South Africa: Tourist shops full of bric-a-brac and no useful brochures

In company for moments

I would have wanted to reflect more and write a lot more on my last trip to South Africa which has the uniquely amazing complement of spending it in the companionship of my partner.

Many things in life can probably be enjoyed alone, but nothing beats the sharing of experiences and moments with a soulmate. The times we visited places and observed, nature, placement, event or exhibit from different or similar perspectives then commented to each other with interest, engagement and involvement were too many to mention.

Many beautiful places to see

The City Sightseeing Tour of Johannesburg was the beginning of shared experiences that were not just between us, the many pictures taken of the locations around the Constitution Hill all into Soweto and back, made for an eventful and unforgettable day.

After our day out at Zoo Lake, there were visits to the Walter Sisulu National Botanical Gardens, Lilliesleaf Farm that gave rise to the Rivonia Trial, Hartbeespoort Aerial Cableway onto the Magaliesberg Mountains overlooking the Hartbeespoort Dam and then the Ditsong National Museum of Natural History in Pretoria.

I don’t want tatty bric-a-brac

All these locations seemed to have shops for souvenirs, African goods and bric-a-brac, however, they were all lacking in essential carefully curated brochures or books about the locations we were at. The gardens, the farm, the dam and museum all had oodles of information about nature and exhibits, many panels of information that you could read throughout the site, and except if you were snapping away with your camera, more than half what was observed would probably be forgotten.

The purpose of a site location brochure or book is not only to document every aspect of the broadly tourist location but also to give background and context to all the features on display. This is a job that can be given to academia in South Africa and I think they would enthusiastically engage to help in this regard.

I want to leave these locations with experiences, sometimes I cannot see everything, having a brochure or guide in at least English and some other languages can make any visit a rewarding and educational experience as one reads up on the detail of where one has gone.

This must be a critical project

The shops did not serve any of the tourist locations well, even when I had previously gone to the Voortrekker Monument near Pretoria or the Kirstenbosch National Botanical Garden in Cape Town, there was a dearth of useful information to take away beyond the on-location experience.

Having travelled around the world and seen that even museums and tourist locations put some work into producing brochures, books, manuals or guides. It is my solemn advice to whoever is in charge of Tourism in South Africa to make this a critical deliverable with the utmost alacrity.

The memories I captured can be found on my other blog.

Blog - Cherishing the gift of precious moments

Thought Picnic: Paper bound in leather and glue

The memory from before

“It’s only a book, paper bound in leather and glue.”

These were the words of a song I heard on a children’s programme too many decades ago for me to remember who sang it or what the name of the programme was.

However, the tune and the music were striking enough for the lyrics to stick in memory that any time I remember the song, I feel like I am watching that programme again.

The book is just what it is; paper bound in leather and glue. Yet, what is written in the book might be useful or it might be useless. The evolution of the book through history is long, from cave drawings through Egyptian papyrus, parchment, animal skins, paper, printing and now petabytes of electronic data.

Words unread are nothing

The book stands as a record unaltered, words written for posterity which might be reprinted, edited or laid waste if no desired for the knowledge contained therein endures.

The words however do not come to life of their own volition, nor does the book animate like some living thing, the words have to be read and comprehended, then in the mind of those that process the words, the book gains potency in the actions or reactions of people.

The value we place on a book should be based on the derived content brought to use by the reader, properly understood in its context, setting, relevance and intention.

Where we miss these elements, the book becomes a guide for malevolence, something misread, misunderstood or misinterpreted, something read out of context, applied to the wrong setting, finding no particular relevance or pandering to the wrong motives and the seeds of destruction are sown to reap a harvest of carnage.

Wholly unholy acts

Yet, even in these modern times, we have people of the Book, religions tied to holy tomes that appear to have all the answers to life and living, read and use to destroy life, liberty and livelihood as a demonstration of power and influence.

The barely educated wielding tyranny like a deaf child being handed a loaded machine gun and at the same time shouted at to put the gun down. The danger not being in the book itself, but in how what was apparently learnt from the book is demonstrated.

That we give the books names and titles, does not change it from it physical and material constituents, and whilst the words therein might bring great meaning to some, the body should not by that suddenly become sacred, except where the words need to be preserved, and alternatives abound.

Book your context right

For instance, if I downloaded a holy book unto my laptop and then destroyed the laptop, would I suffer as much sanction as if I burnt the book? We need to be reasonable and exercise a lot of reasonableness about the things we so easily elect to have offend us.

