Africa's new class of power players

"That was a time where you simply could not do business without having to pay someone," says Makatiani, a handsome one-time track-and-field champion who today favors dapper suits and conservative ties. "But we didn't want to pay someone. We didn't want to join that club. It was like being part of the mafia."

But he also knew that he could not yell and scream and demand things in Nairobi that were par for the course in Cambridge - like getting a working phone line if he paid his bills. With the help of a colleague's influential father, Makatiani created a politically well-connected board of directors that began lobbying on Africa Online's behalf, protecting it from unfair demands and steering it toward helpful partners.

"What we had to do was educate [government bureaucrats and suppliers]. There are a lot of people around who have power but who are poor - trying to get a piece of the action. But we refused to cut corners," he says. If his group had started handing out bribes, he says, they would never have seen the end of it.

"Perhaps we were a little bit naive in those early days at Africa Online," he chuckles. "We wanted to stick to our guns. We might have been richer quicker, but I am not in the business of short-term advantages. And I have always been able to sleep at night."

"It will be men and women like Makatiani who will create the wealth that pulls Africa into the developed world," Red Herring, the respected technology magazine, wrote last year. "His company is treading where diplomacy has failed, confronting problems that have thwarted powerful international agencies, and slowly progressing toward its goal of creating a single market out of Africa's 800 million people."

For every African who goes abroad and returns with professional expertise and grand visions, there are many more who don't come back. According to the International Organization for Migration and the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa, brain drain has been steadily increasing. Between 1960 and 1975 an estimated 27,000 highly qualified African professionals left their home countries. Between 1985 and 1990, the number was up to 60,000 - and Africa has been losing an average of 20,000 annually ever since. These figures do not include the sizable number of students who leave to study overseas - and haven't yet decided whether they will ever return.

If they do, many can be quickly defeated. Corruption bankrupts some. Others are knocked down by poverty, entrenched traditions, AIDS, or tribal warfare.

In 1994, Chris Kayomba was a refugee in Uganda, halfheartedly studying journalism, watching dead bodies flow into Lake Victoria, and dreaming of the day he would go home to Rwanda and make a fresh start.

More than 50 of Mr. Kayomba's relatives - brothers, sisters, aunts, cousins - were killed during the 100 days of genocide in Rwanda. In all, 800,000 people died in the ethnic cleansing.

When the genocide finally ended, Kayomba took a taxi back home to Kigali and, just shy of age 30, got together with some friends to try to do something about repairing the country. They started Umuseso, Rwanda's first daily opposition paper. Umuseso, derived from the Kinyarwanda word for "daybreak," was going to be something fresh, they told themselves. In a land scarred by Tutsi and Hutu tribal hatred, their paper was going to offer straight talk about ethnicity and government - "and Manchester United," adds McDowell Kalisa, a senior editor who also moonlights as the British soccer team's Rwanda fan-club director.

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