Third World Green Daddy 73: A brave new world

Recently my mom died at 76 years of age, a few weeks shy of 77.  Among all the emotions that I've been going through, an unexpected one that jumps out at me is the brevity of life.  Seventy-six years is a long time, and indeed my mom had me at 41, after living a whole lot.  I grew up with her reminiscences of a 1950s adolescence, ten or twenty years farther back from the memories of my friends' parents.  But after Mom died, sorting through her old documents, it seems like that time went by in a flash.  Here is her birth certificate, her baby footprints from the Beloit Hospital.  Here in three or four clippings is her 35-year career at the same textbook company.  The greatest volume of documents she retained are the letters from my dad in the late 1970s, before I was born and in a tone both familiar and unknown to me, who never knew my parents when they were childless and courting.  I feel this fleeting nature of Mom's life perhaps most strongly when I sing my boys to sleep with songs from the 1940s that my mother sang to me.  This sensation is strongest with My Prayer, recorded in 1939 by the Ink Spots, before my mother was even born, yet with a distinctly modern jazz feel to it (even more modern, in my opinion, than the very 50s-sounding Platters version that my mother was actually more familiar with).  There's something that blows my mind to think that this song I'm singing to my little guys in the 21st century, existed before my mother was even a gleam in her parents' eye.  And yet here it is, and here my mom isn't, and her whole life is captured in the span between when someone wrote the song and when I'm singing it today.

At the same time I'm haunted by my mother's continued presence in most things I do.  I prepare my self-evaluation for work, and all the accomplishments I'm detailing, all the things that happened this year, happened when she was alive.  Everything I recount is linked to a conversation with her or a funny email or a visit my mom made to Central America.  None of these interactions with my mom are recorded in my notebooks or files, but they're all that I care about now, and a lot of things that I'd tabbed as "very important" in old notebooks don't even matter anymore.  I finish reading a novel (Percy Jackson) to my boys that my mom started when she was still alive, that in fact she always jokingly complained about because Sam insisted on marathon reading sessions of it.  We go to Paulo's interminable Tae Kwon Do tournament in a sweltering stadium, that so pissed off my mother when she went last year.  I watch DVDs that she had ordered from Netflix before she died, finish paperwork she had started, stay in her house, just as she had arranged it.  My boys finish bags of jellybeans she had started to eat, we even get a Valentine letter from her three weeks after she has died.  I even sometimes debut a new bedtime song that I actually learned from her in my childhood and have kept stored in my head since.

I like this permanence after death.  I think the West Africans are onto something when they claim that our ancestors continue to accompany us long after their death.  My boys and wife and I talk to my mom still, I write to her in my journal, she's in our dreams.  I make mental notes to share funny anecdotes with her next time we talk on Skype.

For the past few years Mom was trying to get rid of her earthly possessions, which weren't many after a lifetime of minimizing purchases and engaging in frequent purges of accumulated junk.  She even joked that she didn't buy the big toilet paper package from Costco anymore, since she didn't know if she had that many shits left in her.  

Living without someone you love is impossible to prepare for.  It is to enter a world that has never existed before, for which there is no guidebook, no hints beforehand of how it will be.  Living without a parent is like traveling to a new country, but in the old days, before Google maps and the internet and even paper maps and guidebooks.  These days you can get to know all about a place even before you set foot there.  But in the really old days, like the Ibn Battuta and Marco Polo old days, traveling to a new place meant going in completely blind.  You just had to get there and figure your way around.  Even in my lifetime, it used to be that the guidebooks weren't all that comprehensive, and a lot of the actual discovering you had to do on foot once you got somewhere.

