Through My Eyes, In My Words:

Modern Sub-Saharan Africa: Kenya and Tanzania

Taught by Rexford A. Ahene, professor of economics and business and co-chair of the Africana Studies program, and Kofi Opoku, professor of religious studies and co-chair of Africana Studies

Dave Mitchell of Bear Creek, Pa., is a Marquis Scholar double majoring in music and economics & business. He plays eight instruments and is a vocalist. Mitchell organized Quintessence, a jazz a cappella group, and is assistant musical director of the Chorduroys, another a cappella group. He plays bass trombone in the Lafayette Jazz Ensemble, Jazz Combo, and Brass Ensemble, and was a member of the pit orchestra for College Theater's fall production of Little Shop of Horrors. He is secretary of Investment Club.

When we gathered at Newark airport, I was the second to last there. I hardly knew anyone going on this trip, save for about three other juniors. It was really an eclectic mix of different students from different majors, and some international students, 18 girls and 10 guys. Before the pre-organization meetings for the trip, I hadn't even seen a third of them on campus before. Much changed over the two weeks we spent there.

The flight from Newark to Detroit to Amsterdam to Nairobi took a total of about 20 hours. While over the Atlantic, I turned 21. It was a moot point, but the stewardess brought me a glass of wine anyway. On the way from Amsterdam to Nairobi, we saw the Alps and flew over about 1,000 miles of Saharan desert. During the nighttime over sub-Saharan Africa, I noticed naturally occurring forest fires, something that usually never happens in civilized nations, but still happens in the less-developed Africa.

Nairobi's airport looked decades old. There was no air-conditioning, and the lighting was poor, and it was dirty. Concrete seemed to be the building material of choice, with wood being a close second. We were greeted by an old bus and dirty, smoggy roads on our way to the hotel. (Nations in Africa generally have very liberal emissions standards, usually none, so cars pollute a lot. You literally had to hold your breath if you were behind a particularly dirty vehicle.)

The first few days were spent touring Nairobi. We visited Nairobi University, a prestigious school whose admission statistics are very stringent. Only about 40 percent of students pass the exam to continue to secondary school, and only a small percentage of those students are then accepted into the public universities. As a result of such strict schooling, all older educated people we talked to spoke fluent English, and the language barrier was hardly evident, even given that most everyone also speaks Swahili from an earlier age than English.

We visited a primary school in Tanzania. There were no lights, and children sat 4-5 to a desk that seats 2 comfortably. Schoolboys would fight over the pens we brought to give out. A teacher brought me aside and begged me for a red pen to grade his papers. I felt so horrible that I gave him my favorite red pen. Sometimes I was really struck with the great divide between the things I had and their lack of things. In the schoolyard at Tanzania, a drug addict roamed the grounds, and there was nothing the administration could do but give him a 10-shilling coin and ask him to leave. He walked around amongst the schoolchildren, who were scared of him, but strangely familiar with his type.

We toured more rural areas of Kenya, first passing over the equator, and witnessing great sights on the way, such as the Rift Valley and Nyahururu Falls. This part of the trip was spent witnessing how the natives lived. Each family would have their own plot of land where they would grow subsistence crops and feed their animals. There was not always efficient specialization and trade because the culture of the farmers is to grow their own food and live off of the land. Economic progress is unheard of because nobody is willing to invest in a cash crop, and then trade for daily bread. It's against the normal thought process to not have your own maize or plantains growing in the backyard or cattle grazing out front.

The Masai tribesmen were a perfect example of a group of people who are content (and also limited by) living off their own land and cattle. Culturally, they don't do anything other than graze their cattle and live off their milk and meat, but this doesn't allow them an opportunity to grow out of more than their own land space. As part of our discussions on land use, we contemplated how Africa will develop economically, given the fact that their culture is not used to a western market-based society, and may not survive if put up to the same monetary standards that Western countries gauge success by.

From baboons to zebra, we saw all the animals anyone could expect to see in Africa, as well as being able to touch a cheetah, tortoise, rhino, giraffe, and warthog. Kenya and Tanzania's economic development depends a great deal on eco-tourism, and their natural resources to conserve are land and animals. The first half of the trip was spent learning about efforts to conserve, reduce poaching, keep animal populations steady, and give tourism revenues back to the surrounding indigenous peoples.

An especially relevant aspect of this trip for me was learning about the local economies of these two nations. Labor was cheap, because of a 25 percent unemployment rate and a dirt-poor labor force. Each of our hotels hired dozens of guards, not because we needed to be that safe, but because it was so inexpensive to do so. A casino in one of our hotels hired six people to work an individual roulette table, with bets as low as 20 shillings (about 27 cents). A big tip to a waiter would be 15 shillings, or 20 cents. Mechanics make about a dollar an hour. Prostitutes and drugs were in evidence everywhere. Everything has a price: I told a Kenyan policeman that his helmet was cool, and he replied, "Oh, you want it? Six hundred shillings!" (about $8).

The last part of our journey was spent on the coral island of Mombasa, a 14-square-kilometer, humid, bustling city. Our resort had three swimming pools, waterslides, ocean snorkeling, beachside bars and dancing, and a 75-degree ocean awaiting our enjoyment. Even a relatively rich port city such as Mombasa had plenty of poor people lining the streets, waiting to sell trinkets and carved animals to any white tourists.

On the way back home, we stopped back in Nairobi to dine at the Carnivore restaurant to sample zebra, crocodile, eland, and other meats, as well as native brews and liquors and Cuban cigars. It was a great wrap-up and a last chance for hedonism before we went back into the freezing cold northeast.