Vietnam's General Giap(1911-2013) Prsente!

General Vo Nguyen Giap

August 25, 1911 - October 4, 2013:  

One of the Greatest Military Strategists that Ever Lived

Gen. Giap with the late Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez

1. People's War, People's Army book excerpt

2. Interview with Vo Nguyen Giap, Viet Minh Commander
People's War, People's Army

excerpt from Giap, Vo Nguyen: People's War, People's Army. Hanoi: Foreign Languages Publishing House. 1961.*

*Although the first English-language edition of General Giap's work was published by Foreign Languages Publishing House, the official publishing outlet of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (the full name of North Vietnam prior to national unification following the defeat of the United States in 1975), it was also published in the United States by Frederick A. Praeger, Publisher, which had extensive CIA connections. For more background on this go to http://jfk.hood.edu/Collection/White Materials/CIA-Domestic Intelligence/CIA-D 0043.pdf.

[For more selections from this work go to http://www.nelsonmandela.org/omalley/index.php/site/q/03lv03445/04lv04015/05lv04154/06lv04158.htm.]
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People's War, People's Army: The Vietnamese People's War of Liberation against the French Imperialists and the American Interventionists (1945-1954)

by Vo Nguyen Giap

Chapter 3: The Fundamental Problem of Our War of National Liberation

The Vietnamese people's war of liberation was, a just war, aiming to win back the independence and unity of the country, to bring land to our peasants and guarantee them the right to it, and to defend the achievements of the August Revolution. That is why it was first and foremost a people's war. To educate, mobilise, organise and arm the whole people in order that they might take part in the Resistance was a crucial question.

The enemy of the Vietnamese nation was aggressive imperialism, which had to be overthrown. But the latter having long since joined up with the feudal landlords, the anti-imperialist struggle could definitely not be separated from anti-feudal action. On the other hand, in a backward colonial country such as ours where the peasants make up the majority of the population, a people's war is essentially a peasant's war under the leadership of the working class. Owing to this fact, a general mobilisation of the whole people is neither more nor less than the mobilisation of the rural masses. The problem of land is of decisive importance. From an exháustive analysis, the Vietnamese people's war of liberation was essentially a people's national democratic revolution carried out under armed form and had twofold fundamental task: the overthrowing of imperialism and the defeat of the feudal landlord class, the anti-imperialist struggle being the primary task.

A backward colonial country which had only just risen up to proclaim its independence and install people's power, Viet Nam only recently possessed armed forces, equipped with still very mediocre arms and having no combat experience. Her enemy, on the other hand, was an imperialist power which has retained a fairly considerable economic and military potentiality despite the recent German occupation and benefited, furthermore, from the active support of the United States. The balance of forces decidedly showed up our weaknesses against the enemy's power. The Vietnamese people's war of liberation had, therefore, to be a hard and long-lasting war in order to succeed in creating conditions for victory. All the conceptions born of impatience and aimed at obtaining speedy victory could only be gross errors. It was necessary to firmly grasp the strategy of a long-term resistance, and to exalt the will to be self-supporting in order to maintain and gradually augment our forces, while nibbling at and progressively destroying those of the enemy; it was necessary to accumulate thousands of small victories to turn them into a great success, thus gradually altering the balance of forces, in transforming our weakness into power and carrying off final victory.

At an early stage, our Party was able to discern the characteristics of this war: a people's war and a long-lasting war, and it was by proceeding from these premises that, during the whole of hostilities and in particularly difficult conditions, the Party solved all the problems of the Resistance. This judicious leadership by the Party led us to victory.

From the point of view of directing operations, our strategy and tactics had to be those of a people's war and of a long-term resistance.

General Giap planning the Dien Bien Phu campaign, 1953-54, his brilliant victory against the French.

Our strategy was, as we have stressed, to wage a long-lasting battle. A war of this nature in general entails several phases; in principle, starting from a stage of contention, it goes through a period of equilibrium before arriving at a general counter-offensive. In effect, the way in which it is carried on can be more subtle and more complex, depending on the particular conditions obtaining on both sides during the course of operations. Only a long-term war could enable us to utilise to the maximum our political trump cards, to overcome our material handicap and to transform our weakness into strength. To maintain and increase our forces, was the principle to which we adhered, contenting ourselves with attacking when success was certain, refusing to give battle likely to incur losses to us or to engage in hazardous actions. We had to apply the slogan: to build up our strength during the actual course of fighting.

The forms of fighting had to be completely adapted that is, to raise the fighting spirit to the maximum and rely on heroism of our troops to overcome the enemy's material superiority. In the main, especially at the outset of the war, we had recourse to guerrilla fighting. In the Vietnamese theatre of operations, this method carried off great victories: it could be used in the mountains as well as in the delta, it could be waged with good or mediocre material and even without arms, and was to enable us eventually to equip ourselves at the cost of the enemy. Wherever the Expeditionary Corps came, the entire population took part in the fighting; every commune had its fortified village, every district had its regional troops fighting under the command of the local branches of the Party and the people's administration, in liaison with the regular forces in order to wear down and annihilate the enemy forces.

Thereafter, with the development of our forces, guerrilla warfare changed into a mobile warfare - a form of mobile warfare still strongly marked by guerrilla warfare --which would afterwards become the essential form of operations on the main front, the northern front. In this process of development of guerrilla warfare and of accentuation of the mobile warfare, our people's army constantly grew and passed from the stage of combats involving a section or company, to fairly large-scale campaigns bringing into action several divisions. Gradually, its equipment improved, mainly by the seizure of arms from the enemy - the material of the French and American imperialists.

From the military point of view, the Vietnamese people's war of liberation proved that an insufficiently equipped people's army, but an army fighting for a just cause, can, with appropriate strategy and tactics, combine the conditions needed to conquer a modern army of aggressive imperialism.

**

Young Giap and Ho Chi Minh.

Concerning the management of a war economy within the framework of an agriculturally backward country under-taking a long-term resistance as was the case in Viet Nam, the problem of the rear lines arose under the form of building resistance bases in the countryside. The raising and defence of production, and the development of agriculture, were problems of great importance for supplying the front as well as for the progressive improvement of the people's living conditions. The question of manufacturing arms was not one which could be set aside.

In the building of rural bases and the reinforcement of the rear lines for giving an impulse to the resistance, the agrarian policy of the Party played a determining role. Therein lay the anti-feudal task of the revolution. In a colony where the national question is essentially the peasant question, the consolidation of the resistance forces was possible only by a solution to the agrarian problem.

The August Revolution overthrew the feudal State. The reduction of land rents and rates of interest decreed by people's power bestowed on the peasants their first material advantages. Land monopolised by the imperialists and the traitors was confiscated and shared out. Communal land and rice fields were more equitably distributed. From 1953, deeming it necessary to promote the accomplishment of anti-feudal tasks, the Party decided to achieve agrarian reform even during the course of the resistance war. Despite the errors which blemished its accomplishment, it was a correct line crowned with success; it resulted in real material advantages for the peasants and brought to the army and the people a new breath of enthusiasm in the war of resistance.

Thanks to this just agrarian policy, the life of the people, in the hardest conditions of the resistance war, in general improved, not only in the wast free zones of the North, but even in the guerrilla bases in South Viet Nam.

The Vietnamese people's war of liberation brought out the importance of building resistance bases in the country-side and the close and indissoluble relationships between the anti-imperialist revolution and the anti-feudal revolution.

