The return of bullets and honey

From now on, African Bullets & Honey will be located here.

I think I am going to start blogging again. Yes, definitely. I feel the urge strong upon me, alas.

Bullets & Honey Closed…

Just got back to Addis with a bag of 2007 resolutions, one which is to temporarily close down African Bullets & Honey for a few months. Yes, I am running a stake through the heart of this monster until I can find more time to dedicate to it.

If you feel like taking over it for six months, then just write to me at bulletsandhoney at googlemail.com so that we can get something sorted.

If you have never been to Lamu on the Kenyan coast, then pack your bags and head there. I spent a week in this most beautiful of coastal towns alongside writers and editors attending the Kwani Literary Festival. Things were smoked, others drank and a 24-hour dhow trip to Pate Island made. I came back from a week of not even bothering to read a newspaper to find that Ethiopia had chased the Islamic Courts out of Mogadishu and that Saddam Hussein had been executed in a particularly thuggish manner. So much to blog about but alas…

Next on the menu for this son of the soil is my very first visit to Dubai and India next week and then a few days in South Africa. Of course as all this is happening, I will be struggling to finish my thesis. After all the happy procrastination, I now have exactly nine months to get it done and submitted. So some sacrifices have to be made; one of them – happily for me – is the ravenous, inconsiderate and always hungry for more Bullets & Honey.

Thanks for visiting.

Bring Back the American Draft

The question of whether we need a universal military draft will be important as long as this country is placing thousands of young men and women in harm’s way in Iraq. As long as Americans are being shipped off to war, then everyone should be vulnerable, not just those who, because of economic circumstances, are attracted by lucrative enlistment bonuses and educational says Charles Rangel, the incoming chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee from New York. You can read more here.

The draft is a logical extension of democracy. If a nation is deciding on whether to wage war or not, one of the questions its citizens should have to ask is whether they are ready to step in harm’s way for the aims that their government is pursuing. The war in Iraq for instance is being fought by young people from the poorest backgrounds, many who signed on just because they did not have other economic options, while almost none of their leaders in the White House and Congress have experienced war or even have children in uniform. In fact a large number actively avoided the Vietnam draft and got off by being connected to the high and mighty.

I have so often railed against the state, especially the Kenyan one, on this blog but there is something about this posture that can sometimes be a bit false, particularly if it is in wartime. Let me stay with the United States for a minute. In the most general terms, both the Left and the Right of that country regard their politics to be in some way opposed to the state even as they fight for the right to possess and direct it. Both sides are after all arguably different strains of classical liberalism with its clarion call of individual rights not only pre-existing the state but taking precedence over it.

From the Left comes the rebellion against The Man who is supposed to support the military or use it to not only dominate and control society – the playground of the (vulnerable) progressive individual with his inalienable rights – but also to embark on a violent imperialism abroad. The Right also fights The Man who it supposes to be a be-suited bureaucrat determined to bring the economy – the playground of the profit-maximizing individual to whom private property is virtue – under his malign control. Both sides regard the state warily and want it cut down to size when it does not serve them. The hunger for power by these two broad groupings is ever present, and is really at the heart of their critiques against the state. If you were a Martian and heard either side rail about the evils of state-power, as I have done so often myself, you would think that the state is run by robots or is a very big animal with a will totally disconnected from the politics of the day.

Yet the government, if democracy exists in America, is created and maintained by the interaction between these camps. The government to put it more simply is the people. If it wages war, so do they. So why should the poorest among them, eighteen year olds from trailer parks who sign on to get a college education and a job, have to be shredded by IUDs while the rest sit back and snipe at each other over the actions of the government from their safe seats?

It does not matter that an individual American did not support the war personally; celebrating his country as a democracy means that he implicitly has to own the actions of the present government. Military service and the draft are an extension of democratic citizenship and not to be understood as an extension of Left or Right politics, or for whom you cast your vote, or the anger or delight you feel as news of the war carries to you.

But in politics as in life nothing is so clear-cut. I suspect that my reasoning opens a Pandora’s Box. If indeed the government is the people in a democracy – take or give some problems here or there – then it might make logical sense for civilians to be violently attacked by forces opposed to that nation’s policies. The more robust and realized a democracy is, the thinner gets the boundaries between citizen, military and government. Thus it would make perfect, if heinous and cruel, sense to attack the citizen of a democratic country because you are opposed to his government’s actions.

