You go to a small village in Africa. People are hungry. Is the real solution 100 kilograms of corn - or an electronic mailbox?
Built on a fractal peninsula scratching the Atlantic, Dakar, Senegal, is a schizzy, exciting, and often unnerving capital where French manners meet African funk. It's a city where you can have fresh croissants and cafe au lait for breakfast and yassa thiof for dinner; a place where Muslims spread their prayer mats out on the sidewalks at noon, and burro-burros - traditional "pharmacists" - hawk iguana heads and monkey paws on blue plastic tarps. Blind beggars pace the sidewalks chanting verses from the Koran, while musicians like Youssou N'Dour and Baba Maal keep the nightclubs alive 'til dawn.
And Dakar is probably the only city in the world where, instead of a busy signal, you often get a scratchy Afro-pop recording, backed by a cola-nut voice that, in melodic French, apologizes for your call's delay.
Yet, despite its hot link to the planet's endocrine system, Africa remains (electronically speaking) out in the cold. This fact is of considerable concern to Babacar Fall - a Senegalese journalist and communications specialist appointed by the United Nationals Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) to revive the Pan African News Agency (PANA). If his efforts are successful, Fall may well go down in history as the Man Who Wired Africa.
Fall met me at PANA headquarters in Faan, a ritzy suburb where all the ambassadors sleep. At 42, Fall is a tall, intense man with almond eyes and a sparse, wiry beard. Having studied communications in Dakar and Montreal, he received a master's in political science at the Sorbonne. He's fluent in at least four languages and obviously well-read; a copy of Howard Rheingold's The Virtual Community sat on his office table.
The Pan African News Agency, Fall explained, was launched in 1979. Its mandate was to gather news at the local and continental levels and distribute it among African nations as well as to the rest of the world.
"PANA sent its first dispatch off in '83," he said, "but its success was short lived. Political interference badly compromised its credibility, and by 1987 the product could not be used."
A financial crisis brought the situation to a head. In 1991, Senegal's state telecom system shut PANA down for persistent nonpayment of telephone bills. That same year, Fall - working as the head of UNESCO's African Communication Projects office in Paris - was asked to head a team of experts charged with developing the news agency's recovery plan.
Fall's plan, submitted in April 1992, was based on three goals. The first two, editorial independence and privatization, are serious challenges that will determine, in the long run, whether the agency wins any measure of professional credibility. But the third goal - the nitty-gritty problem of bringing PANA online with state-of-the-art local and international telecommunications - has been an even tougher nut to crack.
"Forty-eight out of 52 African nations now belong to PANA," Fall declared (the four that don't are South Africa, Namibia, Morocco, and Eritrea). "Most of them are using radio transmitting stations, which are totally dependent on the weather. Tropical storms and sandstorms can totally screw up transmission," Fall said.
Bad lines are the main problem bedeviling PANA in its attempt to become a credible electronic media source. "It can take three, five, even ten attempts to reach another African country by phone," Fall said. "It can take an entire day. And even where good telephone lines are available, the price is often prohibitively expensive." Telecom in Africa is so bad, in fact, that some stations still have to rely on the telegraph, dinosaur systems that cost US$22,000 a year and transmit at the rate of - hold on to your hat - 50 baud.
One of the main reasons for this primitive state of affairs is that the major news networks tend to ignore Africa. It's black, it's Muslim, and, except for stories about South African turmoil, civil wars, or natural disasters, it remains something of a blind spot in the Western eye. In this day and age such media invisibility is the ultimate impediment to progress, perpetuating Africa's long exile on the fringes of the world community.
Fall's solution involves dishes and digits. To begin with, the main agencies in Africa will be linked through a Very Small Aperture satellite Terminal (VSAT) system. That process ought to happen by the end of the year and will immediately cut PANA's telecom costs in half. "But to gather and collect information from all the bureaus," he pointed out, "and to transmit them worldwide, we need a two-way link. We need the Internet."
Fall's dream of a wired Africa was realized partially on February 18, when ORSTROM, a Dakar-based French research company provided PANA with a basic Internet link. It's cheap, and it's a start, but the hookup - which comes only five times a day - isn't enough for Fall.
"When you have news, it burns your hands. You've got to get it online very, very quickly, because it is news. So we want more than just a link; we want to be the electronic center for all of African media. We want to become an Internet node."
Such ambitions cost money, but Fall reckons the agency's volume of news will soon be able to support the expense. His convictions were echoed by Amadou Mahtar Ba, PANA's marketing assistant, who claims that over 300 black media sources and African-American support organizations - in the US and the Caribbean alone - are ready and waiting for the Pan African News Agency's input.
Babacar Fall's grandest plans for PANA hinge, of course, on a quantum leap in African telecommunications systems - a reality that he projects (at least for the major cities) within the next few years.
"We can leapfrog," he pointed out. "Africa doesn't have to go from drums to telegraphs to telex. We can go right to satellites, electronic media, and a computerized newsroom."
Fall sees PANA's node as the first step in an Africa-wide network that will stretch from Algeria to Zimbabwe - providing a lot more than the latest World Cup scores. Fall's vision of a wired Africa, in fact, has less to do with late-breaking news than with the more complex issue of Pan-African development. It's well known that aid projects on the continent have a history of expensive failure; the reason, Fall advanced, is the dismal state of African communications.
"You can't treat people like cattle," he stated imperatively. "You have to convince them - which means you have to communicate with them. For twenty years, the priorities for development in Africa have included agriculture, health, and the environment. Yes. But none of these can succeed if there's no communication. You can't develop agriculture if you can't have a dialogue with the farmers in rural areas. You can't improve health if people aren't informed about major epidemics like AIDS. You can't protect the environment if you can't communicate with the people who are placing it in danger. The industrial countries have spent billions of dollars trying to develop agriculture, change health conditions, and fight problems like pollution and desertification. Nearly all these programs have failed. Finally, we understand why: There is no way to develop a country if the people cannot participate."
Fall peered into his empty teacup as if reading the leaves. Then he made a revolutionary declaration.
"For years," he said, "the main obstacle to real development has been the statement, 'We have to feed the people first.' After all, who can withhold food? But if you want the people to feed themselves, you have to have a different view." He gave me an appraising look. "Say you go to a small village. People are hungry. Is the priority an electronic mailbox ... or 100 kilograms of corn?"
I said nothing. Fall nodded his head.
"What we've learned, over the past twenty years, is that the mailbox may well be the priority."
Contact the Pan African News Agency: PANA, PO Box 4056, Dakar, Senegal, +(221) 24 13 95 or +(221) 24 14 10, (baam@pana.pana.sn).
