The Imposter

Every year, the Voice of America gets thousands of letters and phone calls from listeners around the world and many travel to Washington DC to visit VOA headquarters. VOAcorrespondents around the world also hear regularly from fans and most have unusual stories to tell about amusing letters they have received or first-hand conversations they have had with listeners about VOA programs. But an incident I experienced must surely rank among the strangest of them all. I filed this report in July 1995 (and it is another of the experiences mentioned in my Columbia Journalism School remarks; the photo is of the inscription on a poster my 'double' gave me):

I am sitting in the VOA news bureau in an office building in central Nairobi when the phone rings. On the line is a man who tells me his name is Alex Belida.

I assume it is a mistake, that he really is someone who wants to speak to Alex Belida. But he persists and I am astonished -- so astonished that I agree to an appointment so the caller can drop by the office.

The next day my mystery guest shows up and, with my tape recorder in hand, I ask him to state for the record his name:

“My name is Alex Belida.”

But, he quickly acknowledges, that is not his real name:

“My name is Mesafint Beyene. My nickname is Alex Belida. I got it recently from friends.”

Even I have to admit it is an unusual choice for a nickname, so I ask how he got it. It is a story that will thrill the hearts of all VOA executives back in Washington.

“I got that name because I listen to the radio day and night.”

And not just any radio. He listens to VOA and he especially likes to hear my voice:

“Mostly I like your voice. It’s a wonderful voice. When you present this voice about African affairs, East Africa and normally about Somalia and Kenya, Ethiopia, the sound is great. For me it is wonderful. That is why many friends, when I tell them about Alex Belida, this voice is beautiful. So they gave me that name: ‘your name is Alex Belida.’”

Mesafint Beyene is an Ethiopian refugee who has lived in Kenya since 1991. He says he loves his homeland. But he has no plans to return there and instead hopes to emigrate to South Africa, where he believes he will be able to find work more easily.

I for one am confident he will keep on listening.

(For the broadcast version of this script, I got Mesafint to record a variation of the standard VOA sign off: “I am not the original Alex but Ican say I am the copy Alex Belida, VOA news, Nairobi”. And one more note, a couple years later I received a postcard from him. He had made it to South Africa and from there, as I recall, he had moved or wanted to move to the United States.)

The Chimp Orphanage of Bujumbura

Like Rwanda, the densely populated African nation of Burundi is perhaps best known these days for its ongoing ethnic, political and refugee turmoil. But like Rwanda, with its famous mountain gorillas, Burundi too has an endangered wildlife species whose fate has attracted the attention of Western conservationists. In January 1995 I went to the capital, Bujumbura, to report on an effort then under way to preserve Burundi's small population of chimpanzees.

About 250 to 400 chimpanzees still survive in Burundi's Kibira National Park, a narrow strip of forested land that is considered the country's watershed. On a map, as it juts down from the northern border with Rwanda, the park resembles a long finger that is reaching out for the lakeside capital, Bujumbura.

But American conservationist Aly Wood of the Jane Goodall Institute in Bujumbura says the Kibira forest is being whittled away day-by-day by farmers looking for new land to cultivate. In destroying the forest, Ms. Wood says they are destroying the habitat of the chimpanzees and threatening their continued survival.

Ms. Wood acknowledges that in a densely populated country like Burundi, there are clear and understandable pressures for opening up new farming areas -- pressures which make it difficult for Burundians to appreciate Western concerns about the plight of wildlife. That is why she says her organization is trying to emphasize education.

“Without the forest here in Burundi, there is no life in Burundi, there are no Burundians. Now to teach that, you have to go to first grade, you have to start at ‘one plus one is two’ and teach these people what the importance of the forest is, why do you need trees, why do you need air, why do you need the rain. If you can't have the rain, you can't have your crops, if you don't have your crops, you won't have children, if you don't have your children there is no life. So you are teaching them the whole circle of how the ecology works.”

At the same time, Ms. Wood says she and the other staff members of the Godall Institute are also trying to stress that there can be real economic benefits from preserving animals like the chimpanzees. She says they attract tourists, who not only pay park fees, but also spend money on local handicrafts as well as on food and accommodation.

But there are few tourists these days in Burundi, where over the past two years two presidents and assorted government officials have been killed, where there has been massive ethnic violence and where even today a dusk-to-dawn curfew has been imposed because of the volatile political climate.

In the meantime, Ms. Wood and her associates cater to the needs of 19 orphan chimps who live on the grounds of the Institute's offices in Bujumbura. Some come from Burundi, but others come from neighboring Zaire and Rwanda. Most came to the orphanage after having been sold or offered for sale to expatriates. She says many were abused and mistreated -- especially after becoming adults.

“When you first take a baby chimp, it's really cute...and then you have to chain it up because it grows canine teeth that are just really long and ferocious. I mean, they're really sweet animals but they're also savage and you have to remember that.”

Most of the chimps are kept in cages, while others are allowed out to play though still kept on chain leashes. Only the very youngest are free to roam and play. Ms. Wood says it is not an altogether happy existence. But she believes these chimps are better off than the other members of their families, who are probably dead. For every chimp in captivity, Ms. Wood estimates 10 to 20 were killed.

The Gold Diggers of Bujumbura

The small central African nation of Burundi is not known for having great mineral resources. But as I discovered in January of 1995, the country's capital, Bujumbura, is nonetheless the site of what must be one of the most improbable gold mining operations in the world. (This is one of the experiences cited in my Columbia Journalism School address.)

About half a dozen Burundian men gather every morning, six days a week, in a quiet, mainly residential section of Bujumbura.

They strip off tattered shirts, remove rubber sandals and step into a small drainage ditch knee-deep with water that runs along one side of a tree-lined dirt road. They slowly begin to shovel clumps of wet sand and rock into plastic basins and metal pails, scoop up handfuls of water and let it wash over the muddy sludge.

Peering intently downward, they then pick delicately through the residue with battered fingers.

Strange as it may sound, these men are panning for gold in a waste water run-off in the middle of the city. What makes their effort fruitful is that the run-off originates behind the faded walls of a villa housing what is said to be a secretive gold and gemstone processing operation run by a local businessman.

The businessman, it is alleged, buys raw gold-bearing ore that is smuggled across Lake Tanganyika from Zaire. After he refines it, the gold is sold to buyers outside Africa. In the finishing process, tiny amounts of gold dust get washed away--and the street prospectors of Bujumbura recover it.

They say they find about two grams of gold per person each day. While that is not a lot, it is still enough to provide them with an excellent source of income in a country where most people get by on subsistence-level farming.

The men say they sell their gold to Bujumbura jewelers, who pay them three thousand francs or some 13 US dollars per gram. That means on an average day, each of these urban miners hauls in about 26 dollars--which is roughly the average monthly income of a typical Burundian worker.

That kind of income explains why some of these men have been panning for gold in the ditch for more than 10 years. It also explains why the men say they have to risk occasional raids by thieves.

The businessman who is the source of all this wealth does not interfere with the unusual streetside operation going on just meters away from his property's high walls.

For their part, passersby--European or Burundian, on foot or in cars--just shake their heads in amazement at the enterprise. The men, meanwhile, just get on with their work, smiling and laughing.

Northern Uganda, Again

In any war, the most pitiable victims are usually the young ones -- children caught up in the terror of violence -- violence which most of them cannot understand. Nowhere is that more true than in northern Uganda, where children have become one of the main targets in a decade-long campaign by a rebel group known as the Lord's Resistance Army. I traveled to the northern Ugandan town of Gulu in 1996 where I met some of these children touched by the horror of war.

These children seem happy enough from a distance as they sing, dance and play. But up close, you can see a hollow hurt in some of their eyes. It is no wonder. Most of them have experienced a lifetime's worth of pain, suffering, and sorrow -- and fewer are much older than 15 or 16.

