Everything you know about Africa is wrong.

About a decade ago, I migrated directly from a frontier Wyoming cattle ranch to the frontier of cyberspace. I began to focus on concepts rather than cows. It was a surprisingly easy transformation.

But there is a surface tension on this new world that some folks find difficult to penetrate. It appears to me that common perceptions of the potential of virtual commerce, digital society, and intangible work are limited by the habits of mind one develops in an industrial society.

I believe that my background of working in agriculture, avoiding television, and living in a small town rather than a 'burb spared me some crippling assumptions about this emerging world. And it therefore seemed likely that others in the so-called developing world - Africans, for instance - might have been spared these illusions as well.

I concluded that the developing world's cultural resistance to becoming digital might be as low as mine had been. They would not have to forget everything they knew in order to quickly understand this very different future.

As my own general theory about the information economy developed over the years, I proposed that a good reality check for my ideas would be for Africa to surprise everyone by suddenly doing as I had: skipping industrialism entirely and leaping directly into the information era.

Gregory Bateson, the anthropologist, once defined information as "any difference that makes a difference." In an information economy, difference is everything. It's differences that draw out the voltage of wealth. Africa's strength is difference: thousands of different microcultures that developed out of the difficulty of travel between thousands of different terrains, languages, and climates.

Most Africans stayed out of the loop of the 20th century and were not homogenized into the generica that is now much of the Northern Hemisphere, or what they call the North. And thus their continent - so intensely different from the rest of the world, so vastly different within itself - represents a huge and still unconnected battery of stored potential. All it would take for Africa to leapfrog into the wonderland of an information economy would be to attach the electrodes - get it wired, in other words - and then watch its huge voltage zap the gap. Or so went my theory.

Aside from the grandiosese notion that I could actually extrapolate from my own little experience to the future of a continent, there was a weakness in this argument, gently pointed out to me by my friends at Wired. After hearing me expound on this a few times too often, executive editor Kevin Kelly said something like, "You seem to be awfully optimistic about Africa for someone who's never actually been there."

A solid point. But he then offered to do something about this by sending me off as a kind of human experiment. "I want to see," Kelly said, "if you, Mr. Optimism, can remain optimistic in the midst of Africa."

After a moment of stammering, I agreed, and arranged to leave a few weeks later. Of course, like many who had never been to Africa before, I carried with me incredibly stereotypical notions about the bone-in-the-nose primitivism of the continent's infrastructure, which in my case translated into - among other things - 15 pounds of solar paneling, because I was certain I wouldn't find much electricity. I assumed a lot of silly things. But I'm getting ahead of myself ...

So, at the beginning of August, I set out. For the better part of a month, I went from Mombasa to Tombouctou, experiencing various parts of Kenya, Ghana, the Ivory Coast, Mali, Uganda, and the Virunga volcano area where Uganda, Rwanda, and the Congo meet. Part of the idea was that I would attempt to email Wired a series of dispatches on my travels. The act of finding a port into cyberspace would be part of the adventure.

Before I left, I believed Africans could proceed directly from the agricultural epoch into an information economy without having to submit to the dreary indignities and social pathologies of industrialization. So here I am, bluff called, preparing to carry my pretty dreams into the Conradian heartland. I need to do this. I want to be honest. I am ready.

__ August 2, 1997, New York, New York __

I am not ready.

Indeed, I am afraid, and fear is not a common affliction of mine. I'm not afraid of being killed, nor of any of the projected African perils that have my loved ones so spooked. I figure their horrific images are mostly mediamagoria. I think I'm afraid of becoming someone else, which is, I suppose, a sort of death. I feel as if I am setting out on quest for the next version of myself, much as I did nine years ago when I closed down my first life and went venturing off to Silicon Valley.

Now I'm due for a new mission, but it's an odyssey I don't know how to prepare for. I am absurdly overloaded with electronic gear: two 3400 PowerBooks (courtesy of Apple Computer), against the possibility that one might go down thousands of miles from the nearest authorized Apple repair outlet (or, more likely, be rerouted from some baggage dock into an ad hoc grassroots technology seeding program - in other words, stolen).

In addition to those solar panels, I have a Jaz drive for keeping a set of backup disks rotating back and forth to the mothership; a large bag of power and telecom adapters, most of them for sockets of historical interest; a Newton 2000 MessagePad in case both PowerBooks fail me; and five incompatible transformer bricks to juice this mess.

I didn't sleep last night, and now I'm crazy with confusion. The taxi arrives late, then we're blocked by an accident in the Midtown Tunnel. I still have plenty of time, I think. But I'm about to have my first real encounter with African time.

I have been claiming that the reason Africa - and most other equatorial regions - were spared the industrial age in the first place was that most of these cultures didn't share with Northern Europeans the central organizing perception that adapted us so readily to becoming interchangeable machine parts: a sense that time is absolute, linear, and universal. A sense that time is Time. As certain and merciless as a punch clock.

So, I arrive at the Ghana Airways entrance in JFK International Terminal at about 55 minutes before my scheduled 3 p.m. departure. It's later than I like for international flights, but still ...

There is a hand-lettered sign on the locked door that informs me that the flight closed five minutes ago. Must be a mistake. For all their imprecations, I never heard of an airline actually refusing to board someone under these circumstances. I pound on the door frantically. Eventually a uniformed gentleman from Ghana Airways peers out, opening the door not a nanometer more than is necessary to accommodate his round, impassive face.

"The flight is closed," he says. His tone is as mechanically dispassionate as any robo-worker from a Taylor School of Scientific Management assembly line. His only show of emotion follows my clumsy bwana shot at bribing him. The effort does not advance my cause. His black eyes blaze this affront to his integrity.

"Come back Tuesday," he says.

Tuesday? It's Saturday, fer chrissakes. The usual routine when you miss a flight is that you're rerouted and airborne within three hours, not three days. What about other airlines? "Ghana Airways does not endorse our tickets over to other airlines," he observes with a flicker of pride.

Then I realize the flip side to my theory about equatorial time. In order to interface with white-boy clock worship, these folks have been forced into a parody of our inflexibility. They will show us, and they will do so by being even more punctiliously punctual than we are.

And so, here I stand: from thousands of miles away, I've already bounced off Africa. I drag my sorry, dejected butt over to the cab stand, a couple of loose serial cables bouncing along the sidewalk behind me.

Perhaps this is for the best. I am not ready. I need to regroup for the next assault. I need to collect the person I still am before I start the process of becoming someone else.

__ New York __

I'm still not ready.

I have spent the last several days wrestling with a technological nightmare. It turns out that in the haste of my earlier nondeparture, I shoved a bottle of hair conditioner into a briefcase, where it later emptied into my Jaz drive. I pick up a new Jaz drive as I make my second dash for JFK.

This time I arrive in what appears to be plenty of time, but, of course, I should have known better. The Ghana Airways officials look at my passport and find no Kenyan visa. This should not be their problem: once they get me to Ghana, it will be Ethiopia Airlines's problem to get me to Nairobi, where - I have been assured by the Kenyan consulate - I will be issued a visa upon arrival.

