I have been working the last few days on the Fall 2001 Status of East Africa (which is new—I’ve already done West Africa, but in the Fall I’ll be adding at least North and East). In the course of that, I began looking at the effect of population densities, the tensions between rural and urban, and within rural areas the tensions between settled farmers and nomadic pastoralists.
These kinds of contexts are important because they highlight differences between subsets of a general population, and it is within a context that a decision tends to be made.
- The context that we are in – the daily life decisions we make – frame the defaults for our decisions. In the book Nudge, the authors highlight how changing the defaults can change decisions for many people. I’ve talked a bit before about the power of defaults: in particular, how changing the default is what the Southern Baptists are trying to do, and why it’s a difficult task. In East Africa, the defaults of a nomadic pastoralist in drought-stricken East Africa are different than those of, say, an urban Egyptian.
- The context of our life also shapes the social network that we are in, and Rodney Stark has written in a number of his books (notably, The Church of America and in ch. 3 of The Rise of Christianity) about how social networks are very important to people adopting Christianity. He shows how joining the Christian social network tends to come first, and then we come to believe the doctrines.
However, many people who are consuming what’s generally available about East Africa don’t really care about the context. They want the bottom-line analysis. Will this government fall—or not? Is there likely to be a famine—or not? In fact, the vast majority of people who read about East Africa simply want to see how much worse off they are then we are, so we feel a bit better about ourselves. Bad news sells because it in fact makes us feel better.
Because there tends to be less demand for detailed information about contexts, they tend to be harder to find. So I was spending a lot of time hunting for the arable land sizes of the East African nations. I probably could have looked it up in a book but I was determined that it should be easy to find online—and wherever I found the arable land sizes, I’d probably find a potload of other data.
I went to Wikipedia first, but humorously they didn’t have it all—at least not on the pages I looked at. They did have one list which had the larger countries of East Africa, and I could have gone country by country and found it. But instead I turned to another search engine that is less known, but still quite valuable when it comes to data—“Wolfram Alpha.” Simply going there, typing in “list of land areas in East Africa” gave me what I needed to know. (On the Land Area Rankings, if you click “More” it goes into more and more detail, presenting more and more countries.)
I’m pretty sure Wolfram Alpha will also have other things. (For example I just tried “income per person in East Africa”). I didn’t get income per person in the end, but I did get “national income” rankings. I need to check and see just what the definition of “national income” is, but if it’s anything like total aggregate income per person, all one would need to do is divide by the population to get the per capita figure.
So there it is. Context is important. (East Africa will be in 2025 the most densely populated region of Africa, the most populous region in Africa, and the 2nd most populous in the world—while still one of the poorest. This is context.) This context is valuable for at least two reasons:
- People don’t listen to an evangelist when they’re hungry (well, at least I don’t). They need to spend time each day finding food.
- There aren’t mass movements to Christ where choosing Christ means that their family loses access to the social networks through which they get food and employment.
- The best evangelist to a pastoralist may not be someone from the farming community with which they have fought for years.
- Some of the persecution going on in this area between Muslims and Christians may have nothing to do with religion and everything to do with who gets access to the land.
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