What, no rainmakers in Copenhagen?

It has been heartening to see a once-demoralised Africa becoming increasingly assertive in international affairs in recent years.

A few weeks before the ongoing UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, Africa threatened to walk out of the meeting if its demand for $300 billion eco-compensation was rejected by the industrialised world.

Africa is demanding compensation because, though it is the world’s smallest polluter, it suffers the greatest damage from climate change.

Africa may have gone to Copenhagen as the conference’s most self-righteous bloc, but it also has the world’s most contradictory practices where nature is concerned, and complicates campaigns to protect the environment in strange ways.

Generally, we seem to believe that environmental and climate problems can be fixed quickly.

If the rains stay away for a long time, you gather half a dozen white chickens and take them to the local rainmaker.

He will get a powder into which a tiger tooth and lion claws have allegedly been ground, climb to the top of a high hill, blow the powder in the air, flash his miracle-filled backside at the heavens, and frighten the sky into opening up.

If some mysterious insects eat all the village’s crops just before the harvest, the resident diviner shall be asked to investigate.

She will identify a family of “wizards” in the area whose dark arts have brought the pestilence.

In the night, the men will gather with clubs and machetes, attack the “wizards,” kill everyone and burn the house down.

And if a family wakes up one morning to find that all the cows in its kraal have died (after drinking from a poisoned well), in no time an elder will proclaim that it is the avenging ghost of an uncle who died with bitterness in his heart, which needs to be appeased to protect future herds.

This tendency to attribute environmental misfortunes to witchcraft and ghosts, and the existence of easily available superstitious solutions to deal with environmental calamities makes protection of the environment difficult, and good policy nearly impossible.

Thus many of the forests that are still fairly intact in several parts of Africa are safe probably not because our blood is green.

Rather it is because people believe that a dangerous serpent or angry ancestral spirits live in the forest, and if you cut down a tree your children will go mad.

Mau Forest

The effect of all this is that science is not a powerful argument where the environment is concerned.

Thus in Kenya, where the debate over the eviction of settlers from the environmentally critical Mau Forest has turned nasty, highly educated personages from the Rift Valley have stood up and argued that rain comes from the sky, and forests have absolutely nothing to do with it!

Second, long-term policy that seeks, for example, to restore water levels to a water mass like Lake Victoria, sound laughable in places where people believe a rainmaker can end a drought overnight.

There are exceptions like Rwanda, which has had remarkable success fixing environmental damage and with reforestation.

Perhaps it is because in the 1994 genocide in which nearly one million people were slaughtered, many a Rwandese learnt that there are no gods in the forests, or rivers that will fight your wars for you.

That ultimately, man is both his worst enemy — and only saviour.

Charles Onyango-Obbo is executive editor of the Nation Media Group’s Africa Media Division. E-mail: cobbo@nation.co.ke