Three hundred miles above the earth, the Pisces satellite maps out the geography of our planet. As it orbits it records the great mountain ranges, deserts, forests—even the trajectory of clouds, storm systems, and ocean currents. Beyond these natural features, the satellite also records images of human development, of economic geography. These images are especially stark at night where some regions of the planet glow in extravagant displays of energy, vitality, and abundance. But as the Pisces passes over the great land mass of Africa, it records only a void. Over 100 years after Joseph Conrad’s famous book, Africa remains, literally, the heart of darkness.

The question that has been gnawing at me since my first encounter with Africa almost 20 years ago is just how did we get here? How did the birthplace of humanity, home to so many of the world’s most precious natural resources, a land of rich diversity, arable soils, and bountiful game, become the modern era’s cliché of deprivation?

A few statistics bear repeating: of the United Nations Development Program’s list of the world’s 25 least developed countries, all 25 are located in sub-Saharan Africa; Africa is the only place on earth where in some regions life expectancy is actually in decline; while the continent account for 15 percent of the world’s population, it produces only 1.3 percent of the world’s gross domestic product, accounts for just 1.6 percent of international trade, and receives less than 1 percent of all international direct investment. For many people, consciously or not, the entire continent of Africa has come to be symbolized by late night images of emaciated children with flies lingering on unkept faces.

Yet it hasn’t always been so. The bifurcated and polarized world of today, with its glaring cleavages between the haves and the have-nots, is a relatively new development in human history. As economist Jeffrey Sachs notes in his book The End of Poverty, 200 year ago we were all poor. Today a growing chorus of experts is warning that this state of economic disequilibrium is untenable; something is going to have to give—and a better understanding of what has and is going wrong in Africa is central to humanity’s ability to form an adequate response.

It was night the first time I landed on the continent of Africa. I recall the hustle and confusion of Nairobi’s airport just outside Kenya’s capital city. It seemed a swirl of colors, textures, and aromas all blending into a distinctly third world sensory experience. The most distinctive quality was that of the air. It felt heavy, as if the humidity, pollution, and odors added weight onto your skin. You had to part through it.

During the drive into the capital I felt as though I were entering a completely different planet. Even at night, the sides of the roads were teeming with people—vendors, beggars, hordes of young men smoking cigarettes and staring aimlessly as cars streamed by. The periphery of the city is surrounded by shanties of corrugated aluminum and plywood. The smell of humanity without access to basic sanitation creates a lingering impression.

At the time of my arrival, Kenya had been ruled for a generation by Daniel Arap Moi, a Kikuyu representing one of the country’s strongest and most influential tribes. His rule managed some nominal claim to democratic legitimacy by periodically holding something called a “one party election.” You could vote for him, or choose not to vote. His autocratic style of governing did lead to periodic outbursts of decent. While I was in Nairobi protests broke out by a group known as the Forum for the Restoration of Democracy. The demonstrations were quickly squelched by the military, but the incident did make the nightly news in America, and for that brief thirty seconds Africa was brought into the Western mind.

Despite these periodic protests, Kenya has long been held out as one of the great economic and political success stories of the continent. It has managed to maintain relative political stability and prosperity throughout much of its independence. That is what made the recent crisis in which thousands were butchered and driven from their homes all the more startling. The international community sat by helplessly after a contested and most likely fraudulent presidential election led the country to break along ethnic lines and descend into the chaos of ethnic cleansing, tribal schisms, and criminal anarchy.

Former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan and US Secretary of State Condolezza Rice shuttled to the region in an effort to broker peace, and the feeling within the African Union was that the stakes couldn’t be higher. Given the past decade of chaos that has plagued Kenya’s neighbors in Rwanda, Sudan, Uganda, Chad, and the Congo, the growing feeling on the continent was that if Kenya’s government couldn’t keep it together, what African country could?

The ease to which Kenya could descend into anarchy driven by ethnic division is instructive on an essential problem facing the continent as a whole: what is the meaning of the nation-state in Africa? What does it mean to be a Kenyan, or a Sudanese, or a Ugandan? The borders that demarcate these countries into sovereign entities bear very little resemblance to any ethnic, cultural, or linguistic cohesiveness. Kenya, or any African nation for that matter, cannot point to an organic evolution that bestows upon it some agreed-to legitimacy. There is no relationship between the national tradition and the people, such as that of the French to France.

The nations of Africa and their boundaries are colonial inventions—dark gifts that keep on giving. Most of the political borders that divide the continent merely reflect the competing spheres of European influence at the turn of the last century. The “nation” of Nigeria alone contained as many as 250 ethno-linguistic groups; the Belgian Congo was once ruled by 6,000 individual chiefdoms.