Friendly Advice to the African Headed to Liberal Arts College America

Congratulations on your acceptance letter my friend. You must now tap into the deep rivers of American survival craft that I, with the help of the wise ones, have fashioned for the better part of a dozen years. You have struggled mightily to gain that visa, found just the right angle to pitch your proposal for a grant (‘I was a child soldier before I went for a sex-change operation and I shed tears for the environment every night’) and you are very clever and have read many books. But, and indulge me in saying this, you are a babe in nappies when it comes to the Herculean challenges facing the African man in his first year at an American liberal arts campus. The bigger your scholarship, the more prestigious the school, the more you need me. For a one-time fee of beers, which I will collect when I next see you, I will let you in on a few of my many secrets of how to keep the winter darkness at bay and your sanity intact. Here are some basics that you may want to keep in mind:

1. Black Man Rage: This is unavoidable on the whole and should be managed carefully. Every once in a while, you will feel a massive surge of anger at a very reasonable stance or action by a white person. Breathe deeply when you feel it coming on and let rip when it first appears. Allowing it to build will only guarantee its nuclear-like proportions when it eventually explodes; better to let it go at grenade stage. BMR, which is a clinically proven state, is brought on by mercy, understanding and a certain slow nodding motion that has been perfected by the white denizens of liberal arts colleges. I could tell you more grasshopper, but you will learn as you feel. There is only one situation in which you must avoid BMR: when you are inevitably stopped by the cops. You will have generously suppressed it earlier only to see it emerge in the presence of an armed man with little compunction shooting terrorists and angry black men.

2. The Drought: You must forget sex for three-six months after your arrival on campus. You will discover that your language of sex (unless it is monetary) sounds like Martian to the co-eds around you. Being a writer and having dreads might allow you to cut some of the Drought period but make no mistake, there shall be a drought. What this will do is increase BMR and can potentially be demoralizing. There is nothing quite like disrespecting people who then refuse to be seduced by you. It crushes even the strongest egos. Even those that the owner did not know they possessed. The Drought will lead you down several wrong paths. It will make you believe for instance that the slow-nodding liberal girl from a small town in California is about to give you action. Nothing could be further from the truth, she is likely of the opinion that you are a diseased pet placed on campus for her entertainment (and here I stop to collect my breath and swallow a sudden, bitter spike of BMR).

3. Collegiality: this is a biggie. The fact that you are going to a college town means that the faculty sets great store by this word, and that they are supposedly proud and committed to teaching. Nothing could be further from the truth. Small towns breed intense jealousies and rivalries that use weapons of exceeding pettiness to win the day. The spoils? You would hardly recognize them but everyone around you will be attuned to nuances that you can barely guess at. My dear, you are a collegial fellow and so this itself might be your saving grace since you will appear to fall straight into line. And a line is what it is. My advice for what it is worth is that you must do occasional writerly huffs and adopt a few eccentricities. Walking barefoot on a snowy day for example will go a long way to excusing your every absence from collegial gatherings.

4. The Smile: the slight movement of the lips that you will confuse with a smile and that will eventually make you wish that you could punch through it. The Smile is a very great danger to the African who is suffering from the Drought and is therefore partial to BMR. You, being collegial, will no doubt initially respond to this movement of the lips with a Sambo type smile that shows a delight that you can hardly explain at the sight of this almost-stranger. When you finally realize that they are not smiling and that it is at best merely a courtesy and at worst a sign of nervousness or fear at your screaming blackness, you will be liable to losing it and going down a particularly bad path. I heard one African scream for a whole afternoon at anyone who moved their lips in said fashion to him.

Let me leave you with just those four items. There will be others should you need or want them. Remember, there is no spoon, it is you that must bend… Peace African, have a good trip. I’ll see you when I come to bail you out.

The courtiers who use isms like machetes and will grind you to dust.

