Well, as I mentioned a couple of weeks ago I’m blogging for The Frontline Club now. I had wanted to try to keep South of West going, largely because I liked the name and it was my first blog. But it’s time to face up to reality and put it into hibernation. So for anyone who feels the need to keep up with my desperately inaccurate predictions about what is happening in Kenya, it is time to please change your bookmarks.
Deeply disturbing news arrives from Sudan. President Bashir has ordered a boycott of all things Danish in response to those cartoons of the prophet Mohammed being republished in newspapers over there. I suspect the Danish bacon industry will be unconcerned. But wait. What about the pastries served at Ozone, possibly the best coffeeshop in the East of Africa?
Turn up here any time past two o’clock and the place is full of aid workers (and yes visiting journalists) tucking into a coffee and a Danish.
Having tried his best to thwart the work of charities in Darfur itself, President Bashir may have stumbled upon the best way to bring the whole aid enterprise crashing to its knees. Morale will crumble within days. And it may not be entirely accidental. Aid workers still talk in despairing tones of the Great Tonic Water Crisis when the government allegedly blocked imports of Schweppes leaving expats wondering what to do with the illicit gin they had managed to source from around Khartoum. Say what you like about Bashir, sometimes you have to admire him.
Say what you like about China’s role in Darfur, but no-one can accuse them of not having a sense of humour.
After much prevarication I have begun blogging for The Frontline Club. I sort of said I’d do it ages ago but gradually got cold feet. It’s fun blogging for its own sake. No need to wonder whether what you’re saying reflects badly on anyone else. Or whether discussing which music to listen to while driving through burning villages is inappropriate. If people don’t like what I say then they can disregard me as an idiot, and that’s that.
The Frontline Club though is for serious journalists. People who discuss reporting restrictions in Bolivia or which brand of body armour is better for stopping an AK-47 round. That made me feel slightly self-conscious. Like most journalists I have a nagging doubt that one day someone is going to find me out. Who appointed you a gatherer of news, they might say. Or what qualifications do you have? Sometimes I forget the name of the president of Tanzania. Or confuse Equatorial Guinea with that other one.
Often the closest I get to a frontline is calling a photographer from my coffeeshop and asking her what she can see.
But then my coffeeshop almost became the frontline a couple of weeks ago as youths streamed out of Dagoretti chasing opposition supporters. I have been to Darfur and Mogadishu more than most of colleagues here in Nairobi. And my writing goes in a newspaper so I guess that makes me a journalist. (I take my definition from Damien Hirst defining art as anything in an art gallery.)
For now, I’m not sure how it’s going to work. South of West will keep going for some of my more irreverent or political stuff. African Safari might focus a bit more on what it’s like to be a journalist in Africa. But they might end up being the same thing. We’ll see.
It’s not hard to sneer at diplomats. Particularly those who have learned the art at the United Nations. And, being a journalist, it’s something that comes easy to me. I’ve done it already on this blog several times. You know the sort of thing - making fun of their platitudes, using the term “diplomatic” as a euphemism for “weak” or “weasle” words (or vice versa), and generally suggesting that anything other than overnight success in conflict resolution is a total disaster.
But I’m developing a sort of grudging respect for Kofi Annan’s way of doing things.
His efforts haven’t really achieved much of a breakthrough in tackling Kenya’s post-election violence. We have had hints of a big, power-sharing deal only for them to peter out by the time the ink on the next day’s headlines has dried.
Instead we’ve had a series of very small deals. A commitment to talks, first up. Then to end the violence. Then an agreement on an agenda. A narrowing of options. And today an agreement to set up an independent review of the elections and that constitutional reform is needed. That sort of thing.
And it’s starting to work. The two sides are locked into talks and a sort of momentum is building. We are at the point where it is almost impossible for either side to walk away without being accusing of sabotaging the country’s fragile peace. There’s still a long way to go but it’s gradually becoming more difficult for things to slide backwards.
So Steven Spielberg has pulled out of the Beijing Olympics.
“I find that my conscience will not allow me to continue business as usual,” he said in a statement. “At this point, my time and energy must be spent not on Olympic ceremonies but on doing all I can to help bring an end to the unspeakable crimes against humanity that continue to be committed in Darfur.”
Now, I must confess to not entirely understanding the Darfur mess but the last time I was there UN officials were telling me that China was stepping up pressure on Khartoum to clean up its act. And you needn’t take their word for it. Even such anti-Sudan characters as Eric Reeves had become “cautiously optimistic” about China’s stance in recent weeks.
His comments were put out by Olympic Dream for Darfur (Mia Farrow is on its advisory committee), again hardly the sort of people who are ever soft on Beijing or Sudan. Yet they are now applauding Spielberg for resigning as artistic director of the 2008 Olympic Games.
For what it’s worth, I’m not convinced Spielberg’s actions are the best way to get China to move. As the Teddy Bear debacle showed, engaging Khartoum is always a better bet than throwing your toys out of the pram. Similarly China. Push Beijing too far and they’ll stick up two fingers and continue with their policy of taking over the world anyway.
The episode raises one other obvious question, but I’ll let the sight is in end deal with it in forthright fashion.
Like many of my colleagues writing for British newspapers I have spent the past few weeks waiting for Britain’s response to the unfolding catastrophe in Kenya. Ministers have expressed their deep concern and said vaguely that there could be no “business as usual”, parroting the same line delivered by the US and our European partners. There have been suggestions that London could go the same way as Washington by refusing visas to a dozen or so Kenyans thought to be linked to the violence. And that was it.