These are some of the children of northern Uganda's violence-ravaged Gulu district -- children kidnapped from their village homes by rebels of the Lord's Resistance Army. They have been forced into service as load bearers, camp servants, and fighters. They have been forced to commit murder and mutilation -- often after being whipped or threatened with death themselves.

The girls among them have had to suffer added horrors -- like being forced to become the personal sex slaves of rebel officers. The girls become pregnant; they contract venereal diseases.

Mark Avola is one of the counselors now trying to help these victims overcome the trauma of their rebel captivity at a special center in Gulu, established by the international humanitarian group, World Vision. He explains how the children are being treated.

“Our services are mainly counseling services with the components of some rehabilitation in the form of giving them some clothing, blankets, plates, cups, and then giving them treatments -- taking them to the hospital for proper check-up because being in the bush for so many months, years sometimes, there is a problem of poor health, no feeding at all. Let us not talk of good feeding. So what happens is they are put on a proper diet here, they are clothed, they are given medication. We have for them indoor and outdoor (activities), we give them opportunity to have these kind of cultural dances, to try to rub off the trauma they have gone through and so they stay here for between one month, perhaps 45-days depending on the level of the trauma.”

Local officials and diplomats in distant Kampala give a lot of credit to the trauma center for the work it is doing. The government, which has offered amnesty to the rebels, routinely turns over to counselors the young fighters it captures for treatment and eventual return to their homes.

Another aide worker at the center, Aldo Ochen, says it is a sensible policy.

“With the existence of presidential pardon, these children do not go under any kind of charges. They are already pardoned and they simply bring them from the barracks and hand them over to World Vision for trauma counselling. So they are not charged, they are not taken to court. They are forgiven.”

It is not an easy job trying to return these young victims to a sense of normalcy. Sometimes the counselors hear stories of the brutal acts committed by the young people in their care and fear that one or the other might suddenly snap and attack them. They say it has not happened.

But when the children fight among themselves, they are often heard to shout threats like, 'I will kill you' -- something that might have proved all too true not too long ago.

Uganda's special government minister to the violence-torn north of the country is Betty Bigombe, a strong-willed woman who has largely sacrificed her personal life in a quest to bring a measure of hope if not outright peace to the people of the region. I met with Ms. Bigombe in early 1996 at her office in Gulu, the northern administrative and commercial capital.

Betty Bigombe admits she was terrified when in 1988, at the behest of President Yoweri Museveni, she first took on the challenge of trying to negotiate a peaceful end to the insurgency of the rebel Lord's Resistance Army -- a woman surrounded by warrior men.

“At the beginning it was very frightening. It was a very lonely job. It was highly risky. I thought and thought and thought about it for a long time. I had been a church drop-out but I had to pray to get guidance from God. But I'll be honest with you, when I took it up, it was like coming face to face with death. I accepted there is no way of getting out of it.”

Ms. Bigombe, a staunch Museveni supporter, was picked for the job because she was born and raised in Gulu, the main town in the north. She retained extensive family ties in the region that the President thought she could exploit in an effort to achieve a peace settlement with the rebel movement.

Even though she herself spent many of the years before Mr. Museveni came to power living abroad, working, and studying in places as varied as Japan and the United States, she says she could not refuse.

“The other aspect was that, after all, many other people have perished as a result of getting Uganda back on track, so I came to terms with it.”

Her eight years in Gulu have been filled with frustration. Although at one point she believed Lord's Resistance Army leader Joseph Kony was finally prepared to lay down his arms, he never did. Instead, with what Ms. Bigombe charges is the backing of the Sudanese government, Mr. Kony's forces resumed their raids with a renewed vengeance, leaving her goal of peace in the region unfulfilled.

Gulu has in recent weeks been all but cut off from the rest of Uganda because of rebel ambushes along the main roads leading to the town. Ms. Bigombe now spends much of her time aboard military helicopters, hopping from village to village in the countryside, always guarded by heavy-armed soldiers.

“It has been highly risky, very lonely as I said, extremely challenging. But sometimes I don't even know where I get my courage from, but I suppose the driving force is the suffering of the people. When they see you, they see hope in you. You go there, you get into certain places. There are dead bodies lying and you give hope to the survivors and that has been the strongest driving force. It has been a source of inspiration...”

To keep up her work in the north, she has essentially had to give up her life as a wife and mother. Her husband, a career diplomat, now lives in Germany with their two children where they are insulated from the often frightening news of the dangers she faces. She says she regrets that the children, a boy and a girl, have been growing up without her.

Ms. Bigombe talks about writing a book about her experiences. But that is a challenge for sometime in the future. For the moment, there is no indication that she is ready to abandon her post.

A postscript: in late April 2007, Uganda's government and the northern rebels restarted peace talks aimed at ending two decades of fighting. The chief government negotiator, Internal Affairs Minister Ruhakana Rugunda said he thought the prospects for success were good. The talks in the southern Sudanese city of Juba were being resumed at the same point they left off three months ago, when rebels from the Lord's Resistance Army walked out of the negotiations. The rebels had then accused the southern Sudanese mediators of bias. The two sides agreed in April to return to the talks after meeting with the U.N. envoy to the conflict, former Mozambican President Joaquim Chissano. The Ugandan government and rebels have been observing a shaky ceasefire since August.

In the meantime, Human Rights Watch said LRA. rebels accused of war crimes must be prosecuted if the region is to achieve a durable peace. The LRA's leader, Joseph Kony, and three other rebel officials are wanted by the International Criminal Court on charges of war crimes. Rebels have demanded the charges be dropped before they sign any peace deal.

Death, Disfigurement and Despair in Northern Uganda

Before the interlude, I reported on Uganda and the impact the violence in Rwanda was having on villagers along the western shores of Lake Victoria. But Uganda was also experiencing problems of its own. This series of reports was done in 1996 after I traveled to the northern Ugandan town of Gulu, where, for years, there was sporadic violence as government troops fought rebels of an obscure fanatical group called the Lord's Resistance Army.

On the surface, Gulu seems calm enough. But it is a town under siege. Ugandan soldiers toting machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades walk the streets and guard key buildings. Still others patrol in vehicles. Occasionally, a military helicopter gunship passes overhead.

The reason for all the troops -- 18-thousand in the whole northern district -- is a ragtag group of rebels called the Lord's Resistance Army -- a group believed to number no more than two-thousand which has been terrorizing Gulu and villages scattered across the adjacent countryside for about 10 years.

In a new offensive launched in February, the LRA, as it is known, has at times managed to cut off all road links between Gulu and the rest of Uganda. Visitors now have to fly in or travel in special overland convoys with troop escorts. But even those convoys have been ambushed.

Some 250 civilians have been killed in rebel raids in recent weeks. Others have been severely injured -- often maimed by land mines planted by the LRA. Gunshot and mine victims fill the wards at the local hospital in Lacor, on the outskirts of Gulu.

But such attacks are not the only reason why residents of the area live in fear -- or why at least 10-thousand people have fled their farms and villages outside the administrative and commercial center to take shelter in Gulu itself. The rebels of the Lord's Resistance Army are also known for kidnapping young men and women and pressing them into service -- as bearers, fighters, even as sex slaves.

They are also known for their brutality -- often slicing off the ears, noses or lips of some victims, disfiguring them for life.

Hardly a family in the area has not suffered from some such loss. Locals say they do not understand why the LRA does the things it does. Those who have traveled with the rebels and escaped or been captured tell strange tales about the group's leader, a man named Joseph Kony, an illiterate former altar boy who claims to have an herbal cure for aids.

They say he preaches the 10 commandments but says it is okay to kill nonetheless. He often wears a white robe and claims he speaks directly to god. He anoints his fighters with oil and tells them it will protect them from bullets. He has told them stones will turn into bombs if they are thrown at government soldiers.

