'RaceCourse Station' Kumasi, Tamale Branch

Trucking the dream.

Hello all, i thought I’d bore you with some tails of the road and why trucks are cool.

The theoretical blurb, come waffle;

Recently I’ve been doing some work in Ghana, a tricky situation after life at SOAS as anyone whose tried to grasp the length of time needed to operate according to the practical application of Hobart’s method. I think the rigour he expected probably initially produces such a sense of claustrophobia when faced with the need to affect your own reincarnation as the object of study before successfully regressing to the state of your previous life as an anthropologist. Then having a group of illiterate children act out the thesis in a cave. Exaggerated perhaps, and I would say vastly profitable. Once the rigour of academia is a little dimmer in the minds eye, you are left with a sense of the danger of simply being in conversation with someone.

I wouldn’t like to slight the development department because I know they’re a bang on bunch but certainly they seemed (only seemed to me I swear!) that there was a less rigorous approach to the interrogation of knowing. Still being as that’s what I fancied doing I thought that the best notion would be just mucking around a little bit with the way information is held and moved. This seemed to be more concerned with connectivity rather than actually having to decide stuff about people and thus hopefully less intrusive although I’d happily accept its hardly a safe option and Hobart’s dismantling of a mobile phone based chap in our first methods talk over the inherent consumerism attached to it still brings on the sweats. Still the pick-up rate was I think higher than that of China in the last few years so in some respects, bugger it, horse has bolted.

So, trucks. The area that I’ve been working in has, as in my last post (Comrade Chief), been in the area of communication between groups involved around the agricultural economy. Whereas chieftaincy was an exploration of those forms of control, social motivation and a raft of everything that comes along with life, the trucks was much more concerned with information exchange, the actions carried out and the logic of where trucks go.

The brief;

The Boss and the Vice; happy to run the biggest game in town

There are a group of people in Accra called ‘esoko’, they have a Market Information System (MIS) and they’ve had it up and running for around four years. It works over mobiles in both 2G and 3G and provides price data for just about every market in Ghana. It also provides the ability for people to upload offers to buy and sell. Most of the data that comes onto the sites (as they involve mobile to PC link-up) are provided by Ministry Of Food and Agriculture (MOFA). They have people who go around the market every week to try and find out what costs what. At Techiman, the largest food market in Ghana, this seemingly innocent activity has lead to mob’s burning down offices, concerned about too much transparency. But in most other cases things are less antagonistic.
Esoko had in the beginning hoped that people would use the service to trade over. This may have seriously reduced the cost of trading and provided greater access allowing the richer south to more direct trade with the agricultural North without such a cut going to the various middle men and women that move goods across the country.
One of the success stories of the trading scheme was a groundnut (peanut) seller from Accra that exported large quantities overseas and made use of the system to buy direct from sellers in the North allowing him to make a lot more money. Although it also allowed the farmers to ask for a better rate they were finding that small scale traders were not using the trading platform. A classic example of this would be illustrated with the farmer holding 25 bags of corn speaking with the trader in the south about releasing the goods. Who releases first and under what assurances? With no weights and measures to provide insurance and little possibility of assuring the quality of the goods neither was willing to risk the relatively small capital they held on a system to which there was only the word of a stranger in terms of guarantee.

The hope;

When we in the UK purchase goods over the internet across a site such as ebay, user ratings give us a sense of the probability of the other actually posting the goods. This is where we have to make a decision concerning the risk our goods will not be posted. What we don’t really consider as risk is that once posted they may still not arrive. Both paypal and the postal service are largely trusted as being honest in-so-far-as if they prove not to be we have recourse to systems of law and state to seek redress.

In Ghana numerous systems of control exist that provide structure and certainty in the case of state run systems and those that exist in social relations. In the delivery business there are three major unions that operate most of the trucks in Ghana, these are the Ghana Private Road Transporters Union (GPRTU) and the Ghana National Cargo Transporters Association (GNCTA). There is also the Ghana Haulage Transport Drivers Association (GHTDA) that deals exclusively with the articulated lorries. The GPRTU is by the largest organisation, the GNCTA representing a breakaway faction that left in outrage to comments from the chairman that he did not deal with cargo trucks, following criticism from the government over malpractice. They do however retain a good relationship with some union members sharing office space.
The hope then was to use these organisations to produce the level of certitude users might require to begin to use the trading platform.