The courtiers who use isms like machetes

In every city, every town and hamlet, there is a small core of men and women who are drawn to the business of proselytizing to their fellows on how best to think or act. They have sought to join courts with no regard to whether they are monarchical, fascist, authoritarian or democratic. What they desire is the pose that is power, to beat their counterparts competition to the throne. I came to these abstract thoughts recently when I was listening to friends of mine praise the efficacy of free markets and the governmental policies needed to maintain this state of affairs. We spoke of informing, educating and cajoling ordinary people to appreciate ‘how markets work’. We raged (with me contributing a lion’s share) at the ignorance and lack of curiosity among people while generously pledging to help find ‘solutions’. Those of an opposite persuasion, among whom I also count not a few friends, speak of the inefficacy of markets and they too seek to inform and empower by educating and advocating for their point of view. The objects of their responsible attentions mill about, ignorant, disempowered, simple minded, blind to real interests according to their saviours. Yet those billions of people know markets intuitively and intimately. They have been buying, selling, exchanging, possessing and being dispossessed every moment of their lives so that their knowledge resides as much in the instinct and unconscious as it does in their diplomas. To them, the market is not the system their self-appointed betters announce they can view from the eagle’s viewpoint. Rather, it is the millions of transactions they conduct: decisions to act driven by past lessons of painful or pleasurable consequences and sometimes by rights and wrongs that are wholly moral.

The courtiers do not allow their ignorance to stand in the way of their fierce competition among themselves to win the right to be the main proselytizer to the people. Ideas are merely weapons in the race to the throne. This is not to say that they are all equally good or bad, or that they are necessarily harmful to the ordinary person. It is to recognise that those who wield them do it more in the fashion of a machete with which they wish to dismember court rivals. It matters not the historical period or the system of government, the court is where the ideas ‘of the (self) anointed’ are deployed. Our broadest and most opposed political categories after all were born when the deputies of the French National Constituent Assembly ranged themselves to the left and right of Louis XVI during that country’s revolution. Absurdity is always present in court: I am told, for instance, that the arrangement of the ‘conservatives’ to the right of Louis or the Speaker and the ‘radicals’ to the left originated from an old custom of a host seating an honoured guests to his right at formal gatherings. Right versus left, fascist versus communist, social democrat versus libertarian, whatever their roots, are mighty war-clubs called isms used by one group of courtiers against another. The rest, meanwhile, sleep, eat, have sex and die, each individual deeply woven into his own material and emotional markets, some which are regulated by some commandment and others in an unregulated flux of pain or pleasure. Each life is a million contradictions, multiple defeats and victories. There is little that is linear in it, even if its owner tries mightily to think it so. Its layers are multiple, their interaction with time not to mention other lives making for such complexity that it is best described as a universe: a whole. Yet the courtiers would have us believe that their idea du jour must be followed by all of us if we are to better understand the system and live better. Their ambition to possess the throne that they believe allows them to make our lives in their image, blinds them to the fact that each of us is a sun in a solar system with billions of planets. Isn’t this self centring how it should be since we only burn for a short while? The reason so many people love pop music or cliché Hollywood films is that we turn the page and eye the film star through the lens of a dynamic and labyrinthine life. So much so that we can even elevate drying, grey paint into great art provided we filter the experience through us. Alas for the courtiers who hold that learned tomes, with their handy advice or diagnosis, are richer in than the inner life of each person. How little their red or green books or manifestos have that is relevant to the totality of my life. Yet observe how much they threaten it with their conceit and determination to replace me as guardian to myself.

To the court’s aspirants, the mass of people remain ignorant though each one is embroiled in an unending transaction of goods, emotion and sensation. Those who would wear the crown disdain the individual life. They only respect those parts of it that can be loaded onto their ism. They are as the knight who would use the sword to introduce new ideas while clearing the path with a scythe of contempt. The victory of the powerful, which initially must be a victory among courtiers, once it leaves the centre to meet its appointed destiny with ordinary people, is nothing less than the denial of their internal human existence. It should come as no surprise that the communists killed as much as the fascists, they were all projects of the powerful striding out of the court and into the hut or the tenement. The solutions of the court are best considered with suspicion by their ostensible beneficiaries. And the time to fear for your individual life is when one group of ism wielders has beaten another for they then turn to you with your ignorant, unscientific and unintellectual life and if left to it will grind it, and probably you, to dust.