Nevertheless, the counter people tell me it can't be done. Ghana Airways would incur a fine should I be bounced back. It's quite impossible, Sir. I make myself all big and puffed. Their eyes go blank and they stare at me like basilisks.

It is now about 10 minutes until departure time and despair blooms in me like malaria. I can't even figure out how to get to Africa, let alone how to be there as the poor, motherless alien that I am. I put my forehead down on the counter, a pitiful wretch.

Suddenly, everything is different. My chief obstacle becomes human again. He puts his hand on my shrunken shoulder and says, "We will take a chance." Huh!? Surely now it isn't possible in any way - the plane is leaving. But I also see that my helplessness has created an equality that makes everything more possible. When I was being the angry bwana, I had made a thing of him and he was only returning the favor.

"I can't even make it to the gate now," I say. I'll never get all this gear through security.

But in my despondency, we have become brothers, united by a very challenging problem. I have realized something important. What he wanted all along was a real relationship with me and not some bureaucratic interaction that reduced us both to machinery. Only compassion could break the hard shell of protocol, and now he wanted it broken as badly as I did.

"Come with me," he says and leads me through a maze of doors to the zone where bags are loaded into belly containers and hauled out to the aircraft by little tractors. I am now someplace in the bowels of security-obsessed JFK International Airport, where those who do not bear security laminates can be arrested.

There is a luggage container standing open. "Get in," he says.

"But what if they don't know I'm in there?" If they stick me in the hold, I'll run out of oxygen and body heat very quickly.

"I will use radio. They will know." So in I get with my bags, listen to the locks clang shut, and find myself in a condition of speculative faith that is ecstatic in its way. The little tractor seems to drive me through eternal darkness, and then the doors whip open.

"Now out. Quickly!" someone shouts. The gangway stairs are nearby. I grab my White Man's Burden of technological carry-on and dash up. The DC-10 door flips down behind me and I am on my way.

__ Accra, Ghana __

The flight from JFK lands in a gray smothering wet dawn. A large percentage of the international freight that enters this country does so as Ghana Airways baggage, so before I can locate my own luggage I spend about an hour and a half watching many tons of badly battered cardboard boxes pile up around me and the carousel.

Eventually I am delivered from the chaos by Professor Ablade Glover, an artist who also sells the work of his local colleagues in an Accra gallery. He leads me through a band of aggressively helpful "rude boys" and out into the dirt parking lot, where a brass band of teenagers are playing something that sounds like an even mix of John Philip Sousa, hip hop, and acid jazz. Professor Glover hands me over to his driver, Seth, a clear-eyed young man with a Bob Marley T-shirt, for a look at the town during the few hours I have between flights.

Imagine a city of people who drive like Neal Cassady. Cars hurtle into unmarked traffic ganglia, negotiating in nanoseconds such niceties as lane boundaries and right-of-way. Seth overtakes and passes on either side at will, Zen-like in the calm of his concentration. The car radio blasts American rap music, interspersed with commentary in ornate Afro-Oxonian English that sounds like the BBC's World News on some more of that acid.

In the course of our drive-about, I count about 30 different billboards and shop signs advertising computers, data services, and ISPs. Dell, Compaq, and Gateway 2000 are the best represented, with Gateway claiming the high ground in an ongoing price war. The only products more widely advertised than information-processing goods are things you can drink.

Most interesting, there are also a very large number of storefront data services, some with rusted corrugated roofing, all offering the same suite of communications services: sending and receiving faxes, preparing and mailing professional correspondence, desktop publishing, and phones calls (both local and international).

We stop for a look. The places seem identical. Five or six computers. Five or six trim young women operating them. A few private phones booths. Several fax machines. It is obvious that there would no problem whatever wiring it all into the Net and adding electronic locations to the rest of their communications offerings. A slam dunk, really. Just add IP packets and jump back.

So here, already, I've debunked a nice big misconception about Africa: We assume that telecommunications have to reach every office and home before good things can happen. We assume that our one person/one computer model is the best way to accomplish the task. We're wrong about that, I think.

It isn't hard to imagine these storefronts becoming places where people - clever, English speaking, open minded - arrive at various hours of the day and night and work online for companies in the North. Maybe starting with data processing, and then proceeding, as they did in Bangalore, to programming, language translation, and all the other forms of information massage that only a human mind can perform.

Back in the car, I also notice that most Ghanaians get about in tiny buses, which generally seem to have about 16 people packed into a space where 10 might feel a little too intimate, emblazoned with mottoes such as "Love and Harmony," "All Peace, All People," or - my personal favorite - "You Are My Witness." Rolling homepages.

Enterprise is everywhere. Each time the car stops we're mobbed by people selling everything from sneakers to pocket calculators. One guy has about 20 surge-protector strips draped over his back like long beige dreadlocks.

I take lunch in a restaurant where three of the waiters come over to admire my PowerBook. One of them notes proudly that one of the local radio stations is also broadcasting on the Internet, though he isn't quite sure how they d0 it.

They're clearly not doing it with overseas calls. I try to jack directly into several different US dialup systems, and while I can get these distant modems to connect - amazing! - I can't establish a PPP socket; satellite latency looks like the culprit. I need a local dialup.

So I ask Seth to take me to the local office of Africa Online, a Prodigy project that now offers Internet connection in Ghana, Kenya, and the Ivory Coast, with plans to add Zimbabwe, Uganda, and South Africa.

Africa Online's Accra office is housed in a building that seems to be teetering on the edge of collapse. Ascending the stairs, I'm met by a sparkling young man in a white shirt and tie. He takes one look at me and says, "You seek Africa Online. I am sure of it."

Once inside, I find a staff consisting mostly of young women, lovely in their composure. (Most women on the street are carrying stereotypically large baskets on their heads, and the posture engendered by this seems to persist even after the baskets have economically evolved away.) I sign up for an account, attended to by a young nerdess named Sakyiwa Dadzi, who talks about DNS servers as casually as if she were discussing a good place to get a manicure. She knows Macs well, since Apple dumped a bunch of old Pluses and SEs in Ghana a few years back. We go online, and I get a consistent 33.6-Kbps connection, surfing the Web at about 2 Kbps - not bad, given that the entire local node relies on a 64K line leased from the Ghanaian PTT. In addition to Africa Online Ghana, there are two other local ISPs, both with the same exponential growth rate.

Looking at these kids, it doesn't require my usual pronoia to think that I'm glimpsing the future of this place. That is certainly what they believe. Their office has gone from zero to 30 employees in a year, and they are serving 500 subscribers, including businesses for whom they design and build Web pages.

The young man I met on the stairs, one of the Africa Online crew named Richard Asomani, later sent me an email salute: "The warmth and bubbliness with which you filled our reception room hold brief for appreciation. The professionalism and tact that accompanied you up our stairs, whose impact and airs drove me to ask if you were heading for Africa Online office need no further elaboration!" This was not some colonially ornate bit of marketing ebullience, but heartfelt. He's on a mission from God, and he knows another of his sort on sight.