As Britain’s colonial-era Prime Minster Lord Salisbury glibly put it, “We have been giving away mountains and rivers and lakes to each other, only hindered by the small impediment that we never knew exactly where they were.”

To most Africans, the political borders crossing the continent are just lines on a map. In Africa, the old adage that the map is not the territory is a truism, one holding a loaded gun. Without agreed-upon political legitimacy, most Africans continue to identify themselves not with the state, but with the tribe.

One of the first people I met in Kenya was a man named Akili. He became my Swahili teacher and all-purpose guide into African culture. One evening over dinner he explained to me the problem as he saw it. “We lack institutions. Nobody seems to know where the government’s money comes from or goes, how the system actually works. There is no window into the government, and with no window, no grassroots legitimacy.”

Many African governments simply morphed into crude cleptocracies following independence. Their rule is maintained simply through terror or bribery. Of the top 10 most corrupt states on earth according to the United Nations, 8 are located in sub-Saharan Africa. One stand-out, the Central African Republic, was recently categorized as being “beyond a failed states” by the International Crisis Group. The report goes on to describe the nation as being “virtually a phantom state, lacking any meaningful institutional capacity.”

This corruption and inefficiency which have grown out of Africa’s post colonially constructed nations, make the proper distribution of international aid nearly impossible. Over the last 50 years the developed world has provided billions of dollars in aid to Africa, yet large swaths of the continent still remain without even the most basic sanitation, clean water, schools, or access to health care. This lack of a return on investment has invariably led to a growing “donor fatigue” within the developed world.

In the late 1970s and throughout the ‘80s, as international aid began to wane, African nations began to look to the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund for loans to keep their economies afloat. In a brief decade, many countries took on suffocating debt. External debt held by the nations of sub-Saharan Africa amounted to $6 billion in 1970. That figure ballooned to $86 billion by 1983 and has been growing ever since. In some instances just servicing the debt accounts for as much as 40 percent of a country’s annual income. This has led to a pernicious cycle, a nation wide poverty trap.

One of the more tragic aspects of this debt is how little of the resources went to improve the overall condition of the average African. A review of World Bank-funded projects finds numerous airports, hydroelectric or coal burning power plants, port infrastructure—much of which is geared towards the interests of international corporations exporting raw materials. This survey finds only a few serious, concerted or well-organized public health, education, or village-level economic development initiatives. As University of Toronto Professor Thomas Homer-Dixon puts it, “People don’t need the Internet when there is no food to eat.”

Many who follow the path towards sustainable development in Africa are slowly coming to the conclusion that there must be a better way forward—an empowering option beyond governmental aid or corporately slanted loans.


The Great Rift Valley is one of those sites you will never forget. The horizon spans out into such a distance, it seems to defy traditional perspective. For two weeks I backpacked across the Rift with a small group of international students. With us was a short, 30-something Tanzanian man named Pius. Those weeks traveling with Pius opened my eyes and gave me the opportunity to catch a glimpse of the world looking out from the continent.

Looking through this lens, I discerned a pattern in which the world looks to Africa as a backwater of incompetence and inferiority. As President Clinton said on his historic tour of the continent, “For too long we have asked what can we do about Africa, or for Africa, but not what can we do with Africa.”

The West has, since colonial times, since slavery, viewed the continent as a periphery of civilization: as either a region to be exploited or a problem to be ignored or solved—but a problem all the same. What my experience with the people of Africa taught me is that they don’t need charity as much as they need fairness. Fairness should be the new paradigm the developed world uses in creating strategies for dealing with Africa.

While the Western world, and the US in particular, preaches the miracle of free trade, Africa’s experience has been far from even-handed. US cotton subsidies alone work to distort the international market enough to off set all the US direct aid to cotton-producing counties in Africa. Other subsidies that distort the concept of free trade in Africa include the European Union’s annual cattle subsidy, which amounts to $900 per cow per year. The Europeans subsidize each of their cattle with more money than most Africans earn in a year. In Japan that annual cattle subsidy is $2700 per cow.

There appears to be a lingering racial assumption that African entrepreneurs are ill-equipped to compete on the global playing field, that a continent of people is somehow genetically or geographically handicapped. Yet my experience spoke loudly to the contrary. If anything, it is impressive what many Africans have managed to accomplish given the host of disadvantages apportioned to them. If American farmers, with all the benefits of technology, market access, and infrastructure, can’t compete globally without multi-billion dollar subsidies, how can we justly judge Africa’s lack of competitiveness?

