I don’t want to give the impression we lived like hippies. In fact, just pondering the plan, I could see my comfortable life fading like a Saharan mirage. I already saw Whit abandoning for months at a stretch his wife, Shelly Sundberg (a program officer at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation) and their two teenagers, Cameron and Rachel, back home in Seattle’s Queen Anne neighborhood; paying two years’ rent on an incredibly noisy seven-room office and living space in a provincial town with running water two days a week; investing hundreds of thousands of dollars of his own money; convincing Jan Watson, his former head of operations at Cranium, to quit her job at Microsoft and join him in Ghana; and hiring a full-time local employee with all the state-required benefits. I had a nice home in Maine, two amazing boys, and the world’s greatest wife, plus a sailboat. What was I thinking?
There wasn’t much research we could fall back on. My brother and I started a reading list, everything from the catalog for a 2007 exhibit on third-world product design at the Cooper-Hewitt Museum, to histories of Africa, its leaders, colonizers, and explorers. Yet the literature on grass-roots social entrepreneurship was thin, once you got below all the breathless hype. There was no Idiot’s Guide. Consider the reaction to Gates’s Davos speech. Perhaps not since the Gettysburg Address has a short talk been so intensely analyzed and parsed. (At 2,765 words, Gates’s speech was ten times as long as Lincoln’s, but still brief by the gaseous standards of most executive presentations.) Yet at latest count, googling bill gates creative capitalism yielded about 141,000 entries. This is not surprising as Gates pretty much invited the world to come up with solutions to the problem of making capitalism work in the developing world. Furthermore it wasn’t completely clear what he meant by creative capitalism, since plain-vanilla capitalism would seem to be creative by definition. So the floodgates opened.
A notable example was the book Creative Capitalism, a collection of online essays assembled by Slate editor Michael Kinsley in response to the Gates speech. There were some nuggets of wisdom, notably from economist William Easterly, who has spent a lot of time working for the World Bank in poor countries. “You have to work very hard to figure out what the poor want and need,” he wrote in the book, “and you have to work very hard to meet those needs under local conditions [my italics].”
Good point. But none of these writers offered any clue as to what it’s really like to do so. How could they? Of the forty-two contributors to the book, only one—Loretta Michaels of HMS Wireless, which develops Internet technology for poor countries—was an actual businessperson doing deals on the ground in grubby foreign places. All the other contributors (besides Gates and Warren Buffett, both interviewed briefly) were professors, journalists, consultants, and “fellows.” I have nothing against these professionals. I am one myself. But anyone starting a business in the developing world doesn’t need navel-gazing economists and op-ed theorists. He needs a survival kit.
What kind of business models work in really poor and possibly dangerous places, and who invests in them? Can you find competent employees? Don’t these countries have absurdly bureaucratic regulations that hamper start-up business ventures? Are you even allowed to repatriate profits? Is there FedEx? What happens when the dictator dies? Aren’t there crocodiles and snakes? On these and scores of other pressing real-world questions, the experts were silent, and the only sound coming from the developing world was the hum of the tsetse fly.
1. Beyond the Horizon
It was mid-morning and the gong-gong man was drunk. We sat, visitors in cheap folding camp chairs from the back of our Tata pickup truck and villagers in molded plastic patio chairs, under the canopy of a mango tree thick with weaver nests that hung like Christmas ornaments. The village of Ampedwae, near the regional capital of Koforidua, is like countless others in Ghana—countless because many are not on the government maps or even on an actual road and may go by several different names, depending on whom you ask and whether they speak Twi, Ewe, Ga, Hausa, or one of the more than seventy other languages and dialects of the country, not counting the official English.*
Villages in Ghana often have names that are devotional or inspirational in meaning. Ampedwae means “you should not boast” in Akwapim (the dialect of Twi spoken here)—advice the village seems to have taken to heart. Other than a stuccoed blue-and-beige schoolhouse, the built environment of Ampedwae is barely removed from the natural world: just a few dozen rectangular wattle-and-daub huts with bamboo or raffia roofs, their mud walls slowly melting from the rain back into the landscape, as if smeared together in wet oils by an artist. There would be no rain today; January is the dry season, which is one of the only ways to distinguish seasons in a country where every day of the year is hot and begins and ends around six o’clock. In January all of West Africa is dry, and the wind known as the Harmattan picks up the Sahara Desert—all 3.5 million square miles of it, as far as I could tell—and blows it south to the Gulf of Guinea—a thick, choking haze that stings your eyes and clogs your nose with the same brick-red dust that coats the broad leaves of the banana palms. Ampedwae—no electricity, no well—is bisected by a road of the same red dirt, and whenever a beaten Nissan bush taxi bounces by at high speed (which is the only speed driven in Ghana), it churns up a wall of dust that breaks like a tsunami over the squat village, scattering chickens and goats.