Congenial though the human interface at Africa Online may be, their good will doesn't appear to extend to pricing. An account costs US$50 a month, which is about $20 more than the monthly income of most Ghanaians. Not good. Then again, not so long ago the price of an Internet connection was beyond the economic means of most American households.

__ Mombasa, Kenya __

Ancient port towns generally have a reputation for expedient Darwinian squalor, but Mombasa beats anyplace I've ever seen for the sheer dedication to malice. Mombasa, the primary seaport of East Africa, sucks. It is the Gila monster of cities. The place is wretchedly poor, ill-tempered, and broken in most respects. In other words, a place where I could start putting my optimism about Africa's future to a proper test.

After a night-time transcontinental milk run (Abidjan, Kinshasa) from Accra and then a hop from hell in an old Air Kenya Fokker out of Nairobi (no visa problem, by the way), I was met in Mombasa by an old San Francisco pal I'll call Michael Kurtz. Since I knew fuck-all about how to proceed in Africa, I thought it might be best to find a zone of acclimatizing sanctuary, and I figured that my friend, a resourceful sybarite with years of experience knocking about the Poor World, might help.

The scene into which my friend had installed himself sounded good in ASCII - caretaking an enclave about 30 kliks north of Mombasa, where an old Arab slaver's estuary called Kilifi Creek hits the pale Indian Ocean. This place is owned by a world-class eccentric named Lorenzo Ricciardi, who numbers among his many accomplishments having played Jesus Christ in Ben Hur. (I'm beginning to think that Africa, like other frontiers, attracts a special sort of liminal character.) Lorenzo's little piece of paradise is a collection of thatch-roofed villas and gardens so riotously floral as to be almost tacky. He calls it African Rainbow, and often lends it out to his friends. There I am met by Dimitri Negroponte, who like his dad, MIT Media Lab chief Nicholas Negroponte, shares my obsession to wire Africa.

Outside, the bougainvilleas look vigorous enough to attack the house. Inside, we set to alligator-clipping ourselves into African Rainbow's curiously wired phones system, aiming for an Africa Online node in Mombasa. After an hour of swearing and puzzling over strange readings from the voltmeter - one of the items I'm hauling that does turn out to be handy (as it also would be in, say, Davos) - we scored a channel clean enough to sustain 33.6 Kbps without disconnects. Back in cyberspace again.

The Indian Ocean murmurs on the shore. Mosquitoes rise from the creek, whining with malaria. Across the bay I can see Kilifi village. Above it rises a microwave tower, from which our bits make their way out to the world.

__ Kilifi, Kenya __

I spend the day sleeping off my travels, but toward dusk, my friend Kurtz, his Parsi girlfriend, and I venture out to sample the local nightlife.

In Kilifi, we go first to mud-walled club with black lighting and dismal disco music extracted from the '70s. Everyone is busily peeling and chewing twigs of mira, a stimulant - better known by its Arabic name, khat - that, if you chew enough of it, makes you feel like you've gulped about six Sudafeds. The price is right, but the high is there with Romilar cough syrup and angel dust on my list of things to try just once.

I head off on my own to the really happening joint, The Top Life Club, distinguished from its predecessor only by its being a lot more crowded, higher (if that's the right word) on mira, and much drunker. When I walk in someone at the bar looks up, points at me, and shouts something that sounds like "Jook! Jook!" I'm suddenly feeling particularly white and sober. My anxiety is made worse when several more look up, point at me and join in with the exclamation, "Jook! Jook!" Suddenly I realize they are saying "Chuck." They think I'm Chuck Norris, the actor, to whom I bear a faint resemblance.

The interesting thing isn't that they think I'm Chuck Norris. What's interesting is that just about everyone here knows who Chuck Norris is. Indeed, as I wandered across Africa, including places of off-the-map remoteness, I never went anywhere without being called "Jook Norriiis." It is possible that Chuck Norris is as well known throughout the continent as Nelson Mandela. So the global rivers of information and media flow.

__ Mombasa __

Just now I am hurtling toward Mombasa, an hour late for my 15 local minutes of fame. Upon hearing that Dimitri and I were in the area, the folks at Africa Online Mombasa thought such "visiting wiremen" might provide a good excuse to make themselves more widely known to the general public. So they scheduled a press conference, featuring our distinguished selves.

The trip, less than an hour, is complicated considerably by the fact that there has been a steady stream of riots in Mombasa. There are many theories about the cause of the uprisings - the government, the opposition, gangsters, the police - which have featured a small but growing death toll. The police are setting up roadblocks every few kilometers, each centered around a little maze of spiked panels that would put a car on its rims in a microsecond. Between the stops, our driver blasts through an extremely miscellaneous swarm of walkers, carts, matatus (minibuses), and huge trucks driven by men wired on mira.

I'm not sure that either Africa Online or the local papers got much out our presence, but the meeting gave me a chance to meet another tidy bunch of young idealists, who have managed to create an almost antiseptic zone of professionalism in the midst of a funk beyond description.

The most interesting of these amazing young people is a particularly convoluted sort of digital missionary, a lovely Muslim woman (attired accordingly) named Bonita McGee, who has come to Kenya after graduating from Ohio State University. Raised in Akron, Ohio, by her African-American mother who converted to Islam in the '60s, McGee is looking as much for the roots of her future as she is for the roots of a past she never really had. She has the kind of indestructible cheerfulness that is the rule everywhere else I've been - and the polar opposite of what one finds on the street below.

And what is on the street below is pretty ugly. As I was waiting on a corner outside the door with Dimitri, a sour young man in a dirty Megadeth T-shirt was standing near us. He kept glancing at us like prey. Without warning, he reached down onto the street, grabbed a stray brick, and threw it as hard as he could at what appeared to be an arbitrarily selected passing matatu. The shattered glass sprayed across the passengers, including a group of children sitting by the window. The brick itself passed clear through the bus, then blanged some poor man's face on the other side of the street.

The brick thrower then looked at us as though he didn't care whether we'd seen it or not, then turned and sauntered away. The matatu never even slowed down.

__ The Taita Hills __

Time to hit the road. After some hours of gonzo driving on a mega-potholed road from Mombasa, Dimitri and I arrive on the slopes of the volcanic buttes of Taita. We head to a village high enough to get plenty cold at night. We check into the local hotel, a place where the room we share with our driver costs three bucks and is priced about right, given that the one toilet in the place has obviously been out of order for a good long while and there is no water coming to the faucet at the only washbasin.

We are here to visit Gibson Zai, a fortysomething Kenyan who is working with an organization based in Oakland, California, called the Global Education Partnership. Gibson has set up shop in the hotel, managing to wedge two dozen vintage PCs into a room smaller than most American kitchens. Ten students, six of them young women, are working on basic skills like surfing the Web - albeit at paint-drying velocities, over antique modems hooked to the otherwise excellent microwave phones system - and using Microsoft Word with skill sufficient to create professional-looking correspondence. The kids are children of farmers who hack subsistence from these hard hills.

