My Africa Today

Swahili is the most commonly spoken African language — it is the chief trade language of East Africa and is the first language of at least 70 million people living in areas such as Kenya, Tanzania, Congo, and Uganda, according to the team working on Kilinux, the Swahili Localization Project. Alberto Pascual, the technical project coordinator for Kilinux, said the release is primarily focused at Tanzanians, as there are strong regional differences in Swahili, but the team is working with groups in Kenya to make modifications for Kenyan Swahili. A Microsoft spokeswoman said that Windows and Office are not available in Swahili at present. Infrastructure problems have posed more of a challenge to the project than have technical problems, according to Pascual. “Infrastructure is more of a challenge than the technical things,” said Pascual. “Internet access is slow and we have three power cuts every week.

It is even difficult to make a phone call.” Transferring the OpenOffice.org code over the Internet only takes minutes in Europe, but can take hours in Tanzania, as high-speed internet connections such as ADSL are not yet available. Instead Web users have to rely on slow dial-up connections, said Pascual. The cost of Internet access is also an issue. Cats-net.com, an ISP in Tanzania, charges around $36 per month for 33.6Kbps dial-up Internet access, according to the company’s Web site. This is more than 10 percent of the average income of an educated professional. Professors at the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania earn $300 per month, Pascual said. Another challenge for the project has been translating computer terms into Swahili. Computer terminology is not included in the Swahili language and the team has found it difficult to find people who understand enough about computers to do the translation.

To translate terms, such as bookmark and download, the translators first needed to understand what the physical result of carrying out this action was and then find a word in the Swahili language which could describe this. “If you translated download directly it would mean to unload food from a truck,” said Pascual. “We needed to understand the concept, and then go back to the language and match the concept — this took a long time.”

The initial release of Jambo OpenOffice, which follows four months work, is a test version. This initial version will only work on the Linux operating system, but the final release, which is due in February 2005, will also work on Windows. Once the final version is available, the Kilinux team may have a difficult job explaining the advantages of open-source software as software piracy is rife, said Pascual. “People here don’t buy Microsoft licences, so free software is a difficult concept to explain as they think Microsoft is also free,” said Pascual. As Internet access is slow and expensive, distribution of Jambo OpenOffice is likely to be manual. The team plans to hand deliver CD-ROMs of the February release to primary schools, so that Tanzanian school children can use the software, said Pascual.

The Swahili localisation project has been funded by the Swedish International Development Agency and the University of Dar es Salaam (UDSM). The project has been coordinated by the Department of Computer Science at UDSM, the Institute of Kiswahili Research and Swedish consultancy IT+46.

The Federal Government of Nigeria has reaffirmed its interest for acquisition of nuclear technology, saying its aspiration to develop nuclear technology capability may be realised within the next 10 years.

Presenting Nigeria’s case at the 50th regular session of the General Conference of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), at the weekend, the Special Adviser to the President on Energy, Prof. Anthony Olusegun Adegbulugbe, quoted President Olusegun Obasanjo as expressing optimism that Nigeria would be able to generate electricity from her own nuclear power plants in about a decade from now.

The special adviser said although the country was fully committed to the spirit and letter of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, it would, however, strive to build nuclear plants and to derive maximum benefits from its application for power generation.

“The Federal Government hereby reiterates her commitment to utilizing nuclear science to solve some of her developmental problems”, he said.

According to him, the recent establishment of the Nigerian Atomic Energy Commission (NAEC) to coordinate activities leading to the development nuclear technology capacity is a reaffirmation of the country’s determination to deploy the facility for purely peaceful applications.

He said the President while inaugurating the Board of the NAEC, had charged the body to develop and implement a proactive energy programme, which would lead to the generation of electricity from nuclear power reactor within the next 10 -12 years.

While assuring the international community of the country’s readiness to abide by safety standards, the presidential adviser said Nigeria had “set in motion the process to fast-track the development and deployment of nuclear power plants for electricity generation in the country”

To give vent to the country’s quest for nuclear technology capability, he said the President last July charged the board of the NAEC to take on the primary responsibility for the formulation and implementation of the country’s nuclear energy programme.