Nothing would improve the lives of average Africans more than fair and open access to the world’s markets. Enabling small farmers and entrepreneurs to sell their goods competitively abroad would bring with it the benefits of village-level prosperity that could have vast and important political consequences.

In the coming decades Africa will continue to need significant international support in the form of direct aid and grants. But ultimately it will be up to Africans to create a more prosperous future for Africa, and that will require wrestling control away from the more corrupt regimes and developing national institutions capable of taking effective advantage of the aid that is provided by the international community. Village-level economic development fostered through fair trade practices could help in tipping the political power balance.

The international community can also help in the transition away from the model of post-colonial authoritative regimes by demanding a new level of accountability and transparency as a condition of continued aid. A further inducement of debt forgiveness could be attached to a program of economic and political reforms. The Earth Institute’s Jeffrey Sachs outlines this three-pronged formula of fair trade, direct aid attached to political and economic reform, and debt forgiveness in his book The End of Poverty, and believes that this approach could accomplish more in the coming decade than the last 50 years of World Bank mega-projects and IMF loans ever did.

This program could also hopefully act to help open the window into the government that Akili spoke of. Once a government becomes accountable to its people, the people have a much greater opportunity to feel like stakeholders, and that is one of the first important steps in the development on the journey to legitimate nationhood. The borders may at last take on meaning.


If the Pisces satellite had mapped out the earth at night at the turn of the 20th century, all the world would have been black. That image is a reminder of how quickly history can be written. The decades ahead may lead Africa into even further despair, violence, and turmoil; or this could prove a turning point, a pivot in history. Regardless of the outcome, the 21st century is likely to be remembered as the African century. How we address the challenges and opportunities facing the continent will be one of the defining characteristics of our era, and the outcome will matter to everyone. As anthropologist Christopher Stringer continues to remind us, “We are all Africans under the skin.”

GLOBALIZATION- Governments, Corporations & the Individual in the 21st Century

On March 17th at 5:30PM, Westminster College's International Economics program will host Jonathan Duncan to an evening exploring the social, environmental and political consequences of globalization. "To a large extent the phenomenon of globalization is the defining characteristic of our age," states Duncan. "Whether you are a farmer in Africa, a bond trader in London, or a steel worker in Pittsburgh, your life is impacted more and more by the trends of international economic integrations. Not everyone is fairing the same in this global competition."

Duncan's lecture is broken down into three sections exploring globalization influence on: 1) Democracy and the Individual, 2) Resources and the Environment, and 3) The Future of Nations. Following the lecture Duncan and Dr. Michael Mamo, Director of the College's International Business Program, will field questions and provide differing views on the economic imperatives of global trade and the benefits of a globalized financial system.

SPIRIT OF HIGH PLACES

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: March 13, 2008
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Westminster College to Host Evening Celebrating the Earth's Great Mountains

On Tuesday, March 25th at 7PM, Westminster College is proud to host award-winning mountain photographer Jonathan Duncan for an evening celebrating the world's greatest mountain ranges. After growing up along the Wasatch Front, Duncan went on to explore and document high and wild regions around the world, including the Himalayas, the Patagonian Andes, Antarctica, the Alaska Range, and many of the high peaks of the American West. Tuesday's program, The Spirit of High Places, combines the best of Duncan's photography with a narrative exploring how different cultures relate to mountains, and the role they have played in world mythology throughout human history. The event is being sponsored by Westminster College's Outdoor Recreation Program and is free and open to the public.

Event title: The Spirit of High Places
Where: The Gore Auditorium, Westminster College
When: Tuesday, March 25th, 7PM
Press Contact: Jonathan Duncan, 435-659-1522, alpinevision@comcast.net

ENVIRONMENTAL PHOTOJOURNALISM
Westminster College 2008
Jonathan Duncan, Instructor

This course will introduce the technical, aesthetic and practical aspects of professional environmental photojournalism. Combining in-class lectures, interactive student critics, and field work, the course will work to help students develop an understanding of how photography can be used as a means to communicate our experiences in the natural world and the challenges facing our environment

COURSE OBJECTIVES:

-To develop the technical skills and knowledge to create effective photographic images
-To develop a sense of photographic composition and a feel for what makes an evocative image
-To develop an awareness on how to utilize different types of natural light to achieve certain dramatic effects
-To develop an appreciation for the role of photography in the evolution of the environmental movement
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COURSE CALENDAR:

WEEK ONE:

Course objectives and structure—an introduction and review of the art and science of photography

The History of Photography—an overview of the technical and cultural evolution of the art form and its role in helping shape the environmental movement

Photographic Technique—uses of depth of field, shutter speed, manual exposure, light metering, lens selection, digital settings, camera care and maintenance