From the political point of view, the question of unit among the people and the mobilisation of all energies in the war of resistance were of paramount importance. It wa at the same time a question of the national united fror against the imperialists and their lackeys, the Vietnamese traitors.

In Viet Nam, our Party carried off a great success in its policy of Front. As early as during the difficult days of the Second World War, it formed the League for the Independence of Viet Nam. At the time of and during the early years of the war of resistance, it postponed the application of its watchwords on the agrarian revolution, limiting its programme to the reduction of land rents and interest rates, which enabled us to neutralise part of the landlord class and to rally around us the most patriotic of them.

From the early days of the August Revolution, the policy of broad front adopted by the Party neutralised th( wavering elements among the landlord class and limited the acts of sabotage by the partisans of the Viet Nam Quoc Dan Dang.

Thereafter, in the course of development of the resistance war, when agrarian reform had become an urgent necessity, our Party applied itself to making a differentiation within the bosom of the landlord class by providing in its political line for different treatment for each type of landlord according to the latter's political attitude, on the principle of liquidation of the regime of feudal appropriation of land.

The policy of unity among nationalities adopted by the National United Front also achieved great successes and the programme of unity with the various religious circles attained good results.

The National United Front was to be a vast assembly of all the forces capable of being united, neutralising all those which could be neutralised, dividing all those it was possible to divide in order to direct the spearhead at the chief enemy of the revolution, invading imperialism. It was to be established on the basis of an alliance between workers and peasants and placed under the leadership of the working class. In Viet Nam, the question of an alliance between workers and peasants was backed by a dazzling history and firm traditions, the party of the working class having been the only political party to fight resolutely in all circumstances for national independence, and the first to put forward the watchword "land to the tillers "and to struggle determinedly for its realisation.

However, in the early years of the resistance a certain under-estimation of the importance of the peasant question hindered us from giving all the necessary attention to the worker-peasant alliance. This error war subsequently put right, especially from the moment when the Party decided, by means of accomplishing agrarian reform, to make the peasants the real masters of the countryside. At present, after the victory of the resistance and of agrarian reform, when the Party has restored independence to half the country and brought land to the peasants, the bases of the worker-peasant alliance will daily go from strength to strength.

The war of liberation of the Vietnamese people proves that, in the face of an enemy as powerful as he is cruel, victory is possible only by uniting the whole people within the bosom of a firm and wide national united front based on the worker-peasant alliance.

*** Interview with Vo Nguyen Giap, Viet Minh Commander

PBS.org broadcast June 28, 1999 http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/peoplescentury/episodes/guerrillawars/giaptranscript.html


Q: Was Diên Bin Phû a conventional military victory or was it a victory for military warfare?

Giap: The victory at Diên Bin Phû was a victory for the people. But then, of course, while the concept of a people's war and guerrilla warfare are not entirely separate, they are separate nonetheless. In this case, it was the people's war that was victorious. And guerrilla warfare was one aspect of that people's war. It's all quite complicated.... What is the people's war? Well, in a word, it's a war fought for the people by the people, whereas guerrilla warfare is simply a combat method. The people's war is more global in concept. It's a synthesized concept. A war which is simultaneously military, economic and political, and is what we in France would call "synthesized." There's guerrilla warfare and there's large-scale tactical warfare, fought by large units.

Q: What was new about the idea of the "People's War"?

Giap: It was a war for the people by the people. FOR the people because the war's goals are the people's goals -- goals such as independence, a unified country, and the happiness of its people.... And BY the people -- well that means ordinary people -- not just the army but all people.

We know it's the human factor, and not material resources, which decide the outcome of war. That's why our people's war, led by Ho Chi Minh, was on such a large scale. It took in the whole population.

Q: What do you think about the significance of Diên Bin Phû for the world?

Giap: The history of the Vietnamese people goes back thousands of years. During that time we've repelled thousands of invaders. Only, in former times the countries that tried to invade us were on the same economic level as we were. Theirs, like ours, was a feudal society. That was the case, for example, when we fought the Chinese in the 13th century. But Diên Bin Phû was a victory in another era. What I mean is that in the latter half of the 19th century, when western imperialism divided the world into colonies, a new problem emerged. How could a weak, economically backwards people ever hope to regain its freedom? How could it hope to take on a modern western army, backed by the resources of a modern capitalist state? And that's why it took us 100 years to fight off the French and French imperialism. Diên Bin Phû was the first great decisive victory after 100 years of war against French imperialism and U.S. interventionism. That victory that put an end to the war and marked the end of French aggression. From an international point of view, it was the first great victory for a weak, colonized people struggling against the full strength of modern Western forces. This is why it was the first great defeat for the West. It shook the foundations of colonialism and called on people to fight for their freedom -- it was the beginning of international civilization.

Q: Was Diên Bin Phû an easy victory because the French made so many mistakes?

Giap: It's not as simple as that. We believed that in the French camp, French general staff and the military chiefs were well informed. They'd weighed up the pros and cons, and according to their forecasts, Diên Bin Phû was impregnable. It has to be said that at the beginning of the autumn of '53, for example, when our political headquarters were planning our autumn and winter campaigns, there was no mention of Diên Bin Phû. Why? Because, the Navarre plan didn't mention it either. They had a whole series of maneuvers planned.

For us, the problem was that Navarre wanted to retain the initiative whereas we wanted to seize it. There is a contradiction that exists in a war of aggression whereby you have to disperse your forces to occupy a territory but rally your mobile forces for offensive action. We took advantage of this contradiction and forced Navarre to disperse his forces. That's how it all started. We ordered our troops to advance in a number of directions, directions of key importance to the enemy although their presence wasn't significant. So the enemy had no choice but to disperse their troops. We sent divisions north, northwest, toward the center, towards Laos; other divisions went in other directions. So to safeguard Laos and the northwest, Navarre had to parachute troops into Diên Bin Phû, and that's what happened at Diên Bin Phû. Before then, no one had heard of Diên Bin Phû. But afterwards, well that's history, isn't it? French General Staff only planned to parachute in sufficient troops to stop us advancing on the northwest and Laos. Little by little, they planned to transform Diên Bin Phû into an enormous concentration camp, a fortified camp, the most powerful in Indochina. They planned to draw our forces, break us, crush us, but the opposite took place. They'd wanted a decisive battle and that's exactly what they got at Diên Bin Phû -- except that it was decisive for the Vietnamese and not for the French.

Q: Before Diên Bin Phû, do you think the French ever imagined you could defeat them?

Giap: Well, everyone at Diên Bin Phû, from the French generals and representatives of the French government to the American generals and the commanding admiral of the Pacific Fleet, agreed that Diên Bin Phû was impregnable. Everyone agreed that it was impossible to take. The French and then the Americans underestimated our strength. They had better weapons and enormous military and economic potential. They never doubted that victory would be theirs. And yet, just when the French believed themselves to be on the verge of victory, everything collapsed around them. The same happened to the Americans in the Spring of '65. Just when Washington was about to proclaim victory in the South, the Americans saw their expectations crumble. Why? Because it wasn't just an army they were up against but an entire people -- an entire people.

So the lesson is that however great the military and economic potential of your adversary, it will never be great enough to defeat a people united in the struggle for their fundamental rights. That's what we've learned from all this.