Before this happens though, let me turn again to the game at court which is initially one of poses. Power over the mass of people is pretended to exist at all times over all when the house on the hill can scarcely keep up with the goings on in the bush and bed of the peasants’ life. Most courts rarely emerge from their rivalries except to use a public action to consolidate their place in the only contest that matters to them. The ones that manage to win the throne comprehensively, if only for a short time, will be impelled by the momentum from their contest to try and expand the throne to fit into all the public spaces. When that is done, and they have won even that contest, which is no mean feat, they shall clutch at their bloody ism and wield it at the insides of individual lives. They will be for Life and a life, for The Market and not the individual’s varied transactions. The courtier, unable to peer inside the pleb to see how his ism slices and dices, and intent on his own inner voices, shall desire simplification. That is they shall attempt to match their ism with the inner life of most people or at least ensure that it meets no resistance. But people are unable to switch off, to follow the dictates of any ism and so they slip up, and are judged ignorant, unconscious, counter revolutionary or rebellious. Many are killed to ensure the success of this engineering attempt; it is the ultimate simplification. The courtier’s ambitions pursued to their logical extreme require that his life be the only one left on earth. They are driven ultimately by the little voice that never stops promising the sun that it shall become cold and dead soon, no matter how hot it burns now.

The Return of the Prodigal Blogger to His Spurned Mistress

Yes, I have been away. Trying to recover from the sickness, the addiction, that is blogging. On most occasions I sat still for any length of time, my jealous mistress, known to you all as African Bullets & Honey, would sound her plaintive cry: ‘you have not posted today’ she would whine. What was I to do, being weak of will and filled with opinions that my dear loved ones now listen to with sighs of resignation? I had to return, to blog, to bloviate and join the almighty clamour of noise and thought that is blogosphere. Problem is this, I find myself unable to write well academically and otherwise while I am blogging. The feedback loop is so immediate that it becomes more attractive than the other forms of writing which might actually present the tiny hope of paying the bills.

Now where was I when I left off a few weeks ago? Yes, I was in mid-rant about the usual utopianism of the Jeffrey Sachs crew. And I stopped, exhausted at the sheer stupidity of arguing about stupidity. So let me turn to something that I think is far more interesting: Jane Jacob’s studies on the nature and organisation of cities. I am ashamed to say that I first heard of her a couple of months ago; now that I am reading her book – The Death and Life of Great American Cities – I am stunned that I did not come across her sooner. How strange it is to now know what I don’t know after not knowing what I did not know. I grew up in Nairobi and always regarded the steady deterioration in its security to strictly be a matter of lax police work by a corrupt and dictatorial state. While that may be true, Jacob’s studies suggest that there might be more afoot in Nairobbery than poor policing, it could be a matter of the way public and private spaces are apportioned, the lack of mixed use neighbourhoods and the paradoxical impact of the ‘high walls for security’ culture actively reducing the ‘eyes on the street’ which are the key to urban safety. But all this is a post for another day, a flexing of disused blogging muscles…

Why Western Visions of Utopia are Killing Africans

William Easterly writing in Foreign Policy asks: What is utopianism? and goes on to answer that ‘it is promising more than you can deliver. It is seeing an easy and sudden answer to long-standing, complex problems. It is trying to solve everything at once through an administrative apparatus headed by “world leaders.” It places too much faith in altruistic cooperation and underestimates self-seeking behaviour and conflict. It is expecting great things from schemes designed at the top, but doing nothing to solve the bigger problems at the bottom.’ This is the model proposed by the usual idea-challenged and arrogant rock stars alongside their rock star economist partners such as Jeffrey Sachs; all possessed of a feverish utopianism that would have Africans look to them for the solutions to poverty and war. Once again, African Bullets & Honey is home to an anti-Western aid screed. The reason I am so taken with this issue if I may just explain is that I believe fighting the aid industry in its many forms is one of the great moral crusades of our time. Read more of William Easterly’s piece here.

The Ritualistic Cynicism of African Bullets & Honey Navel Gazers

There is a certain Anonymous who has been peppering the comments section with a wake-up-you-navel-gazers message. Below are his or her latest reactions to my cynical take on Live8 and the Make Poverty History campaign.

Anonymous said…
You forgot to mention that all this was inspired by Jeffery Sachs’ report to the UN (he’s the Director of The Earth Institute, Quetelet Professor of Sustainable Development, and Professor of Health Policy and Management at Columbia University. He is also Director of the UN Millennium Project and Special Advisor to United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan on the Millennium Development Goals)?