Some of his other beliefs are odder still. He orders the killing of civilians who have bicycles, apparently because they can be used to speed word to the authorities of the rebel's presence in this or that place. He has banned the eating of white chickens, allegedly because of their association with witchcraft. Pork is also taboo, the result of an understanding he has reached with the Islamic government in Sudan, where he often retreats and which has allegedly supplied him with weapons. Escapees and captives say that in another concession, Mr. Kony now holds prayers on Fridays, the Muslim holy day, as well as on Sunday.

Ugandan authorities and residents concede that the rebels, drawn largely from the northern Acholi ethnic group, might once have had legitimate political grievances with the government in Kampala. But they say that is no longer the case.

The government has offered amnesty to the rebels if they surrender, but that has not worked. It has also sent more and more troops and military equipment north to quell the insurgency. But that, too, has failed despite repeated vows by President Yoweri Museveni to crush theLRA.

It seems difficult to see how the fighting can be stopped. Senior government officials are urging the international community to pressure Sudan to stop helping the rebels. But Sudan has denied it has provided them with either aid or sanctuary.

Authorities are now looking to western donors for more money to pump into the north. They believe if more people are given the hope of a better future and an economic stake to defend, maybe that will give the government an even more powerful weapon than guns alone to fight the LRA.

Following that initial report, I went on to focus on the military aspects of the fighting, noting Ugandan security forces have not been able to halt attacks by the LRA – this despite a heavy troop presence, the deployment of sophisticated new military equipment, and repeated claims of significant battlefield victories. Top government officials appeared frustrated at their inability to quell rebel raids.

Uganda’s special Minister for the north, Betty Bigombe, says about 18-thousand soldiers have been deployed in the sparsely-populated region bordering Sudan in an effort to halt activities by the rebel Lord's Resistance Army.

It is a fanatical, quasi-religious group whose total strength is not believed to exceed two-thousand fighters. Yet it was able recently to cut off all road links between Gulu and the rest of the country, forcing visitors to fly in.

Diplomats say that 18-thousand figure for the government's troop size in the north is the highest yet revealed by authorities and represents about one-third of Uganda's total army. It has been considered one of Africa's best fighting forces since it helped propel President Yoweri Museveni to power 10 years ago after a guerrilla war.

Yet Ms. Bigombe, in an interview in her office in Gulu, suggests that even more troops are needed -- despite Uganda's current efforts to reduce the size of its military and to trim defense spending:

“We just demobilized. I'm not saying we should get back into recruiting more but I'm saying that bringing in as many (troops) as possible to strengthen the number that is in here.”

Ms. Bigombe and senior military officials say the army in the north also needs more sophisticated equipment -- including specialized communications and intelligence-gathering technology as well as newer and better weapons.

Yet official sources have revealed that some of the new weapons and equipment already sent to the north have so far not only failed to meet expectations, but have even led to tragedy. A newly-acquired Russian-built helicopter gunship now flying missions near Gulu recently fired by mistake on Ugandan troops, causing an undisclosed number of dead and wounded.

Another gunship was allegedly disabled by the rebels themselves, and senior commanders have complained about the need for intensive helicopter maintenance that is difficult to carry out in the remote north.

Ugandan officials also sought night-vision equipment from abroad and eventually acquired it from Israel. Yet military sources say the army generally retreats to its barracks at night and the rebels continue to move freely in the dark, carrying out raids on villages and planting landmines.

Despite the continued attacks by the Lord's Resistance Army -- attacks which Ms. Bigombe says have claimed some 250 civilian lives in recent weeks -- President Museveni vows that the rebels will be wiped out. But analysts say it is a vow the Ugandan leader has made before and still the rebels keep on striking. They say the rebels cannot hope to achieve their goal of ousting the Museveni government. But as long as the government fails to suppress the LRA, these analysts believe continued fighting will drain the national budget and slow Uganda's economic recovery.

In a third report from Gulu, I focused on the civilian victims of the violence.

Forty-five-year-old Rosalba Acheng is one of the latest victims of the Lord's Resistance Army. She is lying in a bed in St. Mary's hospital at Lacor, just outside Gulu. Her right leg is missing. She stepped on a landmine as she ran after the rebels who she says beat and killed one of her sister's children in a raid. The baby she was carrying at the time is also hospitalized with wounds sustained in the blast. The mine was planted on a path she and other villagers regularly used.

Twenty-year-old Sabina Alal is another kind of LRA victim. She was kidnapped from her home by the rebels a year ago and pressed into service as both a fighter and a sex slave to a rebel officer. She admits she was forced to kill fellow abductees who tried to escape. She was herself whipped and threatened with death. She fled in the confusion caused when a Ugandan government helicopter attacked the rebel band she was with. She is now receiving counseling in a special trauma center in Gulu run by the international charity group, World Vision.

Twenty-year-old Christine Achamolok is also receiving care at the trauma center. She cries and fights for control as she tells how the rebels came to her home one day and kidnapped her husband, who has not been seen since. In the midst of her frantic worrying, a second LRA contingent burst in. This time, the rebels stole all the chickens and the commanding officer raped her. She is seven-months pregnant. She has now been told she has syphilis.

Sixty-six-year-old Basilio Okema is yet another victim of the Lord's Resistance Army. He was kidnapped by the rebels one day near his home at Atiak, site of a rebel massacre of civilians last year. After several days, he began to weaken and fall behind as the LRA column moved through the bush. The rebels decided to kill him, clubbing him on the head. When they finished beating him, to see if he was really dead, the rebels cut off part of one of his ears and sliced one of his fingers in half lengthwise. It is swollen like an overcooked sausage.

Residents of Gulu say after a decade of rebel attacks, almost everyone who lives in the district has been affected one way or another. Most appear to have little sympathy for the LRA and question whether it has any legitimate political grievances worth fighting for. One retired engineer says two words sum up his view of the rebels and their leader, Joseph Kony, a former altar boy who preaches the 10 commandments to his followers. He says those two words are fanatic and hypocrite.

Reflections on Journalism: An Interlude

In 2006, I was honored with the Alumni Achievement Award of Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism. My wife and several colleagues who worked with me in Africa nominated me. Our friend, Suzanne Daley, former Johannesburg correspondent for the New York Times and later National Editor, was my "presenter" at the awards ceremony at Columbia. I then delivered a short address, attempting to meet the requirement that: “At the ceremony, attendees are traditionally treated by recipients to inspirational remarks filled with humor, nostalgia, and insight into world affairs and the journalism profession.” Here now are my remarks:

Several years ago, while in Africa, I began toying with the idea of a book. The working title is “What They Never Taught Me in Journalism School: Reporting in the Real World.”

I went as far as coming up with chapter headings --- and I may still finish this project so please don’t get any ideas. But my introduction goes back to the origins of the J-School:

‘Joseph Pulitzer wrote in 1904 that “A journalist is the lookout on the ship of state.” But he never said anything about practical matters like where the lifejackets or lifeboats are. That’s why I’m here to help.’

I then go on in various sections to address some of the skills a real working journalist needs, starting with patience, and drawing on a saying I once was told in Kenya: ‘You Europeans have the watches, We Africans have the time.’ I get into the problem of bored border guards rooting through everything you have just because you and your things are a novelty, a diversion from the ordinary. And I include a tip on how to deflect the amorous interest of a border official who might want to know why a woman reporter you are traveling with is unmarried. For that it is helpful to put a high bride price on the female journalist. I once put a price of 15 camels on a colleague. Trust me, it was an outrageous sum --- and we were allowed to go on our way quickly.

