The Zanzibits Internet link uses a satellite, Sky-Vision, which my ISP in the UK did a check on and found that it slowed everything down dramatically. It stopped everything working: FTP was unusable, a typical web access took 30secs+, any download above a couple of Mb was impossible or had to be left overnight. Unusable for project work.

My first attempt was to see if my UK mobile phone dongle would work; I took it to Zantel, they said it was the wrong protocol and I should try Vodacom. I then went to Vodocom (in case you’re wondering, not the same as Vodaphone; Vodacom is South African but Vodaphone have now taken them over. Maybe they liked the name). They gave me a free SIM card and lots of advice, I bought 2,000Sh (£1) of vouchers and loaded them up. No connection; Obviously my modem was locked into T-mobile. And it would have been only slightly better than modem speed (~5% of broadband) anyway.

One of my students then lent me his Zantel wireless telephone (looks like a landline but with an antenna), and associated bits and pieces, which he had used until it became too expensive and he went to a land line. It was fast at the time, but Zantel obviously downgraded the service so they could sell lots of their shiny new 3G modems. It was back to a bad modem-speed connection again.

I finally got agreement from Martin (of whom more later) that he would fund a 3G internet dongle from Zantel. Sweetness and light, but at a cost. The new fibre optic link should speed everything up dramatically and lower costs to boot. Let’s hope they get it going quickly. Zanzibar needs it!

This morning I received the following email from Martin:

I am in Vienna and just opened a tetra pack of passion fruit juice
from the European premium brand “Rauch happy day” and took a big
swallow to find out that it tastes like SHIT … It comes in a dark
brownish color and is terribly sweet. You can only drink 3 small sips
in a row or your tongue starts burning like fire. It has a adhesive
character and even when it is cold as arctic ice, there is no
refreshment at all. hell no!

Comparing it to the fresh home made one you get at Achipelago/Stone
Town is totally impossible. The one there is so refreshing that I
always had at least 2 big glasses in a couple of minutes … You drown
it slow or fast and the experience is terrific, your mind and your
body is literally amused … It is bright yellow and you can feel some
of the seeds going down your throat smoothly … It tastes like fruit,
not like sugar … You usually drink it using a straw, which makes it
even more exciting! hell yes!

Now you may read into this what you will. It sounds like the musings of a sensualist, nay a voluptuary. I myself like passion fruit, but my passion is for oysters. They also go down your throat smoothly, and they taste like … but some things must be left to the imagination.

Gray says that we cannot choose to be what we are born, so in that case we cannot be responsible for what we do. He then goes on to make a much more specific point: that recent research has shown that the “electrical impulse to initiate action occurs half a second before we take the conscious decision to act” (p66). This, he says, has weakened the notion of free will even more. Recent research on mirror neurons, reported in a recent Scientific American, supports this. In general, the vast majority of neural activity involved in any action takes place at an unconscious level. But the major decisions we take in our life are not of this nature. A soldier is trained to respond both to obey orders, and to respond “appropriately” in a variety of circumstances, involving immediate threat or dire consequences if the wrong action is taken, in an unthinking and automatic way; pause for thought can often be fatal. But the decision to become a soldier was taken at a conscious level and perhaps even in a reflective manner.

Of course in a society where war is glorified, personal honour is satisfied by valiant conduct in battle, and perhaps there is an external threat, then many will become soldiers wihout giving it much if any thought. But then it has always been the case that mankind, en masse, is predictable. It does not however follow that a given individual is predictable. The training to obey orders deals largely with orders that require immediate action. The injunction that a soldier should obey all orders includes those involving future action, such as the killing of all women and children. The decision to obey such orders (or not) is categorically different from the decision to attack when threatened, or a shouted order to “fire”. In the latter case, the “decision” is outside conscious control, and is of the same nature as Jim’s decision, which haunted him for the rest of his life.

Most of us are not trained to act in an automatic fashion to specific circumstances, but we still find ourselves regretting our actions and impulses. Just as the solder is trained to act in a particular way (and can subsequently be retrained to act differently), so can we all train ourselves to react differently in future, and this brings back the notion of personal responsibility. In this sense, we are responsible even for those actions governed by the half-second phenomenon, in the same way that a drunk is responsible for his actions as he had the prior choice to become drunk or not, knowing what the likely consequences would be if he did.