Adegbulugbe said the country had embarked on a number of preparatory activities that was necessary to launch it into the nuclear age, among which were the strengthening of nuclear regulatory framework and cooperating with the IAEA in observance of international treaties on nuclear non-proliferation.Relevant Links

He solicited the continued support of IAEA in fostering regional cooperation towards effective utilization of some of the nuclear technology projects, which included the Gama Irradiation Plant, (a multi-purpose facility for industrial and research applications located in Abuja) and a miniature neutron source reactor in Zaria.

The presidential adviser said Nigeria had benefited immensely from the agency’s support to the African Regional Cooperative Agreement for Research, Training and Development (AFRA) related to nuclear science and technology in education and training.

He said the country is currently engaged in the mobilization and information programme aimed at enlightening the public on the benefits of the peaceful use of nuclear energy in electricity generation, agriculture, and health care delivery and pest control.

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Nairobi

Two of the world’s richest nations - the US and Britain - together rake in more than Sh270 million each year from Kenyans in visa application fees.

And not all people who pay the money end up travelling; many are turned away- without a visa or refund.

And they will have to pay the application fee again if they reapply.

The press attaché at the US embassy in Nairobi, Ms Jeniffer Barnes, confirms that the mission interviews about 24,000 Kenyans every year for all types of non-immigrant visas, most of them for visitors and tourists. About 4,000 applicants are interviewed annually for immigrant and diversity (Green Card) visas.

Ms Barnes says the mandatory $100 (Sh7,200) visa fee “covers the cost of processing visa applications” while an extra $20 (Sh1,440) is a reciprocity fee for a visitor’s visa.

This means that the 28,000 Kenyans who annually apply for US visas pay more than Sh200 million to the US government.

This is a conservative figure because some types of visa attract higher charges.

At the British high commission, press officer Stella Ondimu says the mission does not have records of how many Kenyans apply for visas to travel to the UK every year.

But figures released two years ago showed that the consular section interviewed between 45 and 60 people every working day. If the higher figure were applicable today, this would translate to more than 15,000 applicants each year, paying a non-refundable fee of Sh4,700 each. This would translate to about Sh70 million annually.

Both the British and the American visa fee totals are worked out on a much lower scale than actually collected because the calculations do not take into account that some visa types attract much higher fees.

According to Ms Barnes, the processing fee “is charged because Kenya charges US citizens to issue a tourist visa. Kenya charges US citizens $50 (Sh3,600) for a single-entry, three-month visitor’s visa. Our fee is for a visitor’s visa, which normally is multiple-entry and 12 months in validity.”

The application fee is a requirement of the US law, she adds.

On if the US could consider lowering the fees and if unsuccessful applicants could get a refund, the official says there is no provision in the US law allowing refunds.

The US Congress, she explains, would have to authorise the embassy to refund application fees in case a visa was denied.

Ms Ondimu stresses that “the charges levied are for processing the papers, and whether or not one gets the visa, work has been done.

“Visa fees are set by the government department responsible for visa issuing services overseas. Fees are charged to assist with the costs of processing an application and are fixed globally… the fee is the same regardless of the nationality of the applicant or the country in which he or she applies.”

All people seeking entry into the UK, she points out, must show that they meet the relevant provisions of the UK immigration rules.

But she says the mission does not keep statistics of how many Kenyans enter the UK annually.

On reports that applicants, including senior government officials, are sometimes harassed, Ms Ondimu explains: “Understanding the demands on Kenya government officials and other VIPs, we currently accommodate them with special processing procedures designed to ensure that their visa applications are processed expeditiously.

“Government officials and other VIPs usually use their contacts within the embassy to help facilitate this process.”

On complaints over the treatment of applicants, Ms Barnes denies that consular officials harass or delay the applications of Kenyans seeking to travel to the US.Relevant Links

“A primary goal of the consular section of the US embassy is to provide fast and courteous service to all visa applicants,” she says. “Our customer service survey indicates that we achieve this goal.”