But navigating life without my mother has no guidebook.  I couldn't "get a taste" of it before she died, just to prepare myself.  Yeah, there are books about losing a loved one, but they're very general, and they're not the sort of thing you read about when your family member is alive.  No, it's simply impossible to truly imagine what life will be like without someone.  You can think it through intellectually, think, "Mom always took care of renewing my magazine subscription," or "Mom paid all the bills for her house," and of course you know that if Mom isn't around, you'll have to do those things yourself.  But as to how you will actually feel, how this world will feel, once that beloved person isn't around, you just can't even begin to prepare yourself for it until it happens.  And then it's too late to prepare--you just have to live it and deal with it.  I've tried to apply lessons from dealing with my mom's death to anticipate and prepare for the death of other loved ones.  But I can't do it, I simply can't imagine in any meaningful way living without someone that is currently a part of my world.

My mom and I didn't even talk that frequently, at least not compared to some other families I know.  We lived thousands of miles apart, and I would call her maybe every few days.  We would exchange short emails almost daily, but sometimes there would be a week where I wouldn't hear from her at all.  She had her own life, her own things that kept her busy.  So the absence in my life isn't a logistical thing, because even when she was alive, the great majority of my time was spent not talking to her directly.  No, the absence is in the world, in just knowing that she's no longer out there, doing her thing.  If Rio de Janeiro or Shanghai or even Kinshasa ceased to exist, I would feel like the world, my world, were poorer without them, even though I've never been to any of those places.  In the same sense I feel less secure, less happy, without the knowledge that my mom is taking care of her little neighborhood in Chicago, going to her book club meetings, seeing plays, volunteering at the homeless shelter.  I feel like Chicago has lost a great piece of itself.

 My boys have been so noble and strong.  They have cried and felt sad, but they are also very attentive to me.  Particularly my middle boy Paulo is terrified by the idea of losing people, so he takes extra care of me since, according to him, I'm "not a kid anymore."  I don't have my two parents, so I'm not a kid.  He's more right than he imagines; there's nothing like losing your parents to make you feel adult, like you're thrown out on your own in the world. 

Even my newborn son, who came to the world two months after Mom left it, is linked to her.  I feel like she knew him; Mom was visiting us when Caro found out his sex, so she new he was Francisco before I did.  And Mom fell in love with his 3D sonogram photo.  When I see him sleeping with purpose, looking identical to me and his two brothers when we were infants, wearing my jacket from the early 80s, I feel that my mom does in fact know him.

I feel bad that I used to get so annoyed at certain things about my mom.  Her willful incompetence with electronics, little catchphrases she would use, her sometimes tempestuous moods.  Now that she's gone I wonder why I fussed so much about these small things, and I feel that this is yet another lesson she's teaching me.  I am not good at the subtle teaching of life lessons.  I'm constantly doing explicit lessons with my kids.  Counting numbers and reading of course, but also pointing out injustice, inconsistencies in certain ways of thinking, the presence or absence of certain differing perspectives in the movies and books we are exposed to.  I'm not good at leaving things unsaid and letting them figure stuff out for themselves.  I hope this doesn't hurt them in the long-run; the wisdom of the ages has long been transmitted through indirect lessons, Mr. Miyagi-style, as opposed to just coming out and saying things, and I think there's a lot of merit to this more subtle, self-led process.  As in-control and explicit as my mom was in many things, somehow she was really good at leaving me to figure out the big lessons by myself.  Now in her death I feel like I'm receiving her last lessons, of tolerance, unconditional love, understanding the unfathomable depth of each person. 

I hope that my mother read my love from my actions, since I wasn't too explicit or frequent in telling her how much I admire her, or what a cool person she is.  But I think she did, and beyond that I think a huge lesson for me is that parents don't need too much of that explicit validation and reinforcement.  Their joy is just seeing you grow up and take care of your own kids.  Their joy is to see you prosper, or even just to be the asshole you are naturally, but for a parent that's validation enough, that's the most important "I love you".  Mom had never expected to have a kid, so she used to tell me that every day she would wake up and thank God for this unexpected gift.