On the wider topic of freedom of will: it seems that there are two separate questions: whether our every action is determined by a combination of our internal brain state at any given instant, combined with all the external inputs that are impinging on that brain state, and whether, by genetic predisposition and our life experiences (think of the the child soldiers trained to kill), we can ever be free, outside of a narrow band of possible choices, to escape this “programming” and freely adopt a different framework, of our choosing, for our beliefs and consequent actions. One might categorise these two as theoretical, or philosophical free will, and practical free will.

Gray has little to say on the former. It is essentially unknowable; there is no way, even in principle, in which we can evaluate the state of the universe at any instant, in order to predict what will happen next to any individual. To do so would involve stepping outside the universe into a higher frame of reference, which by definition is impossible. Even if we replace universe by world and thereby allow this higher universal frame of reference, there is no way that any prediction can be fed back to an individual inhabiting the world without changing the state of the individual and therefore the world, which would necessitate a new prediction, and thereby an infinite regression. So we have to act as if we have free will; we have no other choice.

Regarding practical free will - Gray states that we are not free in the way stated above. Again I think that he is extending the predictability of the masses - the above child killers will on the whole lead short, wretched and brutal lives - to that of the individual - there are those who have escaped this web of catastrophic circumstance to resume life as what we would regard as members of the wider human race. It is a truism to say that the lives of the vast majority of people are governed by circumstance and they fit in, largely unquestioning, into whatever framework they have been born and bred into (human society would not function were this not so). But I think that Gray is saying more than this; he is denying freedom of will, in the sense of control over life choices, per se. In this, I do not think that he has proved his point.

Finally, I do not think that whether we are free or not necessarily has implications for the way in which we order civil society. If we do not have free will, then nobody is responsible for their actions, but the whole system of criminal justice in that case is something that has evolved, without our having had any deliberate part in it, to create a society in which order prevails, social disruption is kept to a minimum and the notion of social engineering, or rehabilitation, returns to society those who can play a useful part in it. Societies organised along these lines will be successful, and we must therefore suppose that there has evolved a predisposition to organise society along such lines, in which we behave as if we have free will, and therefore notions of punishment and rehabilitation fit naturally into this framework. We also have notions of degree of culpability, in which the individual’s greater or lesser responsibility, depending on external circumstances, determines the extent of the punishment. In all of this we assume that the individual ultimately is responsible for her actions but whether this is so or not, the system is a universal framework to deal with deviant behaviour.

I have brought Straw Dogs (Granta Books, 2003, ISBN 978-1-86207-596-2) with me, described as “a devastating critique of liberal humanism” (Will Self), which “challenges all of our assumptions about what it is to be human .. and shows that most of them are delusions (JG Ballard). The format of this short book is that of a series of short essays, some argued through, and some little more than one liners; all brilliant and challenging. My overall problem is that Gray’s statements have the flavour of ex cathedra pronouncements, backed up by limited evidence picked up from a wide range of sources - historical, philosophical, neurophysiological, genetic. One must assume that he is familiar with the wider literature ini these fields, but there does seem to be an amount of cherry picking, favourable evidence presented in an almost anecdotal manner, and so convenient to his thesis that one wonders if, by choosing different anecdotes, he could have made the opposite case with equal conviction. I suspect not, because he presents a cogent and coherent case, but the unworthy thought remains that this is a gigantic intellectual coup de theatre, designed to sweep the whole of the current pack of bien pensants of its collective perch.

I shall examine some of Gray’s arguments in following posts. All page references are to the edition mentioned above. Please do leave comments!

We then strolled back through the Stone Town maze (there isn’t a maze - it is a maze), and ended up at the house where Masaka (a teacher from Kenya who is working at Zanzibits for another 6 months) and Guy (local name Moussa), the Dutchman who’s NGO created Zanzibits. Guy also runs a hotel out of town, so we spent an hour or two with Masaka, eating the remains of his last-night’s meal (tomatoes, paprika, onions & garlic, with local spinach - delicious, and inspires me to start my own cooking enterprise), and Said fiddling with Masaka’s laptop (he hates the dreaded yellow shriek ( ! ) in Device Manager, so fixed a couple of bad device drivers). Suleiman - the factotum from Zanzibits, who keeps the keys, and generally looks after everything, and when he talks, talks with his whole body, turned up and fixed a blocked sink.