In the morning they will be graduating, and we're asked to give the commencement speech. The kids have suddenly become global villagers and they know it.

Despite their shyness in the presence of such space invaders as Dimitri and myself, when we give our small talk their keenly directed gazes gleam with a supernova of The Suddenly Possible. In my little speech I recount my own experience of growing up in a poor mountain town that I still call home, but which can participate in the village of all humans. Dimitri tells them of his vision for 2B1, a nonprofit organization based at MIT that aspires to enabling all the world's children to communicate directly in cyberspace without the intercession of governments or other manifestations of adult tediousness. They liked that, too.

And they were clearly in awe of Gibson Zai. As they should be. It is by the work of such very local prophets that the poor world will join us in the future.

__ Abidjan, Ivory Coast __

It would be challenging to get the collective travel wizards of Nairobi to organize a ham sandwich. Every agent and airline we spoke to offered a dizzying array of incompatible options for how to get to the other side of the continent; flights that didn't connect, boats that only leave at the wrong time, visa officials who were only available at times we weren't. They said it couldn't be done, and they may have even been right. But thanks to another episode of compassionate intervention on the behalf of a bereft traveler, we're here anyway.

Côte d'Ivoire - what we boorishly call in English the Ivory Coast - is widely regarded to be something of an economic miracle, chief among the reasons being an effort to de-bureaucratize commerce and government. The mind reels at what things must have been like before. Just now I am mired in a mind-numbing Kafkaesque bureaucratic tar pit at the main bank. I have been standing in one queue or another for an hour and a half, seeking to accomplish what generally takes me about 35 seconds: charging some cash against my Visa card. Even in the disconsolate tangle of Kilifi, I was able to perform this act without automation in something like five minutes.

It is very hard to imagine how a city with so much commercially available automation - I counted 15 computer-related Yellow Pages - can still have its main bank so utterly anti-automatic.

It is harder still to imagine how anything like an information economy can be established here unless it does so in a fashion that avoids any direct contact with the existing commercial institutions. On the other hand, the process of banking everywhere is evolving ever-better avoidance methods for existing institutions. And in places like Abidjan, they might even get there sooner. God knows there's the demand.

__ Bamako, Mali __

Jim Lowenthal has probably done more than any other single person to wire Africa. Since 1993, he's been beavering away at creating connectivity in northern Africa, currently through an astonishingly effective program called the Leland Initiative, overseen by the US Agency for International Development. Thanks to Jim (and your tax dollars) there are Cisco routers humming with bits in 10 African countries, including Mali, Rwanda, Madagascar, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, the Ivory Cost, Ghana, Senegal, Niger, and Morocco. All of them bearing USAID stickers on their cases.

Jim and I share a keen desire to wire the unwirable. And for the occasion of my horizon-widening visit, we especially wanted to create an inspirational connection between the Net and some true neglected corner - say, Tombouctou. We wanted to jack in "la fin du monde," as Tombouctou is called within its own country, Mali, which is already far from the center of anything. We would not come as the usual NGO types in the customary white Land Rover bubble. We would come as what one appreciative African official called NGIs: nongovernmental individuals.

Jim knows Bamako, Mali's capital, well. And he also knows that the most wired hotel in town is a modest little place at the end of a long dirt alley called, for some unexplained reason, the Hotel Tennessee. We had arranged to meet there and to use this as our point of departure for the end of the world, the place better known to most of us as Tombouctou.

The Hotel Tennessee's owner, Momadou Sidibé, is one of Jim's converts to Net religion. Momadou didn't think it an imposition that I would arrive at midnight and ask him to help me set up a local Internet connection before going to bed. This turns out to be a challenge technically. And the task was further complicated by the fact that Momadou, like nearly all francophones Africans, speaks no English (on a principle of cultural preservation even more rigid that the Parisian equivalent), and that my French is, as he says with a compassionate smile, "pathétique."

So for the next three hours, we hack technology, language, and culture all at once.

Midway through, Momadou sends off to the kitchen for a little something to sustain us. His assistant returns a while later with a pot, with the head of an animal - I politely avoid looking too closely at what kind - boiled into a kind of stew. We crouch on the floor of his office, fiddling with IP configurations and eating an animal head. By the by, I find myself with a 33.6K connection to my stateside server, as zippy as any on earth.

Momadou swears that the next time I come to Bamako, there will be an Ethernet socket in every room at the Hotel Tennessee. It is possible that the first hotel in the world to provide really fat bandwidth to every guest will be in one of the poorest countries in the world.

Mali may be destitute, but it is hardly poor in color, culture, or enthusiastic human connection. Moreover, Malians are pioneers in the critical transition back to a style of governance that is more traditionally African than the postcolonial kleptocracies of Nigeria and Kenya.

Dimitri and I had a day to kill in Bamako before we flew to Tombouctou. Dimitri had the name of a certain General Touré, who appeared from his stated title to be some minor official in the Ministry of Finance, but whom we also knew was interested in 2B1's effort to wire the world's kids. Dimitri decided to give his office a call to see if we could meet. What we did not know about Monsieur le Général was that, in addition to his modest official position, Amadou Toumani Touré is also the George Washington of Mali. Back in 1991, while still a lieutenant in Mali's air force, he led a coup that dislodged the bad old régime that had been in place since the 1960s. Installed as interim president, Touré oversaw a swift transition to democratic rule, culminating in multiparty elections the following year. With a civilian successor finally in place, he requested appointment to his current obscure position and has remained in it ever since. To his supporters he is the moral chief of Mali, if no longer an official political leader.

Walking into his office, we knew at once that we were in the presence of someone with a larger perspective. Our conversation, in French, was sometimes so lumpy that he laughed heartily, if not derisively, at our efforts. We talked about 2B1, what could be done to get Mali's schools online, how to make sure the least-advantaged kids got something too. If my French is right, he told us to please let him know if there was something he could do to help. And I think I heard him say as we were leaving, "Don't forget about Mali." I won't.

__ Tombouctou, Mali __

In the 16th Century, there were 1 million people in Tombouctou, 25,000 of whom were students at its university, coming from all over the Arabic world. Today, four centuries later, Tombouctou's population stands at barely 20,000. It's hard to get to, even by airplane - old Russian turboprops, sketchy schedules, sandstorms ... you get the picture.

On the surface, the place looks exactly as one might imagine. Sandblasted shades of ancient tan and mud, low against the endless desert around it. Camels. Tuareg nomads. The place regarded by just about everyone in the world as being at the end of it.

But look again: it turns out that Tombouctou is already wired beyond any of my expectations. There is electricity everywhere. Telephoness are perfectly ordinary. The only problem is that to reach the outside world they have to pass through a 2-Mbps satellite bounce to Bamako, with so much latency that it gives my modem indigestion. So while I am writing this in the Podunk of the Planet, I don't think I'll be able to actually send it until I get back to Bamako tomorrow.