Reminded about the incident in June in which 77 people were arrested but later released without charges being preferred against them, she says they were seized after being found to have engaged in fraud to have their visa applications processed.

“Without going into details, the type of activity engaged in by these individuals was illegal under both the US and the Kenyan laws,” she says.

The arrested people were initially accused of being members of a ring of fraudulent visa applicants.

The frustrations are not peculiar to Kenyans wishing to travel to the US and Britain. But there are other foreign missions whose visa application charges are moderate and in which reports of harassment or other complaints are minimal.

China, for example, which in recent years has proved a popular destination for Kenyans, charges a relatively modest fee - Sh2,500 for the double-entry visa and Sh3,800 for the multiple one.

An official of the embassy’s public affairs department says that although there has not been cases of rejection of applications from Kenyans, a refund of the fee would be guaranteed.

Government-sponsored students are exempted from the visa application fee, the official says, adding that the exemption is part of the two countries’ development cooperation.

But self-sponsored students are expected to pay a token Sh2,200 if they show proof that they agree on the fees charged by the institutions they are going to.

The charge is even lower in the case of Japan for the various categories of visa. And money is not paid upfront, but until the visa is processed when one is asked to pay it on collection, says an embassy official, Ms Oba Kozue.

A single-entry visa, the official adds, costs only Sh2,050, while a multiple one goes for Sh4,100.

She says that the charges are uniform for all categories of visitors, including students, except people on transit who are required to pay only Sh500.

The South African high commission charges no fee to Kenyans wishing to travel there for whatever reason. The country has of late become a preferred destination for Kenyan businesspeople and those seeking medical treatment and further education.

A good turn deserves another, so the old adage goes, and since Kenyan missions treat those wishing to visit the country with decorum, it may only be expected that other countries will reciprocate, says an official at the Nyayo House offices of the immigration department.

There have been many complaints about the US and Britain in particular mistreating visa applicants or denying them entry for no good reason.

For instance, Livestock and Fisheries minister Joseph Munyao early this year came face to face with the grim reality of the frustrations many Kenyans undergo in pursuit of a visa to the US. The VIP treatment he expected was not there, and he was forced to join a long queue of people waiting to have their fingerprints taken and to be searched.Relevant Links

After 30 minutes on the queue, the minister stormed out in a huff.

A public affairs officer at the embassy, Mr Robert Charles Kerr, says that apart from government officials travelling to the US on official business, visa applicants, including Cabinet ministers, are not exempted from the rigid visa security requirements.

Mr Kerr stresses that for security reasons, all visitors to the US embassies around the world, including American citizens, must pass through the security checks.

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AFIG is currently raising the Atlantic Coast Regional Fund (“ACRF”, the “Fund”), a $100 to $200 million regional fund focused on 28 countries on or near the African Coast of the Atlantic Ocean from Morocco to Angola (the “Region”). The Fund will target strong growth companies operating in West and Central Africa, preferably with a regional scope. ACRF will consider investments in all sectors, with particular focus on industrial firms, financial institutions and companies investing in infrastructure and other related sectors. Target companies will be mature and cash-flow generative companies operating in sectors with high entry barriers and/or enjoying market dominance. In addition, target companies will exhibit a proven track record in terms of managerial competence, satisfactory and measurable performance and a solid business plan. ACRF expects to generate a net Internal Rate of Return of 20% - 25% in US$ terms, resulting in returns in excess of two times invested capital. Geographic Focus The Region targeted by ACRF is defined as follows: * Western Africa encompassing the 15 Economic Community of West African States (“ECOWAS”) countries, plus Mauritania and Morocco * Central Africa encompassing the 6 CEMAC countries, plus the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda and Angola.

