A goat can travel farther and deeper in Africa than Obama ever will

US President George W. Bush greets President-elect Barack Obama as he arrives at the White House in Washington on Monday.
Photos/REUTERS

One of the biggest events in Africa happened more than 11,000 kilometres away in the USA – the election of a Kenyan descendant Barack Obama as America’s first African-American president.

The tears of joy that were wept around the world on the night Obama was declared winner of the presidential race, are enough to fill half of Lake Victoria (in a manner of speaking). There were celebrations galore, and in true African spirit there were public holidays declared for Obama. Kenya declared a one-day holiday to celebrate the great victory of its “son”.

But it was Nigerian, that most truly African of African countries, that took the biscuit. It laid on a two-day public holiday.

In the carnival atmosphere, however, the less excitable Africans on the street and commentators did not lose sight of the fact that “an Obama phenomenon” would not happen in Africa.

Killed before election day

Obama, said one writer said, as a popular “Opposition” candidate would either have been disqualified (declared a non-citizen as Frederick Chiluba did to Zambia’s founding father Kenneth Kaunda); would have been arrested (as happened to opposition leader Dr Kizza Besigye in Uganda ahead of the 2006 elections); killed before election day; cheated at the ballot box (an all too common occurrence on our fair continent); or denied victory as happened in Algeria in 1992 when the Islamists won the election.

A Kampala businesswoman reported one of the most thought-provoking comments on Obama’s victory. She was discussing the election with her driver who said: “You know madam, where my friends and I drink, we were saying now that America has elected a black president, perhaps it is time for Uganda too to elect a white president”.

The idea being that if an African-American president is being hailed as troubled America’s hope, then in most of Africa we must look beyond our leaders to find a solution to the continent’s many problems by electing white men to rule. And because that is so unlikely, then Africa has no hope.

Almost everyday in Africa tends to confirm to the sceptics that Africa can’t save itself.

There is always either a Democratic Republic of Congo, where hundreds of thousands of people are in flight because of the renewed fighting there, and are being slaughtered and wasted away by hunger and diseases, or Zimbabwe where a once prosperous agriculturally rich nation has been reduced to a dustbowl with a mind-boggling inflation rate of 12,000,000 per cent, probably the highest in world history!

However, Africa is a very big and diverse continent. Although its big failures and seemingly unending disappointments have made people afraid of being optimistic, in several respects it does quite well.

For example, early this year Africa had its small Obama moment. The fact that it did not make big news is itself a sign that the continent is changing.

In February, Mr Jean Ping, then Gabon’s Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Affairs Minister, was elected the new chairman of the African Union Commission to replace Mali’s former president Alpha Konare.

Ping got 31 votes, while the other two candidates, Inonge-Mbikusita-Lewanika, Zambia’s ambassador to the US, and Sierra Leone Osman Conteh, managed only 17 and 1 vote respectively.

The remarkable thing about this, to use an expression Obama himself used a few days ago, Ping is a “mutt” like him. His father was a Chinese trader, and mother Gabonese.

There are very few mixed-race African figures, not even former Ghanaian President Jerry Rawlings, who have won a major office in a democratic election. Rawlings helped himself to power through a coup, and when he won elections it was because he largely used state machinery to steal victory.

Until Ping was elected chair of the AU Commission, not too many were aware that Gabon had a bi-racial deputy PM and Foreign minister.

Even just 10 years ago, Ping would not have got the job.

As the Philippines Communist Party used to put it, the best measure of how progressive a society (and men) is how they it treats it womenfolk.

Being a woman in many parts of Africa can be a death sentence. South Africa, Kenya, and the Eastern DRC have among the world’s highest rape rates. A woman has a higher risk of being raped in Johannesburg, than she has a chance of getting pregnant in Japan. While in other countries militias are formed to fight, loot, or protect threatened groups, in the DRC they are rape gangs, roaming the countryside looking for women to attack.

And we have designed very sex-specific rituals for killing women in times of conflict. During the Rwanda genocide in 1994, for example, the country’s moderate Prime Minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana was snatched by extremists, and shot her in the head. They stripped her clothes from her body, and rammed beer bottles up into her using stakes.

However, this same Rwanda set a record in September when it became the first country in the world to have more women than men elected to Parliament.

Its 80-seat Parliament now has 44 women, or 55 per cent in the lower house. That placed Rwanda far ahead of Sweden, where women account for 47 per cent of Parliament, and the third highest, Cuba, where 43.2 per cent of MPs are women.

