Ideas In The Sky

Jonathan Ledgard believes a wild imagination could save the world.

- Ben Taub

In a clearing in rural Somalia, a jihadi commander sat in a white plastic chair, stroking a dik-dik, an antelope the size of a cat. His men escorted two British journalists into the clearing and sat them under an acacia tree. The commander, who had offered safe passage and a rare interview, released the dik-dik, which scuttled off into the bush.

Dik-diks are hard to catch but easy to shoot, and for this reason one of the journalists, Jonathan Ledgard, who was the East Africa correspondent for The Economist, later described the battle against these jihadis, known as the Shabaab, as “the dik-dik war.” The commander began a lecture on the supremacy and fairness of Islamic law, jabbing his finger at the sky. But Ledgard barely noticed; he was looking at the array of mobile phones that the commander had laid out in front of him. It was 2009; the digital world was becoming enmeshed with the physical world, accessible in a place where the environment could hardly sustain human life. “You could receive money through a wire transfer, but you could not keep your child alive,” Ledgard later wrote. He realized that nothing the man had to say— nothing that anyone had to say about the conflict—was as essential to understanding the transformation under way in the region as the fact that the phones had perfect reception.