There’s a tip in my unfinished book on how to cope at massacre sights, the perils of military press pools and a word to the wise to check the label of your bulletproof vest on its stopping power. My first one in Mogadishu, sent out by the home office, said --- and I quote --- “will not protect wearer against rifle fire or sharp objects” --- not particularly useful in a continent of AK-47’s and machetes.

For broadcasters, there is a section on the problem of recording sound at a distance --- like the night I tried to capture the audio of shelling and other gunfire in Rwanda, only to discover later that a cricket had been sitting near my microphone, occasionally chirping OVER the distant thud of mortars. We dubbed that one the Cricket that Ate Kigali.

I even have a section on ethics. Its title is “OSTRICH FEATHERS.” It involves the issue of gift-giving to get the cooperation of sources and notes there are places in the world where money is essentially useless and items like cigarettes unimpressive. Once such place is northern Kenya’s Turkana country. Fortunately I and some colleagues were traveling with a former British colonial officer who had packed along some ostrich feathers, an essential element for traditional Turkana ceremonies. We met two young herders who had only a half feather, black and borrowed. We gave them a whole nice new shiny white one and they practically keeled over in delight. In return I got a nice recording of them singing a praise song about their lead billy goat.

Actually this has less to do with ethics than observing that the best journalism comes from relishing moments like that --- and writing about them. One of my other proposed chapters underscores that by focusing on the “GOLD DIGGERS OF BUJUMBURA,” the capital of tiny Burundi in Central Africa, not known for its mineral riches.

One day, I noticed several men knee deep in water in a ditch by the side of a residential street. They appeared to be panning for gold, which struck me as improbable. So I asked my escort and he said that was indeed what they were doing. Seems the house next to the ditch was owned by a man who received smuggled raw gold from the Congo, did a rough smelt in his compound and some of the waste-water run-off contained flakes of gold.

Another such incident took place in Luanda, capital of the southwest African country of Angola. Returning from the airport late one day from a trip with some aid workers, I saw a body disappearing into a drain hole by the side of the road. One of the aid workers told me she had heard of a group of “sewer boys” living there who usually emerged at dawn.

So the next morning, a colleague and I were there and saw, as the sun came up, a head pop out of the hole, followed by two arms. Eventually a whole boy in tattered shorts and a filthy t-shirt emerged. Several other sleepy looking boys followed. They were the most pathetic street kids I had ever seen in Africa.

Regrettably I could only tell their story. But that is how correspondents try to make a difference.

Working for VOA may be virtually anonymous in this country but abroad it does occasionally mean a certain notoriety. The most bizarre form of recognition came one day in the mid-90’s while I was sitting in my office in Nairobi, Kenya.

The phone rang. On the line was a man who told me his name was … Alex Belida. Needless to say, I was shocked. After prodding he admitted his real name was Mesafint Beyene. He was an Ethiopian refugee. He said his nickname was Alex Belida, given to him by friends because he listened to the radio day and night --- and not just any radio. He listened to VOA and he especially liked to hear my voice.

I think I’ll find a special place for him in this book, if I ever write it.

While we might laugh about the notion of what they don’t teach you in journalism school, the things that really count about a journalism education are the big important issues --- like why we need watchdogs and the fundamental notion of the people’s right to information.

Around the world there are still places that do not honor that notion and there are millions who are eager to hear or read or see what in fact is going on. Those who work at VOA, the BBC and other international broadcasters know the power of information transmitted to a global audience --- as do those who still jam our signals and try to bloc access to our websites. We have a special responsibility to be scrupulous in working to put out news products that are beyond reproach.

That is what I remain focused on now and it is one reason why I have directed our newsroom staff to the Project for Excellence in Journalism, which is part of this school, and specifically to its book, "The Elements of Journalism.”

The book makes the following observation, which I consider particularly relevant: "Journalism provides something unique to a culture -- independent, reliable, accurate, and comprehensive information that citizens require to be free. A journalism that is asked to provide something other than that subverts democratic culture. This is what happens when governments control the news….”

The book refers to Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union but it could just as well refer to any number of countries today.

When one of VOA’s most respected news directors retired many years ago, he told the staff in a farewell message: "Remember you represent the American people and its free press." It’s something I continue to remind my colleagues: We must work to remain a model for responsible journalism, and I have asked them to remember the first words broadcast on VOA in 1942: "The news may be good. The news may be bad. We shall tell you the truth."

It was the right model then. It is the right model now. For all of us, wherever we work.

A Flood of the Dead

In May 1994, Rwanda's biggest and most gruesome export was the bodies of victims of the ethnic and political violence then wracking the country. Between 7,000 and 10,000 bodies had by then traveled hundreds of kilometers along the Akagera River into Lake Victoria, spoiling the Ugandan shoreline. I flew over Lake Victoria in a Ugandan police helicopter with colleagues from the AP, N.Y. Times and Time. This first report contains observations recorded live-to-tape:

"We are overflying the coast of Lake Victoria. We are about 80 kilometers south of Entebbe and we have already started seeing evidence of the slaughter in Rwanda. Body after body, decomposing, body parts, skulls, the bodies of small children. Some of them just washed up on the shore. Some of them already half buried in the sand.

"Sometimes the bodies are in groups. They appear almost to be bound together. They have been bleached by the sun and they no longer appear to be much more than mannequins from some bizarre store...

"Along this very same shoreline there are little villages, maybe half a dozen to a dozen grass huts. People fishing, going about their business. We just stopped in one little village of about 50 people. They tell us that the greatest impact so far by the bodies that have been coming in from Rwanda is the price of their fish, the Nile perch -- five kilos normally sells for two thousand Ugandan shillings (about two US dollars). The price is now down to six hundred Ugandan shillings (about 60 cents). They say that price began to fall within the last month as the bodies began appearing here on lake victoria. [Pause]

"That is maybe the most revolting thing I have ever seen: a pig along the shore nibbling at a body."

After the day was over, I compiled a more complete, produced report which also began by noting thousands of bodies from the ethnic and political slaughter in Rwanda had ended up in the waters of Lake Victoria in Uganda, polluting the shoreline, destroying the livelihoods of fishermen, and leaving behind deep psychological scars. This report was datelined from one Ugandan lakeside village called Kasansero:

47-year-old Ngoga Murumba is a farmer. But for the past week, instead of tending the crops in his fields, he has joined in a grotesque harvest of an altogether different sort -- one that is taking place along the shores of Lake Victoria in southeastern Uganda.

It is a harvest of horror. A harvest of shame. A harvest of bodies from Rwanda, bodies that traveled hundreds of kilometers along the Akagera river before ending up in small Ugandan lakeside villages like Kasensero where Mr. Murumba now goes about his grim work.

As he unloads bodies from the small fishing boats that bring them in and then helps load them onto the truck that takes them to a nearby mass grave, he says he has been numbed by it all.

But Mr. Murumba says one image is still seared into his mind, still haunts him even in his sleep. It is that of the woman and her five children whose bodies he helped recover from the lake. They were bound together in death:

“One time we found a woman tied with one arm with a child, another one with a child, on the back, another leg, on the leg...five children."

He says they had no obvious bullet wounds or machete gashes. They appear to have been tossed alive into the water.

Up to 10-thousand bodies have been recovered in Uganda so far -- almost two-thousand in Kasensero, a village of about 12-hundred people near the mouth of the Akagera River. Most of the bodies are badly decomposed. Many are missing heads or limbs. Some show evidence of having been tortured.

At first, the villagers tried to cope with the problem by burying the corpses in shallow shoreline graves. But these were easily exposed by the lapping waves and by prowling dogs and wild pigs, who even now can still be seen feasting on unrecovered corpses.

Then the villagers were overwhelmed by the sheer dimensions of the recovery task as more and more bodies floated ashore. With the help of relief organizations and the Ugandan government, an organized collection effort began. Villagers were given plastic sheets to wrap the bodies in along with face masks, rubber gloves and boots to wear as they went about their work. They also began receiving a wage of about ten dollars a day.