The truckers;

When I begun the project for me the trading platform was the big excitement, the team at esoko were however less positive on that front. They’d survived a great big car crash of a project that had tried to roll out a MIS over 15 ECOWAS states; MISTOWA. They were more interested in doing something simpler like a ‘load-finder’ application for the drivers. Obviously I turned aside from such a poverty of dreams, I at the very least wanted a stock and flow application with the possibility of bandit alerts and goods checking capacities.

A study;

The esoko people agreed that they’d give me half of what I needed to survive now, and half later, if I made it back to collect, they realised I was enthusiastic and would do it anyway. I’d pegged out a rolling anthropological model that sought to be influenced by the flows of goods and thus follow the natural ebbs and flows around the country. I was hoping to take in the long cross country trips in the articulators, the overnight groaning shamble of a cargo truck and the shorter mad dashes from the regional markets to the local districts for more produce. I’d asked them for four months of immersive trucking with breaks at the major market places to explore differences in the traders and their relationship to the unions. They gave me a month and a half and said not too be so academic.

The union stations are found all over the country, there are probably close to a thousand or more although there are 10 major regional stations and the majority of the stations will be very small affairs as each village that has some sort market place and is serviced by a tro-tro (mini bus), Benz or taxi will have some form of shelter, a representative that collects a fee from the driver and provides tickets for travel.

What was of particular interest to me was the amount of integration that existed between the traders and the station reps. Traders that visit the markets are always at the behest of these reps when it comes to the successful transportation of goods. Traders that are unable to find transportation for perishable goods will risk loosing a full load if they are waylaid for long. Stories of waiting sometimes a fortnight at the farm gate with progressively damaged goods makes the ability to quantify profit difficult, this goes on to effect credit worthiness and financial planning.
Station representatives in busy stations might have to organise the loading of 60 trucks in a day while a busy maize traders association in Techiman can count 212 traders under them with each employing as many as 10 porters all belonging to their own union.

What you are left with then are layers upon layers of relation and formalised control that if plugged into a centralised store of dynamic information offers the chance for a plethora of differing applications. In all there are around 2 million members of the transporters unions. In terms of the numbers working in and around agriculture there are thought to be over half the population working in the agricultural sector (10 million+).

A preliminary conclusion;

There are very few station bosses that are calling for ways in that they might make the journeys they make more efficient through having data concerning the movement of trucks. They have the information on paper, and they have it in their head. The stationmaster if he gets into trouble has a heap of people they’ll call to find out whether there are trucks at another truck stop, or whether anyone has heard of any attacks. They were consistently demonstrated to be well-respected and capable individuals that were always deeply rooted in the relationships of the market. They are however also human beings that are generally unable to know what is unknowable to them, there is no particular reason that a stationmaster will phone ahead to let another station know of a trucks arrival, information travels in many cases at the speed of the truck. A stationmaster if they are approached for a load will be from that point seeking to find a truck for a load that is from the moment of being ready and without vehicle, wasting resources or heightening the chances of the products spoiling.

The price of the transportation is high, a sack of rice will cost perhaps a third again once the transportation has been paid. The cost of transport is perhaps half for the fuel and the other half for bribes and risk such as failing to find a load to return with.
Unions take a 10% cut from the driver’s fee and this is obviously a barrier to their reduction as 10% of less, is less. They are however sitting on the edge of a free market and all the excitement that provides. Trucking companies are moving into Ghana and in certain key industries like the Coco they have the business. Wherever they are able to talk to a centralised authority they are able to take the market. They have no problems competing on cost, it is only the dispersed and strongly traditional market system that resists their advances by the sheer complexity of its operation.

For a operation like this there needs to be a decentralized network style tool that operates according to the micro decisions made through-out its maw, building a site that allows that data to interact and ultimately provide clear sign-posts to where there are shortages and thus higher premiums, or gluts and so accessible quantities of reasonably priced foodstuffs.
Ultimately the promises of reaching an internal market that routinely imports 70% of the rice that it eats in relation to growing 98% of its annual consumption 20 years ago are tempting. Food in West Africa continues to be some of the most expensive on the continent due to the associated coats. The push to export high cost items to niche markets is an expensive waste of air freight, the icing but not the cake, internal markets will ultimately make the difference to wages and food security.

