Rift
Impala alert in the Albertine Rift
Rift Valley politics and personalities
The Great African Rift Valley is something I first read about as a depressed secondary school student in Calcutta. We in India are famous for learning intimate details about other countries – the amount of rainfall in Brazil, the height of Mt. Fujiyama, the aridity of the Atacama – without ever being encouraged to step outside our neighbourhoods. There is some reason for this.
When you step outside your threshold in Calcutta (or Kolkata as desperate purists would have it), you have to negotiate: acres of dog poo; the city sewers which either rise up to meet you (if they’re blocked) or you sink to find (through open manholes whose covers have been stolen); charging rickshawpullers who will not give quarter; diesel-fume belching taxis and buses piloted by hash-fuelled maniacs; mini-buses that appear to be heading for suicide missions to Kandahar; jets of red paan spittle which are aimed at you from numerous shop-windows by pot-bellied, armpit-scratching gents clad in wife-beaters and dhotis; and much else. So, we Bengalis (or in my case, Parsee-Bengalis) tend to be brilliant surveyors of the world without ever having seen it.
Which is why it’s such a great pleasure to actually live near the Rift Valley. It is an enormous fissure in the Earth’s crust running from the Red Sea to northern Mozambique, in which lie nestled a string of shining lakes, like so many jewels in a rocky girdle. Uganda sits on the Western side of the Rift, and is itself split by an arm of it, the so-called Albertine Rift, which rises in South Sudan and stretches to Rwanda. Conservationists say that if global warming worsens, one of the areas least affected will be the Albertine Rift, and will lead to it being a focal point for the migration of wild animals. I guess by living here, I’m already one step ahead of the competition.
On this page you will find stories relating to the principal actors in the Rift: Kenya, Sudan, Tanzania and Ethiopia. Uganda has its own section. I will also include occasional stories from the Great Lakes region – Rwanda, and the DR Congo, whose participation (or enforced participation) in Rift Valley politics keeps things very lively.
