38 THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER23, 2019
could put motorcycle deliverymen out
of business. He added that only Led-
gard and Foster’s droneport concept was
exempt from this critique, because it was
conceived as an organic network, for lo-
cals to use as they saw fit. “The last thing
you want to do is disrupt the local mo-
torcycle-delivery guy, picking up from
the fixed droneport location and deliv-
ering on the last mile,” Led-
gard said. “But the middle
mile—when you want to
get over a mountain or a
lake—that’s where it can
get very exciting.”
Maréchal Gasana, the
Rwandan regulatory offi-
cial, also had cost in mind.
“In Italy, they have roads
that are two thousand years
old, built by the Romans,
but we are trying to meet the needs of
a population that has never had anything,”
he said. “So if I am given the option of
building one kilometre of road that will
last two thousand years, or taking the
Chinese contract that will build a thou-
sand kilometres of road that will last five
years, plus two hospitals, that’s the offer
we are going to take.”
A hawk stole another tourist’s break-
fast. Gasana was reminded of a video
he had seen, in which a carbon-fibre
V.T.O.L. drone falls out of the sky. “It
broke my heart,” he said. “I was think-
ing of it in terms of houses. In my vil-
lage—seventy-five thousand dollars?
That’s two houses.”
T
he next morning, the World Bank
rented both of the speedboats in
Mwanza to take a couple of dozen Lake
Victoria Challenge participants, who had
signed up for the conference’s “Infra-
structure Track,” to Juma Island. Guided
by Ledgard, the group set out to iden-
tify a good location for a droneport, and
to evaluate how it might contribute
to the economy, which relies mostly on
fishing. I sat in the back, in a growing
puddle, with the Swiss construction ex-
pert and Steve Kemp, the livestock ge-
neticist. “Artificial insemination is ludi-
crously complex, cumbersome work!”
Kemp shouted, above the roar of the en-
gines. “If you want to do an insemina-
tion well, you’ve only got a few hours!”
The boats pulled up to Juma’s east-
ern shore, where L.V.C. representatives
had set up fences and chairs and awnings.
Islanders stood at the periphery. One
of them held up a carp by its gills, and
smiled, as visitors snapped photos with
their phones. Ledgard, who had visited
the island a year earlier, asked partici-
pants to be “very gentle and respectful
of everyone on the island,” but it seemed
an inherent violation for such a large
delegation of mostly white
strangers to wander around.
We set off through a lush
grove of banana trees, past
goats and chickens, into a
village of mud-and-concrete
huts, where Ledgard stepped
into a tiny shop selling bat-
teries, toiletries, snacks, and
cheap plastic goods from
China. With the help of
Freddie Mbuya, a Tanza-
nian entrepreneur who helped organize
the L.V.C., Ledgard started interview-
ing the shopkeeper, who was twenty years
old. After several minutes, the man be-
came agitated. “What he is saying is being
said repeatedly in places all over Tanza-
nia, and I’m sure all over Africa,” Mbuya
explained. “You guys came last time and
you said that these drones will bring med-
icine. He hasn’t seen any medicine. Now
you’re coming in and saying these drones
are going to be bringing other things.”
He added that, because we had spent
time inside his shop, his neighbors will
ask him about the World Bank’s plans
for the island, and will assume that he’s
been paid. “I think he’s a hundred per
cent right—we should be able to tell him
why we’re here,” Mbuya continued. “What
can he go and tell the islanders?”
“We’re a group who are looking at
building a small structure near the school
and the clinic,” Ledgard said. “It will take
some years. You have to be understand-
ing that this is a new technology. It’s not
going to change anyone’s life straight-
away, but it can be a useful service.”
The shopkeeper nodded but looked
dissatisfied. “It actually makes me ex-
tremely uncomfortable as a Tanzanian,
because I think he’s asking the right
questions,” Mbuya told me later. He
used to be a full-time consultant for
the World Bank, where he often found
himself promising short-term solutions
to intractable issues. “If I were some-
one else, I would be slamming the per-
son in my role, really hard,” Mbuya said.Back at the staging area, the L.V.C.
delegation ate boxed lunches while is-
landers watched from the other side of
the fence. Then we piled into the boats
and returned to Mwanza, to compare
notes at the Malaika. No one from Juma
was present for the discussion about how
to connect the island to its own future.
On Juma, Ledgard had learned that
fishermen sell a sardine-like fish called
dagaa by the bucket, while the middle-
men who transport and sell the fish to
Mwanza sell them by the kilogram. The
fishermen of Juma don’t know the price
per kilo, and couldn’t tell him how many
kilos were in a bucket, because they didn’t
have a scale. “So, obviously, the drone-
port will need a weigh station,” Ledgard
said. “What is going out is, essentially,
fish. And what is coming in is cash, spare
parts, postal delivery.”
A young Rwandan entrepreneur ob-
jected, saying, “If you mentioned all that
in the Rwandan context, the government
would not allow you to do it. It is against
the vision of the country. We are encour-
aging zero paperwork, zero cash—it’s all
mobile money, mobile banking.” He
added, “When you are looking at earliest-
use cases, you quickly want to run them
through the strategic direction that the
country has.”
“You’re too Rwandan,” Ledgard re-
plied. “Tanzania does not have a strate-
gic direction.” For Ledgard, the fact that
the L.V.C. trial had taken place was it-
self a miracle. For all its tonal and logis-
tical challenges, he saw it as a potentially
transformational event, whose effects
might spread throughout the region as
participants from neighboring countries
returned home. But, months later, the
Tanzanian government still hasn’t set
aside any land for the construction of a
droneport, and has blocked the full L.V.C.
event from taking place until at least- “The conversation with Mwanza
is off, indefinitely,” Anderson, of the
World Bank, told me. “We’re relocating
the next phase to Lake Kivu, in Rwanda.”
At the Malaika, the Infrastructure
Track group pondered heady questions.
“What is the role of architecture?” an
American architecture professor asked.
“What is the iconographic identity that
we can achieve through some kind of
performative structure? What are the
values that we can chase?”
“Design is the problem,” another said.