I hope too that my growing understanding of who my mom was, not just in my life but throughout hers, is also an homage and a fitting honor to her.  I am realizing that she learned how to be a mom as she went along.  When I was a little guy, she would joke to her friends and even to me that she wasn't much of a mother, that after forty-plus years of independent, single, professional life, she was entrusting a lot of the childrearing to my babysitter.  But this wasn't really true even back then, and she became more and more adept at raising me as the years went on.  She would seek out interesting stuff for me to do on the weekends, she would invite kids over from my class (both close friends and kids I didn't hang out with much, just to make sure they weren't being excluded), she would cook for and have fun with my buddies.  When I was a teenager she had a bit more free time and got more involved in the parent association at my school.  She seemed to perfect her arts when she became a grandmother, planning activities for my kids, making cookies, organizing birthday parties, and finding gifts and books that were just right for them.  I think Mom slowly gained confidence in her own ability as a mother, and I'm thankful that in her last visit with us she finally realized how important she was to my kids.

This is a propos to my own childrearing.  I too am growing and changing, learning how to be more patient, how to not just stimulate my boys intellectually but also show them love, take care of both physical and emotional needs.  Most of all I am learning, thanks in no small part to my evolving relationship with my mom, how to appreciate each kid for who he is, instead of getting annoyed by what they aren't.  With my sons and with others I am more and more amazed and delighted at the uniqueness of each person, and how we all make up a world that would be poorer without any one of us.

Just before my latest son was born, in a few hours that I had to go home and rest before we returned to the hospital, I had a weird quasi-dream, really more a semi-conscious reflection on the nature of life.  I thought that life was fleeting and unrepeatable, so that the highest use of a life is to make your mark, to tailor it like a great musical composition with a single, relentless pursuit of a given purpose.  Live out loud, don't just passively enjoy your loved ones or respond to external conditions.  Strive at all times to make this one life a great one.This is the Steve Jobs model; you can be a total jerk, morally and personally incoherent, apathetic to injustice or larger social issues, even totally neglect your family relationships, as long as you do something great, some intellectual or physical or artistic or even moral accomplishment.  You don't simply respond to the realities that life throws your way; you mold those realities, even deny them until they conform to the new reality that you make yourself.  Don't respond to life, make life respond to you!

I was surprised, even in my half-waking state, to come to this conclusion, since I am obviously so averse to it.  Lately I have been living my life in a much simpler, more family- and community-oriented way.  I have tried to live more consciously and just enjoy time with my loved ones.  I still try to excel in my work, and I do have grand projects that I pursue gradually, in my scarce free time, but I don't want to throw away other aspects of my life in the single-minded pursuit of some "higher" accomplishment.  The dream though made me wonder if this was a cop-out, an excuse for mediocrity.  Was my supposed commitment to family just a front for my fear of pursuing excellence?

Once again my mom has helped me to resolve this seeming impasse.  Mom billed herself as I see myself; committed to the unglamorous but ultimately fulfilling things like doing your work well, taking care of your family, meeting with friends, helping your community (and bringing others into that community that have been shut out).  She believed in high concepts of justice, of decency, of economic development and progress, of Godliness, but these were always tied very clearly for her to the "boring", everyday living of life in a coherent way.  Yes, she went to marches, she volunteered with the homeless, she advocated with elected officials, but all in an unassuming way; she didn't see herself as the centerpiece of any revolution.

And the story could have ended there.  She did good where she could in an unremarkable way, while Steve Jobs and his ilk are recognized for changing the world.  But after Mom's death, the Chicago Sun-Times published a feature article on her that highlighted all the ways she had touched people in her community.  All that incremental decency and life well-lived did in fact turn out to be rather remarkable. 

So what is the answer to my dilemma of whether to live life by making your mark, or rather by responding to life's demands and living decently?  My mom did one by doing the other.  She made her mark by responding to the world around her, working to right wrongs where she could, and enjoy the wonderful things that do exist.  Not all of us will get a feature article about us in a newspaper, but we can all copy this approach of effecting big change in a lifetime by living decently, day by day.