Q: Why was the National Liberation Front so successful in expanding the areas it controlled between 1960 and 1965?

Giap: Throughout our long history, whenever we've felt ourselves to be threatened by the enemy, our people have closed in the ranks. Millions of men, united, have called for "Unification above all," for "Victory above all".... The National Liberation Front was victorious because it managed to unite most of the people and because its politics were just.

Q: Did you change your tactics at all when the American troops began to arrive after 1965?

Giap: Of course, but even so, it was still a people's war. And, a people's war is characterized by a strategy that is more than simply military. There's always a synthesized aspect to the strategy, too. Our strategy was at once military, political, economic, and diplomatic, although it was the military component which was the most important one.

In a time of war, you have to take your lead from the enemy. You have to know your enemy well. When your enemy changes his strategy or tactics, you have to do the same. In every war, a strategy is always made up of a number of tactics that are considered to be of great strategic importance, so you have to try to smash those tactics. If we took on the cavalry, for example, we'd do everything we could to smash that particular tactic. It was the same when the enemy made use of strategic weapons.... And, when the Americans tried to apply their "seek and destroy" tactic, we responded with our own particular tactic that was to make their objective unattainable and destroy them instead. We had to...force the enemy to fight the way we wanted them to fight. We had to force the enemy to fight on unfamiliar territory.

Q: Was your Têt offensive in 1968 a failure?

Giap: As far as we're concerned, there's no such thing as a purely military strategy. So it would be wrong to speak of Têt in purely military terms. The offensive was three things at the same time: military, political, and diplomatic. The goal of the war was de-escalation. We were looking to de-escalate the war. Thus, it would have been impossible to separate our political strategy from our military strategy. The truth is that we saw things in their entirety and knew that in the end, we had to de-escalate the war. At that point, the goal of the offensive was to try to de-escalate the war.

Q: And did the de-escalation succeed?

Giap: Your objective in war can either be to wipe out the enemy altogether or to leave their forces partly intact but their will to fight destroyed. It was the American policy to try and escalate the war. Our goal in the '68 offensive was to force them to de-escalate, to break the American will to remain in the war....

We did this by confronting them with repeated military, as well as political and diplomatic victories. By bringing the war to practically all the occupied towns, we aimed to show the Americans and the American people that it would be impossible for them to continue with the war. Essentially, that's how we did it.

Q: You are familiar with those famous pictures of April 1975, of American helicopters flying away from the American Embassy. What do those pictures mean to you?

Fidel Greeting Gen Giap in the 1960s.

Giap: It was as we expected. It marked the end of the American neo-colonial presence in our country. And, it proved that when a people are united in their fight for freedom, they will always be victorious.

When I was young, I had a dream that one day I'd see my country free and united. That day, my dream came true. When the political bureau reunited Hanoi with Laos, there were first reports of evacuation. Then the Saigon government capitulated. It was like turning the page on a chapter of history. The streets in Hanoi were full of people.

The pictures of the helicopters were, in one way, a concrete symbol of the victory of the People's war against American aggression. But, looked at another way, it's proof that the Pentagon could not possibly predict what would happen. It revealed the sheer impossibility for the Americans to forecast the outcome. Otherwise, they would have planned things better, wouldn't they.

The reality of history teaches us that not even the most powerful economic and military force can overcome a resistance of a united people, a people united in their struggle for their international rights. There is a limit to power. I think the Americans and great superpowers would do well to remember that while their power may be great, it is inevitably limited.... Since the beginning of time, whether in a socialist or a capitalist country, the things you do in the interests of the people stand you in good stead, while those which go against the interest of the people will eventually turn against you. History bears out what I say.

We were the ones who won the war and the Americans were the ones who were defeated, but let's be precise about this. What constitutes victory? The Vietnamese people never wanted war; they wanted peace. Did the Americans want war? No, they wanted peace, too. So, the victory was a victory for those people in Vietnam and in the USA who wanted peace. Who, then, were the ones defeated? Those who were after aggression at any price. And that's why we're still friends with the people of France and why we've never felt any enmity for the people of America....

Q: Who invented the idea of People's war? Whose idea was it originally?

Giap: It was originally a product of the creative spirit of the people. Let me tell you the legend of Phu Dong...which everyone here knows well. It's a legend set in prehistoric times. The enemy was set to invade, and there was a three-year-old boy called Phu Dong who was growing visibly bigger by the minute. He climbed on to an iron horse and, brandishing bamboo canes as weapons, rallied the people. The peasants, the fisherman, everyone answered his call, and they won the war. It's just a legend and like popular literature, the content is legendary, but it still reflects the essence of the people's thinking. So, popular warfare existed even in legends, and it remained with us over the centuries.

Q: Why do you think Vietnam is almost the only country in the world that has defeated America? Why only Vietnam?

Giap: Speaking as a historian, I'd say that Vietnam is rare. As a nation, Vietnam was formed very early on. It is said that, in theory, a nation can only be formed after the arrival of Capitalism -- according to Stalin's theory of the formation of nations, for instance. But, our nation was formed very early, before the Christian era. Why? Because the risk of aggression from outside forces led all the various tribes to band together. And then there was the constant battle against the elements, against the harsh winter conditions that prevail here. In our legends, this struggle against the elements is seen as a unifying factor, a force for national cohesion. This, combined with the constant risk of invasion, made for greater cohesion and created a tradition -- a tradition that gave us strength.

The Vietnamese people in general tend to be optimistic. Why? Because they've been facing up to vicissitudes for thousands of years, and for thousands of years they've been overcoming them.

Q: What was the contribution of Marxism and Leninism to your theory of a People's War?

The People's War in Vietnam pre-dated the arrival of Marxism and Leninism, both of which contributed something when they did arrive, of course.

When the USSR collapsed, we predicted that 60 to 80 percent of our imports and exports budget would be eliminated because we depended upon aid from the USSR and other socialist countries. So people predicted the collapse of Vietnam. Well, we're still hanging on and slowly making progress. I was asked what I thought of Perestroika, so I answered that I agreed with the change and thought it was necessary in political relations. But Perestroika is a Russian word, made for the Russians. Here we do things the Vietnamese way. And we make the most of our hopes and the hopes of those in Russia, China, the USA, Japan, Great Britain -- but we try to assimilate them all.

 As I mentioned, the Vietnamese people have an independent spirit, stubborn people, I suppose, who do things the Vietnamese way. So now the plan is to mobilize the entire population in the fight against backwardness and misery. While there are the problems of war and the problems of peace, there are also concrete laws, social laws, great laws, which retain their value whether in peace or war. You have to be realistic. You have to have a goal. You have to be a realist and use reality as a means of analyzing the object laws which govern things. To win, you have to act according to these laws. If you do the opposite, you're being subjective and you're bound to lose. So, we learn from the experience, both good and bad, of Capitalism. But, we have our own Vietnamese idea on things. I'd like to add that we are still for independence, that we still follow the path shown us by Ho Chi Minh, the path of independence and Socialism. I'm still a Socialist but what is Socialism? It's independence and unity for the country. It's the freedom and well-being of the people who live there. And, it's peace and friendship between all men.