Until now. The Department for International Development, which has largely taken over control of foreign policy from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, has unveiled its new position on Kenya.
“It’s encouraging to see that more and more people recognise the benefits of buying products from developing countries as a way of supporting the poorest people on this earth. Everyone can make a difference on Valentine’s Day including to the lives of Kenyan farmers who, given the current political crisis in the country, have been working so hard in such difficult conditions to ensure their flowers reach the market in time for 14 February,” he said.
“Buying flowers from developing countries makes it easier for people there to make a decent living. It’s also important to remember that flowers flown in from Kenya aren’t grown in heated greenhouses so they use less energy than most of those produced in Europe.”
Shameless stunts like these are no substitute for targeted sanctions against Kenyan leaders guilty of inciting hatred. And buying Kenyan roses - while helpful to the country’s floriculture industry - is not going to keep up pressure on Raila and Kibaki to seek a political accommodation.
Matt Green, formerly of this parish, launched his book on Joseph Kony in London last night. I’m thoroughly looking forward to reading The Wizard of the Nile: The Hunt for Africa’s Most Wanted, about his search for the mysterious rebel leader who unleashed untold misery on northern Uganda. Not least because about a year or so ago I was lucky enough to meet the bizarre and reclusive figure. (Kony that is, not Green, who is a thoroughly agreeable chap and claims no magical powers.)
A bunch of hacks was flown into the dense jungle of South Sudan, close to one of the Lord’s Resistance Army assembly points which had been established as part of peace talks. All week hopes had been raised and then lowered that Kony himself was going to emerge from the bush to meet Jan Egeland, then UN humanitarian relief co-ordinator.
But as we stood sweating gently in the jungle clearing, the half-dozen or so of us realised we had a problem. No-one knew what Kony looked like.
He hadn’t emerged from the jungles of Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo or Sudan in a couple of decades. All anyone could remember of him was an old black and white picture that showed him dreadlocked and youthful. As we pondered this difficulty, it happened. A dozen or so rebels in full combat gear, AK-47s and Wellington boots strolled out of the undergrowth. Adrenalin pumping, we scanned the faces as quickly as we could. No-one quite dared to shout out, So which one of you’s Kony then?
We could relax. This was his second in command, Vincent Otti (now dead), and bodyguards.
Only then did our Thuraya satphones start ringing with breathless editors calling to ask us what Kony was doing, saying, smoking, chewing, killing etc. Someone had jumped the gun and assumed the man with impressive looking braiding on his jacket was Kony, putting the story out on the wires.
Fortunately, the elusive commander did appear a couple of hours later. He trooped out of the bush with about 30 dreadlocked rebels all carrying plastic chairs. Kony managed a handshake with Egeland before they disappeared into a Unicef-branded tent for “talks”.
I suspect negotiations were limited. At a shambolic briefing afterwards, Kony looked confused and frightened in front of the few of us left in the evening gloom. His eyes - bizarrely dull and wild at the same time - seemed to give away his fragile state of mind. Inside the tent, according to someone privy to the meeting, Kony bore the symptoms of prolonged drug use or insanity or both. It seemed as if he had been ”smoking the root”, said my source.
If Wizard of the Nile goes any way to explaining how this shambling, incoherent man managed to lead a rebel army that came close to toppling Uganda’s government - and remains capable of inflicting wounds should peace talks eventually fail - then Matt Green will have done an excellent job. I have no doubt he got the right guy.
He is supposed to be Kenya’s great hope. The man who could turn this country around, restoring peace and democracy. A role model for all aspiring politicians. But as Barack Obama’s run for the Democratic nomination heads towards its most crucial phase, there has been barely a mention of his campaign in the Kenyan papers. Well, there’s been a bit… but nothing like the Obama mania that has accompanied his every previous step up the political ladder.
The reason is pretty obvious. Kenyans have a political crisis that is consuming most of their energy for the time being.
But that wasn’t enough to stop dozens of reporters and photographers from the international media trooping up to the Obama family farmstead a couple of weeks ago for Super Tuesday. In fact things there became so busy that Said Obama had to start taking bookings so that Granny Obama didn’t become exhausted.
With her neat turn of phrase and broad smile, the 86-year-old has become something of a media darling. Just one problem. Sarah Hussein Obama is not Barack Obama’s grandmother. Step-grandmother or half-granny or adoptive gran, yes. But she’s not actually a blood relation. But why let that get in the way of a good story?
It’s just one of a number of myths that have grown up around Obama’s roots (and I use “grown up” slightly euphemistically). He’s not the son of a goatherd. He’s the son of a Harvard-educated economist who rose to prominence after independence, but ended up drunk, penniless and bitter. Friends saw Barack Obama Sr beat his third wife and warned him not to drive while drunk. It was a car accident that killed him.
Does any of this matter? Well, it would be nice if presidential candidates chose not to gloss over awkward personal histories. If Obama’s book, Dreams from my Father, is supposed to be about how the shadow of his absent father shaped a large part of his life then it would have been nice to have had the truth. But then again, how many people write memoirs without judicious use of selective memory?
So I guess my beef is as much with journalists who seem to think that African stories don’t merit the same sort of attention to detail as stories elsewhere. So she’s not his real grandmother. And Obama Sr was a goatherd only when he was a kid - much as you and I were paperboys or whatever. Well, it’s Africa. No-one will ever know, seems to be the refrain. And I just wonder whether Barack Obama isn’t guilty of the same thing.