Many marvels already, including a 14-year-old named Hmmma who - running a 500-meter dash through deep sand in 110-degrees-Fahrenheit heat like Carl Lewis on speed - chases after the pickup bringing me into town from the airport.

Hmmma jumps into the back of the pickup and immediately starts talking to me in American-English and demonstrating great entrepreneurial skills. Now he is my local guide and agent, even though I have also met with the local governor, who has offered me all the services I might require. Hmmma actually seems a better bet that anyone the governor might have at his official disposal. And in fact, the governor later tells me that he figures Hmmma is as much in charge of Tombouctou as he is. He isn't entirely kidding.

So here we are, sitting in this hot desert evening, and I will have Hmmma tell you what he would say to Wired readers in America. Since he can't use the keyboard yet, I will do the typing: "I want to become the most famous guide in Tombouctou, learning English from the people who come and not by going to school. I say hello to everyone in the world from Tombouctou. If anyone should ever need my help in Tombouctou, I am here. You can find me at the gate of the Hotel Bouctou. The phones number here is 223/92 10 12. You can also send me mail at my P.O. Box 49, Tombouctou, Mali, West Africa. I hope for peace and love for everyone in the world."

See? The kid gets it. He is introduced to the computers and the Net, and 30 seconds later he knows the thing to do in this new economy is gain some attention. Advertise! Hmmma has introduced me to some Tuareg tribesmen, who make some of the most beautiful jewelry I have ever seen. They themselves are elegant and proud when they aren't trying too hard to sell me something. It would be lovely to have a way to show them and their work on the Web, rather than forcing them to descend on such rare commercial opportunities as Dimitri and myself like bees on a couple of empty open Coke bottles.

Also here is Sancouns Sessacou, who is from the Dogon country near Mopti, between here and Bamako. He also speaks excellent English (this is an aggressively French-speaking country, mind you): "If anyone would like to make a trip into Dogon country or to Dgenné, the sister city of Tombouctou, they should contact me at the Hotel Campman, Mopti, Mali, P.O. Box 233. The telephones number is 223/430 477. I wish a welcome to everyone in the world and peace to all the world."

Now, since I'm sitting here doing this, we have already created the beginnings of an information economy based on the Internet. Everyone nearby who might have a service is coming around. So here is Alkoi Touré: "I organize a trip for two weeks in Mali, starting in Bamako, then going through Dogon country by bus from Mopti we go to Tombouctou on the Niger River. With pirogues with engines, and we can reach Tombouctou and then we can go to the village of Handoubomou where the market is every Saturday ... " As I am typing Alkoi Toure's message the first Dogon guide, Sancouns, tries to get me to type a lie. He wants me to say that the market day there is Friday, since it's actually Monday. Competitive practices take root immediately. From the souk, the Net is not a great conceptual leap.

Anyway, you get the picture. By the way, the Hotel Bouctou mentioned above is a fine place where the rooms are $10 a night, the toilet sort of works, and they don't shut off the electricity at 6:00 p.m. (as they do at the only other hotel in town). In the bar you can watch big-screen TV fed from the dish on the roof. When I arrived this morning, a French-dubbed version of Lois & Clark was playing. Now, after my impromptu Internet class breaks up, this same TV is tuned to an enthusiastic French show about the Internet. In a rather surreal moment it even briefly featured me talking. There were about 20 people in the place, many of them these regal blue Tuaregs, all silent with attention.

__ Pinedale, Wyoming __

Somewhere in Africa, I got more of Africa in me than I had bargained for. Back home for a two-week pit stop after Tombouctou, I literally collapsed. Not a great début, but I recovered quickly enough to quickly return more or less on schedule.

Malaria lives in me now. Despite several rounds of traditional Western antibiotics, it will probably always remain as a souvenir of Africa. It is not so bad, really. Periodically, my temperature skyrockets for about an hour and I hallucinate mildly. All in all, it's rather like being involuntarily administered short-acting doses of bad acid.

There is something about knowing that Africa may always live in my bloodstream that I like. A kind of sick romanticism, I know, but I'm as susceptible to that as I am the local malaria. Probably for the same reasons.

__ Kampala, Uganda __

Here I am, feeling febrile with malaria again, with a plane ticket in my hand. No fit way to plunge back into Africa, but I'm committed. Hell, Sir Richard Burton had malaria most of his way to what is now Lake Victoria, and he sure didn't fly business-class.

Shortly after takeoff from Geneva, I fall asleep. When I awake four hours later, I look down at Mars. Sand. Pale, hot even against my retinas, drifting for two hours, uninterrupted by any visible life-form.

It's dark by the time we landed in Entebbe. The airport is as buff as anything in Germany, striking evidence of a new Uganda under free-marketeering President Yoweri Kaguta Museveni. The 45-minute drive to Kampala is also impressive. The road is brand new.

Kampala is wrapped in hilly jungle that seems too lush for the air that greeted me when I came out of the hotel this morning. Despite the cool temperatures, people here flow as slow as the Nile. I amble down a hill to the shiny new office building that houses the headquarters of Starcom, Uganda's leading ISP. Starcom grows out of a larger venture, Starlight Corporation, an impressively global alliance of the Somalian PTT, Telenor - the Norwegian PTT - and a group of American freebooters. Still, on first glance, it looks entirely African: the usual miscellaneous group of folks hanging around an office, devoted to what appear to be entirely social purposes.

After a long wait for the director, a well-known local wild man named Edward Baliddawa, I'm informed that he is still in Geneva, attending the conference I'd just left. So instead I'm thrust into the cheerful company of his sales and marketing manager, Riki Roy. Riki Roy, of unmistakably Indian descent, sparkles with determined optimism. She rattles telco-ese of a technical depth that occasionally has me swimming pretty hard.

Starcom is poised to become a very successful competitor - just as soon as the Uganda Posts and Telecommunications Corporation, is forced to release its death grip on nonservice (within a year, by most accounts). In the meantime, phones service is primitive. It is almost impossible to make a phones call between Kampala and Entebbe, only 30 miles away. Worse, even local calls cost the equivalent of about 30 cents a minute - an impossible rate for most Ugandans. Long distance calls are the most expensive in the world.

About 50 percent of the country remains without regular phones service, though Starcom and other companies are filling that gap to the extent they're allowed. They bring in phones service using something called mobiles trunk lines - cell phoness linked into small local networks. Cell phones pricing is already cheaper than landline telephones service - indeed, cheaper than similar American accounts. And you can get fully featured Internet service that seems amazingly hot, given that it has to cross a 64K satellite bottleneck to Norway before hitting a fiber line to New York.

Starcom is a company I'd seriously consider investing in. A lot of money is going to be made here. Indeed, a lot of money is already being made in Uganda. The country has one of the fastest growing economies on earth, with a GNP growth rate more pumped than China's. Part of this is due to starting from close to nothing. Idi Amin and his barely better successors left the country in ruins. Kampala now seems as Singapore must have in the early 1970s. Glass and steel mushrooms up from the compost of old Kampala, providing head-torquing contrasts between the shiny and the drab.

