This website needs some repairs! Photography temporarily unavailable, but should be back up soon.

Extracts from the final chapters of Adam Hochshild’s excellent book, “Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves.”

• When sympathizers in Birmingham celebrated emancipation in 1838 at a public breakfast, a speaker referred to the slaves’ “relying on their own peaceful persevering efforts for the removal of every vestige of their oppression,” ignoring the fact that these efforts had the most impact when they were anything but peaceful.

For many Britons, the idea that emancipation had sprung from the benevolence of a wise elite was deeply comforting. Such confidence in British good intentions was gradually transformed into justification for more than a century of conquests and colonialism in Africa and a dramatic and often bloody expansion of British imperial holdings in India and the Far East.

• Leaders of Britain’s working class movements were usually against slavery, but they distrusted the politics of aristocratic benevolence, and modern critics have occasionally echoed them. Freeing the slaves, they have charged, was a much easier pill for the country’s ruling elite to swallow than permitting trade unions, banning child labor, recognizing the rights of the Irish, and allowing all Britons to vote. And all this fuss about the slaves in the West Indies helped distract the public from the oppression of labor at home. The first point is certainly true. But the second is not, for, once awakened, a sense of justice is something not easily contained. It often crosses the boundaries of race, class and gender. The movement’s impact spread far more widely than the pious Evangelicals among its early backers ever wished for. If slaves should have rights, why not women? If the brutal working conditions of slavery should be outlawed, why not those in British factors?

• To the British abolitionists, the challenge of ending slavery in a world that considered it fully normal was as daunting as it seems today when we consider challenging the entrenched wrongs of our own age: the vast gap between the rich and poor nations, the relentless spread of nuclear weapons, the multiple assaults on the earth air and water that must support future generations, the habit of war. None of these problems will be solved overnight, or perhaps even in the fifty years it took to end British slavery. But they will not be solved at all unless people see them as both outrageous and solvable just as slavery was felt to be by the twelve men who gathered in James Phillips’s printing Shop in George Yard on May 22, 1787.

A bit of a prolonged absence on the blog. A few links for the morning hours.

1. Provide skills NOT just finished technology

2. Ssozi, aka an African Timer, is also raising capital funding here for a project to help rural farmers in his community.

3. Tech@State live streaming. Connecting tech to US State Department’s development and diplomacy goals.

Over at Women of Kireka, Jenny Groza, our newest intern hailing from NYC, has arrived in Kampala. Women of Kireka artisans are also busting out some beautiful new designs that we’ll be launching in September/October. Finally, we’re moving towards an online store for all your individual purchases!

My heart goes out to everyone in Kampala affected by the bombings. I find it hard to believe that this happened – for external or internal political reasons or otherwise.

*Edit: Here’s a brief one from the Atlantic. Al-Shabab taking ownership. Uganda seems like a very odd place for them to ‘strike’ regardless. Either way, security will need to be ramped up for the AU meeting this month.

Over at MIT Global Challenges. My rapid and in-passing thoughts on the comments debate in a few lines:

Interesting thoughts. I would think – in order to reconcile both parties – we should be pushing for bilateral volunteer opportunities (despite the current VISA difficulties). One cannot overstate the importance of international travel and discovery for both sides of the equation – Ugandan, Canadian, Kenyan, American, etc. Perhaps we should be having that argument with our respective governments, rather than one over the inherent values of learning about other people and cultures (which are pretty obvious).

A book I have been editing (and published in) finally out and about.

On the topic of the fast arriving World Cup. I have attended several games around the world these past few years. The most memorable by far was in Kosovo. Just after independence; a game between Mitrovica and a Southern town. Old rivalries, all men, Peja beer, red and black. The fascination is more in the enthusiasm than the game. Standing at the front of the crowd on the banister between field and bleacher, young men whip up a frenzy. Olé, Olé Olé!; crass Albanian chants; human waves; massive flags. From an hour before to hours after, not a moment of silence. The streets are packed with fans streaming through bars and cafes.

Recently in Antalya, an Istanbul team versus a local team were battling for a spot in the upper-level league. The local team had notoriously wild fans. The policemen kindly ushered us away from the packed bleachers to an emptier section. Next door: cheerleaders moving the crowd who eventually threw water bottles at us while bellowing, “stand up! Cheer!” The opposing crowd with a wave across the stadium and floating half-bleacher sized flags across their colored red mass. Families and the reasonable slinking out a few minutes before the announced loss of the game to avoid any retaliation.