In August 1923, David Ndahani, an Anglican pastor-in-training, came before the Kongwa church court in central Tanganyika to accuse his wife, Nenelwa, of adultery. They had been married in a Christian ceremony some years earlier, but Ndahani had never fully paid the bridewealth he owed to Nenelwa's relatives. Nenelwa, disgusted with her husband, had in early 1923 left her conjugal home to live with her parents. Before the church court that August day, David Ndahani said nothing about the unpaid bridewealth. He complained that Ezekiel, a church teacher, had cuckolded him. His accusation led the church court to dismiss Ezekiel from his duties; the errant wife, Nenelwa, was ordered to submit to Ndahani. But on Christmas Day 1923, David Ndahani himself confessed to an adulterous relationship with the communicant Elizabeti. Elizabeti had spent several nights outside Ndahani's door, loudly accusing him of sinning with her. Kongwa missionaries brokered a détente between Ndahani, Elizabeti, and her husband, Ishmael, committed their agreement to writing, and posted the notice on the church door. They hoped thereby to chasten the adulterous communicants. By 1929, however, Ndahani was in prison for thievery, and the missionaries were lamenting that "adultery was the norm rather than the exception."1 1
In Tanganyika, churchmen gained control of converts' conduct by keeping records. Their bureaucracy was meant to formalize spousal relationships, making sexual behavior subject to outside authority. But lovers also represented themselves. Self-interested litigants such as David Ndahani sifted through their spouses' marital and social relationships, looking for evidence that could capture the church courts' attention. They actively recast conjugal arguments over bridewealth, residence, and other issues, using the language of the courts to make their marital debates look like simplified morality plays. In Vicente Rafael's nomenclature, litigants such as Ndahani and Elizabeti "contracted" administrative power, adopting some of its nomenclature while also shaping its hold over them.2 They followed churchmen's script while also molding the courts' efforts to regulate their lives. 2
It is the theatrical work of agency that the scholarship on African legal history ignores. Legal history in Africa has too often been conceived as a clash between the textualized, bureaucratic practice of modern governance and the oral, flexible mentalité.3 Sean Hawkins's Writing and Colonialism in Northern Ghana, for example, studies the "encounter between the LoDagaa and 'the world on paper.'"4 Before colonial conquest, says Hawkins, LoDagaa social order was flexible and negotiable: conjugal relationships and ethnic identity were crafted out of the back and forth of human interaction. Colonial rule worked to "subjugate and regulate [this] oral culture and force it within the conceptual framework of a literate society."5 In legal writs, in ethnographic writing, and through mapmaking, colonial officials used foreign categories to gain control over the changeable LoDagaa world. This "world on paper," Hawkins argues, was divorced from the real world; its simplified categories belonged to the British and their successors in government. Peter Pels follows a similar analytical line in his study of Catholic marital regulations in eastern Tanganyika. Where Luguru personhood was in reality built up through human relationships and ritual processes, Catholic missionaries sought to create individuals to convert and discipline. They fixed Luguru people's names on church registers, charted their life cycles, and plotted their biographies around a standard set of legal events. This individualized morality, writes Pels, was "untrue" and "in direct opposition to the context of reality."6 Like Hawkins, Pels argues that legal bureaucracy was a vehicle by which foreign modes of subjectivity were imposed on Africans. 3
The distinctions that scholars make between the real, oral world and the artificial, textualized practice of governance have shaped the discipline of African history more generally, not only in its analytical agenda but also in its methodology. The record books that church and government officials kept are catalogues of decisions made, sins disavowed, and judgments rendered. They make complicated human situations look deceptively simple. Scholars of legal history have therefore wondered about the extent to which court records can convey real insights into people's lived experiences. Legal historians of England lament that plaintiffs and witnesses couched their statements to correspond with the protocols that governed the court.7 Africa's scholars likewise worry that court transcripts are "but a shadow of a much more complex understanding of wrongs and the complex set of interactions that actually went on in court."8 The discipline of African history was, at its founding in the 1960s, conceived methodologically as a foray into oral research. Jan Vansina's 1965 book Oral Tradition argued that historians could, by excavating the original text from the accretions of later generations, engage directly with the precolonial African past through the spoken word.9 Vansina's book set out an agenda for Africa's scholars to pursue. Of the twenty-one articles printed in the first two volumes of the journal History in Africa (1974 and 1975), ten considered the methodology of oral history.10 By the 1980s, a new generation of Africanist scholars were problematizing the notion of oral tradition.11 But the emphasis on African "voices" remained. In the 1980s and 1990s, a flurry of "life history" publications heralded the methodology of oral history as closer to real African experience than any text produced by European bureaucrats could be.12 4
By marking real life off from the written record, scholars have made it possible to identify an apparently authentic repository of African history. But the identification of African history with orality has made it hard to see how texts could shape Africans' relationships, form their imaginations, and lead them to act. The bookkeepers of central Tanganyika were not standing back from real life. Nor were church archives located in a textualized otherworld. Record books reached outside the archives' walls, and reformed Africans' real-life relationships. British missionaries and church elders regularly called errant parishioners before the courts, asking them to live up to the promises they had made on paper. Using their lists of decisions made and loyalties declared, church officials invited adherents to conform their lives to the book, to orient their behavior to accord with the model portrayed in the record. As distilled, clarified models of conduct, missionaries' lists and record books gave Africans characters to play in the real world. And Africans played into Europeans' archetypes. They signed their names to missionaries' wedding registers and wrote notes confessing their sins. Some of them took missionaries' characters off the page, restaging textualized ideas, sentences, and plots for their own purposes. In front of church courts, husbands and wives reinterpreted nonmarital sexual relationships as adultery. Through their representational work, litigants roped missionaries into their private arguments over marital rights and obligations. As actors within missionaries' morality plays, Africans obligated churchmen themselves to play out a part. 5