Black Spending Power Exceeds $1Trillion

... And we spend our money mainly on trivial self-satisfying stuff... and rarely save. BUT, we do spend more on education than whitefolks.... We also do not buy Black. This has led to a devastating effect within our communities: disappearing small Black businesses and, subsequently, a decrease in property value. As we have more ability to spend money via credit cards, we have amassed massive life-long debts, obesity and other poor health issues (because we spend more money on junk food than any other race or nationality).

This report is important to study for those of us who are trying to organize Blackfolk around issues keeping us ill-informed, oppressed and exploited. We can pull from this certain trends that can be very helpful in educating and mobilizing our Sisters & Brothers. 

For example, we use smartfones more than whitefolks. But, as the report reveals, we use them more for social media and entertainment than anything else. The key thing here is a smartfone is a computer that happens to be a fone. Hence, it has access to everything a laptop or desktop has access to. So... as we organize around, say education issues, we encourage parents and students to check out key websites and education social media sites that will inform, aid and advance their particular struggle.

I'm sure the Sisters & Brothers among us who are organizers can come up with other useful findings in this report.

Lastly, this report is also useful for those of us who studying Black social class dynamics within the context of creating a contemporary class analysis for North America.- SEA

Nielsen’s third report (see PDF below) on African-American consumers reveals that Blacks’ purchasing behaviors and viewing patterns are indeed different from the total market population. companies and marketers seeking to establish meaningful connections with this important consumer group can further enhance a brand’s ability to grow by understanding these unique differentiating demographic, shopping, buying, viewing, digital, and mobile trends.1 further understanding of the various generations and gender dynamics within the population is also essential for marketers who want to maximize business opportunities. 

Despite historically high unemployment rates, Blacks have shown resiliency in their ability to persevere as consumers. Black buying power continues to increase, rising from its current $1 trillion level to a forecasted $1.3 trillion by 2017.2 The ongoing population growth and increases in educational attainment are key factors in the increase of african-americans’ consumer power. notable highlights from the report include the following:

• While Black men continue to dominate as the economic leaders in the Black community, Black women yield a tremendous amount of power as they have attained impressive gains in education, employment, and business ownership. 
  
  
• The reverse migration continues as younger, college-educated Black professionals head South. marketers have an opportunity to develop a “southern strategy” to connect with the more than 10 million african-americans in 10 key southern markets. 
  
  
• While being receptive to trying new products, Blacks commit 18% of their annual retail dollars to store brands and continue to show resiliency in specific non-edible categories such as ethnic hair and Beauty aids, where they are more likely to spend nine times more than other groups. 
  
  
• From facebook, instagram, and twitter to education and career websites, BibleBylifechurch.tv, and glam media network, cyberspace provides a critical outlet for companies to engage Blacks of all ages. 
  
  
• No group watches more television than african-americans (37% more) who lean heavily toward programming that includes diverse characters and casts. Black women watch more television than their male counterparts. 
  
  
• Of the $75 billion spent on television, magazine, internet, and radio advertising, only $2.24 billion of it was spent with media focused on Black audiences. Black businesses, agencies and media continue to wrestle with this disparity as it is not reflective of the overall, high consumption patterns and behavioral trends of the Black consumer.
  
  Nielsen African American Consumer Report -Sept 2013

The Right to Bear Arms for ALL Americans... Right?
Or... Negro with Guns Version 2
What if The NAACP and the Urban League had a "Join the NRA" drive thruout Black America? Afterall, we all have the right to bear arms... and should know how and when to use them. Isn't that the National Rifle Association's Mission?

A Dinizulu Letter: 
Can Howard University and other HBCUs Survive?

 ...This question may be at the very heart of the larger question of what "education" in this nation is, or should be.

[...] I have exchanged many thoughts on this, [...] and the question keeps coming up, like that proverbial bad penny, as indeed it must, until there are satisfactory answers.  One of the most significant recent discussions might have been that "Saving the African American Child" conference which was held in Chicago last October, which went (dare we say "no surprise") in a direction other than what we might have individually and collectively hoped.

It I more than just glib rhetoric, in confronting situations like this, to say that the solution is more about questions than answers.  "In the beginning was the word...":  How we think about things and what we think about them is going to depend largely on the words we use, the presumptions embodied in those words, including cultural connotations and biases, and consequently how we understand and interpret the universe and our place in it.  The analogy of sports or combat reminds us that the victors are usually the ones who can impose their game plan on the situation, and take their opponents out of theirs.  "Name it and Claim it" is very much the name of the language game, which causes us to question (healthfully) what is really meant by "education," the myth of "race," and other American cultural iconic references which have shaped the discourse for decades, if not centuries.

Obviously, I'm not saying anything that we don't already know, only too well if anything, but I am invoking this awareness, this part of our heritage, to revisit this question of HBCUs with fresh eyes, so to speak.  Like everything else in America about "race," the very existence of HBCUs is a double-edged, or should I say double-pointed, legacy, which simultaneously works for and against us. 

"Race" is real for the same reason that money is real and that any number of American cultural artifacts (mental and spiritual as well as physical) are real, which is that reality and relevance, like the power of the mugger who steps out of an alley to change your life, is enforced at gunpoint.  Slavery could only be maintained by the unrelenting threat or actuality of violence.  That is because these things have no basis in natural law or even science (our feeble attempts to discern natural laws).  But, as such, it is a reality: our melanin has been deemed -- by our adversaries -- to be our military uniform in a one-sided war we have not declared, and they decide when hunting season is open.  But it is a reality named and claimed by "them," not "us," and therefore we must be very circumspect in how we embrace, accept, or use it.

In the matter of "education," for example, while we, acknowledging the imposed reality of "racial" separation and segregation, can (and must) fully embrace the wisdom of Dr. Woodson's "The Miseducation of the Negro," we actually know that, with very minor tweakings, his book could have very justifiably been equally called "The Miseducation of America."  Who in America (or in hell, for that matter) can be said to be being "educated" in any kind of functional or effective way if (s)he is being prepared and groomed for participation in (and perpetuation of) an artificially divided, mentally dysfunctional society where unearned and undeserved power and privilege are routinely enforced by ever-present violence, and the unquestioning acceptance of it?

We make no mistake about this: what is masquerading behind the very real psychopathology and quaking fear of the Negro among those who have been successfully programmed to called themselves "white" (an invention belonging to this side of the Atlantic; it did not exist in Europe before), is not just a fear/envy of people who are deemed to be "others," with darker skins, or even with greater sexual potency, but rather a morbid fear of Truth itself, among those who imagine their entire existence hanging on the maintenance of fragile lies and myths. 

That Truth, of which "history has forced, obligated, challenged, and blessed us to be the knowers, keepers, and tellers," is what we brought with us, naked and chained, in the bowels of ships, and have held as a collective patrimony in the violated slave quarters, in the migrant working fields, in the jails and prisons, in churches, in car washes, in sports competition, in movie houses, and in our homes, be they high or lowly, even as some of us have tried mightily to deny and distance ourselves from it.  It walks our streets looking ridiculous with saggin' pants but making its statement.  It stalks our classrooms in the form of disaffection and "acting out," sure markers of individuals to be selected early for the pipeline to prison.  It lifts our spirits every day with remarkable athletic and intellectual achievements and artistic expressions of the deep human soul.  It is, among more things than can ever be described, what Ayi Kweh Armah once referred to as "the zest for life as an end in itself."  To say more about that would be to give up living in the quest for words.

