Where I am Starting

I want to give you a little background information. I am an Undergraduate at the University of Chicago in the International Studies department. In February of 2008, I read an article called ‘A Coming Revolution in Africa’ by Zachary Pascal in the Wilson Quarterly. The article did not portray Africans as passive victims to disease, conflict and famine; instead Mr. Pascal wrote about simple but creative Ugandan agricultural initiatives that were empowering rural smallholder farmers. The article changed my interest in Africa into a passion, and since then I have wanted to help Africans—those who choose to accept my help—change the current economic, and political status quo.

The above-sited article had no citations or notable social science, so my first research project concerning African agriculture had a back-to-front start as I tracked down evidence to support the article’s conclusions. I eventually expanded the report to answer the question of whether Uganda could experience a ‘green revolution’ based on what I had found. I answered yes, that Uganda could have a ‘green revolution’ - as I was quick to call it. I think my conclusion was sound, but the evidence that got me there was not. I now know that I was too inexperienced and unfamiliar with the region at the time to have generated a good piece of original research.

I haven’t stopped though. I continue to read as much as I can about African agriculture, both in and outside of Uganda; and friends and mentors have helped me familiarize myself a bit more. What I have come to want for Africa is a developmental path that empowers normal Africans by embracing their indigenous social forms to alleviate poverty, hunger, corruption, and international exploitation.

Everyday I read something saying that the world is waking up to how important Africa is. After nearly a 50-year nap, the international powers are once again noticing Africa’s immense wealth in both resources and human capital. African development, then, is inevitable. As the world’s attention converges on the continent we can se how China’s industrial in-roads are well documented; how the United States is getting great amounts of oil from Nigeria; how OPEC has increased its membership to include four African states; and the world’s hungry and powerful alike are looking to see if Africa will be the next bread basket of the world. The only question left is whether Africa will be able to avoid a new type of colonialism that dictates who will control the development of these resource related economic sectors and how they will do it.

Sub-Saharan agriculture is particularly important in this regard. An estimated 65% (based off of average of availible estimates of percentage of total population in agrictulture) of Sub-Saharan Africans are rural farmers. Transitively, changing how Africa approaches agriculture will change the lives of the greatest number of Africans. A slew of new initiatives from the biggest names in development (The U.S. government, The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, The Rockefeller Foundation, and the U.N. with its host of agencies, et al.) have been planned or started recently. What I haven’t found in any of the press releases and reports though is an explanation of how African smallholder farming may not just be a ‘primitive’ and quantitatively lesser cousin to western mechanized agriculture. None of these programs to change Africa, and feed the hungry, seem to acknowledge that this continent’s institutions could be qualitatively (due to the un-similar cultural, social, and political understandings of the African people) different as well.

I want Africans to have their own say on how their biggest economic sector will be changed. This blog is one of my first public steps to that end. I am going to share what I figure out about African agriculture, as and the forces that are acting on it, in real time. My ultimate short-term goal is to get an internship (I don’t yet know with whom) in Anglophonic East Africa for the summer of 2009. I don’t feel I can be a legitimate agent for change in Africa until I get to know its localities. I need to see it and meet its people, but until then I will continue to read and write as much as I can.

-Sam C.