The Slavery in Our Midst: The Nairobi House Maid

There is much I could say about modern-day slavery in Mauritania, Niger and Sudan. But let me instead turn to the dirty little secret that so many of us Kenyans know but maintain a studied silence about. Yes, I am talking about the lot of the ‘mboch’, the housie, the maid, in good old Nairobi. It is common knowledge that many housemaids in genteel middle class Nairobi are never paid a wage; it is their parents, or ‘auntie’ who receives the pittance that they are owed every month. Anyone who has lived or visited the city for any length of time also knows that it is not uncommon to have ten-year olds doing the washing, cleaning and cooking for an entire family while enduring a steady diet of slaps and kicks. And I do not exaggerate when I point to the high frequency of maid rape in many households. If you ask your typical Nairobi ‘babi’ or middle class boy what his first sexual encounter was, he will spin a tall tale about the ‘older girl who lived just up the road’. Wrong. The first encounter, and the second and the third, is more often than not with the maid. She is shared among the boys in the house, their friends in the neighbourhood sometimes and very often the man of the house who after dropping off the kids and wife to school in the mornings, will sneak back for a quick one. This sexual access is usually procured forcefully with the implicit threat that for the maid to resist will result in instant dismissal. Here’s a little clue for HIV/AIDS health workers who decry the transmission of the disease from philandering husband to wife: it is the maid who is at the centre of a domestic sexual web that runs through the sons and their father, not to mention any other lovers she may take. This is of course not to blame her, it is to recognise that the helplessness that attends many maids – relentlessly mistreated, isolated from friends and family, and economically disempowered – exposes them to the malign actions of a class of people whose upward aspiration is often marked with a immense contempt for their ‘inferiors’. What dirty little secrets I am airing, and it is the most delicious post I have written in a while. When I have levelled contempt at the babi – a category that I unfortunately fall into though in traitorous fashion – I have only spoken about the public arena. But it is in the home that the moral contracts that underlie Kenyan life can be seen most clearly. Observe and recognise the pervasive violence, the disregard for the rights of the individual and the abiding conviction that might makes right. It is the oppressions in our homes that have made it impossible for us to consistently and successfully fight the oppressions of the dictators who have sat at State House or the injustices of the state. We moan and groan about the burdens of colonialism when right in our homes, or those of our friends, we have a cosy little ‘memsahib and bwana mkubwa’ system on the go.

To extend this washing of Kenya’s dirty laundry in public where it belongs, here is a chat room exchange on this issue. I will share just a few of the disgusting entries:

“nani hapa ashaimanga mboch wao cause it was so sweet mpaka even though i lost my uvirgo to her.” (who here has eaten (had sex with) a maid cause it was so sweet even though I lost my virginity to her)

“Am sure the rest of the people who did what you did aren’t as proud…how did u even start…yaani how did u even get hard in the first place….mboch….have integrity bana.Ama u can’t vibe a gal? Sweetie hebu mweleze huyu ndugu asiwe kama dude…”

“Lets cut to the chase people…how many here have done their mboches? (pop, is that ur hand i see raising?)”

“hehehehe…i think it is sweety! i think it is!”

Yes, it’s True, There are Slaves in Niger…

So here we have it. The latest call for food aid to an African country is by Niger, which coming under the usual media spotlight has been revealed to be a country in which human bondage is alive and well. Anti-Slavery International, a London-based human group, reckons that there are 43,000 slaves in Niger. These slaves, even when freed, are part of a stigmatized and legally unprotected class to the extent that their former masters or parents’ masters have often laid claim to their property.

Just two years ago, in 2003, Niger amended outlawed slavery, ruling it a crime punishable with up to 30 years in prison. The Economist reports that a chieftain in western Niger, faced with this jail term, offered to free 7,000 slaves held by him and his clansmen in a public ceremony. But the government in the week leading to the March 5th event feared that such a large release of slaves would draw international attention to the filthy trade’s existence in Niger. It declared that slavery does not exist in Niger and the ceremony was cancelled.

The problem gets worse when you consider that slavery also exists in Chad, Mali, Sudan and Mauritania. Woe to those who believe that this trade is at an end as I had for many years. Most of us associate slavery with the transatlantic trade that fed the plantations of the Americas and ended in the 19th century. If only it were so. Slaves still exist and many never left on a ship but were enslaved in Africa.

Of course I need not announce the moral vacuum that exists among us provided there are still people in chains, owned as property by others. I need not ponder why a country such as Niger is suffering famine when it has in its midst such an abundance of evil that has been translated into an economy that is the second poorest on the planet. Surely, in a world whose wealth and security has been enjoyed by those countries with the greatest protection of the individual’s rights, it is not strange that a slaveholding nation should turn to the world to feed and clothe it.

