months now, in the comments and the posts. I want you to know I see all those sides, or at least try my very hardest to.

There’s journalism out there that serves to contrast those vibrancies with poverty that exists side by side.

In the LATimes, Robyn Dixon writes about Lagos’ goats and metropolitans, Cholesterol Hair Conditioner and accepting the surrounding urban chaos.

Lagos is one of the planet’s fastest-growing mega-cities, with people drawn not only from rural Nigeria but also from all over West Africa to hack out a living. Depending on your point of view, it’s either a center of irrepressible entrepreneurialism or a nightmarish city of unplanned chaos, a cautionary tale on what not to do.

Bono’s new Vanity Fair issue about Africa, controversial as it may be, celebrates the literary highlights of a vibrant and burgeoning scene, with newly crowned royalty: Chinua Achebe won the prestigious Booker Prize, and the Orange Prize for Fiction was swept away by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

There are other highlights: the man building the windmill to create electricity, rural schools getting internet, etc etc etc. It’s good. Some things are getting better. If I had to choose between the 1950s and now, I would choose now.

But that doesn’t mean there can’t be a backslide.

Some people are working to stop that. This widely circulated article, Women Lawyers Force Big Rights Gains in Uganda, on the pursuit of female lawyers in Uganda makes me think there is progress – women, with higher education, making changes to the judiciary.

I read a lot of news about Africa. I see the good and the bad, and a whole lot of in between. Like this (inserted partially because this is such a long post):

Not just do I read about the good, bad, and ugly, I live it, and navigate the complexities of privilege and visibility within that system, the weights and lightness that ensue.

I try and write in a way that’s true to that. I don’t always see a pretty picture, and sometimes the nice colors aren’t the most memorable part of the scene so they aren’t what I write about.

27, you think, and others agree, that there’s some kind of conspiracy to report an overly simplistic version of Africa. While this holds true for a vein of mainstream media, there’s a lot more out there. There are real reporters, writers, bloggers, citizen journalists and everything in between, doing work – good work. They’re giving words to the undescribed, making the murmur into a shout, and telling stories that might tear at one of your heart’s seams until it bleeds, no matter how well stitched it was.

I wouldn’t live here if it were all heartbreak. But even though the colors are pretty and the women lawyers are great, I don’t ever want to be the kind of person who closes my eyes to this:

When I open my eyes, I can take a lot in (not all of it, of course, otherwise what would be the point of continuing?), but I can only tell one story at a time. I try to tell it carefully, to trod lightly, but somethings need to be stamped out. And some stories are more powerful when they stand alone. Everyone needs a complete picture, but not everyone wants one. And not all the media houses are ready to give people something they don’t want.

But remember, 27, deep down, I’m a bleeding heart too. I actually read most of the collected Marx-Engels Reader in college (along with a lot of other books that remain, highly annotated, in storage in New York), and think that people can come together and make change. I’ve traded in my black cat-eye specs in for a soft brown colored pair, lined with turquoise, and the harsher version of the ideology the first represented for a more flexible one as well. I’m still a bleeding heart though, waiting for all those people to follow John Lennon and come together and do something amazing.

And until they do, I’ll stand alone, with my pen, writing about the ones who don’t.