expert generalist

I am on Delta Flight 200 from Atlanta to Johannesburg, on the way to the first technology conference in the last absolute monarchy in Africa, the kingdom of Swaziland. The flight is 15 hours across the Atlantic. Somehow flying so far over the churning sea makes my stomach drop, more than if we were flying over land. The woman sitting next to me looks near retirement and is from a rural town in Oregon. She is going with her husband to a hunting reserve in South Africa. I ask her if it costs extra to kill an elephant. Yes, she says, they’ve looked into it, elephants cost $80,000.

In the seat in front of me, 38G, sits Katrina Heppler, a video blogger from San Francisco whom I now officially have met in person. Before I got on the flight, I was not quite sure I hadn’t actually met her in the flesh, since we had exchanged a plethora of tweets before and during the first BarCamp Africa at the Google campus, where she was helping to live blog. I was running around trying to stream video from our panels about social change in Africa, as well as streaming video to Mountain View from no fewer than four African countries in the space of a few hours. I was laden with gear at that conference: Nikon D50, Sony PD100, iPhone, MacBook Pro, Flip, analog-to-digital video converter for translating the official Google video into a web-based uStream video for people all over the world to watch. Our idea was to connect people and opportunities in Silicon Valley and African countries.

As BarCamp Africa began, Ellen Leanse and Kaushal Jhalla, the main organizers, greeted the hundreds of people interested in Africa who packed the auditorium. People such as microfinance advocate April Rinne, Henry Barnor and Ato Ulzen-Appiah of GhanaThink.org, even Guy Kawasaki who led one of the panels with his good humor. When it was my turn to speak, I encouraged people to spread word of everything amazing  that would happen that day, and confessed that it was a personal goal of mine to reverse the stream of negative Western media about Africa, and instead focus on the many positive stories emanating from the continent.

In 2001, I took a leave-of-absence from my job in San Francisco, and visited Africa for the first time as a Geekcorps volunteer in Ghana, where I trained people in web development. I remember sitting at my desk at Africa Online (in the tallest building in Accra which had six floors), where co-workers were IM’ing each other and coding in Dreamweaver, much like at home, while they listened to sermons on JOY FM from their favorite preachers and munched roasted plantains with groundnuts from the sellers outside.

A young Ghanaian engineer came by and asked me: “Do people in America think we live in trees?” And: “Did you think there was a civil war in Ghana?” And from a man with a potbelly: “Do all of us Africans look like we’re starving?” 

From BarCamp Africa I flew directly to Johannesburg, to blog from the MobileActive.org conference, where I learned about mobile innovation in Africa including m-banking, data collection by community health workers on cellphones, and the Ushahidi platform which allowed people to use mobiles to map areas of violence after the disputed elections in Kenya. Here was an Africa that was actually more innovative than the United States, leapfrogging us in technology and transforming society.

At MobileActive ’08, after an intense day of sessions, I found myself at night at a wooden table outside the Wanderers Club, sitting under the Southern Hemisphere stars and sipping a Castle. Pragnya Alekal was telling us how XPrize’s founder Peter Diamandis longed to make space travel possible for individuals. Gcina Dube, a Swazi whose name started with a click, told us that his dream since he was little was to be an astronaut. Gcina worked for YouthAssets.org, a non-profit which empowers youth in Southern Africa through technology, and was there with Jennifer Sly, the executive director of YouthAssets. Since Pragnya and I had just come directly from BarCamp Africa, the conversation turned to asking how the barcamp went, how to organize a conference where attendees participated, and then…maybe there could be a barcamp in Swaziland to bring together the emerging technology community there…

Eight months later, Katrina and I fly over the Atlantic, on our way to document the first technology conference in Swaziland. Before the plane takes off, she turns to greet me, the Twitter avatar version of her face morphing into the real-life version. We are all about documenting, so I grab my N95 and snap a photo. Due to the lighting in the plane, her face has a greenish tinge, not what she really looks like. Though over this sea, in this plane, neither here nor there, things look different.

I glance at the flight map on the monitor of the woman sitting next to me, and there is still no land in sight. It’s getting darker and darker as we speed faster into the night. I wonder where we are, and I look to my own monitor, but it’s not displaying the path of the flight. It’s just endless white numbers printing row after row onto a black screen. It’s been rebooting for hours, for all those dark miles over triangles of ocean where ships disappear. The lights are out in the plane, and only a pale ghostly light emanates from the monitor.

I try to sleep, and can’t, and stare and stare at the parade of 1’s and 0’s, wondering when they will resolve into something comprehensible. We fly and fly at top speed toward our future, as the passengers breathe rhythmically, asleep under their thin blankets that become transparent skins, porous borders, barely covering who we are, until over Namibia, we reach land.