#1 - Stay calm. Don't get in over your head. Don't get illusions of grandeur.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve been busy running a survey in one of the many unplanned settlements of Dar es Salaam. It’s my first time doing this, so inevitably there are going to be hiccups. Some tips:

#6 – DON’T use props that might be eaten by hungry respondents. Part of the survey involves respondents tracing out probability distributions using beans or counters (i.e. place more counters here if you think this is more likely to happen). In the slums, we found that groundnuts worked as a cheap and readily available prop for this module. Yet only a day after the launch of the survey my enumerators came asking for more nuts, as the respondents usually favoured eating them over returning them to enumerator. Perhaps asking the poor to use food for anything else than eating is in the same moral territory as Chris Blattman’s soft drink torture.

#23- DON’T try and run a survey from a school. For several days I’ve met my enumerators inside the walled grounds of a local primary school. Yesterday, when I got in my car to drive off, a swarm of children crowded around. They followed me to the gate of the school, closed and defended by an irate guard with a large switch. As he tried to open the gate for me, I realised that the children were using my (white) 4×4 for cover to get past the gate and…. escape school! Several got away – so currently my biggest impact on the community has been to lower the primary enrollment rate.

#41 – DON’T try and design identity cards for the enumerators yourself, or, if you do, make sure you do a good job of it. My enumerators were not impressed with the 5×2 inch ‘super’ ids I created in Microsoft Word, especially the black & white printing. What made things much much worse was a large number of mixed up names with a few misspelling. The biggest gaff: accidentally changing a ‘Godbless’ into a ‘Godless.’

I’m certain there are more to come.

A friend of mine has lent me an old copy of the London Review of Books (December 2008 – such are the luxuries of an island paradise). Part of a letter it published caught my attention:

This is what I remember [Chistopher Isherwood] saying about Klaus Mann:

‘Klaus was in despair, always, but in the 1940s, during the days of the Stockholm Peace Pledge, he and many other famous European intellectuals and artists set up a plan for all of them – in protest against the development of atomic bombs – to create and sign a document of protest in which they would declare their agreement to kill themselves on a certain specific date. This mass suicide of artists and intellectuals would draw attention in all the news media all around the world and the impact would bring peace for ever’

It turned out that Klaus Mann was the only one of those who had pledged to kill themselves on the set date who did kill himself on that date. His death received little attention anywhere.

Economists will recognise the pledge made by Mann and his fellow (apparently exceedingly optimistic) intellectuals and artists as a version of the Prisoner’s Dilemma. It appears as if each of the people involved welshed on the promise to kill themselves in the hope that enough of the others would still do so to bring about their desired outcome, namely unilateral disarmament of nuclear capabilities.

What interests me is why Klaus Mann didn’t do the same. I think it has something to do with the power of an idea to motivate action, even when it appears to fly in the face of rationality. Resistance movements very often are characterised by this: think of the Maji Maji rebellion, for example, or John Chilembwe’s rising in Malawi. These were resistance actions that were objectively almost certain to fail (as they did). Still, many gave their lives in support of them. This isn’t something economics deals with very well, which is why, for all the proliferation of economists dealing with conflict, we should never let go of the importance of historical and sociological analysis of motivation.

1) All economists analyse humans according to their essential characteristics, be it their classification in the labour / capital divide as Marx did, or their rational thought process as a member of the species homo economicus. Race isn’t one of them, and we knew this even when others around us were mourning the end of the slave trade (tip of the hat to Aid Watch).

2) On Sunday, I’ll be in Dar es Salaam to see Youssou N’Dour perform. I’m very excited. As a taster, here he is performing two of my favourite songs, New Africa and Africa Remembers. Both are from my favourite of his albums, Eyes Open. And no, I have no idea how to embed things on this blog.

As an aside, in Zanzibar we call Dar es Salaam ‘Bongo’, derived from the Kiswahili word for ‘brain’. Because if you don’t use your nut out there, that city’ll eat you alive.

3) One thing I’ve been asking people about in the last couple of days is Popobawa. Popobawa is a folk-monster with wings of a bat which attacks people at times of collective anxiety. Attacks range from simply scaring people to anal rape of both men and women. Popobawa hunts have led to murder before, commonly of those with mental illness. This is a great article about the phenomenon, by an anthropologist who lived on Pemba when the biggest Popo-scare took place.

What’s most interesting for me is the divide in the myths of origin of Popobawa among Pembans and many people in Unguja (Zanzibar’s main island, the place most people mean when they say ‘Zanzibar’). It reflects the different primary concerns in their livelihoods as well as their dominant political affiliations.