“Okay!” The gong-gong man rose shakily from his seat under the mango tree, stood at attention, and saluted us crisply with his right hand. In his left hand he held the village gong-gong, which is a hand-forged cowbell, and a foot-long stick. He wore brown polyester pants, sandals, and a filthy tan bowling shirt missing several buttons. In the back pocket of his slacks was jammed a liter-sized bottle of local gin, which must have made sitting as difficult as its contents had evidently made standing. He spoke rapidly in a slur as hard to grasp as mercury, while scribbling the air with his stick. I trained my digital camera on him and shifted the switch to video, which is why I know exactly what he said: “I know ya I say now listen up, so yo-yo come, ya make goo-gong. Okay.” (Two raps of the gong-gong with the stick.) “Good-morning-good-morning-good-morning! How are you? Thank you! You are always will be here. You come and speak to us in under the good to Arno. Jesus la-la, Ampedwae, that’s right. I going out now call every Jedi better come now and cure the sow.”
At least that’s what I got. It could have been a figure of speech. “Thank you,” he concluded with a low bow. “God bless!” And he staggered down the road banging the gong-gong and announcing in Twi, “Aggo! Aggo!” Listen up!
Soon more villagers, alerted by the dull clang of the gong-gong, joined those already assembled under the tree. It was Thursday, which is rest day in Ampedwae—meaning the men were not tending their small cassava and cocoa plots and thus available for a town meeting. In theory the children would be at school, but although public school is free, many Ghanaian families cannot afford the required uniforms and books; children are also needed for labor—caring for smaller children, hauling water and wood, and tending animals. So throngs of barefoot kids in underwear waved from across the road, squealing “Obruni! Obruni!” which is Twi for “beyond the horizon” but in Ghana universally means “white man.” (The Ewe slang for white man, yevu, seems to have originally meant “trickster dog,” although this is debated.)
The children knew better than to cross the road. Important town meetings are for adults, and children in Ghana keep a prudent distance from their elders—not just out of respect. In Ghana if you beat someone else’s child, his parents will thank you; the child must have deserved it. Other than Harper, my seventeen-year-old son, the only minor under the mango tree was an infant sucking at his mother’s breast. She was one of just three women in the group of more than thirty. “Where are all the women?” I whispered to Jan Watson, who was sitting next to me in one of our camp chairs.
“Busy,” she said. “Somebody has to pound the fufu,” she added, referring to one of the national staples—boiled cassava and plantain pulv
erized in giant wooden mortars and formed into dumplinglike balls that are eaten by hand, dipped in peanut or palm nut soup. But soon enough the women straggled up, abandoning their long fufu pestles, and the meeting began. Ghanaians respect traditional gender boundaries—women cook and carry towering loads on their heads, men farm and carry machetes, sometimes on their heads—but some ethnic groups, like the Ashanti, are matrilineal: status is determined by your mother’s family, a practical arrangement considering it is generally easier to be certain of your mother than your father. And in much of this predominantly Christian country, even Islamic women hold jobs, vote, frequent beauty salons (in roadside shacks on virtually every block), and allow the men to pretend they are in charge.*
Around strangers Ghanaians are formal, even courtly, so the first order of business was to shake hands with several of the important elders—ending with the village chief, a modest but mildly officious middle-aged man who seemed like the type who would refer to Robert’s Rules of Order at an Elks Club meeting. His attire, an orange sport shirt and impeccably pressed sage green slacks, would not have looked out of place at the Seal Harbor Yacht Club. Every handshake ended with the elaborate Ghanaian mutual finger snap, along with the standard greeting “You are welcome!”—used in Ghana as we would say “Welcome to my home” and not as a rejoinder to “Thank you.” The local dignitaries moved down the receiving line, ending with my brother Whit.