Next stop is Kampala's Mengo Senior School, an institution I had learned of through 2B1. On arriving, I'm astonished to find out that Mengo has a Net-based virtual exchange program going with my alma mater, Jackson Hole High School in Wyoming.

Behind Mengo's computer initiative are an inspiring pair of Net-heads named Baker Ntabi and John Bosco Ntangaare. They showed me past the open thatch-roofed classrooms to an enclosed computer lab, where three ancient PCs labor away to serve the needs of the 400 juniors and seniors, all promised some computer proficiency before graduation.

There was no problem getting the kids interested. Even though it was a Saturday afternoon and no one was compelled to be there, the little room was packed with painfully shy kids, clustered five or six to a machine, designing Web pages in PageMill with 386 processors and floppy disks. Everything was taking forever, but they waited for the screens to redraw, pixel by pixel, with the patience of angels.

It was painful to see such hunger to learn having to subsist on such meager resources, but inspiring, too. These kids know this is their future and they embrace it without any hesitation. It makes me want to put together a container of used computers myself.

Equipment was not the biggest obstacle, though. Again, the problem was the piratical PTT. There was no way these kids could do much on the Web at 30 cents a minute, especially at the speeds afforded by these machines.

I suggested they contact Starcom - Riki Roy had made it clear that she considered computer-literate students to be future customers, so it seemed a short jump to the idea that the company could provide a microwave link to the Mengo school as an investment in the future. We'll see.

In the meantime, both Ntabi and Ntangaare were determined to make do. They are True Believers, even to the extent of making their three computers available to the kids' parents in the evenings, part of an actively promoted community outreach program.

But they also want to come up with a way to break the funding limitations imposed on them by Uganda's public education system; specifically, they want to find a way to get help from private industry. "Our products - the students - are consumed by the private sector," says Ntabi, "so it only makes sense that they should help for it. We can also be a resource center for them to retrain their staff. Right now, they come to us for information, but they don't give anything back."

"Computer skills," he continues, "are increasingly becoming a condition for employment in Uganda. If you are an accountant or doctor or engineer, you will need computer skills. We were at Uganda Airways the other day, but they were complaining that they couldn't get the employees they needed with computer skills."

"In fact," he says, matter-of-factly, "the whole High Court of Uganda went into recess for a number of weeks while the judges went off to school to learn computers. They felt they were no longer equipped to judge a modern society without knowing these things."

Imagine the US Supreme Court coming to a similar conclusion and you begin to appreciate how quickly our lead in the integration of technology into society could fade.

__ Lake Victoria, Uganda __

The 40-minute drive from Kampala down to Lake Victoria is packed with information from the driver, who tells me, among other things, that anybody who doesn't know Windows will be out of economic luck inside of five years. I tell him that I hope not to fall into either category and show him my Mac, a type of computer he'd never heard of.

I'm on my way to see gorillas. It's not clear whether the trek will really relate to my main mission, but I'm persuaded that there is a role for the Net in figuring out how to deal with the international and interagency information flows - information that is critical to the survival of the 600 or so remaining mountain gorillas. Also, on this junket would be Jonathan Bulkeley of America Online UK, who is part of an effort to get continuous data on the gorillas online.

I find my fellow gorilla tourists installed in an incredibly pukka-old British lodge called the Lake Victoria Inn, beautifully nestled on the lakeshore. After checking into my sumptuous digs, I called the desk to find out about jacking into Starcom from my room. Complete incomprehension.

I find the manager and finally gain permission to use the lodge's direct-dial fax line, but after 10 attempts to log in, I never get a line clean enough to sustain an IP connection. The line between Entebbe and Kampala, still under the dreary grip of the Ugandan PTT, turns out to be just as deficient as Riki Roy had warned me it would be.

Later, Jonathan and I go out under the full moonlight, point the microdish of his satphones at the geosynch zone, and try to get to the Internet that way. No cigar. Once again, the fancy Rich World stuff wasn't working as well as what I had been hacking together on the ground.

The next morning we're on the road to Kabale, our jumping-off point into the Virunga volcano region. On either side of the road are two concrete hoops, through which passes the virtual dotted line of the equator. I stand with my feet spread in the middle of one and can just touch its inner circumference with my outstretched fingertips - a less-ideally proportioned version of Leonardo da Vinci's sketch of a man within a circle and a square, the belt of the planet passing between my legs.

It's near noon and when I look right down at my feet, I see I am casting about a quarter-inch of shadow. In the hoop across the road Jonathan is seizing the opportunity to beam straight up with his satphones, calling his office in London to try to find out why we can't connect by computer. Once again, no luck.

Around us are banana plantations and lush jungle. A nearby roadside stand is freshly painted, apparently by Pepsi, whose logo is all over it. There are smells: burning brush, composting jungle, and half-burned diesel from the trucks hurtling past.

We stop for lunch at a crisp little hotel in Masaka, 138 kilometers from Kampala. Jonathan spends most of our lunch break sprawled on the grass trying to pull down some tech support; I notice a microwave tower sticking up over the village center, and ask if there's a phones. Within a minutes, I locate the hotel fax machine and jack its plug into the back of my PowerBook. After convincing the young woman in the office that I would do no harm to her equipment, I find myself sucking my mail from the EFF's server at 57 Kbps.

Back on the road, the country we pass through is drying, the population thinning - the rain shadow of the Virunga. Termite colonies the size of small houses dot the landscape, some with trees growing out of their top, like something from Dr. Seuss.

We stop in the regional capital, Mbarara, a town of 50,000 people serving an area of about a million people total. Riki Roy back in Kampala had told me there was a Starcom office, which turns out to be a shipping container painted glossy gray with a bright blue logo across it. The 4-meter dish on top points at an odd angle - toward a bird owned by Telenor, the Norwegian PTT, and one of Starcom's owners, in an orbit that lines up with Norway.

Inside - air-conditioned, of course - are three phones booths, a fax machine and two lovely, clear-eyed young women named Esther Tusabomu and Asiimwe Bridgit. The pair have been operating the center since it opened a month ago. It is the first job either has held and they are taking it very seriously. They know exactly how much bandwidth they have: 64 Kbps. Hell, these women work with more bandwidth than most Americans have ever clicked their way across.

There is another, older telecommunications center right across the street, run by the PTT. It's not so tidy. I ask Esther what she offers that the folks over there don't have. She smiles like a sunny day and says, "Our service is better." Starcom's prices are better, too, starting at 17 cents for local calls. But, of course, there's almost no one to call locally. Everyone expects that to change now: Esther tells us that local businessmen are in here every day asking when they'll be able to get their cell phoness.

I ask about Net. Both girls are excited at the possibility of adding it - the dish could certainly handle it - but they're also a little apprehensive. It turns out that both had been exposed to computers in school, but neither had been online. "Most people around here don't know enough about the Internet to know that they want it," Esther says. But she also allows that this is likely to change.