My friend and translator Ifrahim searches for beer at the market

So…

Well, its all a bit patchy but I had fun, this was an off-the-top-of-my-head production of a much larger piece of work that I would stress is ongoing. Currently there is not a system in-place, we pegged a very simple set-up at around 100k and probably a couple of years work.

At the moment in Ghana there is a pretty widespread availability for knock-off smart phones, this is allowing people for whom a laptop is unlikely access to the internet anywhere, with GPS and directional bits and stuff on its way in. I’m quite sure that the re-spatialisation of the digital arena will be in many ways more exciting in Ghana where current systems are often paper based, the influx of technologies that are both geographically relevant as well as digital could be really interesting. So any ideas…

If you want more info or to chat give me a contact …. mr.tom.n@gmail.com

Following our reports HERE about the plight of SOAS (ex-)student Hossein Derakshan the plot around his imprisonment now thickens even more.  Now Newsweek is accusing him being a spy behind the current Iran trials aimed at arresting many of the opposition figures.  I quote:

A central figure in what is supposed to be a vast international conspiracy to overthrow the Iranian regime has been officially invisible until now. The information he provided has been key to the confabulations presented in the Stalinesque show-trials in Tehran. An American scholar, a British embassy employee, a prominent economist, and leading members of former Iranian governments have been given long jail sentences. A young French researcher now languishes under house arrest in her country’s Tehran embassy, and Newsweek correspondent Maziar Bahari passed four grueling months, mostly in solitary confinement, before finally he was released. All because of their alleged roles in the surreal narrative presented by the regime. Yet the key witness is described by the lead prosecutor only as “this arrested spy, whose name we do not mention out of security considerations.”

Credibility problems are the more likely reason. In truth, we know who this guy is, and he’s not the kind of character that even the hallucinatory conspiracy theorists of Tehran should want to build a case around. The regime’s description of the so-called spy’s travels, contacts, and opinions make it unmistakably clear that he’s the mercurial, maddening Hossein Derakhshan, a.k.a. Hoder, a.k.a. The Blogfather. He is the man who started the Persian-language explosion on the Web in the earlier part of this decade that led directly to the blogging, texting, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube phenomenon that helped bring huge protests into Iran’s streets last June and get the protesters’ message to the outside world. Yet without Derakhshan—or at least without what he’s alleged to have said and what he previously posted on the Web—the Iranian regime, even by its own lights, would not have much of a story to tell (full article HERE).

So given the amount of mis/dis-information going around today with Iran and this, I am somehow slowly reminded of Agent Mulder / Scully and the X-Files (if not the X-factor): “The Truth is Out There.”   Or perhaps a quote by Baudrillard would describe this better:”the discourse of truth is quite simply impossible. It eludes itself. Everything eludes itself, everything scoffs at its own truth, seduction renders everything elusive. The fury to unveil the truth, to get at the naked truth, the one which haunts all discourses of interpretation, the obscene rage to uncover the secret, is proportionate to the impossibility of ever achieving this. …But this rage, this fury, only bears witness to the eternity of seduction and to the impossibility of mastering it.”

For seven years, I used to read Editor: Myself, while sipping on my morning coffee. Hossein, had chosen this name for his blog to reflect his protest to the censorship he had known in Iran. Once landed in Canada, he had started his blog in Persian and English, opening the way for an impressive wave of socio-political movements in Iranian recent history. Iran is one of the rare countries where blogging is the most influential way of communicating among its youth. Through blogs, otherwise imprisoned minds are set free and ideas flow with no constraints.

Hossein understood the power of blogging very soon. He used all sorts of media forms such as recorded interviews, photo streams, and films to communicate with his audience. Although the layout of his weblog resembled that of a newspaper, his writing style was far different from it. He chose to adopt spoken Persian for his posts, breaking the barrier between the writer and the reader. His simple language combined with his provocative remarks made his blog one of the most read Persian blogs of our times.

In the heydays of his weblog, Hossein covered all sorts of subjects from politics to social event, to music and even his daily life. We followed his “metamorphosis” in his political views, enjoyed his taste in music, admired his boldness in tackling taboos, traveled with him to Israel, and why not we were entertained with his various adventures.

For Iranian bloggers, his weblog was a hub and he himself was a reference. At the right side of his blog, Hossein had made a list of most of the blogs held by Iranians, sorted by language, to facilitate access to them. Whenever he would find a blog that he liked, he would do the promotion. Many of today’s famous Iranian blogs got their debut in Editor Myself.

