36 THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER23, 2019
fragile countries to new challenges in
safety and security. In the Middle East,
jihadi groups have attached explosives
to commercial drones, and deployed
them in swarms against their foes. “You
are opening your window to get fresh
air,” a Tanzanian aviation official said.
“But sometimes insects might come.”
Ledgard has stressed the importance of
government protection for droneports,
at a level somewhere between that of a
post office and an airport. As for acci
dents, “fear of drones falling out of the
sky should be set against the carnage
on African roads,” he said. The conti
nent has three per cent of the world’s
motor vehicles but accounts for eigh
teen per cent of the world’s road deaths.
Several years ago, Ledgard tried to
organize an event called the Flying Don
key Challenge, in which drone manu
facturers would compete to transport
goods around the perimeter of Mt. Kenya,
the secondtallest peak in Africa. The
event was backed by the École Polytech
nique and the Swiss government, and
planned to include, Ledgard said, partici
pants from Amazon, Alibaba, and DHL.
But the threat of the Shabaab in Ken
yan territory was growing, and Kenya’s
intelligence agency shut down the event.
Soon afterward, the government issued
a multiyear ban on commercial drones.
O
ne afternoon last October, Ledgard
stood at the edge of a disused rail
road track in Mwanza, Tanzania’s sec
ondlargest city, on the banks of Lake
Victoria. To his left was Bismarck Rock,
a striking geological formation named
for Germany’s first Chancellor. (From
1885 until the end of the First World
War, Tanzania was part of German East
Africa.) To Ledgard’s right was a rust
ing ferry, which had been built in Scot
land, then chopped up, exported to
Kenya, and reassembled at the edge of
the lake in 1961, when Tanzania was part
of the British Empire. Nearby, women
grilled fish and vegetables over open fires
and shooed away marabou storks—hid
eous, illtempered carnivores with rot
ten bills and stringy, matted feathers.
Ledgard has the wiry, athletic build
of a man who hates to be inside; out
side, he bounds forward with eager steps,
legs slightly bowed, shoulders hunched.
He is mostly bald, with a rim of white
stubble, and prone to sunburn. He in
haled deeply, and said, “This was always
the dream: to connect Lake Victoria.”
The largest freshwater body in Africa,
Lake Victoria has more than four thou
sand miles of jagged shoreline, belong
ing to Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania.
Some thirty million people live in set
tlements on the periphery, in structures
ranging from glass skyscrapers, in Kam
pala, to mud huts, on islands where there
is no electricity. The lake is twice the
size of Belgium, but it is overfished and
filled with deadly parasites.
That night, on the lawn of a lakeside
resort, Ledgard met with Edward An
derson, a senior technology and devel
opment specialist at the World Bank. In
2014, Anderson recalled, he had noticed
“an explosion in the variety and capabil
ity of small drones,” at a time when most
countries in Africa had no regulations.
“It was a bit of a Wild West scenario.”
“Moving blood, moving medicine—
it’s a good start,” Ledgard said. “But the
scaling is really going to kick into gear
when it becomes cheap enough to move
around everyday things.” Battery tech
nology hasn’t advanced as quickly as
Ledgard had thought it would, when
he wrote his manifesto; five years later,
cargo drones lack the powertoweight
ratio required to lift heavy loads.
Anderson said that he’d just met a
livestock geneticist who wanted to use
drones to transport “élite semen” to cat
tle farms in remote areas in Kenya. “Yes,
he’s all about artificial intelligence for
artificial insemination,” Ledgard replied.
“In the way that the Internet was lifted
by porn, cargo drones will be lifted by
khat,” the stimulant leaf that’s ubiquitous
in parts of Africa and the Middle East.
Anderson raised a glass of beer and
slumped in his chair. He had first sought
out Ledgard in 2016, “to get his insight,
advice, and, ideally, blessing on how to
revive the Flying Donkey Challenge,”
he said. Now, after years of coördinat
ing with Tanzanian officials, Anderson
and his colleagues had organized the
Lake Victoria Challenge, the world’s
first droneinfrastructure conference.
Part lecture series, part sales pitch, it
would bring together entrepreneurs and
experts in development, regulation, gov
ernance, security, infrastructure, and
technology from across Africa, as well
as from Silicon Valley. Ledgard, its guid
ing spirit, would deliver the keynote ad
dress. Foreign drone companies would
BEFORE WINTER
I imagine there is a place of deep rest—not in the resting but after,
when the body has forgotten the weight of fatigue or of its many
betrayals—how unfair that once I thought it clever to blame my body
for the wounds in me: the ankle bulbous and aching, the heaviness
in the thigh, and the fat, the encroachment of flesh. It is hard to believe
that there are those who do not know that it is possible to let things
go, to then see the expansion of flesh—it is so easy, and that knowing
is a pathology. What is unknown to me is the clear day of rest—
I carry a brain of crushed paper, everything unfolds as if by magic,
every spot of understanding is a miracle, I cannot take any credit
for the revelations, they come and go as easily as the wind.
You must know that this is a preamble to an epiphany I will record—
the latemorning light of October, the damp soiled back yard,
the verdant green lawn, the bright elegance of leaves strewn
over it all, turning nonchalantly in the wind, and the Nebraska sky
blue as a kind of watery ease, a comfort, it is all I can say, the kind
