32 THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER23, 2019
AREPORTERAT LARGE
IDEAS IN THE SKY
Jonathan Ledgard believes a wild imagination could save the world.BY BEN TA U B
A journalist and novelist for more than fifteenI
n a clearing in rural Somalia, a ji-
hadi commander sat in a white plas-
tic chair, stroking a dik-dik, an an-
telope the size of a cat. His men escorted
two British journalists into the clearing
and sat them under an acacia tree. The
commander, who had offered safe pas-
sage and a rare interview, released the
dik-dik, which scuttled off into the bush.
Dik-diks are hard to catch but easy
to shoot, and for this reason one of the
journalists, Jonathan Ledgard, who was
the East Africa correspondent for The
Economist, later described the battle
against these jihadis, known as the
Shabaab, as “the dik-dik war.” The com-
mander began a lecture on the suprem-
acy and fairness of Islamic law, jabbing
his finger at the sky. But Ledgard barely
noticed; he was looking at the array of
mobile phones that the commander had
laid out in front of him. It was 2009;
the digital world was becoming en-
meshed with the physical world, acces-
sible in a place where the environment
could hardly sustain human life. “You
could receive money through a wire
transfer, but you could not keep your
child alive,” Ledgard later wrote. He re-
alized that nothing the man had to say—
nothing that anyone had to say about
the conflict—was as essential to under-
standing the transformation under way
in the region as the fact that the phones
had perfect reception.
For fifteen years, Ledgard had been
reporting on war and disaster in Latin
America, the Balkans, Afghanistan, Cen-
tral Asia, and Africa, while writing novels
to settle his mind. He carried two note-
books—red for his reporting notes, blue
for thoughts and observations to use in
fiction. With each journalistic assignment
he grew more interested in the contents
of the blue notebooks, and less sure that
reporting on the world’s horrors did any-
thing to change them. “I had been look-
ing at the world as if it were cracks in
a pavement,” Ledgard told me. “But it’s
not about the individual cracks, it’s about
the patterns and the networks,” the scale
of which eluded the dispatch format.
The world was undergoing an accel-
erating convergence of technological and
environmental trends—you could feel it
in Nairobi, Kenya, where Ledgard lived.
A little more than a century earlier, the
city hadn’t existed; now it had a popu-
lation of millions, doubling in size every
generation, and was home to perhaps
the largest urban slum in Africa. “The
biggest risk for Africa is the unmet ex-
pectations of its youth,” Ledgard wrote,
years later. At least fifty per cent of the
continent was less than twenty years old.
It was the best-educated generation in
African history, digitally connected to
the rest of the planet, yet the World
Bank estimated that seventy-five per
cent of sub-Saharan youths would be
unable to find a salaried job in the com-
ing years. “They will be easily knocked
flat by mishaps or illnesses,” Ledgard
continued, and would be prone to re-
cruitment into insurgencies and terror-
ist groups. It was no coincidence, he
thought, that the jihad was most active
in the areas already being ravaged by oil
extraction and climate change.
New technologies were lifting a na-
scent class of entrepreneurs and activ-
ists, but also enabling predatory regimes
to crush them. “Africa rising” was the
phrase often heard at conferences in
Geneva and New York; “Africa waver-
ing” was Ledgard’s view. Decades of hu-
manitarian aid had not slowed the pro-
liferation of refugee camps, or the surge
of migrations across the desert and the
sea. Meanwhile, the pace of human de-
velopment was destroying the natural
world faster than scientists could cata-
logue its systems, much less understand
how they fit together. “You don’t have
to be a C.I.A. analyst to realize that it
doesn’t add up,” he said.
Ledgard saw a brief window for
radical changes in sustainability and