I met Hossein after many years, when our paths crossed in Paris. At that time he had already lost his spotlight. His political views had taken a different orientation than that of the Iranian “intellectuals” and he had become the ugly duckling of the Persian blogsphere. He was not happy about the situation but his beliefs were stronger than the desire to be popular. I admired him for his honesty, his transparency, and his ability to question the mainstream opinion. Even if I was not always in agreement with his analysis of the political situation in Iran, it was stimulating to read his posts and ponder about his point of view.

These days, Iran is traversing a hard period in time. Many things have changed inside the country since Hossein has been imprisoned. Many innocent people have lost their lives and many more imprisoned. I always wonder, what would Hossein write if he were free. Indeed, we are missing him in our virtual as well as real world.

Karineh is a researcher working in Paris since 2006. She was born and raised in Iran, and completed her studies in the United States. Reading weblogs has been one of her favorite activities over the years. In 2007 she started her own blog called “Between the lines” (http://clarinetteblog.net/), where she sporadically posts her writings.

PREVIOUS STORIES:

http://www.projectcarousel.org/2009/11/mind-medium-message-part-ii/
http://www.projectcarousel.org/2009/11/mind-medium-message/

Matti asked me to write something personal about Hossein for Project Carousel. After the first few articles, I realize that what I have to say is from a different perspective and not the objective political angle that most people are taking.

One of the first times I noticed Hossein was during our weekly seminars put on by the Media and Film studies department.  I don’t remember the details of the presentation, but I do remember a smarmy smooth talking woman presenting ways in which to frame the Israel/Palestinian conflict on news programs.  Her presentation made my stomach turn and encapsulated everything I find immoral about the mainstream media industry.  Again, my memory is fuzzy on the details, but I remember that when the floor was opened for questions, and Hossein posed his, it made the woman so angry that she demanded he leave the room and refused to continue the Q & A.

Hossein is a mind to be reckoned with: this wasn’t the last time he would make a visiting scholar feel years of study and careful construction of worldviews shattered by a simple question.  At first I found his style a little jarring: how impolite to rip the rug out from under this settled media practitioner.  But the more time I spent in conversation and in classes with him, the more I realized that there was absolutely nothing vindictive in his motives, on the contrary he always comes from a place of innocent curiosity. He spends his life transgressing boundaries and breaking taboos purely for the pleasure of learning.

At this point you know that he set in motion Iran’s blogging revolution, that is an activist, journalist and a son and a brother. He is also a good friend, and interested listener, has a soft-spot for dark, thick hot chocolate, is fascinated by French New Wave cinema, and loves Iran with all of his heart.  The last day that I saw Hossein was a gorgeous sunny day in London.   As we shared a lunch in Russel Square, he waxed poetic about Tehran being a beautiful city and how happy he was to be going home.  Hossein knew better than anyone that he had made a lot of enemies over the years.  He knew that going home to Tehran meant risking his freedom, but Hossein is as dedicated to his country as he is to his cause.  I hope he knows how much I admire the choices he’s made, and how much I miss him.

Barrie McClune got an Masters in critical Media and Cultural Studies from SOAS in 2008. She now works for California Newsreel, a non-profit educational film distributor in San Francisco.

PREVIOUS STORIES:

http://www.projectcarousel.org/2009/11/mind-medium-message/
http://www.projectcarousel.org/2009/11/hossein-and-his-readership/

In an ongoing effort to reinvent itself, Project: Carousel is launching a new monthly feature to acquaint its readers with interesting and important people/organizations working in the field of global media and cultural studies. These people/organizations have, through their work, made some kind of a difference to the lives of people around the world – a difference that has made a difference.

A great idea.
A new technological tool or invention.
A new way to perceive the world.
Something that, we believe, simply needs to be heard and seen.

The series called Mind.Medium.Message will consist of three-part exposes:

Part 1 will offer biographies and background information and explain why these people/organizations are interesting and important.

Part 2 will look at the more general influence and contribution these people/organizations have made to the field they work in – academically, theoretically, artistically, technologically, politically.

Part 3 will provide them with a voice, featuring interviews, guest writers and artists, and offering a platform for their work.

(However, please note: this will not be an exercise in idolatry. The perspectives we provide to our chosen ones will be as multifaceted and critical as the people/organizations we profile. We will provide a platform; not an altar.)