Most do not work for more than two or three days, though. A local official says the psychological stress is too great: “Because, you see, handling human bodies, decomposed, is not an easy job."

The bodies are now being placed in mass graves -- away from the shore. In Kasensero, that gravesite is marked by a single wreath said to have been placed there by some Rwandans. It dangles from a stick rising from the freshly-turned red soil. Its flowers are now dry and lifeless, its ribbon faded.

The villagers say they have been told where the bodies come from. But they are less concerned about the reasons behind the slaughter in Rwanda than they are about the impact the bodies are having on their lives in Uganda.

Most of the residents of Kasensero and its neighboring villages earn their living from the lake -- from its rich fish resources. But demand has fallen -- and so have prices -- as news of the rotting bodies spread. Five kilograms of Nile perch, the biggest catch from the lake, normally bring a price of two-thousand ugandan shillings, or about two dollars. The price is now down to six-hundred shillings, about sixty cents. It is still falling.

Officials insist there is nothing wrong with eating Lake Victoria perch or tilapia, another popular catch. But even they admit it is difficult to fight the psychological disgust felt by prospective fish customers in big cities like Kampala or Nairobi.

Still, the villagers try to go about their normal activities. Fishermen not involved with the body collection continue to set out their nets or work on their boats. Women tend to cooking fires and laundry, while casting watchful eyes on their children, who still play in the dirt outside the simple houses of Kasensero.

But when the wind blows the wrong way, the putrid stench of death penetrates the village. It cannot be forgotten.

The Last Kalahari Bushmen, Part Three

In the center of Botswana lies the vast Central Kalahari Game Reserve, once an exclusive sanctuary for the "San" or bushmen. In late 1998, I visited the reserve in search of these last indigenous hunter-gatherers of southern Africa and has this, the final segment in a series of three reports.

A San bushman speaks in the distinctive click sound of the Naro language, saying “it is a good day to go for a walk in the Kalahari." It is a vast, desolate thirstland. And to survive here has never been an easy task – especially because there is no permanent source of surface water.

Explorer, guide and naturalist, Grant Craig: “It's very unforgiving, uncompromising. If you make mistakes here, you can die. But everything here is unique and specially adapted -- the springbok, the gemsbok -- and for them to survive is actually quite a special happening.”

That goes for the San who once lived here as well. Hunted and chased into ever more remote areas by the advance of both black and white groups across southern Africa, they developed special skills that enabled them to survive in the harsh environment of the Kalahari -- skills ranging from the recognition of edible plants to the hunting of animals with poison-tipped arrows.

Yet the San have now been largely removed from the central Kalahari reserve once set aside as a sanctuary for their exclusive use -- removed to bleak government-sponsored settlements where their culture is dying and their unique talents are being lost.

Once again,Grant Craig: “It's a very hard life and unless you work at it all the time and stay on top of the skills, they're going to lose it -- especially the younger people and the new generations, they're not going to have it anymore. And they'll never be able to come out here and survive again, once the older generations are gone.”

Authorities say the resettlement of the San, or Basarwa as they are called in Botswana, is intended to give them better chances to develop and thrive. They also maintain the San posed a threat to the preservation of tourist-attracting wildlife within the Kalahari reserve.

Yet critics, like Grant Craig, say the San had little impact on the desert scrublands they called home. “They're not hurting anybody, they're not degrading the environment or anything like that. They're not a threat out here.”

But at more than 50-thousand square kilometers in size, the central Kalahari reserve seems to have more than enough space and few enough visitors to make coexistence possible. There are no lodges, stores, gas stations or other amenities. Only a handful of barely passable dirt roads run through the area.

This correspondent traveled through the reserve over a three-day period and saw only one other vehicle and two other persons outside the official entry and exit posts. Regretably, all that could be seen of the San were just a few abandoned grass huts and animal pens.

For the record, Botswana’s High Court ruled in December 2006 that the Botswana government's eviction of the Bushmen was 'unlawful and unconstitutional', and that they had the right to live on their ancestral land inside the Central Kalahari Game Reserve. The court also ruled that the Bushmen have the right to hunt and gather in the reserve, and should not have to apply for permits to enter it.

However, the judges also said that the government was not obliged to provide services to Bushmen in the reserve.

While in December 2006 spokesmen for both the Bushmen and the international tribal rights group, Survival, welcomed the decision as a victory, since then there have been new expressions of concern.

In March 2007, Survival issued a news release noting Botswana's Attorney General had written to the Bushmen's lawyers turning down their request for permission to install a pump at an existing borehole (well) on their land in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve. The reason given was that the borehole was the property of the government.

Jumanda Gakelebone of Bushman organisation First People of the Kalahari was quoted as saying, 'The court said we could go back to our land, but now we see that the government is doing everything it can to stop us. Why else would it stop us using a borehole that nobody else is using? Without water we cannot live in the Kalahari.'

The Last Kalahari Bushmen, Part Two

The indigenous San or hunter-gatherer bushmen of Botswana's Central Kalahari region are a people in danger of loosing their traditional roots as they enter the new millennium. Botswanan authorities say they are trying to help the San. But critics of government policy charge the San are simply victims of human rights abuses and a longstanding policy of discrimination. Here is part two of my 1998 series:

Just how well or how poorly the San are treated depends on your perspective. Botswana's President Festus Mogae calls them a "favored" group and says they are given everything by the government for free -- even cattle.

But in an interview, Mr. Mogae says that if the San want to benefit from such government schemes, they must leave the vast expanse of the Central Kalahari -- now a game reserve, but once an area set aside for the exclusive use of this tiny semi-nomadic ethnic group.

“Now they say they want to own cattle, they want to own goats and sheep and we say, ‘look, if you want to own cattle, goats and sheep and also to bear arms, you have to get out of the park.’"

But those San who have relocated outside the reserve, lured by the promise of free livestock and better access to modern amenities, may well have been misled. The US State Department's annual human rights report on Botswana this past year said those arriving at new government-sponsored settlements found services and facilities that were either substandard or non-existent.

The State Department report says the San or Basarwa, as they are known in Botswana, have been marginalized. They have lost access to their traditional land and are vulnerable to exploitation. It says their progress in society has been hampered by not only by their isolation but also by their ignorance of civil rights and lack of representation in local or national government.

Alice Mogwe of Botswana's Ditshwanelo human rights center says bluntly that the San or Basarwa are the victims of generations of discrimination.

“They are not encouraged to be proud of who they are. It's insulting to be called Sarwa. People use it as a term of insult..."

Ms. Mogwe and other activists concerned with the plight of the San believe they should be treated as partners in the development of the Central Kalahari, whether for tourism, mining or whatever. But she says the movement of the San into government settlements outside the reserve is killing their culture.

“When the custodians of a culture are marginalized, the culture itself will become marginalized and it will become weaker. And I think that is what's beginning to happen. The link with the land is incredibly important.”

As recently as two years ago, diplomats and other observers were taken to the remote town of Xade in the Central Kalahari, where a small community of San lived. There they heard government officials say the bushmen would not be forced to leave the reserve.

Yet today Xade is empty and lifeless. Only a few abandoned huts and animal pens remain along with a few government buildings where visitors register their presence in the park.

Asked why the San have gone, the woman who runs the office shrugs and says she does not know.

“Ask the Director of Wildlife, maybe he knows something...he doesn't tell us.”

Witnesses say that despite promises by the Botswana government, the residents of Xade were threatened -- even with military action -- if they did not agree to move. Activists familiar with the plight of the San say that not all have left the reserve, however. They believe as many as 400 are still resisting resettlement and remain effectively hidden away in even more remote parts of the Central Kalahari, far from the reach of a civilization that has all but destroyed them.