__ At the Congo-Uganda-Rwanda border __

It's actually cold as we set out before dawn on a three-hour drive up a wild dirt road under a fog-broadened full moon into one of the most beautiful sunrises I've ever seen. The air is hallucinogenic, from huge yellow-and-white roadside blooms of datura - deadly nightshade.

We arrive at the boundary of Mgahinga National Park at about 8 a.m. To keep the number of visitors minimal I agree to stay behind with two of the party today while Jonathan and one other trek in to commune with the gorillas. Jonathan plans to report from the rain forest to a special gorilla section on AOL using the satphones, to which he has finally been able to connect his PC.

I hang out for awhile in the ranger's hut, working on this journal. I ask a ranger named Shaban if it would help his work to establish an Internet connection for the three contiguous Virunga parks, in Rwanda, the Congo, and Uganda. "It would be very good," he says with a big smile, not missing a beat. He wants to know more about the Internet; and I show him yesterday's email, from the US, Denmark, and Catalonia. His smile grows. "Someday all the world will be able to talk like this, one person to one person!" he says this without prompting. He gets it, right away.

One thing that definitely would help would be an easy, high tech way to keep track of where the gorillas are. It's not completely foolish to imagine the rangers, who follow and protect them from poachers, carrying eMates with GPS cards and cellular modems along with their AK-47s. But first we have to deal with the fact that the rangers over in Rwanda can't even afford boots.

Meanwhile I'd still like to see if I can just connect myself - from a remote mountain outpost in the equatorial tropics, in an often ignored country, part of a written-off continent. As sundown approaches, we check into the Sky Blue Motel in the village of Kisoro, a 50-bucks-a-night concrete blockhouse with the rooms named after planets. Kisoro has abundant kilowattage, but we've left behind our AC adapters. We blast a few emails through Jonathan's AOL link before both his laptop and satphones flick off.

Still not satisfied, I ask if there might be a phones into which to plug my still somewhat energized PowerBook. Turns out the Sky Blue does indeed have one, though it shares a single line to the outside world with the rest of Kisoro's phoness. Demand is high; it takes a while to get a dial tone. When it finally comes through, I'm surprised to find a nice clear signal into Kampala. I log into the Starcom server on my first stab, then fail to locate a domain-name server, for some reason I could never figure out. A dozen more tries, and still no luck. So no mail.

Irritating though it is to be so close to cyberspace and yet so far, my struggles are vastly entertaining to the little crowd that gathers around me in the hotel office. They are observing Internet suffering at its worst, and yet still profess eagerness to engage in such struggles themselves someday. I just wish I could've shown them how worthwhile the struggle is.

__ Mgahinga National Park __

As I type these words, I am sitting about 15 feet away from Bigingo's family. Bigingo is a 450-pound silverback (or alpha male) mountain gorilla. He has two wives, Kaboko - who is missing a hand that was caught in a poacher's snare - and Nyiramwiza. There are also a nearly grown son, Epapharah, and two charming kids born earlier this year, Maffia and Majambere.

In order to be here with these sweet creatures I have literally crawled most of the last three hours on my hands and knees through a fractal maze of gorilla tracks that gained about 400 meters of elevation along the way. I have a sleeve ripped most of the way off, I am bleeding from a couple of places I know of, and some of the giant stinging nettles I encountered on the way up are still burning in my palms. My fears that there might be something zoo-like about this experience are gone. This is not a zoo.

Amazingly enough, after crawling through fresh gorilla shit for the last half mile, we have come upon them in one of the few real clearings I've seen all morning. The gorillas are chillin'. Bigingo is some distance away on the far side of his family, sitting under the canopy. He is observing us with a perfect combination of attention and detachment. A real Zen master.

Closer to us, the ladies are spread-eagled on their backs. The young male is busily peeling some of the 20 kilos of bamboo he will eat today. And the kids are just plain busy. Really busy.

Now they come closer and peer at my PowerBook. I am pretty sure this is the first time a wild mountain gorilla has ever seen a computer. I find myself hoping the little ones will be as fascinated as the rangers were. (My God! Have I really become so demented in my techno-evangelism that I now want to wire the gorillas?) It's probably fortunate that they seem to have lost interest. They've rolled themselves in a big, black ball over to the other side of the clearing. Now one has just chased the other up a bamboo stalk near me. It keels over, and they almost land in my lap.

After writing the above, I put my computer away, quit dicking around with media tools (having little choice with two dead cameras) and drill into being there now with Bigingo's brood. Smelling their ammoniated odor, watching the kids pester their mothers and harry each other, peering into the dark vegetative cave where the silverback was hanging. Looking into the glossy depths of these black-on-black eyes.

I don't know whether it's actually important that the mountain gorilla is spared extinction. There is nothing that intrinsically makes this life-form more sacred than, say, the large number of toad species that currently seem to be on their way out. But, while all life is sacred, some kinds of life seem more obviously so. And perhaps learning to protect those life-forms that move our hearts, as these do, might help us become more protective of those that appeal less obviously to our human sensitivities.

Perhaps we will also see the irony in trying to spare the last 600 of our mountain gorilla cousins while somehow allowing the slaughter of 400,000 fellow humans - the Tutsi - that recently took place nearby and appears about to begin again. Certainly a little more firsthand knowledge of these things, conveyed to the world via the Net, wouldn't hurt.

__ Kabale, Uganda __

The drive back down to Kabalae is as lovely in the late afternoon as it had been at dawn. The country glows with a rainbow of women dressed in brightly colored clothes; the villages are filled with drab men wearing distant expressions.

"They have been drinking all day," says our driver Abdul, shaking his head.

"You mean they just hang out and drink while the women do the work?" I ask.

This turns out to be true in much of rural Africa. Abduk also tells me that rural Ugandan women manage to trade what they grow through something called Women's Cooperative Association. They are, in essence, in charge of much of the basic economic chain out here.

Thinking about this, I felt an intellectual ka-chunk!, as a unifying connection dropped neatly into the space between a group of my optimistic notions about information economy.

The first is a belief that women will assume a more central role in the information age. Like cyberspace, information is made up entirely of relationships, a subject women, in most places, study far more deeply than men. Furthermore, physical strength means nothing in cyberspace, either regarding one's ability to do the work or one's vulnerability to threats of force.

This goes particularly for the strong, independent young women I keep meeting. They seem generally more curious and technophilic than the men. They seem to have a keener instinct for the future and are less susceptible to the contagion of violence. And, as it turns out, they are already operating the economy.

Finally, there is my belief - originating in my own personal leap from the 19th century to the 21st - that the mental habits of agriculture are much more conducive to understanding the essentially biological qualities of information economy than is the mechanical skull vise of the industrial worldview.

Watching the road show, all this suddenly melds into a vision of a prosperous Africa of small towns and rural communities, networked to the global grid through a web of wires and hearts opened wider with estrogen.