It was not only Africans who recast their characters. Historians have shown that litigants in medieval and early modern England were similarly contracting with bureaucratic procedure. In the fourteenth-century Christianity of York, litigants Agnes Huntington and Simon Munkton bent the church courts toward their own ends.13 Against Agnes's wishes, Simon was planning to sell the land she had inherited from her father. Agnes knew that the church courts would annul marriages only in cases where a technical flaw could be shown to invalidate the original marriage vow. In court, therefore, she produced evidence to show that she had married another man before she pledged herself to Simon. For his part, Simon argued that Agnes's unwillingness to cohabit with him showed her to be an adulteress. He hoped that the court would confirm his marital rights. Both litigants used the framework of canon law to recast an argument that was really over the disposition of Agnes's property. With examples such as this one in view, historian Lawrence Stone has described the law of marriage and divorce in medieval and early modern England as a "fig leaf inadequately covering the very different reality of human behavior."14 Couples desiring a clandestine marriage in the early eighteenth century could obtain official-looking certificates from clergy jailed at the Fleet Prison in London. By 1740, at least half of Londoners were being married in a clandestine fashion.15 The Marriage Act of 1753 put the Fleet marrying shops out of business by nullifying any marriage not carried out by regular clergy, and by requiring couples to sign the parish register. Those who counterfeited marriage registers were liable for the death sentence. Even this reformed bureaucracy, however, could not squelch lovers' efforts to secure a respectable married life. After the Marriage Act, prospective brides and grooms arranged clandestine marriages by seeking out accommodating parsons in anonymous urban churches. 6
Litigants such as Agnes Huntington, David Ndahani, and the lovers of early modern London were practicing theater. They were reading the moral archetypes and the legal procedures outlined in church law as scripts, as directions on how best to play the courts. Litigants were not shuttling between a textualized, artificial legal process and a real oral world. The characters defined in church and government bureaucracy could be taken off the page and acted out, in a theater where church officials and litigants alike were bound to play a part. Litigants were representing themselves as wronged husbands or sinful penitents, and thereby generating social capital, making allies, and getting leverage over spouses and parents-in-law. 7
Seeing marriage litigation as a theatrical performance helps us rethink the analytical category agency. Africa's scholars have very often equated agency with resistance. Inspired by E. P. Thompson and James Scott, social historians in the 1970s and 1980s set out to document "the ongoing, if prosaic, struggle between peasants and those who sought to extract from them their labor, rent, food, and taxes."16 Where an earlier generation of scholars had celebrated Africans' heroic wars of resistance against white conquerors, social historians looked for resistance in the mundane: in the quotidian negotiations between plantation workers and their overseers, in independent church members' subtle appropriations of missionaries' symbols, and in workmen's efforts to defend their own conceptions of time against white employers' clocks.17 This focus on the mundane was made possible by the use of oral interviews, which lent a first-person immediacy to the analysis of everyday resistance. Critics have noted that the sovereign, self-aware, speaking agent celebrated in social history was largely derived from liberal political theory.18 By focusing attention on the relationship between resisters and oppressors, the resistance paradigm made it hard to see that colonized people were themselves divided by generation, class, and political theory.19 8
Social history needs to inquire into the anthropology of colonial power as vigorously as it has analyzed human agency. Colonialism in Africa was not simply an invasive force, working to subordinate African subjects. Neither was colonial power very often resisted by heroic agents who were self-consciously defending their ways of life. Colonial government most often worked through routine, by patterning Africans' marital, religious, and political identities in predictable forms. With identity cards, passbooks, and marriage registers, officials stereotyped Africans' shifting ethnic, conjugal, and social identities, so as better to discipline them as members of tribes, as wives, or as sinners. For Africans, the bureaucratic form of power was at once a structure constraining the possible range of action and an opportunity for novel forms of discourse. Africans leveraged themselves into the characters that Europeans defined, playing the characters delineated in court records and government writs. Through their theatrical work, African agents laid out courses of action for missionaries and government officials to follow. Legal bureaucracy was an instrument of colonial governmentality, but Africans could open up grooves of representation that shaped the courts' judgments. 9
English missionaries first settled in Ukaguru and Ugogo, in the protectorate of German East Africa (later the British protectorate of Tanganyika), in the late 1870s. From that time until the 1920s, when the postwar British administration inaugurated a system of African-run courts, missionaries exercised extensive legal powers over their converts' lives. The German colonial government was represented in central Tanganyika by a cadre of Swahili-speaking functionaries brought in from the Indian Ocean coast. They took little interest in Kaguru and Gogo people's marital disputes. Church courts were therefore virtually the only formal legal venue where antagonistic husbands and wives could redress their grievances. Confronted with converts' ceaseless marital arguments, church officials kept records on who had married whom, took notes on adultery cases, imposed fines, and suspended adulterers from communion. Their bureaucratic work solidified dynamic conjugal relationships, creating standards by which to judge deviant sexual conduct. But it was not only missionaries who were participating in the legal definition of adultery. African husbands and wives stereotyped their spouses' sexual and social relationships. They employed the legal categories authorized by missionary judges to reframe arguments about property, marital deference, or work. By accusing their spouses of moral indiscretions, litigants reconvened the church courts in their favor. 10