Photographic Composition—visual rules and when to break them, symmetry vs. asymmetry, the golden mean, the rule of thirds, the principle of visual harmonics

WEEK TWO:

Lighting—the effective uses of natural light, the nature of color, contrast, the magic hour, identifying good photographic lighting

Vision—the creative potential of communicating with photographs, photography as a tool of self expression, the window on the world

Telling Stories—an exploration of how professional photojournalists use images to convey complex subjects

WEEK THREE:

Field workshops-- and class critiques

WEEK FOUR:

Photoshop and photographic ethics—are photographs evidence of anything today, photography and audience perception, Susan Sontag’s “On Photography”

The Business of Photojournalism—editorial contacts, portfolio development, stock agencies, magazine assignments, collateral materials, equipment

Final project and portfolio development workshop

Final project review and critique

POSTCARDS FROM THE SEAT OF ENLIGHTENMENT

“The search for enlightenment is like riding an ox, in search of an ox.”
--Buddhist teaching

This is not what you would expect from the road to the seat of enlightenment. Outside the car window a bleak landscape unfolds. Stray dogs gnaw on discarded garbage. Cement huts and cheap shacks litter the countryside. The road is a maize of pot holes, mud and gravel. It is a geography of impoverishment. But 2500 years ago this region had its moment in the sun, when a young prince named Siddhartha descended from the nearby hills after a long fast and positioned himself beneath a sturdy looking tree, a Bodhi tree, and that night he achieved his goal of Enlightenment.

I am just now returning from a few days at the fabled site in India of Siddhartha’s “Big Moment,” and attempting to process the experience. There is a magnetic charge anytime you approach a site of such literal and metaphorical significance, and like a magnet, these encounters tend to attract or repel. The town of Bodh Gaya, built around the Bodhi Tree where Prince Siddhartha transcended to become the Buddha, offers a little of both.

Bodh Gaya is considered by many to be the most sacred pilgrimage site in all of Buddhism, and there is an aura to the actual Bodhi Tree—a sense of history, of significance, of time. Being surrounded by pilgrims from all over the world adds a cosmopolitan buzz to the isolation of the region, and for some this will be the high water mark in their life’s spiritual journey. But there is another side to Bodh Gaya: a dark underbelly.

The town itself is not much more than a huddle of cheapish hotels, restaurants and trinket vendors. The architectural highlight is the presence of a large number of monasteries representing the different sects and aesthetic traditions of the religion. There is also, in the center of town, the Mahabodhi Temple with its ornate pyramids jutting into the sky. Along the eastern flank of the temple rests the famed Bodhi Tree, and the parcel of land beneath known to the Buddhist world as the “Diamond Throne.” The temple complex is a UN World Heritage Site, and attracts international visitors by the thousands.

The Bodhi Tree to which the pilgrims flock is not the actual tree the Buddha would have known. The original Bodhi was cut down by the wife of the great Indian Emperor Ashorka in the 3rd century AD. Fortunately for Buddhist lore a sapling of the original tree had been transplanted to Sri Lanka centuries before, and the tree towering over the Diamond Throne today is an offspring of this transplanted relation. The name Bodhi comes from a Sanskrit word meaning “enlightenment.” The tree itself is a fig tree, a banyan fig tree or pipal tree, known for its great size, broad intertwining limbs, and longevity. It has a powerful presence, and its history and genealogy adds a tangible and symbolically sacred dimension to the spot.

Yet beyond the temple gates are scenes as tragic and shocking as any you will find in all of India. Because Bodh Gaya is the only real tourist attraction in the entire province of Bihar, the great poverty center of the sub-continent, families abandon their physically and mentally disabled kin here to fend for themselves as beggars on these dusty streets. The wretched and conniving also venture here like moths to the flame of the ever-present white tourist buses.

In its introduction to the region, the Lonely Planet Guide to India notes: “The extreme poverty surrounding Bodh Gaya make tourist buses and private cars targets for dacoits (bandits), who periodically use mock accidents and road works to stop vehicles. There has also been an alarming rise of banditry and violence aboard trains, despite an increasing military presence.” You find no such warnings for any other region in India, not even the disputed and terrorist prone territory of Kashmir, or the slums of Calcutta.

Such is the tension awaiting the traveler venturing to the real Axis Mundi of Buddhism: an odd, even surreal mixture of the sacred and the profane. I hold memories of attending the morning meditations with hundreds of monks from around the world, the air rich in the sent of incense and the sound of ringing bells; of hundreds of baritone voices chanting in unison. I felt the exhilaration of a living culture—of a deep breath, of being in the “now.”