Whit was born a few weeks before Barack Obama, who at age forty-seven had been sworn in as President the previous week. He is four years younger than I yet even grayer, his hair having progressed at a relatively young age to Steve Martin silver. He was wearing trendy gunmetal eyeglasses, a batik print shirt, high-tech travel pants, and khaki Crocs—the standard uniform of the hip West Coast entrepreneur. “Ties are for losers,” Whit once told me.
Not that anyone in Ampedwae would have known that. In Ghana, a necktie means you are an important person, a college man, possibly even a Big Man, with a good job that doesn’t require a machete. You might even work in an office that’s air-conditioned and be able to sleep at your desk. Appearances matter: this is why Ghanaian men with office jobs tolerate ties and double-breasted woolen suits in blast-furnace climatic conditions. So Whit was bucking local custom, but he bowed formally as each village elder shook his hand. Then everyone sat down and waited for him to talk.
“Good morning,” Whit began. “Mente Twi.” His admission that he did not speak Twi seemed to amuse the villagers, both for its contradiction (didn’t he just say that in Twi?) and its self-evidence (white people rarely speak Twi). “We are starting a new company and we want to tell you about it,” he continued. “It’s a new way to use batteries that we think you will like. But first I’d like to tell you a little about myself. My name is Whit Alexander, and I am American.”
After each sentence a man I’ll call Kevin, Whit’s first Ghanaian employee—short, stocky, goateed, and a former stage and TV actor in the capital of Accra—would translate into Twi, which required approximately five times as many words as the English version. (“Sometimes people would not understand the meaning so I have to embellish,” Kevin told us later.) Most of the villagers spoke at least some English, so their reactions to Whit’s original words and Kevin’s translation reverberated like an echo chamber.
Whit continued: “I lived for many years all over West Africa. I did one year of university in Abidjan, Ivory Coast. After college I lived for a year in Niamey, Niger, working on a grain-marketing project. Then I spent two and a half years in Bamako, Mali, on a farming project. I have also traveled through Senegal, Gambia, Mauritania, and Burkina Faso. Now that my children are almost grown, I decided it was time to come back to Africa and start the business that I have always wanted to do.”
“Farming projects” aside, as far as I was concerned Whit had been an Africa-based CIA agent. He’s never admitted it, but then they don’t tell their brothers, do they? After graduating from Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service, Whit and Shelly (then his fiancée) did live in West Africa for several years. During that period I couldn’t help but notice that for an African agricultural expert Whit knew almost nothing about farming. Yams, coconuts, carrots—all were the same to him. He called soil “dirt,” none of which could be seen under his fingernails. And he seemed to spend a lot of time off the farm, in places like Washington, D.C., and the United Nations. Who was minding the melons? Letters to him had to be addressed via the State Department diplomatic pouch. Sometimes, on his U.N. visits, he would stay in my apartment in Brooklyn. Once after he went to bed I riffled through his wallet and found all sorts of official embassy clearances and passes. Confronted, Whit said he would now have to kill me. Then he pointed out that all the credentials were in his own name and granted him access to low-level areas like the American recreation center and the shopping co-op. I wasn’t convinced. They practice saying that kind of stuff to throw you off track. In Bamako his private compound and swimming pool were guarded by a psychopathic monkey named Boo Boo who had fangs and was not afraid to use them. (He bit Shelly.) It was all right out of Dr. No.
At any rate, by 1990 Whit was back in the States and living in Seattle, Shelly’s hometown. He dropped out of grad school in 1992 to take a job at Microsoft, where he produced the maps for the first Encarta Encyclopedia and then led the design and development of the more detailed Encarta World Atlas. (CIA agents would know a lot about exotic foreign maps, wouldn’t they?) That was the stock-option heyday at Microsoft, when secretaries hired in the 1980s were retiring as multimillionaires. Whit came too late to win a game-ending jackpot, but after five years he too had “retired” at age thirty-five with enough options to sit back and plan his next move.