Games in Kenya and Uganda lack no enthusiasm either. A game in Nairobi saw white gates being thrown out of the bleachers into the field in protest of a referee’s decision. A game in the outskirts of the city complete only with khat and smuggled cans of beer.

In my final year of university studies, I took a class on “Middle Eastern Culture.” A terrifying broad title, we focused primarily on Iran, where our professor grew up. One of the articles we read detailed the role of sports in building relationships between countries (Iran and the US in this case). Despite the (often violent) rivalries existing between teams, there is a satisfying opportunity to temporarily settle surface differences in the football field.

I am currently writing an article about new trends in psychosocial support in the field of development. If anyone has done significant work in this, particularly in post-conflict zones, I would appreciate your insight. Kindly drop me an email at siena.anstis@gmail.com.

I was thinking about previous work in Kenya a few days ago and wanted to re-post this story I wrote in September. Out of the short time spent in North East Province, it contains many of the valuable lessons I learned in regards to the complex relationship between culture, climate change and economy:

The sandy track cutting through Kenya’s northeast province is marred by the corpses of cows, goats and donkeys. The drought has sucked all color leaving the landscape a singular shade of gray. Global warming has scarred this region. Somali pastoralists, the main community in this barren desert, cannot remember a drought this severe. It has not rained for over a year.Nomadic pastoral communities depend on water and green pastures to maintain their livestock and the worsening conditions pose a drastic threat to their pastoral lifestyle. Many are succumbing to this pressure and “dropping out” of pastoralism, relocating to towns destitute and without work experience. The United Nations Institute for Environmental and Security Studies estimates that by 2010 there will be 50 million such “climate refugees.”

Mobile schools – secular pre-schools which follow these groups as they move to find pasture and water for livestock – are an attempt to help nomadic communities develop more options as the climate becomes increasingly hostile. “Security is now seen [by pastoral communities] in children’s education,” says Kassim Ali, Chief of Wajir South, a region in Kenya’s North East Province (NEP). Currently, NEP has the lowest primary school enrollment rate at 14.5 per cent, compared to 70 per cent national average.

Understandably, the pastoral lifestyle makes accessing mainstream education difficult. Children are constantly moving as families search for pastures and water. While children are taught Islamic Studies for six to seven hours a day in the Islamic school called dugsi, few communities have prioritized – or have access to – secular education.

Supported by two local organizations, Nomadic Heritage Association (NOHA) and Education for Marginalized Children of Kenya (EMACK), mobile schools have drastically changed nomadic communities’ views of secular education. Mobile schools, equipped by a trained pre-school teacher from the community, ensure that children learn the basics of reading, writing and counting in the national languages, Kiswahili and English.

The existing three mobile schools in the region, first founded in 2005, now host 55 students. Over 30 students have graduated from the mobile school program and are now attending boarding schools in neighboring towns. “We are illiterate, but since schools came we can now read and write. It has been very empowering,” says Abdullahi Sheikh Ahmed, chairman of one of the mobile schools.

Farah Olad, EMACK’s Deputy Chief of Party, comes from a community near the Somali border. When he visits the mobile schools, he brings water and biscuits for the children. His concern over the worsening drought is palpable. “I do not think Somalis will ever say they are fed up [with their lifestyle], they would go into a war-torn country to keep going,” says Olad, “But, change is complex. Nomadic pastorals are beginning to appreciate what opportunities school brings, such as improving their own livestock, initiating small businesses and lobbying on environmental issues.”

“The situation is dehumanizing,” says Alex Alusibia, Chief of Party at EMACK, about the drought. He has been working with the Kenyan government to register the schools in a feeding program to ensure that children have regular access to food. He is also lobbying for an emergency food aid component that would be included in every mobile school.

Culture also plays a strong role in limiting children’s access to school. Ebla Abdullahi, a 10-year-old Somali girl, wants to transfer into a boarding school this year and become a teacher. Eventually, she wants to return to her community and teach. However, as tradition dictates, Farah expects that she will be married by the end of the year. When women marry, the other family pays a “bride-price” to her family, making her a valuable tool both economically and socially.

Alusibia says the government has been very responsive and is hoping to deploy the program inKenya’s 191 arid lands district. The situation in these areas is much the same: herders remain marginalized from mainstream society and increasingly threatened by the changing environment. Without education, they will be left poor and unrepresented.

Education offers choice, both economic and cultural. The next generation of young Somali pastoralists will have the potential to work in villages and towns or care for livestock, if not both. Young women will have reason not to marry young and will be able to better provide for their children when they do settle down.

Published here.