21st May 2014
Take 1kg of strong bread flour with 625ml of warm water; add a little sugar and touch of salt. Mix them well, forcing the ingredients to intermingle fully. Bake until golden brown, glazing with honey when nearly ready.
You have just made yourself a lovely golden brown brick. Perfect for building biodegradable dwellings, but not so good to eat. If you wanted bread, you missed out the yeast. There’s just a little of it, but without Saccharomyces – and some careful and sensitive handling – the dough never quite manages to make the miraculous journey to loaf.
There’s got to be a metaphor in there somewhere.
On a related theme, this is a recipe from 1962: Take 10 million people in a massive country with 20 main rivers; add a little foreign investment and a touch of natural resources. Blend in Julius (‘Teacher’) Nyerere. Intermingle, with firm, careful and sensitive handling, glazing with a new Constitution when nearly ready. What you get is a mixed legacy, but for all the difficulties and disagreements, it is at least a country still at peace two generations later. More impressively, it is a country where the tribes and religions often work side by side.
Corruption is there, but not on Zimbabwean or Nigerian scale. Death is often at the door, and poverty is desperate, but that owes much to the lack of investment and infrastructure. (And to Africa’s most dangerous animal – the mosquito. Mankind is only Number Two.) Muslims aspire to send their girls to school just as much as Christians do – though in rural areas, lack of just about everything too often precludes it.
By contrast, in neighbouring Zimbabwe, Nyerere’s contemporary Robert Mugabe is presiding over a country with 8000% inflation. Prostitution has become a common means of paying for what the developed world takes for granted – education, opportunity, even food. Opponents are crushed ruthlessly and inter-tribal violence is a way of life. For a week-long wedding for his daughter, Mugabe recently paid out what would have been a year’s wages for more than a thousand of his countrymen.
Leadership. Two very similar countries: two very different directions. Is it too much to say that leadership is at the heart of all collective success - and atrocity? (My family might disagree in relation to the latter, with the memory of some of my culinary atrocities still emblazoned on their tonsils. I would point out to them, however, that leadership was not the problem. There was no heady rhetoric. There was no call-to-arms. No-one marched on the Presidential Palace. Just me, the internet, and the misreading of the recipe. Several times. Even my family must admit that some good things came out of it, though, such as the widespread acceptance now that curry paste has no place in sweet-and-sour salmon en croute with mushy peas.)
Success, then, depends not just on the right recipe, but on the person who catalyses the entire process. Berega hospital has a wonderful leader - Rev Isaac Mgego MBA. Like Nyerere, he came up from the grass roots of the country. He was the first in his family ever to complete high school and the only one in his district ever to make University. Indeed he is one of the few from his village who was even literate. He had to wait for his education until the responsibilities of being a healthy son afforded him the time to go and burn charcoal to pay his way.
Now he and Dr Abdallah - Anglican minister and Muslim medic - together try to lead the hospital's response to the health needs of a quarter to half a million people, spread over a vast area, with almost no resources. In a continent of much uncertainty, one thing is sure: without them, Berega would fizzle into the same sleeping sickness which afflicts health services in many rural areas.
So my question is this: out in the community, who will be the one to muster the fight against maternal and child death? Where is the leadership going to come from to tackle the multiple and complex deprivations suffered in Africa's villages? We know that the way ahead lies with empowerment of women, starting with nurturing the development of women's groups. But without leadership, nothing will happen. Who will be rural Tanzania's champion?
The answer came to me as I wrote the question: to lead the fight against the problems of rural African women, we need a rural African woman. Someone who has had to carry precious, dirty water many miles. Someone who has gone hungry to feed a family. Someone who knows what it feels like to watch the motorbike come back with the mother strapped on and the baby poignantly absent.
Money and resources have been what traditionally held us back. However, with the widespread involvement of many good people in EMBRACE / TUSHIKAMANE, perhaps in future the dough will not be the issue. Teacher Nyerere knew the recipe. Let's start looking for the yeast.
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