As a repository, the book does have value, it archives and stores knowledge, but it is not the end of the world, it is paper bound in leather and glue.

Dead Aid - Review

Aid is not working

A couple of months ago it burst on our screens and there was all this rave about a book – Dead Aid – reviews in newspapers, interviews on chat shows, blogs awash with opinions and Twitter in overdrive.

Dambisa Moyo comes with impressive credentials and experience to boot having worked for the World Bank and been a global economist; she completed her Masters at Harvard and culminated in a PhD in Economics at Oxford.

I suppose that is enough to turn heads when she talks about aid especially when it runs counter to the megaphone diplomacy and sympathy-laden enjoyment-based concert fund raising efforts spearheaded by the apostles of aid to Africa in Sir Bob Geldof and Bono.

Easy reading

I consciously decided after all the publicity and debate I had heard not to offer any comments about this matter until I had read the book and reviewed its contents and measured the opinions proffered against reality, expectation and fantasy.

Dead Aid became part of my holiday reading, it was not a tough book to read and it sits in the genre of economics for dummies, taking basic examples, analogy and allusions to explain difficult subjects, it was just as good a read as the Undercover Economist.

At 154 pages, it probably could be finished in hours; between cocktails, the beach and waking hours along with holiday commitments of loafing around, it was done in just about 5 days.

What has aid done for us?

The book is divided into two parts named The World of Aid and A World without Aid – the first part is quite engaging, indeed, it is a brief history of aid and what it has now turned into – her historical analysis of aid and its failings were succinct.

We can more or less agree that the amount of aid poured into Africa has not necessarily shown any appreciable progress or benefits. There is no doubt too that there is a culture of aid dependency that might be counter-productive to development allowing for lazy policy and government activity.

It was also interesting to note that a vicious circle has evolved between the drug addict (aid dependent countries) and drug pusher (countries that mean well and find it an obligation to offer aid). I was not sure the external catalyst to wean off the addiction or the business model of the pusher is clear cut.

The aid industry is a beast, if not a leviathan, it needs to be fed and watered, the employees and the agendas in the West, the bottomless receptacles of ineffective utility in Africa engaged in a mutually destructive alliance that seems to prevent Africa from coming of age and leads the continent into a downward spiral of poverty, disease and insufficiency.

Implausible solutions?

I was not too sure that I followed the leap from aid dependency to tapping the capital markets through the issuing of bonds by the way of obtaining a sovereign credit rating. Whilst she does say sovereign ratings are different from corporate ratings, she suggests that businesses are limited to the ceiling of their sovereign ratings and offers examples of certain businesses that seem to have ratings higher than that of their countries.

I was afraid that the exposure as a global economist might have beclouded some stark realities in Africa, access to the capital markets requires that some fundamentals as infrastructure are available if not robust and governance through leadership are critical for confidence to be garnered from issuing bonds.

To garner support she suggested road shows which brought to mind Nigeria’s moribund rebranding project – there were examples but I felt they would be difficult to extrapolate without the fundamentals.

The Chinese are here

We all recognise that the Chinese are coming and they are offering deals of engagement than the West have ever afforded Africa. But this is just a new Bwanarism in my view, we still have Chinese managers and many Chinese staff supervising where their money is going in projects, however, I am not sure there is enough high-level African involvement to move from installation to maintenance, when the Chinese leave.

The danger of all these projects falling into disrepair is possible as with other aid sponsored projects that did not engage the communities in the purpose before execution despite the benefits that would initially accrue.

Trade and finance

Trade is growing but we need more equal partners in this enterprise, we also need to be able to appreciate what we have, a country selling off land to be developed for agriculture purposes by foreign lands is absurd, when we should be able to manage and cultivate the land and sell the food instead.

There is more scope for the Grameen micro-finance model, the advent of mobile telephony banking instruments but quantitative reliance on remittances as an anti-aid push is a bit far-fetched though one probably needs the brain of an economist to see the effects in entirety.

The Dead Aid model

The Dead Aid model suggests a secession of aid in maybe 5 years forcing governments to pull up their socks – I almost scoffed, but it might work for countries where the governments really care; care being used as an expression for those who understand the purpose of government as opposed to ones that just want to be in office and in power and nothing else.

To implement Dead Aid policies in the fictional Republic of Dongo that we were told of in the book, Dongo requires technocrats, in a very politicised country, it is difficult to focus on enterprise when it is power that offers privilege and opportunity.