…but then it’s only generally accepted that he’s the world’s foremost expert on such things as poverty in Africa.

Of course you guys know better than him…

I’m sure he & Kofi Annan are really secretly planning to take over the world…

No more excuses…

Anonymous said…
While academic armchair revolutionaries like some on this thread try to out do each other on a new cynical take on the debt effort people are actually dying. Look closely and there is no difference between the politicians and their tired begging and the navel gazers ritualistic cynicism.

Dear Anonymous,

Thank you for your comments. I am struggling to understand what you have against a little navel gazing or even being an armchair-bound academic – in fact I dare say that it is usually the best place for academics. But I do understand that you are moved by the urgency of the situation, “people are dying” and here I am dithering, questioning, doubting and opposing those like Jeffrey Sachs and Kofi Annan who daily express their concern and outline the latest plan to save Africa. The situation is urgent, but not for increased aid. The urgent task is for Africans to face their governments and demand the kind of leadership we need. The priority is for us to fight for rules of the game that allow us to create more wealth outside the purview of overly centralised governments that keep bulking up at the expense of the citizen due to the constant flow of aid monies into them. For me to argue that Kenya’s leaders – for instance – should stop begging is no excuse. It reflects my conviction that the present course amounts to a kill-me-slowly agenda. For the past few decades – not to even speak of the period since the late nineteenth century – matters have gotten steadily worse in many parts of the continent despite the relentless talk of aid and foreign salvation.

Even your helpful outlining of Jeffrey Sachs resume, meant I suppose to shut me up through the sheer weight of title and prestige, leaves me totally unshaken in my position. If anything it convinces me even more that our destiny left in his hands and of those like him will lead to nothing but more pain. Sachs is that self involved, spotlight seeking creature that Africa has had its fill of; the kind that one writer described as “revolutionaries with a return ticket home”. This is the messiah who ‘saved’ Bolivia, Poland and Russia and has now decided that he will do the same for Africa and the environment – even Jesus would have balked at the work rate. He represents a rent-seeking agenda: issuing from his mouth will always be demands for more foreign aid and more western involvement in Africa because he knows this is what keeps him in the game. The aid business is just that, a business.

Look carefully, and just behind Bono and Geldof are the aid agencies – such as those run by Kofi Annan – and NGOs all promoting new solutions for Africa and playing up the guilt game for all its worth. Africa crises have become the perfect fundraiser. From a few hundred 4×4 driving, high earning aid expats in the 60s to over 25,000 today, the size of the effort keeps growing in direct proportion to the size of African poverty. In May, the World Bank reported that 40% of aid budgets are spent on consultants alone. Of the $50 billion in overseas development aid, consultants make off with $20 billion. Just add to that the cost of running offices and hiring permanent staff, not to mention the five-star hotels, constant travel to exotic locales for conferences and other lavish perks. Action Aid weighed in as well, reporting that almost half of aid is spent before the money even gets to Africa.

You are correct Anonymous: the time for excuses is past. Excuses that there is not enough aid; that our people are too ignorant and unproductive to help themselves; and that without the help of the Sachs and Geldofs of the world we are doomed. They are poor excuses, made too often by the very people who benefit from us remaining mired in poverty and at war. If only that starving kid with the snotty nose and the distended belly knew how many people depend on him for their careers and much needed moral uplift. If he only knew how many westerners he has lifted out of poverty and the multitudes he has supplied a cause. I wish he would feel the awesome swell of the ego that is felt by every passing rock star and Hollywood actress who uses him as a photo op so that he can know that they may be feeding him but that he too is giving them something that they crave.

Finally Anonymous, what is the price and place of pride? Pride in the sense of confidence in one’s innate capacity to be independent and able to thrive. Surely it is this feeling that underlies all achievement, all survival and every demand for justice. Where it has collapsed, the cause has been human – often governmental. It therefore seems to me that the recovery of this sense of independence, this pride, will by necessity involve a showdown between people and their leaders. But the latter would rather direct their people’s attention to outsiders, offering the alternate hope that there is no need to become independent since the Director of The Earth Institute, Quetelet Professor of Sustainable Development, Professor of Health Policy and Management at Columbia University, Director of the UN Millennium Project and Special Advisor to the UN Secretary-General is on the case anyway.