Alternative solutions for potable water

Here is a fascinating radio report on a researcher who figured out that you could make dirty water potable simply by putting it in the sun for a few hours.  He then tried to spread this technique in areas of the world where people didn't have a piped connection to potable water, and the report follows his successes and frustrations (mainly frustrations) in this quest.  You should listen to it to get the whole story, but basically it seems like, where people don't have access to wells, they'd rather have a piped system for clean drinking water installed, or if they do have piped water or wells but it's not clean, they'd rather improve their existing system to make it potable.  The researcher's solution of putting bottles in the sun is fine as a temporary fix, but it's less practical for a lot of people than the other temporary fix of boiling your drinking water.  And as for a long-term fix, it seems like people would prefer to invest their own resources and their political voice in getting a decent water system like I have where I live, instead of settling for drinking dirty water, even if it's been sterilized by the sun.

Leaving the US

Here is a fun little article about people from the US who have decided to live abroad, either for a short time or indefinitely.  Some cite political or economic reasons, and some are just looking to have a fun and interesting time.  It struck a special chord in me, because I left the US in 2005, and haven't really lived there on an intentional, full-time basis since then.  My job took me to Washington, DC in 2013, for what was supposed to be a few months but turned into two years; this was always a very temporary, precarious foot in the US, since we always thought we were going to be sent abroad just in the next few months.  Anyway, after so long outside of my country, I've really wanted to settle back there for a while now.  I just can't find a convenient time or way to do it.  So I really liked the last quote from the article, where someone who's been traveling abroad now feels both a newfound appreciation for all the good things in the US and a concern about the things that aren't going so well, and is eager to return.

Great power politics vs. narrow self-interests

This is an interesting article that does a lot of things.  On the one hand it signals the increased relevance of Great Power conflicts and politics, as expressed in the latest National Defense Strategy.  It contrasts this official strategy with President Trump's foreign policy areas of focus, as captured for example in his 2018 State of the Union address, which seems to prioritize the supposed threat represented by immagrants and terrorism (and North Korea), while downplaying Chinese and Russian aggression.

More incisively, the article explores the contrast between the US's longstanding foreign policy of defining its interests in such a way that many other countries identify with and support our interests for us, and the Trump administration's narrow definition of US interests in zero-sum, all-or-nothing terms.

In summary, this article echoes a few themes I explored in my blog about the book Rise and Fall of the Great Powers.  Namely, the renewed relevance of Great Power politics in 2018 as opposed to the 90s and early 2000s.  More importantly though, I was and continue to be worried about the danger of defining US interests in such a narrow way that we antagonize the rest of the world and become a hegemon indistinguishable from Russia or China (or the British Empire or Napoleonic France), ripe for the overthrowing by a coalition of discontents.  In the Atlantic author's words:

"America’s unique advantage is that it defines its strategic interests in a way that is compatible with the strategic interests of dozens of other powerful states—meaning, they want the United States to succeed. By insisting that the international order be free, open, democratic, and cooperative, the United States is offering something that appeals to a wide swath of people across all nations. Yes, the United States shouldered a disproportionate share of the burden for decades, but this was precisely why other nations treated it differently than the great powers and empires of old...

"But if the United States follows the examples of Russia and China and elects to define its interests so narrowly, it reduces the appeal of the American model of international order. Little would differentiate America from the other great powers that aspired to leadership, either now or in the past."

Upland red bearded rice

This is a fascinating story about a long-lost variety of rice originally from the southern US.  It was rediscovered in the country of Trinidad, where it was likely brought by slaves relocated from Georgia, who had won their freedom and land in Trinidad by siding with the British in the war of 1812.  It's great to see people getting interested in food and agriculture that might not otherwise be, and it's fascinating to see links between black American history, ethnobotany, and biodiversity.

African migration and brain drain

This article from the Atlantic discusses the positive aspects of out-migration for source countries.  Its argument rests heavily on a recent World Bank study finding that each migrant who leaves an African country equates to an additional $2100 in exports per year from that country, in addition to the remittances they send home.