So the question of HBCUs and their survival becomes critical not for the shallower (but nonetheless real) question of how to obtain the resources to maintain physical campuses and to exist as institutions modeled on the American definition of higher academic education, but for the deeper question of the role that they can (and do) play in advancing the knowledge, "the African genius, which was absolutely required to be here, to keep this from becoming a disaster that would have been beyond human imagination," in the words of that Afro-Cuban Yoruba priest years ago, and which, if fact, has been proven by history to have built and saved a nation, at least thus far. 

This is the opposite end of that double-pointed legacy from the one that is pointed at us as a weapon of desperate ignorance, hate, and greed.  This is the point by which we make our positive mark on the earth, to honor Ancestors and guide next and future generations yet unborn.  We know, from our experience, that there is as much to be learned about life from the stereotypical drunk on the corner as from the graduate school classroom.  (Indeed, it is proverbial that even "When the fool speaks, the wise person listens," as many have done to me.)  So what, then, is the specific role of the classroom in this drama, and this agenda, as it might well be called.  (Prof. Marvin Dawkins at the U. of Miami, has suggested replacing the idea of "the African experience in America" with "the African Initiative in America" -- not inconsistent with that Yoruba priest's assessment.) 

Schools, and specifically the HBCUs, have a definite role to play in the education of America and the world, not just of African Americans.  The survival of these institutions depends not on what next clever fundraising ploy might be concocted, or what rich sponsor might be found to provide some erstwhile bailout, or even a lasting endowment (subject, as present endowments are, to financial crises and the like), although those quests and challenges have their place, and in themselves might stimulate our creativity.  Obviously, however, something more viable and sustainable as an ongoing mission and source of inspiration must be found.

I have shared with you all in the past what might be a signpost pointing in the direction to be explored: There are many radical differences between our situation here and that in Bahia, Brazil, but, as wisdom ever reminds us, these pale in comparison to the similarities that unite us, and unite us to "other" peoples as well.  So, we have to take the differences into account as we look at the Ile Aiye school and performing group in the inner-city Liberdade section of Salvador da Bahia:

Brazil has the largest African population outside of Africa, who are mostly concentrated in the northeast, so that Bahia is best known for its Blackness -- even though, as folks are pointedly aware, most of the positions of power and influence are held by non-Blacks.  In the sprit of "lighting a lamp rather than cursing the darkness," we might say, Mae (Mother) Hilda, and her son, known as Vovo, began an effort to revive and build upon traditional African survival skills and community values.  Strangely (but not in light of the power matrix), their first attempt to enter their group into the Carnival celebration was rejected by the judges; it was, by some accounts, "too African."  Their response was not to try-again-next-year or to assimilate more, but rather to establish their own Carnival in Liberdade, which (comparable to the same kind of phenomenon in New Orleans) would become the "real" one in comparison to the more commercial downtown version.

Their efforts morphed into the establishment of a school, which unlike here, is able to accept "only African students," who learn skills from hair plaiting to fabric printing along with their academic subjects, with an emphasis on self-reliance and, perhaps even more importantly, African community values.  To African American eyes it is almost an unbelievable sight to witness the sheer, genuine joy with which these children attend school, and the love, care, and dedication that their teachers very obviously bring to the classroom.  To glance into a classroom and see the only words on the chalkboard being "Unity is Strength" says something powerful. 

It is therefore a bit ironic that Ile Aiye is not known primarily as a school at all, but as a performing arts group that travels the world, thus raising funds and support.  (In fact, one young man there remembered me from his travel to Miami years previously as a 10-year-old with the group for one of Chuck Davis's "Dance Africa" presentations.)  With all this emphasis on self-reliance, the group does not put much stock in grant-writing or "standard" fund-raising, but, after 30 years of persistence and success, found themselves rewarded by generous grants from Petrobras, the national oil company, and the Odebrecht corporation, allowing them to build a brand new complex of classrooms and performance space across the street from their former cramped quarters in a three-story house.  (Another of those notable differences between Brazil and here.) 

I think our own history here shows that the early days of the HBCUs were not very different from that model.  Groups like the Fisk Jubilee Singers became legendary as they toured the country and filled auditoriums.  One of Hampton's main buildings was said to have been "sung up" from the ground by a similar effort.   Tuskeegee, and George Washington Carver's role there are legends in themselves, with benefits to the whole nation and the world.  (Peanut butter, anyone?  Mr. Reese?)  Howard is a story unto itself. 

But then, historically, there was that old double point again.  It was certainly wisdom that Hampton was established for both African and Native Americans, but that brought with it some of the same mentality that went into the odious "Indian Boarding Schools."  It is ironic that Howard, with all of its promise for Black students, was named in honor of Gen. O.O. Howard, he of the "Tell General Howard that I know his heart..." in the opening of that powerful speech by Chief Joseph of the (finally) defeated Nez Perce nation (which I still can't read without choking up).  Our gain at the expense of another oppressed people's loss is not our way.

"A people's culture is both a window and a mirror."  It is the lens through which we grasp our knowledge and unique interpretation of the universe.  It is the reflection in which we see and confirm who we are, individually and collectively.  And it is the portal through which others see us and form their own interpretations, informed or otherwise, honest or not.  Quietly, in typical fashion, almost unbeknownst to the people of the United States, the United Nations last year declared the decade of 2013-2022 to be the International Decade for People of African Descent.  This, as you know, is a follow-up to the 2011 International Year, and emanates from the work of the 2001 Durban Conference and the 2009 Durban Review Conference ("Durban II) in Geneva.  I have referred to these initiatives as a global call to the human family to acknowledge that some members of the family have been treated very wrongly for at least the last 500 years, which needs to be made right, but also as a call to global Africans to "show the world what we've got" -- culturally, spiritually, and in every other realm in which we can show ourselves strong.  Obviously, this all includes that gorilla stomping about on the table of humankind called Reparations, which ("They think that we think like they think") means much more than money (which, in the end, might just be irrelevant).

The only people to receive any reparations for the wrongs done to them are those with the power and ability to enforce their claim.  Ours is arguably the last Reparations case ever to be decided, not only because it will ultimately be for the benefit of everyone, not just us, but mainly because, partly for that very reason, it will not follow any of the established guidelines and procedures.  The stereotyped notions of cash in our pockets to take to Wal-Mart or the Cadillac dealership are so far away from such real needs as removal of land mines from Angola, economic justice and environmental repair in the Congo and Niger Delta, healing, healing, healing of "child soldiers" and gang-rape victims, sufferers of the AIDS pandemic, etc., etc., etc., and the building of viable educational institutions that are consistent with traditional values of righteousness ("right with God, right with Nature, right with the rest of Humanity). 

This (re)definition of the Reparations agenda (we ourselves owe reparations to the earth for our erstwhile roles and participation in the violence against her, Truth to be told) is integral to the question of redefining and stabilizing the roles of our HBCUs.  By defining reparation by our own initiative, actions, and example, on our own terms, will take charge of that discourse and determine the scope and nature of what we demand from others.  That is one way to frame the new, viable, sustainable agenda.

With that in mind, we also know that the HBCUs must be dedicated to what the late African scholar Ibrahima Baba Kake called "la popularization" of academic knowledge, so that it is accessible to all, just as the knowledge, insights, and concerns of the working class are readily available and commonly known by scholars.  Obviously, slavery to the student loan industry must be abolished, and other, better, more creative ways of sustaining our university campuses and resources need to be found.  (The new, phony-campus, on-line corporate "universities" might actually be offering a glimpse of what might be -- the equivalent of "virtual tours" and the like, as a possible methodology). 