South Africa, meanwhile, has among the highest percentage of women in government in the world – side by side with its astronomic rape and domestic violence rates. In the DRC, some brave women have not been overwhelmed by the epidemic of rape. In Bukavu, a nurse called Beatrice Kabemba-Bapemacho, was so alarmed and moved by the plight of the rape victims, who often are infected with HIV and Aids, that she and four other colleagues formed the Association of Women Nurses.

They assist women and children rape victims, giving very small micro-credits of loans of $20 (Sh1,560) to women, on condition they undergo an HIV test. The loans are given irrespective the result of the test.

Early this year, the Association of Women Nurses was honoured with the Prize for Women’s Creativity in Rural Life, with a special award of $3,000 (Sh234,000).

The magic of solidarity

One of my favourite stories of hope and the magic that international solidarity can work in a continent where billions of dollars in aid are stolen is about a goat and Beatrice Biira, the daughter of a poor family in Kisinga, a small village in remote southwestern Uganda.

I was reminded of it by Mary Cairns, a grandmother I got to know through email. Some weeks ago I wrote about one of the most beautiful organic gardens in Kenya, plank in the middle of Kibera, Africa’s largest and one of its toughest slums.

Cairns wrote to say she is uplifted by those types of sunny stories from all over the world, and collects them on her website (http//hopebuilding.pbwiki.com). It was there that I first read about Kabemba-Bapermacho, and was re-united with the story of Biira.

In 1992, nine-year-old Biira dreamt of going to school, but she seemed doomed to the difficult life of many people rural children, because he family made less than $1,000 (Sh78,000) a year.

However, two events that year were to change Biira’s life forever.

To begin with, the women in her village decided to do something to improve life for their children. They sent a request for goats to Heifer International, an Arkansas group that has been providing poor families with livestock for income and food since 1944.

Then, in a small Connecticut village children attending Niantic Community Church raised $1,673 (Sh134,000) to pay for a herd of 12 dairy goats from Heifer’s on-line gifts catalogue to be given to African villagers.

As Hopebuilding recounts the story: “When the goats arrived in Kisinga in 1993, Beatrice’s mother received a pregnant goat that the family called Mugisa, meaning “Luck” in the Lukonzo language. Mugisa soon lived up to her name, producing twins and lots of milk – so much that Beatrice’s family could afford the $60 (Sh46,000) to send her to school… [Biira] breezed through first, second and third grades in three months each, and she and her goat soon became famous.

Filmmaker Dick Young’s video to celebrate Heifer International’s 50th anniversary featured a beaming Biira “in a red dress with the back torn open so it would continue to fit as she grew, tilling fields, cutting and hauling bananas, and tending Mugisa”.

Inspired by the video, Connecticut neighbours Page McBrier and Lori Lohstoeter, during a Heifer study tour to Uganda in 1995, decided to collaborate on a children’s book, entitled Beatrice’s Goat. By the time the book was published in 2000 and became a best-seller (now in its 12th hardcover printing and third printing of the paperback version published in 2008), Biira was a top student at Uganda’s best girls’ high school in Kampala, with filmmaker Young helping with the costs.

Intern with Clinton Foundation

Biira travelled to the USA to promote the book. She subsequently won a full scholarship for a preparatory year at a Massachusetts Boarding School, and then four years at Connecticut College, with some of the costs covered through a “Friends of Beatrice” fund created by 20 Heifer donors.

Almost everyone in Biira’s village of Kisinga now has a goat. In 2002, she appeared on the Oprah Show which donated 50 goats to her village. In 2005, the CBS program 60 Minutes aired a report on Biira’s trip home to her village.

In 2004, she was a summer intern in the office of US Senator Hillary Clinton, who wrote the afterword to Beatrice’s Goat, and in 2007, interned with the Clinton Foundation.

Biira graduated in May 2008 with a degree in international development and gender studies. Kisinga village held a special mass and feast to celebrate their first college graduate.

Africa survives because every tragedy produces a response by unsung individuals who refuse to be swept away by its pervasive despair and cynicism.

And African culture, at its best, generates a remarkable resilience. Most African cultures believe that we never completely die. That when we die in bitterness, or without having forgiven our enemies, our spirit is troubled and always returns to torment the living. That the grandparent is always reborn in a grandchild.

Everything just keeps going round, and coming back. And that’s why, in most of our villages, we still build circular huts that express that circular spirit. So it was that Mugisa the goat died in 2006. In Kisinga, they probably believe that while it died, it also still lives on. Biira is proof of that.

Charles Obbo-Onyango is Nation Media Group’s Convergence and New Products Development Managing Editor

(This article is deeply indebted to Mary Cairns and Hopebuilding).