This is fair to point out, and the article's point is well taken that sometimes we in the development sector are too dead-set on having people stay put where they are, and that we thus don't acknowledge the very positive contributions that out-migration can make to a country.  Likewise I agree that developed countries should allow freer movement of people into and out of our countries if we are really serious about equality, fairness, and above all free markets.  Why should financial capital be ever-freer to move around the world, when people are constricted in their movements to seek a better life?

But let's at least point out some holes in the logic and make some counterarguments.  Nobody can deny that the desire to migrate is a powerful force for a lot of people, as evidenced by the sheer numbers of people who do migrate.  But we also can't deny that most people don't migrate, due not only to restrictions on their ability to do so, but often because they simply don't want to.  (This alone would seem to justify development agencies' focus on making life better "at home", since most people in any community will stay there, not migrate).  Even those who do migrate often feel ambiguous about their decision, and many migrants return home (or plan to) as soon as they can, whether that's after three years working hard and saving, or after a long career abroad so they can retire in comfort in their home village.  I've been flabbergasted recently that a number of my friends' immigrant parents, people who I'd placed unambiguously in the ranks of die-hard, lifelong Chicagoans, have returned to their countries of origin to retire.  It reminded me at a very visceral level of how strong a pull is exerted by home.  I'm feeling it too, as I seek ways to start a life in Chicago after more than a decade living abroad.

I also think the Atlantic article cited above is too blithe about the reasons for migrating, making migrants out as unhurried Homo economicus making a cold monetary calculus.  But as profiled by a recent NYT article, many Central American migrants are not so much making a carefully pondered choice to seek economic opportunity elsewhere, but rather are desperately fleeing gang violence in their home countries.  Such situations are common as push factors for migrants throughout the world (usually also mixed with an economic impetus), but the Atlantic article doesn't consider this angle at all.  (Side note:  up until reading this NYT article, I was appalled to see that news coverage of the Central American migrant caravan, which is a public protest staged annually to draw attention to the plight of migrants, focused so much on President Trump's framing of it as a sort of military assault on the border that they missed the whole moral and religious theme that the organizers are trying to evoke.)

Again, this is not to diminish the agency of migrants, and the very real economic choices they make and real benefits they and their communities reap by their migrating.  But it is to say that the decision to migrate is often not purely economic, and migrants often have mixed feelings of elation to discover a new reality and seek new opportunities, tempered by nostalgia at leaving their homes and fear of the very real dangers they'll face abroad.

Okay, let's deal with the other, and in my view the bigger, problem with the Atlantic article.  $2100 a year is not much, even in most poor countries.  If an educated, motivated person stays in his or her country of origin and invests their time, effort, and money in their own business, or as part of the qualified workforce for someone else's business or working in government, then the value this person contributes to the economy will almost always be superior to $2100, and even to the remittances they might have sent home otherwise. 

I understand the Atlantic article's skepticism vis-a-vis "keeping people put" in a given place (they drive home their point with a straw-man argument tying such community development efforts to the slave trade and colonial corvee labor).  No one should oblige anyone else to remain in an intolerable stagnation, just to satisfy some utopic ideal of local development.  But at the same time, all successful countries do in fact implement policies precisely to keep their people put.  City governments like Columbus, Ohio or Palo Alto, CA or Naperville, IL do their best to attract and hold onto highly-qualified people and families, because they recognize that attracting human capital is always better than letting it go, even if those who leave were to send back a bit of money from time to time to their relatives back in Naperville.  I guess my point is that any place should seek a balance between getting people to stay put and hence develop that place, and of course offering people the freedom to move away.  In fact, many countries that have greatly benefited from migration seem to have done so by holding on to professionals and higher-income people who "contribute" more to the country, while allowing and even encouraging the poorer, less-qualified people to migrate away.  For Mexico in the 1990s, losing a doctor would be bad, but having a subsistence farmer send some of his sons to the US to work construction would decrease pressure on land in Michoacan, while increasing earnings beyond what those farmers'  sons could have gotten back home.  For Sweden or Sicily in the 1880s the calculus would have been similar. 

