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COLTRANE
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Posted: Monday March 28th, 2005 15:58 |
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Folks,
Wawa Ngenge is from the Cameroun. He is an agricultural economist
trained in the US. He now works for the UNDP in Cameroun where he is
the national co-ordinator of the sustainable development networking
programme. This programme provides connectivity, training and
support to help launch Internet activities in a country and keep
them sustained. See http://www.sdnp.undp.org. He is also provisional
Vice President of the planned ISOC chapter in the Cameroun.
This interview with Wawa took place in San Jose California during
INET99, the Annual Global Internet Summit organised by the Internet
Society.
Survival and the Internet in Africa
What do you see as the relationship between the Internet and basic
needs of countries in Africa.
The Internet is the most recent of many technologies introduced into
developing countries. Each technology came with a lot of dreams. The
post office, for example, replaced the drum signals and the smoke
signals. As the number of people grew it became more and more
difficult to communicate with smoke signals and drums. Smoke doesn't
go across oceans. It goes with a lot of difficulty across mountain
ranges. So when the post office and writing came, it was said that
this was going to solve all our problems...
Before you didn't need to send messages across the great water. The
perception of distance was quite different...
You are right. The need to send messages way beyond the community
was created. At the time, the concern was to get the message to the
next community and that community would take it beyond if necessary.
Each technology came with a lot of dreams, but none of those
technologies themselves had the solution to the basic problems:
water, food, housing and clothing. Writing came, the post office
came, the telegraph came, the telephone came and now the Internet.
These technologies will not solve the basic problems. They will
contribute to solving them, because the solution to problems
involves searching for solutions. This in turn means exchanging
information. Somebody may have already solved the problem somewhere
else. The theory is that, by having easy access to a solution
developed elsewhere, the time it takes for me to look for a solution
is shortened. This is the basis of development using new
technologies. The coming of new technologies then contributes to the
development process but in itself is not sufficient to guarantee
development.
...is there not a risk that solutions taken from elsewhere might not
be appropriate? ....
The concept of inappropriateness is time-based. At each point in
time, it depends on the constraints we are faced with. Right now,
many people in developing countries are more concerned with dealing
with the four basics I mentioned rather than worrying about whether
a culture is preserved or not. If we are going to use the Internet
as a development tool and there are people that feel that parts of
their culture need to be defended, then we need to teach them how to
use the Internet in order to sustain, store and propagate elements
of that culture. If the communal model of Internet access is better
in certain areas and does not simply exist because people do not
have the means to acquire individual computer for access, then it
deserves to be put on the Internet so that other people can share
it. But if it is there by default because there isn't anything else,
that is a different problem, one of development. And we have to deal
with it. That is why we are talking of going beyond access to
analysing the societal impact of communication. For example, how
does a community which speaks one language change when they are
forced to use a different language in order to get onto the
Internet? We are not talking about languages like mine, Limboun,
which is not generally written, but languages like French and
German. For us it is more fundamental because we are dealing with
oral cultures.
There is much more to the issue of Internet and development and the
issue of Internet and society than the question of connectivity.
Connectivity is very important, but we have to go deeper into the
fundamental problems of survival in order to make the Internet help
us attain the goal of making life on the planet more comfortable for
more people rather than more uncomfortable for more people. The
challenge is to know whether beyond bringing sockets and access we
can actually help people to integrate these tools so as to improve
their lives.
...Is there a framework in the Cameroun for finding solutions to
these problems using new technologies? ...
There is no framework yet. We are still dealing with the problems of
privatisation and liberalisation of telecommunications and the
introduction of competition. We are far away from thinking about the
questions that are going to be raised by the growth of the Internet
in the Cameroun. We have to be careful that the technology does not
prevent us from thinking about our problems. That the technology
becomes the dog and society becomes the tail. We allowed that to
happen with reading and writing, we allowed that to happen with the
post office, we allowed it to happen with the telephone. Now with
the Internet, we have the experience of what other technologies did
when we introduced them. We need to maintain society as the dog and
keep this Internet technology as the tail. Let the dog wag the tail
and not the reverse. That is what Christine Maxwell said to me this
morning.
...There has been a lot of talk about developing countries
leapfrogging problems .......
Culture cannot leap forward. You can leapfrog technology. You can go
from the drum to the telephone very quickly. But as a society you
cannot leapfrog. To be able to do so would imply having a
destination that is well defined. Societies don't work like that.
Actually, we fiddle our way forward. The politicians would like us
to believe that they have a nicely defined world towards which they
are going... We want to stay alive in this world. We want to fight
disease. We want to be able to communicate with each other. We want
to be able to communicate instantly to keep in touch in the global
world. The need for communication fits into the search for survival
means and for means of a more comfortable existence and such
societal issues cannot be leapfrogged.
Wawa Ngenge, San Jose, California.
Interview by Alan McCluskey at INET99
http://www.connected.org/develop/wawa.html
____________________
“Nobody can give you freedom. Nobody can give you equality or justice or anything. If you're a man, you take it.� -Malcolm X
____________________
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