While the list of people/organizations we have lined up is as eclectic and diverse as the contributors to Project: Carousel we believe there is no better way to begin than with somebody who – technically – is still one of us. Iranian blogger Hossein ‘Hoder’ Derakshan pursued an MA in Global Media and Postnational Communication at SOAS and, as he has yet to submit his dissertation, technically remains a SOAS student.

Hossein, however, has been detained in Iran without charges and under uncertain conditions since late last year. Therefore, coinciding with the one-year anniversary of his imprisonment, we are launching our Mind.Medium.Message series with a profile of Hossein and the difference he has made. We want to use this launch as a platform to highlight issues around his confinement (as well as that of other prisoners) in Iran and to get SOAS students to pressure the SOAS administration to issue a formal statement on his behalf. (EDITORS NOTE: because of changes in circumstances regarding Hossein’s current status, we have withdrawn this part of our project.)

We encourage you to all get involved.  We will shortly tell you how.

**

Hossein ‘Hoder’ Derakhshan is a journalist, Internet activist, and blogger, nicknamed the Blogfather for spawning Iran’s spectacular blogging revolution. Since the mid-1990s, he has been advocating the use of the Internet as a means for social and political reform in Iran.

Born in Tehran in 1975, Hossein is the oldest of three siblings in a religious family. Hossein spent most of his primary and secondary school years at Nikan Institute, a private religious school whose strict dress code and lack of humanities surely irritated him: ‘I never do things I have to do. I’ve always resisted what’s forced on me. I’m a rebel.’ Hossein transferred from Nikan to a public school before his final year in 1992, trading religion classes for the pop culture of Tehran.

In 1995, his brother’s friend introduced him to the wonders of a computer connected to a modem. This may not have been the Internet (yet), but it was a fascinating new world with forums and chat rooms that supported Persian.

Hossein started out as a journalist writing about Internet and digital culture for a popular reformist newspaper, Asr-e Azadegan, in 1999. When his paper was closed down by conservative judicial authorities in 2000, Hossein moved to Canada and started working for the BBC Persian service in Toronto.

In September 2001, Hossein set up one of the first blogs in Persian, having, according to Wired, ‘figured out a way to combine Unicode and Blogger.com’s free tools to handle Persian characters’.

In response to a request from a reader, Hossein created a simple how-to-blog guide in Persian. As Nasrin Alavi writes in We Are Iran, ‘with the modest aim of giving other Iranians a voice, he set free an entire community’. In 2003, the Guardian wrote that Hossein’s ‘step-by-step guide to creating a Persian weblog should take much of the credit for inspiring thousands of Iranians to start their own blogs.’

And so the Blogfather was born.

For several years his blog, Editor: Myself, written both in Persian and English, was the most popular blog in Iran but in 2004 it was blocked as Hossein broke one of the iron rules of the Iranian press and criticized spiritual leader Khamenei.

By that time Hossein had immersed himself in the politics of Iran and the Internet: he had founded Stop censoring us, a blog to watch the situation of Internet censorship in Iran; he spoke repeatedly about Internet censorship, methods to get around filters, and the use of wikis to aid political reform and the growth of democracy.

It was breaking taboos like these that got Hossein in trouble with the Iranian police who detained and interrogated him when he visited Iran for the first time since emigrating in 2005. He was allowed to leave Iran only after being forced to sign an apology.

Hossein remained a passionate critic of (not only) Iranian politics and publicly broke yet another big taboo when he visited Israel, a country off limits to Iranians, in 2006 : ‘As a citizen journalist, I’m going to show my 20,000 daily Iranian readers what Israel really looks like and how people live there.’

In the fall of 2008 Hossein returned to Iran before completing his MA Global Media and Postnational Communication at SOAS in London and was arrested at his family’s home on 1 November 2008. It was not until late December 2008 that Iran confirmed that Hossein was in detention.

Today, one year after his arrest, official charges have yet to be laid, a trial date has yet to be set, and the conditions under which Hossein is being held remain uncertain.

Part 2 of this expose will look at the Blogfather’s controversial and turbulent career which has split the blogging community he has helped spawn right down the middle.

Part 3 of this expose will look at some of the controversies and conspiracy theories surrounding Hossein’s disappearance, highlight the Free Hoder campaign, and offer a platform to Hossein’s family, which has only very recently broken its public silence.

Stay tuned for more.