Nineteenth-century central Tanganyika was a place of uncertain environments and uneven opportunities. Its people were therefore entrepreneurial about their social relationships and ethnic identities.20 The people who came to be called the "Gogo" lived in the dry plains of the Rift Valley. Rainfall there was erratic and unevenly distributed, and the Gogo suffered at least nine killing famines during the nineteenth century. Different regions suffered more than others. During an 1888 trip through the eastern plateau, the missionary John Price found that hunger was "dreadful" at Chilomwa, but at Nayu, only five miles away, "there was said to be plenty of food."21 The disparate ecology of their homeland invited Gogo people to defend their local interests. Clan leaders, called watemi, did not acknowledge a coordinating political authority. "Each town is entirely independent of its neighbor, and they frequently amuse themselves by running off with one another's cattle," wrote Dr. Baxter in 1881.22 Ecology and economics did not encourage the inhabitants of the central plains to think of themselves as members of an overarching ethnic community. One popular account has it that Swahili-speaking caravanners named the "Wagogo" after the logs (Sw. gogo) that local people placed across caravans' path when negotiating for tribute. But the people named Gogo did not organize around frustrated outsiders' appellations. As late as 1927, British colonial officers were in despair over their political parochialism. Hugh Hignell, charged with creating a "tribal" authority in central Tanganyika, thought the Gogo chiefs were a collection of "petty despots." He doubted whether he could give "any outline of the composition of the Gogo tribe or any exposition of its original constitution."23