I have also shared in the past that great insight that was shared by some folks in Haiti, about the way higher education (medical school was the example) does not generally prepare us for work in our neighborhoods, rural areas, or in other environments radically different from, say, hospitals with state-of-the-art gadgets.  We cannot contribute (any more) to the "brain drain."  Our students preparing for law school need to see the value in dedicating themselves to cases like Trayvon Martin's rather than to dreams of making Jaguar car payments. 

More than anything else our HBCUs have to be agents whereby we can "emancipate ourselves from mental slavery."  Slavery has imbued us with deeply negative attitudes toward work, toward the land, toward man-woman, parent-child, and other human relationships, etc.  Schools do not even offer courses in these matters, and "accreditation," that carrot-and-stick by which all higher-ed institutions are driven, does not recognize any such needs.

In summary, what is more than obviously, almost desperately, needed is top-to-bottom reform of what passes for "education" in the USA, for ALL Americans.  But we can't teach what we don't know, and certainly can't teach much if we don't know that overcrowded classrooms and poorly maintained schools don't even allow us to teach what we do know.  Those who know the most and know the best are the ones who need to lead this effort.  The HBCUs, redefined along the lines outlined above, recapturing the kind of energy and purpose that created them in the first place, are arguably the most logical place for the remaking of education in America to begin.

Everything that has ever sustained itself in human history has done so because of a political will for it to do so, even in trying times when the king (or, today, the interests of capitalist greed) and his royal court of parasites has been opposed.  "Where there is a will, there is a way."  By "popularizing" the will, by making the campus more relevant to the community and vice-versa, by daring to make education something "real" -- an oasis in a desert of phoniness and preparation for lifetime flunkyhood -- surely there are those with resources who will see real and permanent value in this, and support it accordingly.

Or is that just wild and naïve hopeful speculation?  The real question is, Do we have the choice?

Thoughts are weclcome.

A luta continua,

DGT

Life span for uneducated white women now lower than that of uneducated black women

Life span for uneducated white women now lower than that of uneducated black women

By Diana Reese
September 9, 2013 - washingtonpost.com


    

While most Americans can look forward to living longer than ever, that's not the case for white women who didn't graduate from high school. Their life expectancy has actually dropped by five years — from 78 years in 1990 to 73 in 2008.

Graduation from high school can add years to your life. (Diana Reese for The Washington Post)

Graduation from high school can add years to your life. (Diana Reese for The Washington Post)

More heartening is the finding that black women without a high school diploma saw their life expectancy increase by a year from 73 to 74. In fact, they can now expect to live a year longer than their white counterparts.

The findings are from a study led by S. Jay Olshansky, a longevity researcher at the University of Illinois in Chicago, that looked at the disparities in life expectancy due to gender, race and education.

Published a year ago in the journal "Health Affairs" and funded by the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on an Aging Society, the research is making headlines again after a poignant and provocative piece in "The American Prospect" this week titled, "What's Killing Poor White Women?"

The article examined the case of Crystal Wilson of Cave City, Ark., who dropped out of school in the ninth grade to marry. No, she wasn't pregnant at the time. But by the age of 38, when she died unexpectedly, she was a mom and a grandmother, overweight and suffering from diabetes. She didn't drink or smoke. Her death was attributed to "natural causes."

Writer Monica Potts describes the drastic decline in longevity:

"It is an unheard-of drop for a wealthy country in the age of modern medicine. Throughout history, technological and scientific innovation have put death off longer and longer, but the benefits of those advances have not been shared equally, especially across the race and class divides that characterize 21st-century America. Lack of access to education, medical care, good wages, and healthy food isn't just leaving the worst-off Americans behind. It's killing them.

"It's as if Americans with the least education are living in a time warp," according to a video produced by the University of Illinois at Chicago, with life expectancy rates returning to those from the 1950s and 1960s; the least educated black men are living in 1954, black women in 1962, white women in 1964 and white men in 1972.

The disparity in life expectancy at different educational levels has led to the formation of "at least two Americas," Olshansky said, with "notably different longevity prospects" for each subgroup. White men with a college degree or higher educational level may live, on average, to age 80, compared to white males who did not graduate high school living to age 67. White college-educated women have a life expectancy of nearly 84, while white women without high school diplomas live to 73.

But why? Why, with all the advances in medicine and health care, are we seeing such a rapid decline in life expectancy for uneducated white women and men (who dropped three years from 70 to 67 from 1990 to 2008)?

The reasons are "unclear," Olshansky e-mailed me, saying it's all "speculation" at this point. All sorts of theories have been offered, but researchers have yet to prove any of them, he said.

He wonders whether obesity, a clear risk factor for African Americans, simply takes longer to contribute to fatal outcomes, while non-prescription drug use (think alcohol and meth) kills whites faster.

"But this is speculation," he emphasized. "I have not seen a published explanation for this yet."

In the meantime, the "obvious suggestion," he said, is to raise education levels for all subgroups, which often correlates to higher employment and income and improved access to health care. (If nothing else, a higher income makes it easier to afford healthy food and gym memberships.) As of 2010, 5 percent of whites and 8 percent of African Americans between ages of 16 and 24 were not enrolled in school and did not have a high school diploma.

But Olshansky wasn't quick to blame health-care access:

"I'm not sure the least educated members of the population are missing out on the advances in medical technology as much as they are adopting harmful behavioral habits that shorten their life. I've argued for quite some time that the only control we have over the duration of our lives is to shorten it, and we exercise that control often and with increased frequency (smoking, obesity, etc.)."

In other words, we can't really do anything to lengthen our life span, but we sure can do things to shorten it.

Diana Reese Diana Reese is a journalist in Overland Park, Kan. Follow her on Twitter at @dianareese.

The Second Generation of Integration/Assimilation at Work

Elite HBCUs Losing Grip on America's Black Elite

By : JL Carter Sr

http://hbcudigest.com

Sep 07 2013- Morehouse College recently announced a workforce reduction of more than 40 jobs, to complement a $2.5 million dollar cut in its operating budget. The reason, according to President John Silvanus Wilson, economic downturn.

But in his own words, Morehouse’s money woes are about much more than the national economy hitting a speed bump. An excerpt from his letter, as first published by the Maroon Tiger Newspaper.
 
That is why over the next five years, my primary focus will be on generating more revenues and efficiencies for the College. My administration will implement an aggressive enrollment management plan to attract more students who can afford to pay for a Morehouse education. And we will use our scholarships more strategically to ensure that we are focusing support on students who have the highest potential to benefit from being at Morehouse.

Schools like Morehouse and Howard University, which is experiencing its own money woes, are singing the blues not because the country is in bad financial shape, but because the black people in the best financial shape no longer want to send their children to our most prestigious institutions.

Of the five most prominent HBCUs – Morehouse, Spelman, Howard, Fisk and Hampton, all have faced the growing reality of expedited financial right-sizing. Spelman cut ties with the NCAA to save money and make students healthier. Hampton has capped its enrollment to ensure it attracts and retains students who want to be there and succeed.

Howard has had its money issues aired publicly by the top levels of leadership. Morehouse cuts more than seven percent of its workforce, and Fisk escaped closure by selling off a portion of a prestigious art collection.