We head back to the flat, with me taking pictures at every corner in a vain attempt to find my way back on my own (I have a standing invitation from Masaka for dinner), past Jaw Corner (the local equivalent of Hyde Park Speakers’ Corner), with Said teaching me Swahili on the way. There is no link whatsoever with the European languages, so it’s a question of learning by rote; difficult for me, as I generally learn by association. We shall see!

Discovered I’ve only got a few 100 shilling coins (100sh = 5 pence), as Martin took my few 1,000 notes (1,000sh = £0.50) last night for one of his (human) networking enterprises, and paid me in US$ which I can’t change until tomorrow (1$ ~ 1,320sh). This after celebrating his last night in a pleasantly low-life bar round the corner, with the cheapest beer I’v found so far at 1,700sh (work it out yourself!). So it’s street food for me for the rest of the day!

Stefan and Fritz (my successors), being young hotshots, can no doubt sort all of this out, but I am left with my wits, what I know, and a disinclination to delve into the innards of Linux and Windows networking, as there are more important (to me) things to do, like writing (ever more) student notes and getting on with my own project work.

Also, lengthy downloads on my laptop normally fail miserably, whereas i can leave a download on a Linux machine running overnight. I then use my file upload script to transfer to my server (even a 100MB file, (after having worked out how to extend the file upload size limit).

Also my external hard drives (a snip at £53 for 360GB) work fine except when I want to copy from Linux to my machine. A file downloaded and visible on Linux comes up as a zero-length file on my machine. This is using NTFS; haven’t tried the FAT32 drive yet, but now not necessary because of the aforementioned upload script.

From all of this I conclude that my basic technical knowledge of the innards of networking, as it was in ~1999 when I last lectured on the topic, with then current version of Tannenbaum’s networking book as my bible, supplemented by HTML/PHP file upload, is sufficient to get things working, even if it doesn’t satisfy the current generation of technorati (pace Stefan, Fritz, Werner et al)! Having said that, I did write a windows-based FTP transfer program (using the Indy library) to manage my project web uploads. Like all things here, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.

We spent several convivial evenings at ZIFF, which is held in the old fort, a double-chambered structure, open to the air. One chamber has a sort of amphitheatre, where the films are shown; the other is an open area with a stage at which concerts took place into the small hours. There is a well-stocked bar in each. Entry was a problem (”residents” get charged £0.50, foreigners £5 or £10). I finally got my director’s entry card, passing as Anders Bolin, the Dutch director of Martin’s film, who forturnately did not turn up to challenge me.

The first evening passed pleasantly enough - we finally joined up with a group of Belgian film makers who, like many others here, are involved in the general East African cultural scene, which seems to be thriving. Subsequent evenings were quieter, but we were constantly bumping into Martin’s endless contacts, some local, some European - one who came to Uganda/Kenya/Mozambique 5 years ago, and forgot to leave. All manage to make a living, sometimes precarious, but I’m slowly (quite rapidly, actually) realising that you do not need a lot in the way of material goods. It helps, and I know that I am leaving (I hope not for ever) in a few weeks, so a slightly disingenuous thought.

Apart from a few “big” movies, most of the them were sparsely attended. There was an endless cycle of films about AIDS, mostly well-meaning, but I wonder if they ever reach their target audience. Another cycle with harrowing stories of young women in traditional societies, mainly Moslem, who had a relationship, got pregnant, were abandoned and then had to face the most appalling consequences. (While predominantly Sunni Moslem, Zanzibar does not go in for that sort of thing.) One charming film from Cameroun about a couple of friends who compete for a girl (a beautifully choreographed picture of village life); the father wants to marry the girl off to a corrupt politician; she finally succumbs for the good of her family. Her erstwhile fiancée, meanwhile, is in jail after being stitched up by the politician. In the final scene, reminscent of The Graduate (Dustin Hoffman, Anne Bancroft - remember?), the boy is released from jail by an honest policemen and, reconciled with his friend, they race up to the church just as the bride is about to say “I do”. They charge into the church, the girl runs off with her boy, after they have barred the door of the church with a giant pole through the door handles.