This has its limits though; at some point you want your country to develop, not just to send people abroad to prosper.  Let's think in concrete terms.  If a doctor from Niger migrates to France and makes a lot of money curing the ills of French people instead of curing Nigerien ills, then the improvement in health and wellbeing accruing to the French will be at the expense of the improvement to Nigerien health.  In this case, children and adults in Niger may die for lack of that doctor's care.  In the short term the deal may still come out in favor of migration to France, since the lives improved in France are "worth" more in terms of earning potential than those in Niger, and the doctor can capture some of this value added and even send it back home.  The problem is that, unless that doctor begins to act as if the Nigerien lives are worth just as much as the French lives, they never will be.  The Nigerien economy will continue to value French wellbeing more than Nigerien wellbeing, which means that the gap in productivity between the two countries will never be closed.  It's like when countries try to "develop" by attracting low-wage industries like apparel.  If their prime selling point is the low cost of their labor, then this model will never result in improved wages (and thus wellbeing) for the people of that country, because the only development occurring depends on wages remaining low.

To tie all this up, I'm going to bring the economic point back to the issue of violence and the not-so-rosy motives for migrating.  In Central America we see a very perverse dynamic, in which parents migrate to the US in order to make more money, send money back to their children, and thus "improve" their children's lives.  But right now what is happening a lot is that those kids remain in the care of doting, doddering, or overworked grandparents who for whatever reason can't provide them the structure they need for a healthy upbringing.  Or even worse, they stay with uncles or older siblings who may abuse them, throw them out, or feel resentful either at the imposition of more mouths to feed, or at their economic dependency on the kids' parents and their remittances.  Either way, you find kids who have a weak family structure, which in turn opens them up to all sorts of social ills--sexual promiscuity, drug use, violence, and gang membership.  The fact that they have more money thanks to the remittances only worsens their vices.  I'm not just making this up, doing a conservative diatribe yearning for simpler times.  No, these are trends that we see happening at a massive scale in Central America, which then fuel the conditions of generalized violence that push even more migrants out. 

I'm not saying that the particular dystopia that we've seen in Central America is happening or will happen in every poor country or every country that sends out migrants.  But it is another reminder that the Atlantic shouldn't be so flippant in its blanket endorsement of migration as a way to improve life in Africa.

In summary, I like the Atlantic's reminder that migration isn't always a bad thing for countries that send people abroad (and is certainly a boon for the recipient countries).  But let's not exaggerate.  Every place in every time needs to balance the need to relieve pressure on land and the job market, with the need to expand the opportunities that people themselves create by staying put.  That mix of how many people should migrate and how many should stay put will vary by country and by time period.  But let's not pretend it's an all-or-nothing question.

Anti-poverty programs in China

This is an interesting article about how China has drastically reduced poverty through a coordinated suite of social programs.  The problem is that the poor now often have more cash money, but are no longer able to produce their own food or otherwise be in charge of their own subsistence and wellbeing.  In short, they are less poor but more dependent.  This is a problem that faces many societies; indeed it seems to me that all economic development consists to some degree in trading autonomy and resilience for a sort of prosperous dependence.  Normally the population makes this shift more or less willingly, as people become more confident that their money will in fact be good, that the grocery stores will indeed have food, that their dependence is dependence on a system if anything more robust than the weather and traditional lifeways that had provided their livelihoods before.  In the case of China, it seems like the process has been accelerated and forced by the government, such that the opportunities of new city life don't always offset what the rural poor are forced to give up of their old lives.  And the article signals some early signs of unsustainability that suggest that the government may not be able in the long term to keep up the welfare payments to the relocated poor.  If this were to happen, the poor would have lost both their old rural livelihood and their new artificial life support.

