THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER23, 2019 37
run their wares through a gantlet of tri-
als, carrying objects between the main-
land and nearby islands, in competition
for contracts. “Now that it’s entering
the real world, I think there are better
people than me to push it to the next
level,” Ledgard told me. The full event
was planned for the following year; a
rehearsal would begin at dawn.
I
ate breakfast on a patio at the Hotel
Tilapia, a few feet from the lake. Sud-
denly, there was a rush of air, and a hawk
swooped down and snatched a crêpe off
my plate. A few minutes later, another
raptor relieved my fork of some bacon,
halfway to my mouth, and flung scram-
bled eggs onto my pants. The assault
brought sympathetic laughter from a
group of Rwandan Civil Aviation Au-
thority officials sitting nearby. Maréchal
Gasana, an elegantly dressed regulations
officer, gestured toward an empty chair.
After Ledgard’s meeting with Kagame,
Gasana and his colleagues had drafted
the first commercial-drone regulations
on the continent, a model for other coun-
tries looking to “leapfrog into the fu-
ture,” as he put it.
“It was very complicated, because we
have so many mountains,” Gasana told
me. “We have to make sure that drones
are flying not just at the right altitude
but in relation to the shape of the ground.”
Today, two drone companies are opera-
tional in Rwanda—Zipline, for medical
deliveries, and Charis, a domestic com-
pany, for surveying land and tracking
crop yields. “The biggest challenge that
we are facing is scalability,” Gasana con-
tinued. “We’ve seen all the benefits, but
the question is, how can we manage thirty
or fifty times as many operations?”
On the lawn of the Malaika, Mwan-
za’s grandest hotel, European and Amer-
ican drone manufacturers showed off
their concept vehicles. In Rwanda,
Zipline drones deliver blood packs, med-
icine, and vaccines as a one-way service;
launched from a motorized slingshot,
they travel to remote health facilities,
drop a cardboard box tethered to a tiny
parachute, and return to the launch area,
where they are brought down with a
wire trap. Their inability to land means
that doctors at remote health centers
cannot send back lab samples or biop-
sies. At the Malaika, the prototypes were
largely V.T.O.L. drones—vertical takeoff
and landing. Perhaps the most arresting
one was the Wingcopter 178, a German
contraption with a six-foot wingspan
and a tilt-rotor mechanism that can tran-
sition between vertical takeoff and fixed-
wing flight. Ansgar Kadura, a founder
and the chief operating officer of Wing-
copter, told me, “We’ve already been here
in Mwanza for six months,” conducting
test flights to an island called Ukerewe.
By ferry and motorcycle, delivery from
Mwanza to Ukerewe, around the pe-
rimeter of the lake, takes between four
and six hours. The Wingcopter costs
seventy-five thousand dollars, but it can
transport a payload of up to thirteen
pounds across the water in about forty
minutes, soaring along a preprogrammed
flight path, before rotating the propel-
lers and lowering itself to the ground.
Kadura and members of the other
drone teams had travelled to Mwanza
in part to compete in a race from the
Malaika to Juma, a small island without
electricity about ten miles west. But the
race was cancelled, because the hard-
ware for the traffic-management system
had been lost in transit from Amster-
dam, and without it the Tanzanian au-
thorities wouldn’t allow drones to fly
beyond the line of sight. The drone op-
erators stood next to some of the most
advanced nonmilitary aircraft on earth,
while, at Mwanza’s international airport,
which had no radar system, air-traffic
controllers peered out of a second-floor
window to track incoming planes.
By now, it had become apparent that
the legacy of colonialism affected every
step of this process. Representatives of
Western companies, N.G.O.s, and U.N.
agencies—wary of criticizing African
leaders in an environment imbued with
historical exploitation and contemporary
guilt—spoke of the absence of roads and
other systems in East Africa as if the sit-
uation were in no way the responsibility
of the officials in the room. Broken roads,
no roads, sinking ferries, urban flooding,
cholera; drones could photograph the
problem, map it, deliver small items—
as long as the governments didn’t object.
A Swiss construction expert noted,
with an exasperated shrug, “The supply
chain for these drones is controlled by
fancy Western companies, toting around
carbon-fibre frames. And the international
community will make them rich,” pour-
ing aid and development funds into flying
machines that, for all their advantages,
one knows, even standing there waiting for the dog to squat;
one that I will remember for years but will never have the language
to speak of—one of those precious insignificances that we collect
and hoard. The moment lasts ten breaths, and in that silence
I imagine that I can see spirits, I can know myself, and I will not fear
the betrayals of body and love and earth, and the machinations
of self-made emperors and pontificates. It will be winter soon. I know
my body
is collecting water in its nether regions, the weight of the hibernating
mammal, storing everything in drowsy, slow-moving preservation.
I mean I am losing myself to the shelter we build to beat back
sorrow and the weight of our fears. I have covered thousands of miles
in a few days, and I feel my parts flaking off, a shedding of yellow
pieces covering the turning earth, and I am helpless to this soft
disappearing that some call sleep. I will stretch out and breathe.
—Kwame Dawes
