On the stark white cover of National Geographic's September issue is the African continent and above it, an enormous cover line reading "Africa — Whatever you thought, think again." The remonstration was surely meant to pique, but for a month and a half this subscriber left the magazine on his coffee table, untouched.
I have enjoyed National Geographic all my life, a subscription to it three years old this spring. I greatly prefer stories on the sciences, wildlife, archaeology and paleontology to the magazine's sociopolitical work; National Geographic's posture on the subject favors moral sterility over objectivity. This is especially apparent for stories about illiberal or despotic states, the magazine's analysis often very contorted.
If the Near East is the least free region in the world, the African continent comes in second. Bring a land rich in wonder, resources and human potential under alternating corruption and tyranny, and the burden of staggering modern atrocities, and once has a resounding tragedy.
National Geographic acknowledged the state of the African continent — its privations, but not so much the rather obvious root of its troubles. For the issue editor-in-Chief Chris Johns wrote of his hope that "Africa can be a model for the world in finding a balance between the needs of people and the needs of wild places." That is the position I suspected; why I left the issue on the coffee table. But the other day I moved the magazine and it opened to the "World by Numbers" section. For September was "My Seven," a short interview with 2004 Nobel Peace Prize laureate Wangari Maathai of Kenya.
Wangari Maathai is a Western-educated biologist who is best known for her mass reforestation campaigns like the Green Belt Movement and acts of civil disobedience against Kenya's erstwhile authoritarian government. The occasion of the laureate's acceptance was marred by a public confrontation over her aspersive opinion on AIDS. Kenyans blamed their nationwide affliction on God, explained Maathai, and she felt obliged to enlighten them. What did she say? "In fact [the HIV virus] is created by a scientist for biological warfare...Why has there been so much secrecy about AIDS? When you ask where did the virus come from, it raises a lot of flags. That makes me suspicious." Oh, my.
Christians and Jews believe that the universe is a broken one, corrupted by treachery in the Garden, and that despite an abiding divine love men are subject to ravages of the earth. With the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth and the inheritance of the Gospels Christians believe that corporeal intervention is no longer necessary — no plagues, no burning bushes. Science cannot tell us exactly Why but it does tell us How, and at present science maintains that viruses are protein-encapsulated obligate intracellular parasites. For the faithful, that means poison fruit of salted land and not the work of Providence.
And not, for Heaven's sake, the product of a laboratory. Maathai did nothing but replace one superstition with another. Her mythology imputes the hand of men, which is a pretty serious accusation for — well, a scientist. It is one thing, in the hospital room, to reconcile an explicable malady as the way of the world and quite another to turn on the doctor since he did show up rather conveniently and is, after all, profiting from the circumstances.
What do we do about accomplished people, Nobel laureates, who have a calumnious side? South African humanist and leader Nelson Mandela, who won the prize in 1993, has of late lost his ability to distinguish between abominable dictators (Saddam Hussein) and democratic liberators (George W. Bush). Seventy-four years earlier you had President Woodrow Wilson, the democratist who was also a miasmic bigot. Can selflessness be blotted out by fatuity? Only if we are to expect immaculacy of the living. But it follows, then, that if we treat men as men we elevate to recognize — never to apotheosize. South Africans, plural, millions of them, toppled the National Party; Americans have as a nation stood up, fought and died for the freedom of strangers; and Wangari Maathai is, activism aside, but one who helped bring elected men to Nairobi, and what her tree-planting serves is agronomy.
But Maathai won last year's Peace Prize, and enquirers like National Geographic decided that a biologist must know statecraft, too, so among the September periodicals went a global promotion of the sophism that liberty can be had through the progress of things other than liberty. What other things? Two months ago Chris Johns spoke with Maathai in New York City. According to Ms. Maathai, there is a "critical link" between the environment and democracy. OK, there is, but in which direction does she think the equation goes? What begot what?
Turn to the magazine's one-page interview. Maathai was asked about the environment, empowerment, education, good government, sustainable development, employment and the future. Her answer to the first question (I will abridge each as fairly as possible) was sensible enough. Problems were "Actually symptoms of larger problems...Our country was so hungry for cash crops that...degradation of land was widespread." After winning independence from Great Britain in 1963, Kenyans endured forty years of a repressive, corrupt, negligent, one-party state before a democratic revolution in 2002. Freedom House, the most respected arbiter of polity, notes Kenya's "energetic and robust civil society," as well as its stalwart independent press — crediting the work of activists like Ms. Maathai, though it does not mention her by name.
It is in Maathai's second answer that we see how democracy and the environment figure. "[I] suggested we engage women in tree planting to solve these problems." Government opposition swiftly came, she said, "Because we had organized and challenged the mismanagement of the environment." No! The regime of Daniel arap Moi was responding to a challenge of its authority. Power was most important to the Moi government. If Maathai had not, using the momentum of her Green Belt Movement, contributed to civil disobedience it seems unlikely that she would have caught Nairobi's attention. Her third answer: "When people are educated to the links between environment and government, they can improve both." Again: what begot what?
Maathai says for her fourth answer that "Without a government that is respectful of people's rights, the environment will gradually be destroyed by privatization of public lands," and this is where we can see how environmentalism has, for Maathai, displaced polity founded on government by consent and self-determination. Kenya withered under government kleptocracy, not plutocracy, Moi's legacy being a deep-rooted corruption that today challenges Kenya's liberal Kenyan African National Union. Private property in a capitalist system encourages cultivation, and public appeals from a civil society insure national stewardship. Maathai's "privatization" was jobbery.
In her fifth answer Maathai posits that "If we manage resources more responsibly and share them more equitably, many conflicts over them will be reduced." For a third time, she misses the antecedent. In terms of land claims it is only incursions on sovereign boundaries that stir modern democracies to arms (see the Mexican and Falklands Wars) while domestic contestations, however grim, are resolved civilly (see Oregon's Klamath Basin).
Maathai's sixth answer betrays an unfamiliarity with Kenya's new system. Yes, destitute regions may require Nairobi's direct investment and constitution but to suppose that "People need opportunities and resources in the places they live," well, that is to effect a central planning that — even in the name of assurance — does great harm. Free markets are not floral arrangements: employment will come from wherever the market requires it.
Maathai concludes with hopes for the future of Kenya's youth, that "They can achieve something worthwhile." Certainly they can but with more difficulty should they continue to receive guidance like this. Elsewhere in National Geographic's September issue, the obligatory article on AIDS is bowdlerized. No, by this time very few people are ignorant of how the virus is transmitted; but for all the statistics and narratives offered for Africa's (and Kenya's) victims, an assessment of how a disease communicated by indiscriminate behavior is absent. How, then, can the problem be solved if its anatomy goes partly unexamined?
Well, we know what Wangari Maathai thinks of AIDS, and National Geographic has published to what she attributes Kenya's awakening. It is all right for someone to take part in great deeds they don't understand so long as no one simply assumes they do, and does not try to conflate circumscribed expertise with knowledge of everything else. Kenyans have a nation to bring up, and do not need muddled advice.