The Last Kalahari Bushmen

One of Africa's oldest, indigenous cultures is dying in what some critics charge is an abuse of human rights. The San or Basarwa, the bushmen hunter-gatherers of the Kalahari appeared in the late 1990’s to be losing their last hold on what has long been the heart of their traditional land in Botswana. I traveled to the remote central Kalahari area in late 1998:

A hot wind howls across the sun-baked pans of the central Kalahari reserve, blowing up thick clouds of gritty sand. It is as inhospitable an environment as you can imagine -- the harshness underscored by scrubby, thorny vegetation so parched it almost looks burned.

Yet here in the heart of Botswana, on this vast tract of land -- at 53-thousand square kilometers in size, bigger than Switzerland -- there is an amazing abundance of life that has adapted to the harshness. There are exotic birds like the black-bellied korhan and the red-billed buffalo weaver, and mammals like the magnificent gemsbok, nimble springboks, hungry jackals and more.

Until recently, people lived here, too -- several hundred of them in places like the remote settlement of Xade, some five hours down an unbelievably bad dirt track from the nearest town. These people were the San, or the bushmen of the Kalahari, whose ancestors roamed the area for an estimated 30-thousand years.

But the San, or Basarwa as they are also called in Botswana, are now gone from Xade, from Xaka and most other locations in this massive reserve originally set aside as a sanctuary for their exclusive use -- resettled by a government that has refused to recognize their claim to the land.

It is a government that also maintains the resettlement of the San has been "voluntary" and designed to give them greater access to modern development.

But critics say there has been nothing voluntary at all about the resettlement scheme, which they suspect may be linked to plans for tourism or even diamond mining in the Kalahari.

Alice Mogwe is the director of Ditshwanelo, the Botswanan human rights monitoring group. She says government officials told the remaining inhabitants of places like Xade they would be cutting off their water supplies and other assistance if they didn't move.

“To talk about free choice when you are told no water is not choice at all.”

Ms. Mogwe says the San, past victims of official harassment and even torture, were also threatened with military action if they did not move.

It is a claim confirmed by this member of the San community who accompanied me on a four-day trip through the central Kalahari. His identity is being withheld to protect him.

Reporter: “What did they say, if you do not move, what would happen?”

San: “They say they coming to fight them...you must move.”

All that the San of Xade have left behind are the remnants of their beehive-shaped thatch huts, the "kraals" or pens where they kept their goats, and small plots of once-cultivated land.

Explorer, guide and naturalist Grant Craig has been visiting the central Kalahari for years. As he surveys an abandoned dwelling site, noting the black pepper tree planted by a San family, he says he is saddened.

“This is where they had been for generations and that's why they had a problem being moved. They have been here for many generations. This tree is a good 30 years old so they have been here, somebody's been here for 30 years...sad, eh? One culture dying.”

The Southern African Human Rights Network this year called on the government of Botswana to stop what it called the forced displacement and forced resettlement of the San in the name of economic development and integration into the mainstream of society. It also said those who have already been resettled should be allowed to return to their ancestral lands.

Kenya's Turkana Region, Part Four

For much of the 20th century, the Turkana district of northwestern Kenya was closed to all outside visitors by British colonial authorities. That has now changed. Still, few outsiders travel willingly into what is largely a volcanic desert wasteland of unrelenting heat, wind-whipped dust, and five-meter tall termite mounds. In part four of this series, I made clear I found this inhospitable place enchanting.

Ekuwam Lotokoi and his younger brother are a couple of very happy men -- so happy they have agreed to sing. That is because my traveling companions and I have just given them two large white ostrich feathers.

What is so special about that, you might ask?

Well, every Turkana man has what is known as a dance ox or "emong." It is a ceremonial animal, selected on the basis of color and bone structure, usually the finest animal in the man's private herd. It is not worshiped or treated much differently from the rest of the herd. But it takes on special importance in Turkana dancing and singing sessions.

The man will take center stage in these sessions and sing praises to the wonders of his ox -- and in so doing, he will wear his finest decorations, the most prized of which are . . . you guessed it . . . ostrich feathers. In some parts of Turkana district, they are so prized that two such feathers are worth one goat.

Oh, one other thing. If you do not have a dance ox, you can substitute another animal to sing praises to. And in Mr. Lotokoi's case, it happens to be a goat. With ostrich feathers in hand, that is who he and his brother sing to.

I ask Emekwi Nalukoowoi, our Turkana guide, to explain the meaning of the song.

“It means his billy goat is as white as a cloud and it's very good and if the river is full, it can go across the river without being washed away by the water, and. . .it cannot lead the goats to disappear. If it leads the rest of the goats, it will lead them in a good way.”

Unfortunately for Mr. Lotokoi and his brother, the river near where they make their home is dry. Most of their livestock has died. Drought and famine are a major threat to the future of the Turkana, one of the last truly nomadic people in this part of Africa, an ethnic group once regarded as the fiercest warriors in the region, the only tribe bold enough to have resisted British colonial rule for any length of time.

Even today, they remain largely aloof.

For example, Mr. Lotokoi tells us he has never voted and that he does not know who Kenya's president is. To him, Nairobi, the capital, in his words, is "the place where razorblades come from." He lives in a world of his own.

Historian and author Nigel Pavitt has traveled extensively throughout Turkanaland during the past nearly 40 years.

“They are extremely tough and their character goes with that toughness. They can be actually quite off-putting. They can be incredibly arrogant. They can almost ignore you as if you didn't exist.”

That approach to life is dictated by the harsh environment in which the Turkana live. And it is reflected in two aspects of their language. For one, there are no words for "thank you."

Mr. Pavitt says people live by constant sharing and begging. Favors must always be repaid.

The other linguistic point is that anybody who is not Turkana is described by the word "enemy."Mr. Nalukoowoi, our Turkana guide, explains.

“We perceive that anybody who is not of my tribe, anybody that if you greet him you will say "ajoha" which is a Turkana greeting. Anybody who does not respond, definitely I would say is "emoit" which is simply translated ‘an enemy.’"

The Turkana have many real enemies -- rival ethnic groups from neighboring Ethiopia, Sudan, and Uganda as well as from within Kenya itself. Over the years, these groups have staged many livestock raids on the Turkana herds. Hundreds of Turkana have been killed. Thousands of cattle, camels, sheep, and goats have been stolen.

Do not get the impression that the Turkana are always victims, though. They raid back, generally giving as good as they get. Some of the Turkana we talk to during our visit to the region tell us with great pride of the various weapons they own -- AK-47 assault rifles and the like.

But the most unusual weapon used by this warrior-like people is the wrist knife. Virtually all adult men wear them. These are round, bracelet-like devices of tooled metal that slip over the wrist. The outer edge has been sharpened and when not in use is covered with a protective leather sheath. While originally intended for hand-to-hand combat, wrist knives are now commonly used to skin animals, to cut up meat and other similar functions.

As we leave Mr. Lotukoi and his brother by their dry river-bed home, I wonder what will become of them and their children. They seem miserably poor by all practical standards. Yet I know they are a tough and resilient people, perhaps the only ones who can survive in such a bleak, dry and unforgiving land.

I take heart in the words of Emekwi Nalukoowoi, our Turkana guide.

“It's our land, it's very beautiful, we like it.”

The year before I traveled to the Turkana lands, a silly thing happened which caught my eye. As most know, April first is also known as April Fools Day, and in many parts of the world it is an occasion when newspapers publish humorous news stories about improbable events. The best are usually written in a straightforward manner, as if they were reports about actual occurrences. On April 1, 1994, the best April Fools Day story in the Kenya press involved Turkana district.

