Lost in translation

At one of the evening dinners at TED Global I ended up sitting next to a group of Americans and we started discussing the TED bags that each one of us got. I told them the best thing in the bag for me, apart from the bag itself, was the torch (each bag came with a small yet powerful LED torch (number 6) ).
When I mentioned this, there was short silence, then they asked me,
“You got a TORCH?”
“Yeah”, I reply wondering why they would be so impressed. OK it is a bloody good torch but still.
“In your TED bag?”
“Yeah.”
“Can we see it?”
“Sure.”

I pull it out of my bag wondering which company these guys work for if they have never seen a torch before. Once they saw it, however, the disappointment on their face was telling.

Perplexed I ask them, “What did you expect?”

They explained that when I had said torch they thought I meant open flame, fire, as in burning torch, you know those things you dip into petrol and light at the end, to them that is a torch. You know, like that guy in the Fantastic Four who runs around on fire that is a torch.

To them what I was holding in my hand is a flashlight. To me, a flashlight or a flash is something you stick on top of camera when you want to take pictures in the dark.

OK I can see now why they were initially impressed. Imagine having one of those open flame “torches” in your rucksack just waiting for an opportune moment to light the petrol.

I blame Micro$oft and their “English (US)”!

How the players play

I asked another bunch if this was their first time in Africa, they said yes, they had been in Morocco for a couple of days and then flew to Arusha. So I asked them if they flew through Nairobi.
No, they said they flew straight from Morocco to Arusha.
So now I’m looking at them wondering what kind of a muppet they think I am, why the hell they would lie to me so badly, I mean which airline flies direct to Arusha from Morocco?
Just before I launched into a mini argument with them another Kenyan next to me notices the look on my face and whispers to me, “You guy, they came in their own plane.”
OHHHHH!

Serena Mountain Village, Arusha

Everyone thinks they had it going on but seriously the TED Group at Serena Mountain Village was fantastic. One of the guys predicts the future, another one is a leading Nollywood director, one has built the building with the most solar panels in Africa, one had a brilliant way of keeping intellectual debate going and another had the guts to show this picture during his 3 minute talk, meanwhile this geezer gave the best 3 minute talk any roommate of mine has ever given at a TED conference, at the same time Manu and I spent time debating the merits of a good single malt.

The TED veterans ensured we mixed and to be honest they even outlasted us and still sounded coherent at 5am. A better bunch of crazier yet interesting and completely unpretentious people you would not meet. All we were missing was a neo-con! I think there is a conspiracy going on here, aren’t neo-cons allowed to have passports by the US authorities? I have never met an American who says they voted for Bush. Aren’t they allowed to travel and leave America?

The lodge is very romantic and very honeymoon like. Luckily my roommate has already been on his honeymoon a couple of years back.

A Radio!

You may have heard that due to the generosity of the Google and AMD each of the TED Global Fellows will soon be getting a new Mac or PC laptop. What you may not have heard is that due to generosity of Noah Samara from Worldspace each fellow is also getting a satellite radio and an annual Worldspace subscription. As you can imagine we went, as a famous Kenyan blogger would put it, bananas. But I quickly realised I was going bananas for a different reason from everyone else. All the other fellows are going nuts over the Macs (is anyone seriously choosing a PC?) But me, I was going bananas over the radio.
Walalala.
Satellite radio, for one year. Yani I can wake up at 3am and tune into what the good people of Papua New Guinea are up to? And I’ve always wondered what the theme music for radio news in Peru sounds like. Now I’ll know. On News Year Eve I’ll start listening from Time Zone 1 and check out how each time zone celebrates the New Year! Imagine how many countdowns I will catch! Yeah ok, Macs are cool, very very cool. Lakini, you guy, a radio with a ka small satellite dish, come on now, what is cooler than that! Seriously!

Body no be wood

Umm well, yeah umm, ah ehhhh hmmm!!! If you know you know, if you don’t know, you don’t know, or ask a Nigerian. Don’t ask Google, it will just confuse you! However BNBW in the TED Global context may be slightly different from the traditional context. We kinda switched it into an ICT cheetah thing, (cough cough), let me just put it this way, YMMV, and I do not mean THAT mileage.

Kilimanjaro International Airport

Is there any reason why Kisumu airport can not be expanded to look and feel like Kilimanjaro airport?

TEDGlobal2007 | TEDGlobal

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Experienced bloggers are by nature a questioning lot. A less kind person would call us a cynical lot. You tell us something, we will question it. You raise a point, we will debate it. You lie, you will eventually get caught, usually by another blogger who notices inconsistencies. Like a girl on a first date, we are not easily impressed. To remix that old quote, you can fool one blogger one time, but you can’t fool all the bloggers all the time.

Experienced bloggers are by nature an articulate lot. We spend hours each week not just telling but analysing whatever we find important. It is vital that we are able to put our point across to our readers. We defend our positions, usually by employing intellectual debate. Experienced bloggers are generally not dazzled by your personality, popularity, or prosperity. We want to hear what you have to say and we will judge you on that basis.

So this TED Global thing, what is it about it that has us who attended walking around on cloud nine, talking about a “cheetah generation” and “forget making poverty history we want to make Africans rich“? It is almost like we were indoctrinated by the some powerful force. Every single blogger who was lucky enough to have the opportunity to attend TED Global came out very very very very very impressed!. Why? Recently we got an email asking us to rate the conference, the organisation, the speakers on scale from poor to excellent. Talking with some other TEDsters over the weekend we were of the opinion that the scale should start at bloody brilliant and end at flipping unbelievable. (Thanks Hash for putting all those links together!)