It has been convenient to blame some of these actions on incompetent or absent leadership, but the harsh reality is the adjustment these schools are making to accommodate their lack of rich students with an “I ain’t worried bout’ nothing” wherewithal to afford full tuition and fees.

These five schools, just 10-15 years ago, were still replete with a healthy percentage of students who needed no financial aid, and had parents who wanted to give to the school on top of cutting bi-annual tuition checks.

Between 2009 and 2011, the total number of Pell Grant receiving undergraduates at these schools increased by at least four percent. At Morehouse, the percentage increased from 43 percent to 49 percent. Pell grant eligibility is a strong indicator of the potential to fall short academically and financially – a double-whammy when it comes to retention and graduation rates, and a common bugaboo for the elite black institutions.

Now, those resources have dramatically diminished, and the culture looks worse for it. If the strongest and most tradition-steeped of our schools are having hard times, what does it say about the entirety of the culture?

Reversing the trend is not easy, because simply recruiting smarter, richer black students or increasing recruitment of rich students from other racial demographics not only presents a disconnect from the HBCU mission, but a disingenuous approach to higher education which would make HBCUs just like predominantly white colleges who are poaching our students in the effort to meet racial status quo. Do we really want to be reported as part of the institutional cohort that is making higher education accessible only to the wealthy?

The solution is simply more effective screening of students – are the students we are recruiting able to communicate effectively through writing and speech? Are we screening for aptitude not just in standardized tests, but the capacity to do a job or to create one for themselves? Are we valuing community service, involvement in faith-based volunteerism, and signs of leadership as the key metrics for who can be a solid student likely to graduate?

HBCUs still have a prominent place in the hearts and minds of black students worldwide. They are still hopeful that our schools can emerge from stereotypes of crime, ineffective leadership, apathetic student body and campuses lacking innovation and creativity at all levels of learning and living. These things are possible, but they all begin with the reality that our student profiles are growing poorer – not just in money, but in potential.

And while we have pretended that the HBCU remains the collective body which can build financial and character-based wealth, we are proving to be the exact opposite in the management of our enrollments and mission. The struggles of the HBCU elite aren’t the worst of our problems, but an ominous sign that the worst is yet to come for the culture at large.

Four Black Scientific Innovators Under 35

Columbia U Electrical Engineer Professor Christine Fleming, 30

Images of the beating heart could make it easier to detect and treat heart disease.

Christine Fleming is trying to give cardiologists a powerful new tool: high-resolution movies of the living, beating heart, available in real time during cardiac procedures. Such technology might also one day help physicians pinpoint the source of dangerous irregular heart rhythms without invasive biopsies. It could even help monitor treatment.

Number of sudden cardiac deaths each year in the U.S.: 325,000

Her invention uses optical coherence tomography (OCT), a technique that captures three-dimensional images of biological tissue. A specialized catheter with a laser and small lens near its tip is threaded through the arteries. When the laser light reflects off the heart tissue, it is picked up and analyzed to create an image. OCT has a higher resolution than ultrasound and captures images faster than magneticresonance imaging, or MRI. But today OCT has limited cardiac application—usually to search the arteries for plaques. Fleming, an electrical engineer who joined the faculty at Columbia University this year, has designed a new type of catheter capable of imaging heart muscle.

One of the primary uses of the technology will be to locate, and monitor treatment for, irregular heart rhythms that are typically caused by disruption of the heart's regular tissue structure. In patients with arrhythmias, which can lead to heart failure, surgeons often burn away the affected tissue with targeted radio-frequency energy. Currently they perform the procedure somewhat blind, using their sense of touch to determine when they have come in contact with the muscle wall. "Since the physician doesn't have a view of the heart wall, sometimes the energy is not actually being delivered to the muscle," says Fleming, who adds that the procedure can last for hours. Fleming has shown in animal tests that her catheter, which uses a novel forward-facing lens, can successfully monitor the ablation in real time. Algorithms that help distinguish untreated from treated tissue offer further guidance. Abnormal orientation of cells

Abnormal orientation of cells in the heart wall is a clue to arrhythmias, which can be fatal. These images, created using optical coherence tomography, show the orientation of a rabbit's heart-muscle cells. Christine Fleming's approach to diagnosing arrhythmias could be an alternative to invasive biopsies.

Fleming is also developing algorithms to help improve the detection of arrhythmias by precisely measuring the three-dimensional organization of heart muscle. The technique works best when the tissue has been chemically treated to make it clearer, and thus easier to image. But her team at Columbia is now improving the algorithms so that the method works without this treatment. She hopes that in time the technology could supply an alternative to invasive biopsies, which are sometimes used to diagnose unexplained arrhythmias or to monitor heart health after transplants.

Fleming's arrival at Columbia earlier this year was something of a homecoming. As a high-school student in New York City, she interned at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, which is down the street from her current lab. But in the intervening years her engineering interests have increasingly become tied to medicine; her inspiration for studying the electrical properties of the heart came when she studied electrical engineering and computer science as an undergraduate at MIT. Working with physicians is especially exciting, she says, because "you get the sense that one day your technology will be used."

—Emily Singer- technologyreview.com
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How is a wind farm like a school of fish?
Caltech Engineer Professor John Dabiri, 33.

Caltech professor John Dabiri uses his engineering expertise to try to understand how animals move in their natural environments. While researching the swimming patterns of fish, he recently came to a surprising insight: the way we're thinking about wind power—specifically, the design of wind farms—is wrong.

Conventional wind farms are designed to minimize the turbulence caused by interactions between turbines. That creates an obvious problem, says Dabiri: "You space them out as far as possible. If you're talking about a wind turbine that has a 100-meter diameter, then you're talking about as much as a mile between wind turbines. That's a lot of space that could be used to generate electricity, but can't be because of these turbulent interactions."

Megawatts of wind-power capacity in the United States: 60,000

Dabiri thought of a solution while researching how fish form schools to minimize drag as they move about. "Fish can reduce the amount of energy that they use if they swim in certain coördinated arrangements as opposed to swimming alone," he explains. "In fact, fish in large schools form precise, repeating patterns that allow them to move most efficiently. There's some basic fluid-mechanics theory that you can use to explain why that might be the case. Jotting down the math for urban wind-turbine analysis, there was sort of a eureka moment where I realized that the equations were exactly the same equations that explain fish schooling.

"Why not use how fish form schools as a starting point for understanding how to design wind farms?" asks Dabiri. "We began to use the same tools that were used to determine the optimal configuration for fish schools to optimize the wind farm. We looked at an arrangement that's been identified as optimal for fish, and we found that if we, in our computer models, arranged our wind turbines exactly in the same kind of diamond pattern that fish form, you get significant benefits in the performance of a wind farm."

To maximize that performance, Dabiri would use vertical wind turbines, which have been around for years but are much less common than the familiar horizontal–axis turbines. Vertical turbines can perform better when they are packed together—at least if they are arranged in the optimal pattern Dabiri discovered. That raises the possibility of redesigning wind farms to increase the amount of power they produce and lower the cost. Dabiri says the turbines could be squeezed into existing wind farms so that they produce more power without taking up any more land. It's a solution that could greatly reduce the drag on an industry that often seems to be swimming upstream.

