NET RESULTS: South African president Thabo Mbeki recently established an International Advisory Council on the Information Society and Development to advise. Karlin Lillington reports.
Say Africa and most people think only of disaster, famine, refugee camps and poverty. In a survey of attitudes commissioned by the British volunteer organisation VSO, some 80 per cent of Britons said those words were the first that came to mind.
But visit the continent, or talk to Africans living and working in the Republic, and you realise how utterly simplistic such a view is. Africa is incredibly diverse in its countries, economies, cultures, capabilities and challenges - a fact that seems obvious when you remember that the continent takes in nations as varied as Egypt, South Africa, Mozambique, Uganda, Morocco and Kenya.
Despite the fact that these countries have modern cities and towns, the predominant image in the West is of squalid villages and hunger. People think only of emaciated black people, although, as anywhere in the world, the African population profile includes those who are well-off, middle-class professionals and the very poor, as well as from many different ethnicities - black, white, Asian, Indian, Middle Eastern. Pick a continent and its peoples are represented somewhere in Africa.
This is not to argue that Africa is well on its way to having the kind of casual affluence most of the Western world accepts as its norm. Even in the most developed of African countries, South Africa, more than seven million people live without clean water or any form of sanitation. The chill hand of extreme poverty touches the lives of many in the country's most-sophisticated cities as well as in remote villages, where unemployment is close to 100 per cent.
South Africa's contrasts can be extreme: a Johannesburg-based friend who works with the UN tells me the organisation is deeply concerned about a growing famine in the Eastern Cape, which has already taken the lives of many small children. Yet an afternoon's drive away, the beautiful golf courses, wineries and resorts that draw the bulk of South Africa's tourists recline among the interior hills and undulations of coastland.
Still, the concerns of African people are those of people everywhere: health, education, the economy, crime and the environment. That came across loud and clear while listening to the radio while driving across the east coast of South Africa over two weeks.
What startled me was how similar the concerns of South Africans were to the concerns of many Irish people - which was a humbling reminder of how easy it is to create a stereotype out of a place that is extremely complex. And that's a situation Irish people should know well after years of having people who have never been on the island boil the Northern conflict down to a religious war, or assume the Republic is a nation of red-haired people living in cottages, reliant on donkeys and creel baskets to cart their belongings from one place to another.
Like the Irish, South Africans are split on the issue of emigration - the brain drain of their educated people to better salaries, a less crushing economy and more opportunities elsewhere. They also are divided by the issue of immigration - the arrival of many people from bordering African nations into their wealthier state, in search of jobs or better state support.
I was struck by the response of one black African and former anti-apartheid activist, who said: "I welcome these immigrants and think they help build a better South Africa for tomorrow. These are the countries that gave our activists protection and support under apartheid. We now can give them thanks by giving them back opportunity."
Some people complained that their president, Mr Thabo Mbeki, travels too much and does not spend enough time in South Africa. Others argued that he heightens the visibility of South Africa and encourages investment by speaking to world and business leaders. Does the flight of the Oireachtas to foreign shores on St Patrick's Day come to mind?
There's much concern about the state of the healthcare system and who has access to it. Then, with inflation at 15 per cent and the rand barely able to stand upright among world currencies, people worry about whether badly needed roads will be built, especially into the black villages that often lack running water or electricity. A common site on South Africa's highways was people - especially women and children - patiently carrying enormous plastic containers of water on their heads or in wheelbarrows, drawn from a river or lake miles away.
But the roads into tourist and developed areas are superb, a pleasure to drive on, with extremely polite drivers.
And what about technology? I was interested to learn that President Mbeki recently established an International Advisory Council on the Information Society and Development, comprising prominent figures from companies such as Cisco, Nokia, HP and Siemens, to advise him. Not unlike the telecommunications advisory committees established by the former Department of Public Enterprise to advise the Republic.
The council will focus on growing small to medium-sized technology enterprises as well as developing the use of technologies in telemedicine, health and education. A second meeting of the council in September was attended by HP chief executive Ms Carly Fiorina - and South African education minister Mr Kadar Asmal, a name familiar to Irish people from his many years here as a law professor and political activist.
Before one starts to think of Africa as a technology neophyte, though, it's useful to remember that the first "afronaut" - Mr Mark Shuttleworth, the recent space tourist to the orbiting space station - is a youthful South African who made his fortune in the technology industry.
Indeed, technology, financial and business management expertise is becoming very important to developing African nations, as aid agencies will tell you. Some 25 per cent of the volunteers with the VSO now fall into these categories - and another 6 per cent are volunteers teaching maths and sciences. Irish agency APSO, now merged into the Department of Foreign Affairs, has growing requests for this kind of professional help as well.
Of course, satisfying the basic needs of its people, such as supplying clean water, shelter and food, remain real challenges for Africa. But the microchip, satellite and the internet have a natural home there too - and all will help Africa create its own future.
klillington@irish-times.ie
Weblog: http://radio.weblogs.com/0103966/