Archbishop Laurent Monsengwo of Kinshasa

Here is a fascinating long-form profile of the Archbishop of Kinshasa (and thus the head of the Congolese Catholic Church), Laurent Monsengwo.  It's in French, but I think you can have your navigator translate it.

The current story is very complicated, and I don't entirely understand it, and I'm sure there are nuances, especially as regards the apparent divisions between the Church hierarchy from Eastern DRC and the Archbishop.  But my short take is that Monsengwo is speaking truth to power, demanding that the current president of DRC, who has held onto power for 17 years, follow through on signed commitments to open up the democratic process, step down, and hold elections.

Among many other things, this article makes me:

• want to learn about the "Zairean rite", an officially recognized variant of the Catholic liturgy (like the Eastern rite or the Malabar rite), and about all the other unique attributes of what seems to be a vital and fascinating Catholic religiosity in the DRC
• admire the Archbishop's command of a reported 15 languages!  (including Hebrew, Aramaic, and other classics)
• want to somehow support the struggles of the Church in DRC to bring democracy and dignity to a long-suffering people.  As I learn more about current events in the DRC, it seems like it's the first time in a long time that I've seen the institutional Catholic Church so clearly and vocally siding with the poor and the oppressed in a specific conflict.  It reminds me of Archbishop Romero's Church in 1970s El Salvador, and it's the role I think the Church is meant to play in the world.

Two very different takes on African history

A friend recently loaned me a book by Ryszard Kapuscinski called The Shadow of the Sun, in which he recounts decades spent from the 1950s to the 90s as the only Polish news correspondent in all of Africa.  As such he was present for many of the major moments in the independence and even the post-independence blues (Nigeria's coup d'etat that prefaced the Biafra War, for instance) of most of the countries in Africa.  His accounts are evocative, lyrical, and above all a pretty good primer on the recent history of lots of countries.  For instance, he gives in maybe ten pages a really good overview of German, then Belgian colonization of Rwanda and Burundi, then the numerous pogroms and civil wars that preceded the Rwandan genocide in 1994.

In general the tone and the level of detail are what you would expect of a journalist dropping in at the key moment.  Some very incisive observations and often a surprising understanding of a particular context and historical moment, but at the same time a lot of cliches and lazy or careless generalizations.  To his credit, Kapuscinski is for the most part free of the condescending, dismissive, scornful tone of many "Africa hands" jaded from seeing so much war and poverty and suffering.  He avoids racial essentialism and is in fact a fervent anti-racist, even drawing what I think are eloquent and well-argued parallels between the racism and dehumanization invented to justify the Atlantic slave trade, and its logical endpoint of 20th-century fascism and totalitarian murder (which he knew all too well as a Pole).  And then he intelligently and critically explains many direct consequences of centuries of slavery, racism, and then colonialism, in the form of extractive models of business and politics, and a pervasive sense of inferiority felt by Africans in the postcolonial age.

All that said, Kapuscinski does fall into sweeping generalizations very often.  He prefaces the book with a very wise caveat to the effect that he is not "reporting on Africa" or capturing the essence of an entire continent, but rather describing a very limited number of people and places and times that he has happened to get to know in different places in Africa.  And again, for a European in the 1950s and 60s, I think he maintains this spirit to a great deal.  But by my 21st-century eyes, the author is often guilty of something I've noticed in many journalists and just outsiders in general describing a place that is not their own.