Dr. Moyo herself confessed that she was not sure that opportunities in Africa offered commensurate challenges to her qualifications, but that is just half the story, there are so many of us who have been exposed to Western influences that would almost find it impossible to fit back into our indigenous settings along with the culture and attitudes.

We are of a different generation from our parents too who returned home to build the motherland and have rarely left since then – but Dr. Moyo’s assertions need to be road tested not by the pot-pourri of examples all around the world but by being engaged by African leaders in a concerted view to getting off aid and pursuing real development.

It would preposterous to adopt Dead Aid wholescale without participation that risks the reputation of the proponents that see the truth in the detail.

The need to more modern books

Beyond this, the references and notes in the books were not consistent and whilst URLs to certain documents were so long, as a user of Twitter those URLs should have been accompanied with shortened versions.

It like to read opinions and views but most importantly I like to see where the facts are derived from, and it should not be an extraneous exercise with cataloguing numbers for books and an accompanying website that compliments the views expressed in the book with all the alluded references, the audience does not want to be spoon-fed everything nowadays.

Presumably people with doctorates are accorded a modicum of originality of thought but this topic is too volatile in its assault on the norms of aid to be the main tome but a body of knowledge and opinions has to be created with the proponents coming to the fore – they have their work cut out against the juggernaut of aid.

In the end, to use the readability scales of another magazine which rates books as Read, Skim or Toss, I would give this a Read; you just cannot honestly participate in the debate about aid not working without reading Dead Aid as part of your reference material.

Book Reviewed:

Dead Aid: Why Aid is Not Working and How There is a Better Way for Africa

ISBN: 9781846140068

It's Only a Book

It’s only a book

I remember a song from my childhood when I watched the children’s program the lyrics stuck in my head for days; any idle moment was occupied by that song seeping into my mental tranquillity.

The first two lines went thus:

It’s only a book
Paper bound in leather and glue

I cannot remember the other lines but this is sufficient for the purposes I have raised it.

Abusing the Quran

The newswires are now excited with the news that a US soldier in Iraq had used a Quran for target practice; it was riddled with bullet holes and scrawled through with graffiti.

In any event, I would consider this act utterly insensitive, probably outrageous but I would offer the offender the benefit of the doubt that he was not malicious.

The American Army in Iraq has apologised to the local tribal leaders and hopefully, this will not be hijacked by malevolent forces to bring people unnecessarily onto the streets in protest.

Books, words and acts

I would concur that many religions have their books of knowledge and Scripture, which adherents hold in varying degrees of reverence, but a book on its own does not constitute anything in and of itself.

It has to have words that are read, meditated upon, voiced in prayer or preaching to make any sort of impact.

I would be very sorry if a rare version of the Quran, the Bible or the Torah were destroyed in some Barbaric vandalism, such a book might be irreplaceable but the import of the words would not be all the more potent if the same words were read from a modern-day cheap reproduction.

The benefit we have beyond the days of Johannes Gutenberg is that a basic Bible or Quran can be easily replaced by going to the shops without making wanton destruction affect us so adversely.

Giving books reverence

I remember the reverence with which people picked up their Bibles when accidentally dropped them, they were overcome with a combined sense of guilt and piety as they picked up the book and bowed their heads into it in mock worship.

I would be very concerned if the book were to accidentally leave the grasp of a holder and then fail to obey the laws of gravity just as I would have been concerned that religious books had such powers as to be resistant to the impact of bullets.

A book is a reference document; the quality of the information in it is only as good as how it is used; hopefully for the benefit of mankind – if a book begins to exhibit onomatopoeic tendencies without human influence or anthropomorphic attributes, one might be persuaded to say the book is bewitched.

Yet, we ascribe without thought powers to books which they do not have as inanimate objects – because only the realisation that the content when read can influence situations has any potency.

Between reverence and survival

It is only a book, paper bound in leather and glue.

I would wonder what would happen if one were caught in a dire survival situation where a fire was an essential thing to maintain life – one would hope that the essential bits of information to maintain faith and hope would have already been committed to memory – allowing for the book to be set on fire to provide warmth.

However, appealing to a greater sense of civility, I would hope that this matter would be treated with temperance and put in perspective whilst accepting the apology offered.

Religious fervour is not well served by bringing the mob onto the streets to protest about the peacefulness of one’s religion.

It’s only a book, paper bound in leather and glue, what would happen if one smashed a computer screen where the words in the book appear?