At the coffee plantation Monte Café, to the left of its dilapidated pink colonial buildings, stands a huge shed. The caretaker unlocks a gigantic padlock and we step into a surreal [...]]]>
Ghost factory. By M. Sayagues
At the coffee plantation Monte Café, to the left of its dilapidated pink colonial buildings, stands a huge shed. The caretaker unlocks a gigantic padlock and we step into a surreal décor for a tropical Blade Runner movie.
The shed houses a web of pipes and drums, coffee-processing machinery made by the Brazilian company Pinhalense. It is huge, complex – and never used.
The caretaker remembers when the machines were put in place, about a decade ago, but he never saw them working.
Donors pulled the plug on this US$24 million project after US$14 were spent and a few siphoned off.
The project was sponsored by ESAGRI, the agricultural arm of the Portuguese group Espirito Santo, with US$10.9 from the African Development Bank, totalling US$13 in foreign aid.
I went with a coffee grower who groaned at all the inappropriate elements: for example, a wasteful layout and excessive drying capacity for the production of the 1,800-hectares plantation. The optical scanner for bean selection made him laugh: it required a dust-free, air-conditioned environment, not the dust, humidity and power cuts of Sao Tome.
Going back to the capital after 4 pm, there were no taxis so I start walking. A man in a 4×4 offers me a ride. He is a businessman in his fifties and he insists on showing me his failed textile factory.
In the 1980s, it produced trousers and shirts for both the local market and for Angola, following an agreement between the two allied Marxist governments. When Angola liberalized its economy in the late 1990s, the contract was cancelled and the factory closed.
“Naively, we thought the contract would go on forever and did not look for other markets,” he explained.
Another padlock, another eerily silent space, a 2,000 sq.metres building with rows of old sewing machines.
Two ghost factories: one, the failure of a donor-funded development project. The other, a failure of the post-colonial regime’s industrialisation drive.
Provocative analysis
Improductive from Day One. By M. Sayagues
Africa is littered with abandoned industrial parks and two new, thought-provoking books explain why.
In Dead Aid, Zambian economist Dambisa Moyo argues that foreign aid to Africa has discouraged free enterprise while fuelling corruption and rent-seeking, defined as the use of governmental authority to make and take money without trade or production of wealth.
Aid, she says, lowers the incentive for investment and chokes off growth.
Because aid flows are seen as permanent income, policymakers have no incentive to look for other ways of financing development. Worse, they have no sense of urgency “in remedying Africa’s critical woes.”
In Architects of Poverty, South African author Moeletsi Mbeki argues that African elites obstruct the development of an indigenous entrepreneurial class, seen as a threat to their power. (Read an interview here).
Instead, elites entrench themselves as a “parasitic bureaucratic bourgeoisie…unproductive but wealthy black crony capitalists” who live off state revenues, ignore or exploit peasants, and divert profits to elite consumption or capital flight.
Mbeki notes that one of the biggest scandals is the underinvestment in transport in Africa.
Long wait
The 70 kms drive from Sao Tome to Porto Alegre on the south of the island takes 5 hours and a sturdy car to negotiate potholes.
Few minibuses ply this route because drivers don’t want to destroy their cars. So the trip from Porto Alegre to the capital turns into a day-long journey. That hurts tourism, trade and travel.
Since 7 am, Alice Tavares waited for a bus with her 2 young children and a neighbour’s teenager. They carried school satchels, two baskets of fish, five bundles of clothes and two jerry cans of petrol.
Patient Alice buys a pig. M. Sayagues
The early minibus was full. The second arrived at noon and went half-way to Angolares, where we waited for three hours. Alice bought a freshly butchered pig and stuffed it in a plastic bag. I took photos. We got to the capital after sunset.
How hard can it be to maintain a total of 320 kms of roads in the tiny islands? Since 2007, small billboards brag about a European Union aid project to improve roads. What a joke. Looks more like dead aid managed by the architects of poverty.
]]>“It smells strongly of wine gone vinegary but it works ,” he says.
Last year, [...]]]>
“It smells strongly of wine gone vinegary but it works ,” he says.
The forest is their pharmacy. Photo: M. Sayagues
Last year, when he was scratching madly with chickenpox, his granny’s ointment of coconut oil and leaves relieved the itchiness.
When his friend Geane Castro feels a cold coming, his grandmother makes him a hot bath with water infused with leaves and bark, then a special tea with plants she gathers in the forest. Presto, he recovers.
I meet them at Teia D’Arte, an art gallery in Sao Tome, the capital of the tiny two-island nation of Sao Tome and Principe, off the coast of Gabon.
With a rich biodiversity of 600 botanical species and 132 endemic plants, the islands’ rainforest is a well-stocked pharmacy for herbalists.
Their knowledge is captured in a decade-long ethno-pharmacological study published last year. Researchers worked with 40 traditional healers, midwives and grandmothers to identify and classify 325 medicinal plants, note 1,000 recipes and test 25 plants in the lab. Many look promising for developing new medicines.
Generations of expertise
Across Africa, healers hold an impressive knowledge of medicinal plants, accumulated through generations and transmitted through years of apprenticeship.
The new generation of healers blends tradition with modernity. They throw the bones, brew herbal medicines, book patients by cellphone and negotiate the complexities of modern life. They follow tradition and break away from it.
Nkunzi Zandile Nkabinde is a young Zulu sangoma – the word for traditional healer in South Africa. 
She works in Soweto, married her partner in June, and wrote a book about her life in an homophobic society: Black Bull, Ancestors and Me: My Life as a Lesbian Sangoma.
Today, 31 August, is the African Traditional Medicine Day, established in 2001 by the World Health Organisation.
Repressed by colonial authorities, condemned as witchcraft by churches, spurned by post-colonial Marxist governments, African traditional medicine is regaining prestige.
The WHO describes it as “heritage, knowledge and healing that is affordable, accessible, and culturally acceptable”.
For a majority of Africans, especially rural, traditional medicine is the main professional health care, sometimes the only one available,or the cheapest and closest. In the cities, many people will consult both a bio-medical doctor and a traditional healer.
In Africa, to cure is to restore human vitality and harmony with the universe. Body and soul are not separate entities; they are linked to nature, spirits and other people.
The timeless wisdom of healers is an essential part of African health. “It would be sad to lose this knowledge,” says Sousa.
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