In my experience there are a couple of reasons why I had a fantastic time.

1. I am not alone.

I lie in bed sometimes thinking about Kenya and Africa and I can not sleep because my head starts feeling like it is about to explode. Where is the light at the end of the tunnel? In what way can I be most helpful? Where do we even begin? At TED Global I was in a whole room of people who go through the same thing. Young people across the continent who have a passion about this motherland called Africa that really surpasses all logic. They see what you are doing, you see what they are doing and suddenly you realise that you are not alone, and you do not have to do it alone. Instead of wondering if we will ever rise, now I am like, there is no way, absolutely no way that anyone can keep us down. The next 20 years will not be like the last 20 years, that I can guarantee you. In 2027 this will be the most linked post on Mentalacrobatics and you can all start calling me prophet!

2. The explosion of ideas and learning.

What a speaker line up. You walked out of the room rubbing your head wondering how you are going to process all that knowledge. Next time you bump into one of those idiots who starts asking you questions like, “where is the African Mozart, or where is the African Brunel, implying that Africans do not think send them a copy of Ron Eglash’s study of fractals in African architecture and watch their heads explode as they try to understand just what the hell is going on, and that is just one of many many examples that were shared at this conference. Sending txt messages in Amharic, no problem, want to build a computer that thinks like a brain, easy peasy.

3. The 1958 feeling.

This is the big one for me. I have often wondered how it would have felt to attend THE pan African conference of all pan African conferences, The All-African People’s Conference in Accra in 1958 as the wind of independence was sweeping over the continent. How exhilarating it must have felt to watch freedom galloping over the horizon coming closer and closer as one colonial power after another was kicked out. But I wondered more about how powerful it must have been to walk into a room and you have all those brains there, all those visionaries in one place at one time. Imagine standing in the queue for lunch and you see Nyerere chatting with Lumumba or W.E.B DuBois sharing a knock-knock joke with Nkrumah or something like that. At TED Global I got that same buzz, you got the sense that there were people in that room that would revolutionise this continent. Now you know why I was smiling strangely at all of you at lunch at TED, I was trying to figure out which one of you was Nyerere and which one was Lumumba, who would be DuBois and who Nkrumah! In the 1958 conference they elected a young man called Tom Mboya from Kenya as their chairman, in his summing up speech he called for a reversal of the Scramble for Africa addressing the colonial powers thus:

“Your time has past, Africa must be free. Scram from Africa.”

Substitute colonial powers then for your pet hate today. Corruption, nepotism, tribalism, maybe even neo-colonialism? Whatever it is, tell it to scram from Africa. Like 50 years ago, change must come and change is in the air and that change is unavoidable. But we have learnt the lessons of 50 years ago, this time the pact between African leaders and African people must be paramount.

Kudos to the Tom Mboya of TED Global, Emeka Okafor.

TEDGlobal2007 | TEDGlobal

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Last month in a blog post called a “Tale of Two Kenyans” I wrote about how the Kenyan police woke up an entire slum when two suspected cop killers decided to hide amongst the residents. A couple of readers expressed doubts to put it politely. One of the emails I received even accused me of making the whole episode up claiming the Kenyan authorities did not have enough manpower to mount such an operation.

Kenyan police round up suspected Mungiki members in Nairobi’s Mathare slum. Click on the image to see the full size image.

Well, well, well. I get back from TEDGlobal in Arusha to find the world has gone mad back at home. Yesterday a combined force of 500 made up of regular police, administration police and the elite General Service Unit raided Mathare in a crackdown on the gangsters of the Mungiki Sect that is responsible for the deaths of at least 20 people included at least 12 who were beheaded in the last three months. So far the police operation, code named Operation Kosovo, has resulted in around 30 deaths and 300 arrests. Of course the police claim that they have good reasons to suspect that all those they have arrested and killed are members of Mungiki. Mathare is under siege. After months of harassment by Mungiki now they have another threat to watch out for, trigger happy police.

A policeman with a police dog rounds up suspected Mungiki members in Nairobi’s Mathare slum. Click on the image to see the full size image.

Another Kenyan blogger, Majonzi, writing on this story uses a powerful headline

Wananchi vs Mungiki vs The Police

I would change it to

Mungiki vs Wananchi vs The Police

The wananchi, the ordinary Kenyan citizen, is now caught in the middle of a battle between Mungiki and the police for the control of parts of Nairobi and parts of Kenya. Month after month, year after year this sect has grown unchecked, harassing, beating, killing and beheading ordinary wananchi going about their lives. This sect was seemed untouchable by the police. Well the authorities have woken up and as one policeman was quoted saying,

“Lala chini ung’orote. Unajua kuna serikali?”
(Lie down and sleep. Do you know there is a government in Kenya?)

Kenyan police round up suspected Mungiki members in Nairobi’s Mathare slum forcing them to lie face down. Click on the image to see the full size image.

Where has this “government” been up to now?

This is a clear example that we have to take the optimism, positive energy and empowering ideas from TEDGlobal and start making change in our society at a fundamental level. James Shikwati in his talk urged Africans to start panicking, to enter “panic mode”. We have to open our eyes to our society is breaking and in many ways in broken and perhaps if we enter panic mode we will start to deal with issues with the urgency they require.

Thanks M4 for sending me the images.

TEDGlobal2007 | TEDGlobal

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