ForestBoard

The heat is nothing short of oppressive as I make my way through the courtyards of Northwest Aa District Software Collective #14. The surfaces of the buildings are mostly covered in solar panels while the paving between them is a bright and contrasting white. The walkways travel through beds of small trees, shrubs and aromatic flowering plants. Everywhere is pedestrianised - there are no cars in Uan aa Boa. In a wider space twenty or so teenagers, boys and girls together, are playing kogo. I don't understand the rules but it looks like a cross between hockey, kendo and tag. The players glisten with sweat but seem otherwise untroubled by the temperature. I feel exhausted simply watching.

The medical centre is a 4 storey cubic building. Stepping through its open doors I'm disappointed to find it only slightly cooler. While the Boani computing industry no doubt has plenty of equipment to cool its servers, air conditioning for people is as unheard of as cars. I'm here to meet Joseph Wangui, the commune's assistant pharmacist. The receptionist keys in a message and, moments later, he comes rapidly down the staircase looking ridiculously cool in his white shirtsleeves. He shakes my hand enthusiastically and politely enquires about my journey.

Now in his late 20s, Joseph has worked at the centre since joining the commune as a newly qualified pharmacist. His partner Meliah is expecting their first child. It seems a strange profession for an IT collective to employ, but the commune has its own health centre, schools and many other facilities so as to be almost self-contained, a village in the heart of the city. Almost half of the commune's 2000 adults work in roles that having nothing to do with its main business of developing and maintaining the government's preferred compiler program. Joseph didn't ask to come here. He was posted by the government without being consulted, but in changing times for this communist nation he could now decide to leave.

"I always knew as a student that I would be sent where my skills were needed," he explains in strongly accented but perfect English. "Each commune needs only 2 or 3 pharmacists, so that could have been anywhere." Wasn't he sorry to be made to leave the collective he grew up in? "The pharmacist there is a young woman," he explains, "there would not be a vacancy for many years. Perhaps if I had been more interested in engineering..." His parents belong to a commune that manufactures semiconductors.

The economy of Uan aa Boa is ruthlessly controlled by the artificial intelligences that administer the Ninth Economic Plan. Autonomous and centralised software systems issue each commune with continually updated instructions regarding what to produce and where to send it. As part of a new government reform programme opaquely called A Gift of Wings, however, that centralised control now ends at the commune gates, with human decisions in the local community determining how best to fulfil those computerised instructions. Crucially that means that the commune hires its own people, leaving workers like Joseph free to negotiate a transfer without the involvement of central planning.

I ask Joseph whether he thinks that in reality the machine intelligences would organise the commune more efficiently. "Perhaps," he replies, "if the people who worked here were machines too. We learnt from previous attempts in places such as China that it is a mistake to collectivise at too large a level. Farmers who were accustomed to growing their own food with a small surplus to sell were told they would be able to eat from communal supplies regardless of what they produced. The result was that they stopped producing. It was foolish, but people are people. If all our actions were determined by the Plan the same thing might happen to us." Like most Boani speakers of English, Joseph is formal and never abbreviates anything.

"In the same way, if I worked in the West I would no doubt be employed by some enormous company, and the result of my work would be profit for its shareholders. I would not really care if those profits were large or small. Here, though, I work for my neighbours and friends. I know the people who come to the Centre by name, and the whole commune succeeds together when we meet or exceed our production quotas. A person will always work hardest for their tribe."

This doesn't constitute anything like a free market in the normal sense of the term, but isn't just in the organisation of workplaces that the central government is taking a step back. The judicial system is also being left almost entirely for communes to deal with themselves. The same meetings that decide work rotas and organise communal leisure activities are now acting as judges and juries essentially as they see fit, without legal training. In the absence of prisons, however, the most severe sentence they can impose is expulsion from the commune.

What happens to those expelled is not entirely clear - rigid social structures mean that life without a commune is extremely difficult. In a nation with very low crime rates this doesn't involve a huge number of people, but there are rumours of state run "default" communes that are said, in practice, to be little more than prison camps. Reliable information is hard to come by - there have been a small number of online testimonies by people who claim to have passed through this system but they're hard to substantiate and often sensationalist. No official information exists.

I ask Joseph if the possibility of being exiled by his neighbours, without recourse to a legal system, concerns him. Isn't there a risk of local feuds and victimisation getting out of hand? He shrugs. "In the end, it depends on whether you trust ordinary people to manage their own affairs. Here in Uan aa Boa, we do." But what of the possibility of people who haven't committed a crime being driven out of mainstream society? "I have seen the statistics for prisoners and for poverty, unemployment and addiction in your country," Joseph replies. "What did all these people do to be pushed to the margins? Often no more than being born into a poor home, or being of the wrong race, or becoming ill or losing their job at the whim of wealthy investors. Forgive me, but I do not think it is the place of the West to give us lectures."

The kogo players have vanished into the dusk as Joseph walks with me towards the station. Pungent spices scent the air as people make their way toward the communal canteen. The meal is scheduled to be followed by a discussion group on postcolonial theory and an e-sports tournament. As on other visits to this enigma of a country I'm struck by how quiet a city without traffic actually is. People seem calm and serious, but with a hint of underlying resolve absent in other nations. Not for the first time I wonder what they might be capable of if roused.