Readers of Nairobi's Daily Nation newspaper were stunned to learn of Kenya's first venture into space. According to the paper, the rocketship "Nyayo Ark" blasted off from its launch-pad near Lake Turkana with a payload consisting of two aardvarks, two colobus monkeys and two dik-dik -- a kind of miniature deer.

As the nation noted, it was the first time wild animals have been sent into space -- a move fitting for a country best known for its game parks and wildlife.

The newspaper said the mission was almost put off at the last moment because of objections by top officials to plans to launch the "Nyayo Ark" from a site in Kenya's best-known nature reserve, the Maasai Mara. The Nation said the new head of Kenya's Wildlife Service complained the noise of the launch would disturb animals in the park. A prominent cabinet member complained it would upset the cattle of local Maasai herdsmen.

Kenya's Turkana Region, Part Three

Kenya's northwestern Turkana district looks like a vast sun-baked wasteland, built improbably around a huge, jade-green lake. Yet evidence unearthed by scientists along the shores of Lake Turkana suggests this may well be the place where human life as we know it got its start. In part three of this series, I report on my visit to the region known as 'the cradle of mankind'.

For about 35-years, Kamoya Kimeu has been jostling over barren landscapes like this near a dig-site known as Kanapoi, working with famous paleontologists like Louis and Mary Leakey, their son Richard and and his wife Meave. He may not have the international reputations of the Leakeys, but Mr. Kimeu has proven indispensable to their fame.

He is the head of what is known popularly as the hominid gang, a team of fossil hunters from the National Museums of Kenya who have been working with the Leakeys and other scientists. During the past three decades, he and his men have been the ones who have located and unearthed some of the most significant specimens ever found of hominids, man's earliest ancestors.

As the Land Rover stops and Mr. Kimeu gets out, it is just a matter of seconds before his eyes begin scouring the ground. He never stops looking.

He pauses as he walks across this desolate place. He suddenly stoops and picks up two stonelike objects.

I ask him what he is doing.

Reporter: “Looks like you are putting together the pieces of a puzzle.”
Kimeu: “Yeah, that is what we do in fact. We find, you know, many pieces like this one and then we put them together and they become a complete thing.”
Reporter: “What do you think this is?”
Kimeu: “This must be an elephant because you see the thickness of the bone, it is a big animal. An elephant or a hippo. You can not tell without seeing the joint.”

Whatever it is, it must be four-point-one-million-years old. That is the age of the exposed soil level in this parched and superheated valley. It is the age of the hominid fragments found here during the past two years-- teeth, jaw, and limb bones, discoveries which have pushed back the known time when man's ape-like predecessors first walked upright on two feet.

Mr. Kimeu recalls the first hominid find at Kanapoi.

“We did not know at first what it was because it was covered by stones. So we came and find it is a hominid which is very good because we were looking very hard to find one, but this was the first one to be found.”

Mr. Kimeu again stops and begins scratching at the earth with a small twig and blowing away at the soil. This time he finds a prehistoric fish bone. A reporter finds an ancient crocodile bone lying nearby. The shores of Lake Turkana are 50-kilometers away. But four-million years ago, this area marked the water's edge. There were trees and other vegetation. It was lush.

Now it is simply dry and unpleasant. Mr. Kimeu acknowledges it is difficult to work in places like this given the intense heat, the deadly snakes that appear from time to time, and the occasional bandits. But he says it is important work, work that tells us about our past.

Mr. Kimeu's most significant find to date was his discovery in 1984 of the one-point-six-million-year old remains of Turkana Boy, the oldest and most complete skeleton of homo erectus ever found. Illustrating just how compulsive is his search instinct, the head of the hominid gang says he found the first bone fragment of the Turkana Boy on what was to have been a rest day for his team.

“It was a resting day and I was lucky to find that because I like looking. I just went, other people were sleeping because we were very tired. I did not sleep. I just went to look.”

It is the off-season now and the Kanapoi site is closed. But Kamoya Kimeu and his men will be back next year. He says he is sure they will uncover yet another important hominid find. Why? In large part, because he never stops looking.

“I feel like looking”, he says, “it makes me happy.”

Kenya's Turkana Region, Part Two

In part two of this series about the far north of Kenya, I reported the Turkana people were increasingly threatened by the twin problems of drought and insecurity and in desperate need of help. But I found much of the aid that has gone into this remote and barren district has gone to waste.

“This fine tarmac highway was dubbed the great fish road, and it was built by Norwegian aid in the 70's, and the idea was to have a good road from the fish factory that Noraid (Norwegian Aid) was building at Kalokol, so that fresh frozen fish fillets could be distributed throughout Kenya.”

That is historian and author Nigel Pavitt talking as he drives along the multi-million dollar "fish" highway that links Turkana district with the rest of Kenya. It is the only tangible benefit remaining from what is widely viewed as one of the great foreign aid disasters of all time in Africa.

The modern Norwegian-financed fish factory he refers to still stands in the town of Kalokol, the largest structure in an otherwise undistinguished conglomeration of mud buildings, tin shacks and reed huts. It is located along the hot, wind-swept shores of Ferguson's Gulf, part of Lake Turkana, Kenya's huge inland sea -- a lake rich in Nile perch, tilapia, and other fish.

The only problem is the factory never really started production. The cost of freezing fish in this remote region where temperatures regularly reach 40 degrees (Celsius) and more was one factor. Another, perhaps more important, was the dramatic variation that has occurred in the lake's water level -- 20 meters in this century.

The jetty built for fishermen to unload their catches now stands high and dry. Sand blows mercilessly over the bare metal framework. Historian Pavitt surveys the barren scene.

“Well, 20-years ago this was all lake. This is part of Ferguson's Gulf or was part of Ferguson's Gulf which is a very important fish area. Just to give you an example of how important it was, in 1976, 16-thousand tons of tilapia were taken out of this area. Now I suppose the lake is, as the crow flies, two or three kilometers distant.”

Astute planners could have checked British colonial records to learn about the lake's wildly-fluctuating levels. But they did not. They also could have learned that most Turkana shun fish unless they are desperate. Now thousands of poor Turkana lured to places like Kalokol with the promise of work are poorer still.

Standing on the abandoned jetty, Emekwi Nalukoowoi, a 22-year-old Turkana, sounds bitter.

“I see it is a total disaster. You know like because it just actually shows how some of these people who bring these projects to my district do not see way ahead what will be the outcome or they do not plan ahead or if there is a disaster what would happen to their project.”

The Norwegian fish factory is not the only example of aid gone wrong. Just down the road is an abandoned Italian fish hatchery. In his forthcoming book on Turkana, Mr. Pavitt says perhaps no other district in Kenya has had so much aid money poured into it with so little to show in return.

Perhaps the most successful and most practical project to date is one of the simplest, a project in which the Roman Catholic Church has installed about 50 hand-operated water pumps throughout Turkanaland.

These days, most of the assistance that reaches Turkana, the district and the people, is in the form of food. In recent years, because of prolonged drought conditions and the threat of famine, about 230-thousand of the estimated 300-thousand residents of the area have received food aid. Most of the food programs have now stopped. But relief workers admit conditions in the region are likely to worsen before they improve.

Mr. Pavitt is among those who say there has to be a better way to help people like the Turkana.

“I think the Turkana need help in a practical way to improve their lifestyle but not to change it. I do not see that there is any way that people here can change their way of life quickly because the only way to, say, properly farm this desolate land is by pastoral way of life and the Turkana are very successful at this. So I think that if help is given to the Turkana, it needs to be given in the terms of perhaps finding different alternatives of grass cover, improvement in water resources, improvement in livestock.”

But until that kind of thing is done, Mr. Pavitt and others see a bleak future for the Turkana, with more and more of them becoming miserably poor and increasingly dependent. It is a depressing fate for a once feared warrior people who have managed for so long to survive and thrive in a hostile environment.