 

 

Graffiti outside the flat that Raskolnikov supposedly lived in. Raskolnikov is the most famous of Dostoevsky’s characters. The dude basically offs old ladies believing that he is beyond the bounds of good or evil, and of course this has made him madly popular among angst-hungry western intellectuals.

 

This is a picture of an African scalp outside Kazansky Cathedral in St. Petersburg. I am living just up the street and have spent an inordinate amount of time seating in a small park next to the cathedral. It was, I am told, built at the beginning of the 19th century by Alexander I. It was during one of the Russian-Turkish wars thus the decision to build a large duplicate of St. Peter’s in Rome to prove that Russia was a serious superpower that Turkey shouldn’t mess with. It amazes me how notions spring up in a Czar’s head and they are brought to life at such horrific costs. One look at the huge looking mass with its dark stones is enough to let you know that folks done died putting it up. Anyway, word is that the project succeeded though I cannot really understand how. The Turks surrendered before the cathedral’s completion and therefore it was decided to not build a southern colonnade to match the northern one facing Nevsky (the main avenue where to be a woman not wearing high heels earns you an instant mob beating).

Now I quote and will put up more pictures the moment I am recovered from my lack of sleep:

In socialist times the cathedral housed the ideologically-slanted Museum of Religion and Atheism and had a graphic Spanish Inquisition exhibition in the basement, complete with a pair of legs jutting out of a cauldron. The current exhibition has a small section (in Russian only) on the history of Catholicism and a larger section on Orthodoxy which includes church art, historical paintings, and various religious knick-knacks.

Field Marshal Mikhail Kutuzov, hero of the Napoleonic War, is buried in the cathedral and there are monuments to him and to General Mikhail Barclay de Tolli in Kazan Square, facing Nevsky. From a certain angle, General Barclay de Tolli seems to be doing something that he shouldn’t be doing in public; this is revenge on the randy general for sleeping with the sculptor’s wife.

The Lazy and Shadowy Blogger

The Lazy and Shadowy Blogger on the way to meet research supervisor, thus in a state of anxiety, insecurity and passive-aggressiveness. Since my newest chapter makes theoretical claims that in London read suspiciously like Frenchie hot air, the strategy was to dress in subdued tones meant to reassure my solidly anglo-pragmatic supervisor that my work was still on track. Long story short: it did not work. Tomorrow the Lazy One flies to St. Petersburg, Russia for two weeks with the vague hope of posting a photo journal of the trip on this blog. 

Bob Geldof lets out the strange mix of profanity and plea making that has become his signature tune. Whenever I catch these so called Africa saviours on TV, the urgency of their appeals and the faux concern they exude always leaves me enraged. They use African poverty and suffering like a prop for already over-large egos. We are helpless beings who cannot survive without the concern of an Elton John (in the background) or a Geldof who has not written a hit song in a decade and yet can save Africa.  

Kenya Held Captive By Elders

Is it just me or is Kenya held captive by people who were born in the 16th Century? Whenever I see pictures such as this one, with an elderly politician or public servant standing in front of microphones, I always suspect that they are saying something vaguely ridiculous. I know it is a bit unfair since I did not have the privilege of listening to The Secretary-General of the Union of Kenya Civil Servants, Mr Alphayo Nyakundi, this time around. But surely a raise of 600% is a bit rich isn’t it? Not that I blame the civil servants for wanting to milk the Treasury what with the MPs going hog-wild with greed.
 

Kenyan Blogger Party in London and Nairobi

I know that many bloggers like to be anonymous on account of their sick thoughts and libellous posts. Be that as it may, I am going to host a small party for Kenyan bloggers at one of my palatial homes in London during the course of July or early August. The point of this meeting shall be simple: to distract me from more important tasks, provide me an excuse to cook coconut milk yams, okra and honeyed roast lamb (hope there’s a cookbook for this) and allow me to generally revel in strangers. Then, if I have the energy, I shall propose a black and white talkies film fest in Nairobi when I get there in late summer. Knowing myself, I shall run out of enthusiasm for this idea in a few hours; but you must admit that it’s not too bad, aye? Of course I get the feeling that a lot of the power of blogging is the opportunity to stay ‘undercover’, so I will not be surprised if only the socially desperate and deranged take up this offer.

