{UAH} East Africa @50 still virgin, youthful, loud but with a hint of midlife crisis! - Comment - www.theeastafrican.co.ke

http://www.theeastafrican.co.ke/OpEd/comment/East-Africa--50-still-virgin/-/434750/2120960/-/vvg5d1z/-/index.html

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East Africa @50 still virgin, youthful, loud but with a hint of midlife crisis! - Comment

The flow of history has a clear destination in East Africa - towards Deeper integration for Socio- economic development. Illustration/John Nyagah  Nation Media Group

East Africa at 50 is a beautiful thing to watch. It sizzles with boiling passions and pulsates with promise. It's origins are as improbable as they are a testimony to the tenacity of humanity to construct a self designed future.

The region's history is full of political as well as socio-economic dismemberments and rearrangements, some pre-colonial, most of course colonial, a few post-colonial.

It boasts of the human races' first tentative steps at Olduvai Gorge, to its current attempts to reach for the stars. Today, we take for granted the success of Homo Sapiens as a species but do we ever sit back and reflect on how improbable a story this is? Why did Homo Sapien not suffer the fate of Homo Erectus, or Neanderthal man? Or indeed why were we not dominated by our genetic neighbour the chimpanzee?

Maybe it is predestination and the unfathomable "act of God." Or maybe, it is the East African magic at work. Our cradle that has produced such amazing individuals over the years and continues to confound.

Producing Dr Ian Clark, determined to fill the potholes in his local ward in Kampala instead of the United Kingdom, and Barack Obama, President of the US and leader of the free world, not Kogelo (his father's ancestral home).

East Africa is like the Nile, nay, it is the Nile. When you set your eyes on it, you have an incredible urge to explore it, to discover it. From the Mountain gorillas to its deep craters and majestic mountains, it seduces and beckons millions to its shores every year. Like the Nile, it is a kaleidoscope of speed through narrow gorges, thunderous cataracts, stately passage through calm lake waters, and a determined push through huge Sudd swamps on its way to an integrated political future. It is fed by many tributaries, nourished by nature, controlled and dammed by the ingenuity of man and feeds citizens far and wide.

Like the Nile, it's history is a work in progress. Stories about it abound. It has been interpreted and reinterpreted. It has attracted adventurers seeking reality, as those hoping for a glimpse at the Mountains of the Moon, or illusion — like the seekers of the legendary Prester John. It mocks and confounds foreign hubris, ask Dr David Livingstone, who died believing it was the Lualaba. Go slow it says, be patient, East Africans at work!

Are the waters of the Nile at Aswan Dam in Egypt the same as those at Karuma in Uganda? Are East Africans in Rumonge, Burundi, the same as those in Mtwara, Tanzania?

Measure if you will, subject both the water and the people to laboratory analysis, attempt to categorise, to distil and to test — and yes, you may discern subtle differences in taste — but you will conclude, as I have, that the Nile is the Nile, and East Africa is East Africa.

Like the Nile, it is more than just a geographical feature. The movements of the tectonic plates that gave rise to it those many years ago also imbued its people with an incredible capacity to produce, to persevere and to innovate. You do not marathon the Nile from outside in, but you do marathon inside out. Mensen Ernest, a Norwegian marathoner born in 1795, reportedly ran from Constantinople to Calcutta for £250, at the behest of the East India Company.

He did it in four weeks. Then in 1842, he decided to run to the source of the White Nile, and died at Aswan. Yet, the East India Company (they of the Lunatic Line) cannot hold a candle to East Africa's marathoners. The Keinos and Kiprotichs and sundry other kips will leave you gasping in New York, London, or Boston (even if you bomb them) — and some have done it barefeet!

East Africa leaves you gasping and breathless, it does so with grace and elegance. Sonia Rolland, when mesmerising Europe, or Lupita Nyong'o the Americas, and maybe I should also claim Alek Wek, are children of the Nile. They play and pray. They compete, win, and give back. They will sweep you downstream with the force of their composure, with their proud determination to be better. Some East Africans have coined a word for this invisible and invincible spirit — Agaciro.

So, East Africa at 50 moves on. A combination of the irrepressible exuberance of the youth, the imbalances and convulsions of a midlife crisis, and the beginnings of self-sufficient sanity, loud dialogue, reflection, and continuous self-examination of maturity. Like the Nile, East Africa has seen bodies float down its current.

It has been battered and bloodied. It has provided livelihoods to professional mourners and has given the world names for terrible diseases — Buruli ulcer, Burkitt's lymphoma, ebola et al. The shores of Lake Victoria have suffered the double indignity of receiving the bodies of the victims of genocide, and acquitted themselves well in burying them in dignity, and the HIV/Aids scourge.

With every indignity thrown at it, East Africa has stood firm and straight. It is nothing short of a miracle. Perhaps as important as the miracle of the Nile that refuses to totally evaporate despite its lengthy journey through the Sahara desert, providing sustenance and prosperity to millions in a relentless desert.

East Africa at 50 refuses to be labelled, straight jacketed, simple or simplistic. It is red like the river, blue like the lake, green and sandy. It is home to skyscrapers and sprawling slums. It hosts probably the cleanest city in Africa —Kigali ­—­ if not the world and periodic anti-jigger campaigns.

It likes politics and debates about democracy, yet sometimes debates undemocratically. It has seen dictatorships and liberation. Nation building and destruction. It is like the Nile. Woe to you if you build your house on the bed of a temporarily dry tributary.

The rains will come, the river will roar, the shack will be washed away and the Nile will continue to flow, majestic and Stately, pregnant with silt and humus, producing electricity and fish.

East Africa at 50 is a Community with a morality, a character. It has dignity. Like its river, it is steady and dependable. It may throw a tantrum here, a convulsion there, and a shiver hither - but it will carry you, steadily and surely to a Political Federation.

One may dam it, or divert it to irrigate some critical national acreage, but the flow of history has a clear destination in East Africa - towards Deeper integration for Socio- economic development, or to use a metaphor, the convergence of the White and Blue Nile.

Dr Richard Sezibera is the Secretary-General, East African Community

East Africa @50 still virgin, youthful, loud but with a hint of midlife crisis! - Comment - www.theeastafrican.co.ke
http://www.theeastafrican.co.ke/OpEd/comment/East-Africa--50-still-virgin/-/434750/2120960/-/vvg5d1z/-/index.html