Inevitably when you encounter something new, or even after this thing has become familiar to you but you have not become "of it" or internalized its logic, it is baffling to try to understand things that don't obey your own logic, your own way of doing things or thinking.  If you are humble and intellectually honest, you can sometimes overcome this initial bafflement by asking stupid questions, getting laughed at a fair amount, but eventually by this means getting an explanation from the people themselves of why they do things a certain way.  But this is difficult and embarrassing, and especially for a journalist in Kapuscinski's situation, maybe you just don't have time for these deeper probings.  So lots of things, from driving habits to consumption choices to ways of working or raising kids, either remain a mystery to you, or you just make up your own explanation.  This explanation is usually not right and often has negative overtones, as it must if you are trying to make sense of something you truly believe doesn't obey common sense.  "Resolving" your bafflement in this way ends up dehumanizing the people you're trying to understand, frustrating you yourself, and most importantly, shutting you off from a real possible explanation in favor of cliched, pat answers.  When a journalist does this, the journalist isn't learning anything new; they are restating what they already know of themselves.  The reader ends up learning more about the journalist, and not about the place or people or phenomenon the journalist is supposedly describing.  You can get away with this self-centered pontificating if you're in a position of power; indeed, as has often happened in the history of anthropology or journalism, your inaccurate outsider's interpretation of something may come to supersede the actual explanation understood by the people you are describing, who may not have much entree to shape mass media and gain public attention.

In short, Kapuscinski at times takes the arrogant attitude of, "This doesn't make sense to me, so it must not make sense at all."  This is as if I were to read a novel in Chinese, without understanding Chinese.  It would make no sense to me, and seem like pure gibberish.  But this says more about me than about the novel.  I'm the one who can't understand the sense of it; it's not that it doesn't make sense.  But this revelation will only occur to me if I am humble enough to understand that my perceptions and my interpretations are not a Gods-eye accurate rendering of absolute, objective reality.  There's a whole world out there independent of me, and if I don't understand it, it's my shortcoming, not the world's.

Anyway, I would still highly recommend The Shadow of the Sun.  It's an easily digestible overview of a whole lot of recent history across a broad cross-section of African countries.  Just take the author's observations with a grain of salt, remembering that they are his observations and interpretations, not the final word in "how Africa is".

Around the same time I devoured Ryszard Kapuscinski's book, I also breezed through a book I'd picked up a long time ago called "African History:  A Very Short Introduction," from Oxford Press.  This book is almost the polar opposite of Kapuscinski's approach.  While the title might give you the idea that it is an overview of the history of the African continent, it is in fact a book about how different people have studied (or tried to study) African history.  It starts off by affirming that "Africa" is a pretty murky concept (do we include North Africa?  white South Africans?  the African diaspora abroad?), and keeps up that tone, questioning even the most basic assumptions of what we can or cannot assert about peoples, periods, trends, and ideas.  The book argues convincingly that different approaches to "doing" African history tend to say more about the time and place that the historian is living in than the period he or she is supposedly studying!  So where Kapuscinski at times offers too-facile generalizations ("This is what happened, and this is what it means"), the Oxford Press has us questioning everything ("What do you mean by this?  By "happened"?  Whose meaning, and what is "meaning", anyway?).

Changing diets in the world

Here is a cool interactive tool where you can explore how diets (both worldwide and by specific country) have changed in the past few decades. 

Here is an article summarizing the overall worldwide trend, best summarized in this quote:
"The increase in homogeneity [of diets] worldwide portends the establishment of a global standard food supply, which is relatively species-rich in regard to measured crops at the national level, but species-poor globally".   Incidentally, according to the first link, this "global standard food supply" would look much like the average diet in Colombia, which is pretty diverse, consisting in a wide range of tubers, fruits, vegetables, and grains, in accordance with its wide range of climatic zones.

Let me translate the above quote into layman's terms.  Imagine if the world consisted in 100 people, each of whom ate only one crop (species or variety) not eaten by any others.  In total, there would be 100 crops eaten in the world, presumably each uniquely suited to the specific ecology where it grew, and each crop giving rise to a human cuisine and culture distinct from any other.  Over time, let's say that ten of those crops came to predominate, such that by the end of a transition phase, each of the 100 people in the world would eat the same diet consisting in 10 crops.  For each individual, their diet has become more diverse, which is a good thing.  But for the world as a whole, the diversity of human culture, crops, and ecological adaptation will have decreased drastically, with 90% of crop varieties going extinct.

So the news is mixed.  Most people in the world are now eating a more diversified (read healthier) diet than they used to, but we are losing biodiversity, and diversity of cuisine and culture, which is bad.