Diary of a Mad Kenyan Woman

I have just run across this blog whose first post blew me away. The Mad Kenyan Woman asks: Theoretical Economies: Does Africa Have a Consciousness? Her answer is provocative, mind enlarging and, I must warn you, will make you wish that you had eaten more fish as a kid.

If You Think Africa is Suffering From a Brain Drain, Your Brain is Drained

I am getting sick and tired of this knee-jerk, sanctimonious and yes, stupid Africa-is-suffering-from-a-brain-drain argument. Every week, on one newspaper or the other, I read of a conference to decry the movement of Africans to the West as the latest neo-imperial plot to bring down long-suffering Africa. When they are not after your gold, oil or cobalt, they are after your mind goes the plaintive wail of the unreasoning aid and development industry do-gooders.

I wish they would just shut up, start a business and get some real work done that increases the wealth and security of their countries. Instead, they prefer to play the old ‘White Guilt’ game of joining with the West’s liberals – who make up the bulk of the aid industry – to call for regulations to stop the flow of hopeful people who are trying to do right by their families and themselves. The argument goes something like this: African professionals have been costly to train and are now moving abroad to pursue their professions thus benefiting the West, rather than their home countries which are now suffering the consequences of this migration. What twaddle.

In 2004, Kenyans abroad, just as an example, conservatively remitted at least $600 million to their friends and relatives through official channels such as Western Union. This is only the tip of the ice-berg as a lot more dollars are sent home through other channels. In 2003, the World Bank estimates that remittances by migrants to their (overwhelmingly poorer) countries exceeded $93 billion, twice the level of worldwide official development assistance. There are other estimates trying to account for informal remittance networks that put the figure at $120-$180 billion per annum.

Unlike development assistance transfers – a large proportion of which pays for luxurious NGO lifestyles and lines corrupt politicians’ pockets – migrant remittances go directly to family members. They are available to the recipients to use according to their own priorities and are used to finance basic consumption, education, health, purchasing or building homes, starting businesses and funding retirement.

My mother was a nurse in the UK for nine years before she returned to Kenya last year. She had initially trained as a nurse in the early 1970s, worked at a succession of government hospitals paradoxically managing to get poorer with every year as the cost of living got more expensive and her professional opportunities shrunk. After a decade of this grind, she went into business for herself and eventually ended up competing for small government tenders – a dirty, corrupt business. Every procedure was fraught with either red tape or dishonesty, and she again ended up almost financially insolvent when the government would not pay her for services she had provided.

Her decision to migrate to the UK was a difficult one: she was broke, in debt and two young children, not to mention my grandmother and a sickly sibling, were dependent on her. She moved to Kent in her mid-forties with kids in tow; having to re-qualify as a nurse by starting at the very bottom of the rung; and not knowing how to drive and unable to even afford a car, had to walk 6-7miles each way to her first £6 per hour nursing home job.

She was forced to often work 80-hour weeks, while meals tended toward baked beans and curry deliveries punctuated by intense worrying about Britain’s youth culture destroying her children. Few were the moments that were not stressful. Opening the post was a nightmarish affair; it was always a bill demanding more money and too rarely a cheque in her name. I can remember her calling me once almost in tears when she realised that she owed the BBC £100 for its compulsory license fee even though she could not remember the last time she had managed to put up her feet to watch ‘Celebrity Big Brother’. But through these travails, she scrimped and saved, and took some advanced nursing courses to qualify for better paying work. Eventually, having been offered a part-time postgraduate place at one of the better universities, she was finally able to come into her own.

The hours remained long but in the final three years before she happily returned to Kenya, they had become far more lucrative. She was now earning £20-30 per hour by working for nursing agencies. This enabled her to buy a property to rent, paid down her mortgage in Kenya and put my brother and sister through university. The former studying astrophysics with the dare-you-doubt-me intention of being the first Kenyan to go to space, while the latter reads international relations with giddy plans to change our country’s political landscape. But my mother’s achievements were not limited to Britain’s shores. She invested her money in Kenya by buying land, supported her mother and brother and provided financial assistance to dozens of friends and relatives during her nine years away. This, we are supposed to believe, represents a brain drain and a sort of imperialist plot. If it does, then I am all for brains draining with all speed and would love to hug imperialism.