But the exhilaration is tempered by any number of indelible images: gnarled and aged hands grabbing at me through the temple fences, innumerable polio children dragging their limp legs behind them across stone courtyards, the beggars swarming in droves, murmuring like zombies, “Hello, mister. Hello, mister.” And then there are the ever-present con men playing on the sensibilities of those whose journey here holds deep spiritual significance.

The experience actually hardened me. I took one step closer to becoming the “Ugly American.” Wherein I find the central irony of this adventure: my conscious efforts that led me to seek out this sacred pivot point almost felt like a karmic drain. In confronting such unimaginable misery beyond my ability to remedy only acted to desensitize me further to human suffering. Which leads to a secondary irony: the Buddha’s quest was for a path to end human suffering—a middle way between a devotion to pleasure and to pain. Yet today, the Diamond Throne is a grand kaleidoscope of human suffering.

The Dali Lama has taught that the truly strong can find enlightenment anywhere; they can find Buddha in the basement, if you will. Pilgrimages and sacred sites are for the rest of us, for the would-be spiritual travelers. I have traveled to sacred sites all over the world, from Machu Picchu to St. Peters, and I always leave with a slightly altered perspective on the physical presentation of the human spirit. A journey to Buddha’s Bodhi Tree is sure to make an impression on any traveler—that impression just might not be what you are expecting.

THE TAO OF GENESIS

“In the beginning God created the Heaven and the earth.” –Genesis
“The nameless was the beginning of heaven and earth.” --Tao Te Ching

INTRODUCTION
One of the first steps on the journey towards civilization is for a people to develop a story of creation: a tale of how this existence came to be, and what role we as individuals play in the grander scheme of the universe. Creation stories are the bedrock of every religion, and they can often provide some of the most profound insights into the inner psychology of a culture. In an effort to better understand the ideological differences which separate Eastern and Western civilization, this report will offer an ideological analysis of the biblical creation story of Genesis compared to the antithetical philosophy of no-creation found in the Taoist book of the Tao Te Ching.

In the beginning…
The universe of the bible began with the conscious act of an all-powerful god. “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” An interesting point to begin this inquiry is to recognize that the Christian god existed prior to creation. This notion of a timeless entity responsible for all that will ever be may account for the only similarity between Christian and Taoist ideology. One of the salient characteristics of Taoist belief is that the universe was never created. In the words of the great scholar of mythology, Joseph Campbell, for the Taoists “there never was a time when time was not.”

Where Christians posit the act of creation onto a conscious entity, a god that predates the heaven and the earth, the Taoist recognize a timeless and unnamable entity that has existed for eternity. The closest statement of creation we find in the Tao Te Ching is this lone passage, “The nameless was the beginning of heaven and earth.”

Division and unity
The god of Genesis created the heaven and the earth in six days, and his first task in this monumental undertaking provides a central breaking point between Eastern and Western religious thought: God started by dividing. “And God said, let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that is was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.”

The creation story of Genesis is about dividing and categorizing; about naming and defining the differences within creation. “And out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.”

This process, or even the concept of a universe divided, categorized, and named simply cannot fit within Taoist philosophy. The most popular symbol in Taoism, the Yin and the Yang, is a metaphorical representation of the inherit unity of opposites. Implied in the symbol is a belief that something cannot exist without nothing: man without woman, up without down, dark without light. They are all as one, essential aspects of the same universal force—which cannot be named.

The universe of the Tao Te Ching is an inherently interdependent organic whole, an uncarved block holding within it the unity of opposites. “The way is forever nameless. Though the uncarved block is small, only when it is cut are there names. Thus something and nothing produce each other.”

Continued on posting: The Tao of Genesis Part II

FELLOWSHIP ANNOUNCEMENT

I am pleased to announce the appointment of Jonathan Duncan in the new position of campus Global Studies Fellow. This Fellowship is a one year pilot project with the goal of bringing an enhanced global perspective to campus life and the college’s curriculum. Jonathan comes to Westminster with a great deal of international experience. Working as a photojournalist he has traveled through and documented the geography and culture as well social and environmental issues of over thirty countries around the world. He has served on the faculty of Huxley College of Environmental Studies and the Art Institute of Portland. Most recently he held the position of Executive Director of the International Institute of Ecotourism. Over the next year Jonathan will work to organize a series of special events and multi-media lectures focusing on global trends, cultural geography, and international relations. He is also available as a faculty resource and guest speaker. Please help me welcome Jonathan to the campus community, and don’t hesitate to contact him directly with any questions. He can be reached at campus extension 2811, or at jduncan@westminstercollege.edu
--Cid Siedelman, Provost, Westminster College

New Article Coming: What is Wrong With Central Africa?