—Kevin Bullis- technologyreview.com--------------------------------

Growing up in Kenya, he strained to read by the dim light of a kerosene lantern. Now he’s making solar-charged lanterns and using them to spur economic development.

Evans Wadongo, 27

Kenya’s unreliable electric grid doesn’t reach Chumvi, a village about two hours southeast of Nairobi, where many of the 500 residents live in mud-walled, grass-roofed homes and eke out a living raising goats and growing kale, maize, and other crops. Yet an economic transformation is taking place, driven by an unlikely source—solar-charged LED lanterns. It can be traced to the vision of Evans Wadongo, 27, who grew up in a village much like this one.

Number of people worldwide without access to electricity: 1.3 billion

As a child, Wadongo struggled to study by the dim, smoky light of a kerosene lantern that he shared with his four older brothers. His eyes were irritated, and he often was unable to finish his homework. “Many students fail to complete their education and remain poor partly because they don’t have good light,” says Wadongo, who speaks slowly and softly.

 
 In Chumvi, Kenya, Irene Peter helps her son with English homework by LED
light, which is cleaner and less expensive than ­kerosene.

As a student at the Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology, he happened to see holiday lights made from LEDs and thought about what it would take to bring LEDs to small villages for general lighting. After taking a leadership training course from a nonprofit group, he designed a manufacturing system for portable LED lamps that could be recharged by sunlight. While many such lamps are already for sale commercially—and are increasingly making their way into villages in poor countries—Wadongo decided that his lanterns would be made in local workshops with scrap metal and off-the-shelf photovoltaic panels, batteries, and LEDs.

Each lamp is stamped “Mwanga Bora,” which
means “Good Light” in Swahili.

Wadongo feared that the technology would be less likely to take hold if the lamps were simply given to people who had no financial stake in them. But the lanterns normally each cost 2,000 Kenyan shillings (about $23), which is out of many villagers’ reach. So he uses donations (including proceeds from a recent exhibition of his lamps at a Manhattan art gallery, at which donors gave $275 apiece) to provide initial batches of lamps to villages. Residents are generally quick to see the value in the LED lamps because of the money they save on kerosene. Wadongo then encourages them to put the resulting savings into local enterprises.

The transformation in Chumvi began two years ago, when a woman named Eunice Muthengi, who had grown up there and went on to study in the United States, bought 30 lanterns and donated them to women in the village. Given that the fuel for one $6 kerosene lamp can cost $1 a week, the donation not only gave people in the town a better, cleaner light source but freed up more than $1,500 a year. With this money, local women launched a village microlending service and built businesses making bead crafts and handbags. “We’re now able to save 10 to 20 shillings [11 to 23 cents] a day, and in a month that amounts to something worthwhile,” says Irene Peter, a 43-year-old mother of two who raises maize and tomatoes. “Personally, I saved and got a sheep who has now given birth.” She also got started in a business making ornaments and curios.

 
Christine Mbithi, a mother of four in Chumvi, chops spinach by LED lamplight.

As profits rolled in from new enterprises like these, the women who got the original 30 lamps gradually bought new batches; according to Wadongo, they now have 150. “Their economic situation is improving, and this is really what keeps me going,” he says, adding that some people are even making enough to build better houses. “The impact of what we do,” he says, “is not in the number of lamps we distribute but how many lives we can change.”

Wadongo is also changing lives with the manufacturing jobs he is creating. In an industrial area of Nairobi, banging and clanking sounds fill a dirt-floored shack as two men hammer orange and green scraps of sheet metal into the bases of the next batch of lamps (soon to be spray-painted silver). Each base is also stamped with the name of the lamp—Mwanga Bora (Swahili for “Good Light”). The three men in the workshop can make 100 lamp housings a week and are paid $4 for each one. Subtracting rent for the manufacturing space, each man clears $110 per week—far above the Kenyan minimum wage.

A worker hammers scrap metal to form a lantern housing.

Some of the lamps are completed in the kitchen of a rented house in Nairobi. Three LED elements are pushed through a cardboard tube so they stand up inside the lantern’s glass shade. The LED elements, photovoltaic panel, and batteries are sourced from major electronics companies. Overall, the devices are rugged; the steel in the housing of the lantern is a heavy gauge. If a housing breaks, it can be serviced locally—and the electronic parts are easily swapped out.

Wadongo now heads Sustainable Development for All, the NGO that gave him his leadership training, and he is focusing it on expanding the lamp production program. It has made and distributed 32,000 lamps and is poised to increase that number dramatically by opening 20 manufacturing centers in Kenya and Malawi. Wadongo says that teams in those centers will independently manufacture not only the lamps but “any creative thing they want to make.”

—David Talbot- technologyreview.com

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The mPedigree Network, based in Ghana, lets people determine with a text message whether their medicine is legitimate.

Activist and Astrophysicist Bright Simons, 31

"I grew up in Ghana, where we'd inherited the British boarding school system. At Presbyterian Boys High School, many upperclassmen were abusive toward the younger students. Once, I was made to stay awake all night in a kneeling position outside. But in my final year at school I became student council president and led efforts to reduce abuses. That experience opened my eyes to a whole new world of fighting the system—of being an activist. And this led directly to my becoming a technology innovator.

A few years later, after studying astrophysics at Durham University in the U.K., I transferred that instinct to try to help African farmers. They grow food organically by default, because they don't have money for chemicals. But they also don't have money for the organic certification process that would let them get better prices. So in 2005, I led a team of PhD students to try to implement a solution using mobile technology.

Percentage of medicine sold in some countries is bogus: 30

The idea was that at the point of sale there'd be a code on the product. You'd enter that in a mobile device, and up will pop the history and even pictures of the farm. But we realized a big flaw: farmers have to be trained to do the coding. This was not practical.

But picking up a fruit and wanting to know if it is organically grown is similar to picking up a pack of medicine and seeing if it was properly tested and certified. About 2,000 people die every day from counterfeit medicine. So we shifted the idea to pharmaceuticals.

In 2007 we set up a nonprofit organization in Ghana and rolled out a pilot, and the next year Nigerian health officials invited us to replicate the concept there. But we wanted to get to a point where a big company like Sanofi-Aventis would use us. We learned that most companies won't do business with an NGO, so in 2009 we launched mPedigree as a business.

You can send a free text message and get a reply in a few seconds verifying [that a medicine] is authentic. In addition, distributors and other middlemen can check the codes to verify that the supply has not been compromised. This helped reveal to a major Indian company that there was pilfering at a depot. Genuine antimalarial medicines would be replaced by counterfeits. The shady characters cannot get away with this anymore. If we had not stopped these leakages in the supply chain, they could have put thousands of patients at risk.

The system is used in Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya, and India, with pilots in Uganda, Tanzania, South Africa, and Bangladesh. We've got a relationship with many of the major regional—and a growing number of multinational—pharmas, including Sanofi-Aventis. In Nigeria our codes are on 50 million packs of antimalarial drugs alone, and we have just signed up two Chinese drug makers.

We are now expanding to seeds, cosmetics, and other businesses. And new applications are emerging that we hadn't expected, in the areas of logistics, supply chain management, and marketing. If you send an SMS to check authenticity, you've also given good information about exactly where and when a drug was sold—as well as provided a potential marketing opportunity to dispense coupons. We have built a major platform for supply chains in the developing world. But back at my school, of course, they still remember me as the activist."

—as told to David Talbot- technologyreview.com