Energy of youth makes it terrific time to be a journalist in Africa
THERE are all kinds of things I don’t know about this country in which I live. The volume of feed it takes to maintain a Cumbrian sheep at optimum weight for the market, for example. Or the precise mechanisms by which the London Stock Exchange works, or the exact rate of flow of the currents which affect the movement of small sailing craft on the English Channel.
An argument could be made that it is a basic duty of a concerned resident to keep informed on these matters, influencing as they do the lives of many thousands of people. But I feel the court of public opinion will treat me with mercy if I plead ignorance of the aforementioned.
My learned friends might not be as accommodating if I were to come up short on certain political questions. Were I to say that I did not know that Tories historically favoured a free market or that Labour had foundational ties to the trade union movement I feel sure I would face sanction, perhaps ridicule.
Such is the unhappy situation in which the Conservative politician, Karen Bradley, finds herself after telling a magazine that until recently she did not know that in Northern Ireland nationalists did not vote for unionist parties and vice versa. The furore has been compounded by the fact that Bradley is the current Secretary of State for Northern Ireland. In Ireland, North and South — and across our old friend the ‘sectarian divide’ — the minister’s admission has been met with derision.
However, she is said, in the immortal phrase, to “retain the confidence” of the prime minister and one imagines there is hardly an energetic jostling to unseat her by ambitious colleagues. Northern Ireland does not attract that kind of eager competition.
She has her defenders. The MP for Chelsea and Fulham, Greg Hands, stepped up to support the minister by tweeting the following: “I’m with Karen Bradley on this. I have a bookcase full of books on Northern Ireland, but it’s no use denying its contemporary politics is very different to anything else in the western world.”
Hands does not say whether he has read all of the books in his bookcase. Whatever, I am not sure his intervention greatly helped, certainly not in Belfast or Derry and all the simmering points between.
But is he right in his assertion about the ‘contemporary politics’ of the North?
It is certainly different. More than 3,000 people died over three decades because of those politics.
And now the Good Friday Agreement, that should have ensured powersharing between antagonistic forces, is being imperilled.
But the dangers of atavism and tribal politics are by no means unique to the six north-eastern counties of the island of Ireland. If anything, the North offers a substantial warning from history about the dangers of following blindly a political path defined by ideological purity. It is a not inconsequential lesson in these fearful times for the western world.
******* As so often with the North I am writing about it from another place. My head is lost in the glens of Antrim, but my body is wandering around the Ugandan capital Kampala. There are frogs honking loudly outside in the hotel garden, competing for my attention with a hotel band that is massacring the pop hits of the 1980s.
I am here because of a singer called Bobi (pronounced Bobby) Wine who in the space of a few weeks has caused more embarrassment to the regime of 74-year-old Yoweri Museveni — in power now for more than 30 years — than any opposition figure before him.
By a stroke of unhappy luck, I arrived just as Wine was leaving to seek medical treatment in the United States. He had been detained and tortured by the Ugandan army following a fracas between his supporters and the presidential motorcade.
Still I did get to meet several of his acolytes, like the self-styled ‘Prime Minister of the Ghetto’, a young man in his early 20s who is a musician, fashion designer and political activist. He told me the movement was strong enough to end the decades of rule by one party. There was something poignant about him, about all that hope surrounded by the clubs and guns of merciless state power.
Across much of Africa the young are restless for change. They are social media savvy and linked across nations through musicians like Bobi Wine who preach defiance of entrenched power elites. I have met them on the streets of Harare, Kinshasa, Kampala, Monrovia and Nairobi, among others, and seen in their eyes the conviction that the order which defined their entire lives is coming to an end.
In places like Ethiopia, with its reforming new president, it is possible to believe in the dream.
But Uganda offers a lesson in caution. So, too, Zimbabwe. The old elites are not merely ruthless. They are cunning, too. Divide and rule. Co-opt your opponents and compromise them with the ill-gotten fruits of power. Beat and cajole. The new populist movements are vulnerable to old methods of coercion and corruption.
I am neither an Afropessimist nor Afro-optimist. They are reductive definitions. I reject the proposition that the future of an entire continent with so many diverse nations and peoples can be reduced to a simple bet on winning or losing.
Immense positive change is taking place. In some places that means a leap forward. In other places the momentum is much slower or is provoking a backlash. But with the population of Africa projected to double by 2050 there will be escalating challenges to regimes like those of Museveni in Uganda or whoever among his family, or cronies, he chooses to succeed him.
In the last year, I have had the sense of a continent in ferment.
The energy of youth is expanding in music, literature, theatre, filmmaking and political activism. It is a wonderful time to be a journalist in Africa.
In the words of the ancient (Pliny the Elder in this case): “Ex Africa semper aliquid novi.”
Out of Africa there is always something new.