The last evening was a gala event, and we went down with the Zanzibits students, who were in a mood of ebullient effervescence. It is hard to exaggerate this; they were absoultely fizzng with good humour. They had made a short film in their class - a series of folk tales and fables, engagingly animated and making liberal use of local children. Another upload for sometime. Finally, Madame Karoume (the mother of the current president of Zanzibar; his father was the first president after indepence, so she is a double first lady) made an endless speech, in Swahili but, like the actor reading the telephone book, never boring. The guest of honour was Danny Glover (Colour Purple), who had previously been driven through the streets in a convoy of Unicef jeeps with blaring sirens. He was rather the worse for wear (or, as they say, tired and emotional but without the emotion), and made a rather uninspiring speech. Then the winning film was shown (an excellent, if violent, film about modern South Africa) and, true to form, everybody (or at least the bigwigs and a sizeable proportion of the audience) left as it started and migrated to the bars and music for more networking.

As a sort of postscript, there was an extra day on Sunday at which Martin’s film - Hello Africal - a cinema verité film about mobile phone usage in Zanzibar was screened to the normal sparse audience. This will also be posted in due course. The streets are now much quieter, and the nightly street market (inter alia, excellent Zanzibarian Pizza, which is not a pizza at all, for £0.75) has migrated to Africa House, which I have not yet visited.

Zanzibar is laid back and congenial. Martin (of whom more later) met me off the boat, and we spent the next four hours touring Stone Town, shaking hands with ½ the residents, drinking coconut milk out of a coconut (you drink it on the spot, then hand the shell back for them to scoop out the flesh, which they then hand back to you. Nothing at all like the coconuts you buy at home; refreshing and delicious.

Afternoon spent interviewing the potential students, talking to the other people here. the idea of community service is one that comes naturally to people, and there are a lot of low profile but active projects going. Zanzibar City (Stone Town is the ancien quarter) is a typical 3rd world town, you might say, with potholed roads, and things not working, but place still has a busy, thriving air.

I have since revised my thoughts on “third world”- not because it is politically incorrect, but because it is rather perjoritive. This world has much to teach us about the basic business of living, which is what we’re all on earth to do, so there’s nothing “third” about that. “Developing” and “emerging” have similar connotations, as if ours is the way of life to which all should aspire. (In this context, see thoughts on John Gray, which will be posted some time). I think the simple comparisons between rich and poor are sufficient, so long as these terms are taken to apply in a strictly monetary sense, but money drives everything these days (at least in the “rich” world), so we can take that as read.

It turns out that the expenses do not include beer, but apart from that it is just about doable if you get somebody to cook for you; I am looking into this, but more of that later.  

I met Werner a few years ago in Kingston where he was running a enterprising and worthwhile project to introduce schoolchildren from non-British backgrounds to a sense of their own history and to celebrate their own heroes and role models. With his wife Anne Marie, they wrote and produced plays in local schools and colleges, and hoped to get some work from the government’s Respect for all agenda, which they richly deserved. Sadly this did not materialise. Also, Werner is an IT (Linux) wizard on the side.

They are now back in (Werner’s native) South Africa, and Werner, who was due to do this teaching “holiday”, got another contract which he couldn’t turn down. Hence my presence in Zanzibar. The project is an ongoing commitment by various European NGOs to provide both IT and entrepreneurial skills to local young people, so they can use them to add to and stimulate the local economy, which is largely based on tourism. There are a number of thriving and profitable businesses here, bright and hard-working people, and a stable and diverse cultural life. So all of the signs are good.

My teaching is an introduction to Web programming, based on PHP (and the rest: JavaScript, MySQL and HTML), which will be then taken forward by the bright young(ish) sparks who run this project within a project (more later), all from Austria, who started their IT career at the point where I, with any sense, might have thought of giving it up! However, everybody has to start at the beginning, so people like me still have their uses!

So - more over the next few weeks. Life is good. I am doing an amount of reading, preparing classes, fighting computer viruses, power cuts and bad Internet connectsion, none of which matters too much. After all, most of the world lives this way, and they are no less happy than we are. Oh, and slightly more beer than I might be drinking at home.