Camel Cheese - Seemed like a Good Idea

A unique story that reveals a lot about the industrial nations as it does Mauritania.

Essential reading for anyone embarking or embroiled in NGO work, or cooperation, or development work. Here is a story of a company that worked and is working against all odds on a, at times, unfair playing field. Inspiring and motivating; a great account of an incredible journey ... that continues.

Dear Nancy,You have written a most important book – not just because it describes the enterprise of a setting up and running a camel dairy in the Sahara over nearly twenty years, but mainly because you catalogue in fine detail with places and dates, (and, most importantly, people’s names) of situations that explain why Africa has not yet contributed anything to world progress other than raw materials, babies and the guinea fowl (the camel being originally Asiatic). Although it was clearly never your intention to do so, your accounts of endless governmental avarice and incompetence, individual and corporate corruption and the universal quest for shortcuts to wealth without working, shine an intense light on how you and people like you have been the clutch that has transmitted the drive of world progress to the dead weight of tribal Africa. (I am indebted to Grant Reed (Letaka) for this metaphor.)Before going further, I must explain that yours is not a racist attitude, neither is mine. Although you do not expressly say so, it becomes evident as your story unfolds, that the divide between Africa and the rest of the world is cultural. As Richard Dowden explains, generally, Africans are born into a tribe and are unlikely to change their political allegiance as they grow wealthier. In other words, African society tends to be vertically stratified. In other cultures, individuals change their views as they accumulate wealth – their societies are horizontally stratified and people can move through the political strata, according to their social and economic circumstances. This is behavioural, not genetic adaptation and the great strength of our species as a whole.Keep writing, Nancy, you have a narrative flair that makes even camel-herding and Mauritanian politics fascinating.For you and others interested in Africa, I recommend two books: Chinua Achebe, 1958, Things Fall Apart, Penguin, and Richard Dowden, 2008, Africa: Altered States, Ordinary Miracles, Portobello. Doubtlessly you have read them already.