Here Comes the... Rain
Climate change in East Africa
In East Africa, the seasons are simple: rainy or dry. Summer, fall, winter, spring – these words lose definition along the equatorial line, when the sun rises and sets at the same time and temperatures hover near room temperature year-round. The weather might threaten to become monotonously repetitive… if not for the rains.
The long rainy season typically fall from March to May, while the short rainy season blows through in September and October. During these periods, the rain is such a predictable annoyance – an event around which to plan the day – that it could make a cuckoo clock jealous. Every morning and early evening, book-ending daylight, day after day after day, the skies cloud over, and raindrops drive down with an almost envious clarity of purpose. When I was in Kigali, the sound of the rain pelting against the tin roof was so deafening that it could rendered attempts at deep thought useless.
Lacking the infrastructural prowess of the United States or, say, Germany, these rains are disruptive. Life literally halts for that hour. Motorcycles and taxis abandon the roads for risk of floods; people seek shelter at whichever location can offer reprieve, skipping classes and delaying meetings. Food supply chains are upended, leading to mercurial shortages and steep price cuts as farmers struggle to offload their harvests. Gas tank refills and leaky pipes take longer to be fixed, as the repairmen race around the city to address electrical or Internet outages. But, after the rains stop, there is always moment when birds begin to chirp again, air smells of wet soil, colors spring to vital life. It’s a coda so lovely that it renders any inconveniences rather insignificant, in the grand scheme of things.
Right now, it supposed to be the dry and warm season in Nairobi – Kenyan summer. Yet rain has fallen consistently for the past six weeks, defying the usual patterns. Here, the weather is not simply a way to fill conversational voids, but a matter of fatality, distress, and warning.
The culprit is fairly obvious: climate change caused by human activity. East Africans recognize the signs and bemoan the reality with an apolitical frankness that surprised me at first. I had expected the intense religiosity of Rwandans and Kenyans to lead them to similar conclusions held by the most-vocally religious Americans, 61% of whom deny that climate change is caused by humans. I guess, in the end, when the urgency of displacement and death looms over every ‘freak’ weather event, the pretense of politics is dropped.
So, I’ve been thinking a lot about the ways the climate crisis mimics the old colonial world order, where the Global North Atlantic countries fret over politics while places like Rwanda and Kenya condemned to suffering the consequences created by imperialist powers. We in the U.S. and peer countries are the largest source of the problem, but there are few signs that we are slowing down. We want to live our lives as we have always lived them. If that means shipping our trash to Africa, then so be it.
It’s not that the climate crisis will discriminate and flows exclusively from North-to-South; Americans are already victims of extreme weather events. But it’s more that Americans, Brits, Frenchmen – we have the luxury of inaction, propped up by the delusion that there is time before the worst effects ravage communities. And, perhaps, in some ways that is true because our communities, with strong irrigation systems and hydroponic agriculture and marvels of civic construction, are insulated. Every storm need not be a referendum for us.
Rwandans, Kenyans, Cambodians, Bangladeshi, none of them have this luxury. For me, my conception of the climate crisis only shrank after visiting an elementary school in rural Rwanda this past spring. Located miles away from the nearest village, I noticed an unusual sight -- empty desks, a curious occurrence in any resource-constrained education system. The head teacher explained student absenteeism rates has risen in response to the heavy rains, mudslides, and rushed planting season. Later, during classroom observations, I noticed students using damaged workbooks with distorted paper and blurred ink. Once more, the explanation pointed to the unpredictable and intensified rainfall. Despite its construction just a year prior, the school wasn’t equipped to handle severe weather, and issues with ventilation and flooding had damaging the library and classrooms. I was struck by the image these children trudging through eroding roads, past fields threatening to slough off hills, already well-versed in compromises between education, food security, familial obligation, and safety – worldly in ways that privilege has shielded me from.
For me, the climate crisis is no longer distant wildfires casting the sky in apocalyptic oranges or tsunamis engulfing far-flung islands. The climate crisis exists right there on that hillside in the unfilled seats and waterlogged workbooks, the classrooms that smelled faintly of mold, the delayed planting seasons, premature harvests, and impassable roads made more mud than trail.
Rwanda, Kenya and much of the African continent is caught in a pernicious double bind, suffering from the effects of economic and ecological colonialism. Countries, plundered and pillaged for their natural resources, left destitute and poor; countries that, now seeking that same road to riches, are barred from accessing it by those ole colonial aggressors. Imagine the sense of betrayal. I hear it in the voices of Africans grousing that the glass bottles of Coca-Cola are more expensive than the plastic ones, why the burden of a multinational company’s sustainability is borne by them. I see it in villages where electricity costs more than a liter of petrol, and on rural storefronts where ads for European-owned phone companies are blackened by clouds of motorcycle exhaust and coal-burning stoves. There’s a patronizing sense of self-regard in attempts to “clean up” Africa by those in the Global North—after all, who dirtied it in the first place?
What’s even more frustrating is that these countries genuinely care about conservation, as reflected in public policy. East Africans don’t need outsiders to advocate for green economies because they're already prioritizing it. East Africa has a bountiful set of natural treasures – wild gorillas, coral reefs, mountains, rainforests, elephants, lions, flamingos, and more – that the people want to protect. Conservation is an integral to their national history, a fact that is underscored by the pride with which Kenyans boast of Wangari Maathai, an environmental activist who, in 2004, became the first Black African woman to win the Nobel Prize. The current governments are continuing these legacies as environmental stewards: banning plastic bags, tree-planting initiatives, advocating for plastic reduction, establishing carbon markets, committing to clean energy programs.
For the sake of us all, we cannot continue to approach climate action, or lack thereof, through imperialist mindsets. We cannot ignore the problem, performing subconscious calculations that a cheap tank of gas is worth more than an entire harvest in Rwanda. Nor can we propagate sustainable technologies through the exploitation of human beings. Tales reminiscent of Leopold II's brutal pursuit of rubber and ivory in the Congo Free State echo in the present-day cobalt mining industry in the DRC, where the search for resources for electric vehicles has led to forced evictions and human rights abuses, including sexual assault. “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
We have to disentangle climate action from the colonial narratives that continue to cast the U.S., Canada, and Western Europe as the actors on a global stage, with everything else relegated to background extras. Change must occur from both the top-down and the bottom-up, encompassing the small and large choices that collectively lead to action. This includes re-examining how we measure economic success, penalizing companies that offshore pollution, and centering new voices in climate discourses.
If I’ve learnt anything in the past year, it is just how much there is worth saving in this life. From the coral reefs of the Indian Ocean to the volcanic rainforests at the Rwanda-Ugandan-Congo border, in the great savannah grasslands in Kenya, in village classrooms and congested traffic and open-air dance floors, there is too much beauty and resiliency, natural and human, for despair. This life might be the worst we got, but it is also, undeniably, the best we could ever know to hope for.