Within eight months he was off on a new venture, which became Cranium. After a ten-year ride to the top of the toy business, Whit, his partner, Richard, and their investors sold Cranium to Hasbro for more than seventy-five million dollars. With discretion reminiscent of his shrouded former “farming” work in Africa, Whit maintains that very little of that sum was available once investors and other debts had been paid off. All I know is, Whit then “retired” a second time.
The gong-gong man had returned. His bottle was empty.
“I respect how hard Africans work to provide for their families and build a better life,” Whit went on, ignoring the fact that at least one community member was inebriated before noon. “I know that sometimes there are better ways to get things done. I have been searching for new ways to help people in Africa do more with their lives.”
Growing up in a middle-class suburb of Grand Rapids, Michigan, Whit and I were not particularly close. He was the annoying kid brother who would tell your parents if he knew what was really happening after school. Whit was a techie nerd, before that term existed. He and some even nerdier buddies were programming a Wang microcomputer in high school, less than two years after Paul Allen had shown Bill Gates the first Altair microcomputer, which inspired them to launch Microsoft. By contrast I got through four years of college on an electric typewriter and a bottle of Wite-Out. Computers were forced on me by the workplace. “Here’s a press release,” said the editor on my first day as a salaried journalist. “Gimme a story by six.” I peered at the blank screen on my new desk. “You need to turn it on first,” he added.
Our parents divorced when I was seventeen. I got an apartment with a buddy, and Whit moved with our mother to Tucson, entering the slipstream of Sun Belt immigrants. That was the end of our life together, and for a while it seemed as though our paths would never again cross except at weddings and funerals. I was a rebellious loner, angry with my parents for their failed marriage and angry with myself for letting it happen. Anything my parents wanted me to do, such as college or even attending my high school graduation, I resolved to do the opposite. So I checked out. I drifted through jobs around the country. That might have continued forever had I not met Sarah, my future wife, an aspiring actress who was also trying to figure out who she was, albeit
with considerably more poise and planning. Together we moved to New York, where I enrolled in college at age twenty-six.
Whit did everything in the proper order. He went to college right after high school. He never worked in a restaurant. He got good jobs, saved money, and tossed around phrases like “scalable business.” He had financial planners and the right kind of insurance. Our dad, who fancied himself a keen judge of character, used to say, “Whit will get rich but Max will be famous”—not realizing in his Midwestern way that except in the case of presidential assassins, fame and fortune generally go hand in hand. Whit seemed on a path for both, and I wasn’t strongly motivated for either.
And yet despite our differences, or maybe because of them, Whit and I grew closer over the years—or as close as two brothers could be who lived three thousand miles apart and saw each other once every few years. Our wives and children became friends. We shared a sense of humor, a love of wisecracks and mutual insults. Around me, Whit could loosen his (metaphorical) tie, shed the corporate jargon, and be a kid brother again. I wish I could say something lofty like we completed each other, but mostly what we did was make a safe place for fart jokes.
None of which could have indicated that someday we would be doing business under a mango tree in a village in Ghana.
“Don’t fuck this up, asshole,” I said, trying to be helpful. “You should have learned more Twi.”
“Shut up,” Whit whispered. I blew my nose and voided several ounces of red dust. Whit continued with his spiel:
“Our company is called Burro, and our goal is to help people do more. But I have to be honest with you. I am also trying to make money.”
This brought polite laughter that, for a second, seemed in danger of breaking into a gale. It was unclear to me if the villagers were laughing with us or at us, but Ghanaians have a sharp sense of humor and are especially attuned to the absurd. When four obrunis show up in a brand-new pickup truck, they are either volunteers, Peace Corps workers, NGO reps, or governmental aid agents, all of whom are giving something away. But we were not building wells, digging latrines, or painting orphanages. In fact we were giving away nothing except a leftover stash of Obama campaign pins, and we were getting seriously low on those.
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