A Place of Heat, Wind, Dust and Thirst: Kenya's Turkana Region

In the far north of Kenya there is a remote and rarely visited place of heat, wind, dust and thirst called Turkana. It is a place whose desolation betrays its underlying beauty. Its people, despite the hardships they face, are proud and fierce. I travelled there in October 1995 for this series about a society under siege.

The line of palm trees, fronds rattling in the wind, seems to beckon invitingly, offering shade and the prospect of water. But along this dried-up river bed in the Turkana district of northwestern Kenya, there is little relief to be found from the searing heat and the blowing dust.


Turkana is a place both remote and forbidding. Most of it is a barren desert moonscape. It looks like the world would look if life as we know it came to an end.

Yet it is also the site of one of Africa's most mysterious and hidden great lakes, a massive body of jade-green water once called Lake Rudolf after an Austrian prince but now known as Lake Turkana. Along its shores, fossil finds suggest this may well be the place where millions of years ago life as we know it today began.

For the 300-thousand or so ethnic Turkana who live in the district, it is a place not of barrenness but of beauty. Young Emekwi Nalukoowoi works for Kenya's National Museums in the capital, Nairobi. But he becomes animated as he talks about Turkana on a rare trip home to see his parents.

“Oh it's very beautiful. Yes! Now you can see it's desolate and there's nobody who's using it. But when the rainy season comes, it's very beautiful...it's our land, it's very beautiful. We like it.”

The trouble is, though, rain does not come often to Turkana -- and the prolonged dry spells of recent years seem to be worsening. Over the past three years, the vast majority of the Turkana have been provided with food relief. Many have watched their prized cows, camels, sheep, and goats die or have had to slaughter them to survive. It has all come as a soul-deadening blow to this proud and fiercely independent ethnic group, one of the last truly nomadic peoples in Africa in an era in which the nomadic lifestyle is slowly dying out.

Ekuwam Lotokoi stands and slowly wraps a long cape-like cloth around his naked body. He says there has been no water at all this year in the river on whose banks he makes his home. He says he has lost most of his donkeys and goats.

The 10 people in his family take blood and milk from the remaining livestock to survive. But he fears they will all starve unless there is rain soon. He says his wife has gone off to a nearby village because it is rumored the Catholic mission there is giving out maize.

Still, he does not appear despondent. Historian and author Nigel Pavitt says the Turkana are a resilient people.

“The Turkana are very, very hardy people and they are one of the few tribes that I know of certainly in Kenya that make provision for bad times. When they have surplus milk, they will boil it and spread it on mats and dry it and keep it for the children in bad times. They collect berries and fruits and dry them and store them. They will keep surplus meat and keep it in fat and use it in bad times. So they acknowledge that they live in a very harsh climate but at least make provision for it."

Mr. Pavitt has been coming to Turkana district for nearly 40 years -- first as a young officer in Britain's colonial army, more recently as a naturalized Kenyan citizen and historian who is completing a book about the Turkana. He admires them.

“I find it fascinating up here. But they are a people that are certainly warlike. They have always throughout their lives in this country been at, I won't say, war, but at least been involved in stock raids and skirmishes with their neighbors. They have been on the losing side for many years now because of the troubles in their neighboring countries.”

Those neighbors are Ethiopia, Sudan, and Uganda -- all of which have seen war in recent years, and those wars have led to a proliferation of modern weapons in the region, weapons that have been used by rival ethnic groups against the Turkana and their animals.

The Turkana now arm themselves with AK-47 assault rifles instead of spears when they go out to graze their livestock. Still, every year hundreds of them are killed and thousands of cattle, camels, sheep, and goats are stolen -- another devastating blow to this pastoralist society.

It is a society under siege, a society whose very survival is threatened as it faces the 21st century.

War and Peace in Somalia

Somalia has struggled since a civil war in 1991 to re-establish its central government. More than two years ago a transitional leadership was formed in exile but the closest thing to an actual government was the Islamic Courts Union, which took control over the capital, Mogadishu, and much of southern Somalia. The Islamists eventually were ousted in fighting with Ethiopian troops who had intervened in the country. Yet Muslim insurgents have been attacking those troops and Ugandan soldiers stationed in Mogadishu as part of the African Union's peacekeeping mission. In short, the violence that has wracked Somalia since 1991 continues and there is still no effective central authority to provide law and order or basic services to the population. Yet in a small, almost forgotten corner of Somalia, in 1993, there was an unusual place where United Nations forces in the country at that time were not deployed and where clan struggles had subsided. It was a place called Lugh, and it was controlled by Muslim fundamentalists. I traveled there in October, 1993, and reported Lugh's Islamic leaders just wanted to be left alone to run things in peace, according to their religious beliefs --- something they appeared to be finding increasingly hard to do.

Sheikh Mahmoud Ahmed does not like fugitive Somali faction leader Mohammed Farah Aideed, and he does not like the United Nations military operation in Somalia, either. The Sheikh's Islamic militia drove General Aideed's forces from the Lugh area over a year ago. His aides threaten to resist any attempt by UN soldiers to move in.

So far, dispatching troops to Lugh is something the UN has shown little inclination of doing -- and that has left Sheikh Mahmoud and his group of Muslim fundamentalists known as "the Islamic Association" in effective control of this small district in southwestern Somalia's Gedo region, near the country's borders with Kenya and Ethiopia.

As a result, the Sheikh, who is called the regional commissioner, and his several hundred close followers who control the local administrative machinery and the police, have been able do things their way -- imposing Islamic rules of behavior, such as banning alcohol, tobacco and khat, the mildly narcotic leaf widely chewed by Somalis.

In return, the Association has guaranteed security in the area, in part by imposing a strict ban on the possession of firearms and explosives, leaving the only weapons in the hands of the police. Although there are occasional crime problems like looting, foreign relief workers in Lugh say there have been remarkably few incidents compared to other parts of Somalia. And they credit the Islamic leadership for working with UN authorities deployed in neighboring districts when such cooperation is needed to apprehend fleeing bandits.

The restoration of peace in Lugh has enabled thousands of Somalis who fled into neighboring Kenya to return to their homes, many of them to resume farming in this fertile stretch of land along the banks of the Juba river.

The population of the town of Lugh, which had fallen to just two to three thousand a year ago, has since surged to more than 25-thousand, with more than 100-thousand people now estimated to be living in the entire district.

That sudden population growth has generated problems which clearly have Lugh's Islamic leaders worried. They say their main concern is that there is not enough food to feed all the returnees. Moreover, they say there are not enough jobs available even to offer the returnees a chance of earning a living. They want the United Nations and other relief agencies working in the area to provide more assistance.

Foreign relief workers suggest the local leaders' complaints about the burden posed by returnees may in fact have their roots elsewhere. These aid workers report there are increasing signs of resistance among the new arrivals to the Islamic rules -- especially to the ban on khat and cigarettes.

They say one man was shot and wounded not long ago in a confrontation with police over his continued use of khat. And they report cigarettes can still be found, sold clandestinely on the black market.

But overall, relief workers and residents alike credit Sheikh Mahmoud with trying to defuse most problems arising from the imposition of Islamic law peacefully and through a policy of gradualism. First-time violators of the ban on cigarettes, for example, receive a warning and have their cigarettes confiscated. Second time violators spend a day in jail; third time violators three days. There have been no fourth-time violators.

The Sheikh and his followers take pride in what they have accomplished in Lugh. The central marketplace is full of food and other goods, schools are operating, war-damaged buildings and other facilities like irrigation pumps and bridges have been repaired, the people are receiving medical care. They say members of different clans and former supporters of various factions are living together peacefully.

They believe their Islamic way of doing things could be a model for all of Somalia. But for the moment, their main concern is preserving the way of life in Lugh from outside interference.