The alternative discussed in the ever ongoing conferences bemoaning the brain drain is that my mother had remained in Kenya, getting poorer and perhaps eventually being one of those trades-people that the government treats like criminals when it is not taxing them punitively. Headlines and distinguished dignitaries in the all-knowing aid industry call for the governments that made my mother’s hopes untenable in Kenya and forced her to seek greener pastures abroad to be responsible for regulating and “encouraging” less brain drain. Every such pronouncement draws a bitter laugh from me.

The Kenyan state has routinely devalued and destroyed the aspirations of its citizens with its high taxes, over centralisation, arrogance and criminal conduct. It is akin to the colonial state that we supposedly got rid of 41 years ago though now staffed with black faces whose mouths spout a hypocritical nationalism that enriches them at the expense of those like my mother.

I am weary of the brain drain argument. It belongs to donor and NGO conferences, not to the real lives of those who must live by their wits and effort as opposed to a cheque from Western taxpayers. Those who bandy the argument are relentlessly statist and even now have their eye on remittances that they believe can be directed better by government and development organisations than by the people who earn them. It is an argument beloved by middle class paternalists in hock to donor money and who believe that without those who have left, everything at home will fall apart – it is nonsense of the worst kind.

They make the case not because they believe it, but because they are paid to. Most have been abroad and even worse, make the argument while in London or Washington or Paris. Not for my mother the benefit of migration, but for them who are in the United Nations or Oxfam, being abroad to pursue their vulturous careers based on beggardom is just fine. Ultimately, they choose to not appreciate that people own their own lives and the fruits of their labour belong to them to utilise as they wish provided it does not harm others.

The obvious response to the sentiments I have expressed is that African governments paid for the training of (health) professionals so people such as my mother owe something to the system. This argument, which infuriates me whenever it is made, ignores the fact that most professional who leave their countries do so after years of trying to make a go at home while paying their taxes the whole time. My mother had been a taxpayer for a quarter century before she left. And finally, shocking news to the brain-drained developmentalists: you have failed.

Four decades of your hot air, smugness, arrogance, paternalism and poverty of ideas have only built on equally vacuous colonial legacies to leave many people in Kenya and Africa reduced to a brutish existence that does not reflect their effort, flexibility and hope. Stop bemoaning the brain drain and start thinking of how to use your brain better.

(c) MMK

Ryszard Kapuscinski: The Literary Vulture Circling African Suffering

I am not for disguising the violence and poverty that afflicts parts of Africa – in fact I am for it enough that I am writing a doctoral thesis on the place of genocide in political life by studying Rwanda. But I know that I am not the only one who is sick and tired of these European writers who come to Africa to wax on about bloodthirsty militias, corrupt and stupid officials, and, of course, good hearted prostitutes. Certainly all these observations are true, and to a large extent I agree with them. What I hate though, is how Africa for too many European writers and humanitarians is merely a mirror to confirm their superior humanity.

Africa’s importance to the world is not the minerals under its soil or its markets, as many neo-lefty types would contend. Its real resource is its misery and that is what writers like Ryszard Kapuscinski chase so feverishly. They are joined in this quest by the other ambulance chasers, the international NGOs and donor agencies, all united in their vulture-like need of the hungry and oppressed. See below as Binyavanga Wainaina, the founding editor of Kwani?, Kenya’s acclaimed literary journal, takes on the vultures. He starts with quotes from some of Kapuscinski’s more famous works. The next posting – ‘Binyavanga’s Rage in Manhattan’ will include his powerful rant which gave me goose pimples. Also see my previous posting (Misericonomics) on just this issue. Some Quotes by Ryszard Kapuscinski about Africa and Africans:

Extract from Granta 48 Africa Issue:

The European mind is willing to acknowledge its limitations, accept its limitations. It is a sceptical mind. The spirit of criticism does not exist in other cultures. They are proud, believing that what they have is perfect.

Extracts from Shadow of the Sun:

Let us remember that fear of revenge is deeply rooted in the African mentality.

The European and the African, have an entirely different concept of time.

In Africa, drivers avoid traveling at night darkness unnerves them they may flatly refuse to drive after sunset.

… in Africa a cousin on your mother’s side is more important than a husband.

The kind of history known in Europe as scholarly and objective can never arise here because the African past has no documents or records, and each generation, listening to the version being transmitted to it, changed it and continues to change it…