But as we proceed through the pastoral dreamscape, I also wonder how much of our world I actually wish on these people. They are desperately poor by our standards, but I don't see any of them starving, and, taken as a lot, they sure seem a whole bunch happier than most of us Northerners.

People we see along the road smile and wave. I see them waving even from the distant fields, genuinely glad to see us. Their little gatherings are often doubled over with laughter at something someone has just said.

Imagine average Americans smiling and waving at a carload of passing Africans and you begin to appreciate how different is the vibe. Do I really want to endow other people with such blessings as we endure? At one point, we stop to take a picture and a boy walks past me, coming up from the fields with hoe over his shoulder.

"Hello," he said brightly. "How is your life?" "My life is good," I said, meaning it. "How is your life?" "My life is good, too!" he said, meaning it every bit as earnestly. He had no shoes. He was very dirty. He had probably been working for about 10 hours. Altogether, his family makes maybe 500 bucks in a decent year.

His life is good.

How is your life?

__ Mengo and El Mondo __

Before I went off looking for gorillas, I had promised the kids in the Mengo Senior School Computer Club that I would come back with my digital camera and take pictures of them to put up on the homepages they're designing. I knew how much they wanted to be able to smile out at the world.

So back in Kampala, I dutifully drag my sweat-slick carcass out to Mengo with my QuickTake 200. There, as expected, are about 20 beautifully groomed young nerds, the very picture of anticipation.

I love taking their pictures. I try to trick them out of the sober faces their shyness compels them to put into my viewfinder. They want to look like the kind of people who would be taken seriously by the rest of humanity, not quite knowing all the different methods by which the rest of humanity makes such determinations. What they also didn't know was that the mere presence of these faces on the Web would indicate a kind of seriousness for which places like Uganda have rarely been accorded credit.

I'm also back here to see if we can hack some regulatory sneak-around to improve the absurdly expensive trickle of bandwidth that occasionally connects Mengo to the rest of us.

I had convened a little gathering that put the student's inspiring advisers, Baker Ntabi and John Bosco Ntangaare, in the same room with Riki Roy and Edward Baliddawa, the head of Starcom's Internet activities, along with Patrick Quarcoo of Infomail Uganda, another local ISP and Starcom's main competitor. My own ignorance of the local commercial politics was less a bug than a feature, since Baliddawa and Quarcoo had not been on speaking terms for some time. But since neither knew the other was coming, they had little choice but to get over it.

We worked out a plan whereby the two ISPs would get together to put a direct 64K microwave link to Mengo; local businesses around the school would front the money (about five grand) in return for being able to use Mengo as their immediate node. Baliddawa and Quarcoo also agreed that they could significantly reduce their primary Internet cost - training and support - by passing the job over to the kids at Mengo. They agreed that there was no better way to fertilize a future market for their services than to use the school get as many kids (and parents) online as possible. And I recounted the assurance I had been given by Johnson Nkuuke, an MP and the founder of Uganda's Internet Society chapter, that he could probably get around the local PTT blockade by an almost invisible amendment to Uganda's telecom regs that would exempt nonprofit digital microwave connections.

When it was over I felt convinced that a ball was rolling downhill that would find its own way without any further encouragement from me. It certainly seemed like a model that is reproducible everywhere in Africa.

In Africa, God knows, there is many a slip twixt the cup and the lip. But now I can get on my plane feeling like I'm part of the solution. And that is all I really want from anything I do.

__ Pinedale, Wyoming __

I lost some things in Africa, including my wallet and my health. And thanks to a light-fingered West African baggage handler with a taste for high technology, I returned to these shores without my new PowerBook and several expensive solar panels.

But not without my optimism.

I also gained some things. Here is what I've learned so far: Everything I knew about Africa was wrong: Africans are almost universally much more technologically advanced than I thought. Electricity and at least some minimal telephones service extend into even the most remote regions (and believe me, Tombouctou is just as remote as its reputation implies).

Despite that, everything I claimed about Africa is right: I am now more convinced than ever that Africans are about to even the score, having been economically and politically redlined for the last 250 years. They "get it," as we digital élitists like to say, almost instinctively. I taught people who could barely read how to use a computer, what the Net is and how it works, and the basics of info-economics in far less time than it would take me to pass the same knowledge to your average member of Congress.

Conrad was also right: Weird shit goes on all over Africa. Really weird shit. The invisible ecology of traditional healers, jungle spirits, and other wild creatures of heart and sexuality is just as dense and fecund as the more visible, carbon-based stuff. Africans have developed what we call the right brain (the intuitive and empathic side) as completely as we have the left. This breeds a lot of emotional weather, both affectionate and violent. In the severely right-brain-starved techno-world most of us live in, this juice will be valuable.

Women are about to take over: Women have been suppressed even more unconscionably all over Africa than they've been in the North, but they also run the economy most places and certainly are more ready to assume control of info-tech. Africa is covered with little private telecom centers with phones booths, fax machines, and a few computers for composing official correspondence. These are invariably run by women. Furthermore, I constantly found myself solicited by young women who seemed much less interested in my currency than the information they might extract from me, which they seem to instinctually recognize might profit them more in the long run than will my dollars.

AIDS gets the headlines, but the Net is spreading even faster: Two years ago, there was scarcely an Internet host between the Sahara and South Africa. But I didn't visit a single country in Africa yet that didn't have a variety of extremely together ISPs. And almost everywhere, fat bandwidth is far easier to come by than in most of Europe.

I am a pig for Africa. I want more. I can hardly wait to get back for a few more cracks at describing the Indescribable Continent, where darkness and light dance so beautifully. While there are, of course, plenty of reasons for caution and even despair in Africa, my giddy theories about the continent's 21st-century info-economic potential seem so true now I can't state them strongly enough.

Wired sent me to Africa to see if my optimism could return intact. I am pleased to say that it is doing better than ever. Ridiculous as this may sound today, it is within my ability to believe that a hundred years from now, historians might call the century we are about to enter the African Century. Am I still optimistic? My optimismometer is pegged, folks.

The bottom line: If I had a ton of money I would invest half of it in machete-and-loincloth-level African telcos. I would also put some large chunk into setting up rural information enterprises that would hire Africans to do everything from data entry and digitizing existing libraries to simultaneous Net translation. Will there be data sweatshops? Probably. But, just as the sweatshops of New York were a way station for families whose progeny are now psychiatrists on Long Island, so, too, will these pass.

Africa, with the right confluence of investment and faith, could easily become the new Bangalore of software. As many have remarked, there is a certain overlap between the ability to make music - one of Africa's prowesses - and the ability to make code. I have never met people anywhere who could learn how to operate a computer more quickly.

I returned from Africa believing that Africans have more to teach us than we have to teach them - about connection, about wholeness, about joy. Hutu and Tutsi notwithstanding, they can teach us how to be human again, because they have kept their empathy and their openness while we were machining ours away. But we must open the conversation.

Let us begin by helping to wire Africa. Now.