This issue depresses and infuriates me. What am I to do? Where are the Edmund Dene Morels of our time, the African versions especially? We have a Kenyan Nobel Prize winner running around decrying the cutting down of trees; an AU that says that Africa is ready to manage her own problems (with Western cash of course); billions of dollars in aid; Commissions for Africa; rock star concerts to Make Poverty History; a massive evangelical movement that announces to all and sundry that it is proof of a moral awakening; and yet here is slavery alive and well among us.

“For God’s Sake, Please Stop the Aid!”

I just had to put up this interview of my good friend James Shikwati (Director of the Inter Region Economic Network – IREN) who was being interviewed by Der Spiegel on German aid to Kenya. It is not very different from the stuff that has been on these pages often in the past, but I loved it for James’ outraged and uncompromising tone. Click here to go to the interview.

The History of Kissing

Of course you’ve been kissing and in so many ways too if you think of it for a moment. You have shared kisses of veneration; of peace; perhaps conferred them on religious images, relics or idols; and maybe been ‘lucky’ enough to kiss the Pope’s foot or bestowed one by your superior. It may well have come during your college graduation as you were handed your degree; perhaps from your lover; or it may have been the lustful and adulterous kiss that one wishes they shared with their lover; or the one exchanged by couples sealing their marriage vows. It could even have been the kiss of reconciliation; the contagious kiss; or even the kiss of a Judas. Keith Thomas goes exploring this exchange of saliva, dirt and intimacy.

Are the Lovers of Harry Potter Narcissists?

This is the question that Spengler asks in an Asian Times review of the latest Harry Potter installment – Half Blood Prince (which incidentally I hope you buy using the link to Amazon on this page…)

Spengler has this to say to those such as myself who love the Harry Potter series:

“It may seem counter-intuitive, but complacency is the secret attraction of J K Rowling’s magical world. It lets the reader imagine that he is something different, while remaining just what he is. Harry (like young Skywalker) draws his superhuman powers out of the well of his “inner feelings”. In this respect Rowling has much in common with the legion of self-help writers who advise the anxious denizens of the West. She also has much in common with writers of pop spirituality, who promise the reader the secret of inner discovery in a few easy lessons.”

Read on the for rest of this fascinating review: Spengler

Africans and the European Soul

Are the Formerly Colonised Set To Colonise Their Colonisers?
(A speculation)

It has come to my delighted attention that African churches are increasingly sending missionaries to the United Kingdom. And that the declining number of British volunteers joining the Catholic priesthood – in Wales for instance – has meant that African priests are increasingly taking over rural parishes. This crisis of belief, if it can be so termed, is so pervasive that churches are closing daily which means that the trend of an Africanised priesthood is only likely to grow. In the cities, London being a fine example, African Protestant and charismatic churches are also growing apace, seeking to emulate their counterparts on the continent.

We are entering an era when the welfare of the European soul shall be in the hands of the African. Europe has always had a peculiar need for Africa as a guiding light to its self awareness. The two, African and European, in the latter’s mind at least, have occupied opposed sides of a binary divide for the last couple of hundred years: black vs. white; stupid as opposed to intelligent; savage vs. civilised; backward vs. forward; lazy vs. industrious…

That Europe has become more secular is public knowledge, as is the rise of state power at the expense of the church. Cardinal Murphy-O’Connor, the Archbishop of Westminster, the leader of the Catholic Church in England and Wales, recently argued that ‘christianity is close to being vanquished’ and has little influence on government or the public here.

One of the founding ideas of colonialism, and slavery before it, was the state of the soul: Africans were supposed to have none while Europeans were blessed with a hefty, healthy one. But this duality has been turned on its head. No sooner had some wise men in the late nineteenth century concluded that the African indeed did have a soul – a donor driven plot if there was ever one – that Europeans started denying the existence of theirs. As always, our opposed positions had to be maintained.

With its back to the wall, the Catholic Church is now speaking of the need to re-evangelise the West. A meeting of over 100 bishops in 2004, sponsored by the Vatican, discussed a strategy of clergy exchanges to address the crisis. Africans having plentiful manpower in their rapidly growing churches would fill the gap in Europe while small numbers of European clergy provision Africa with their greater pastoral experience. This of course merely represents the last gasp of a European church that is suffering from a colonial hangover and that imagines itself to be the center. The re-evangelising of the West shall not come under its auspices.

The Africans who shall increasingly take up pastoral duties here will be off-shoots of their home churches. They shall reflect a conservatism and syncretism that shall be unlike anything else the European Christian has ever encountered. Gone will be the sleepy little churches that dot the countryside and welcome to the drive to create super churches that lay claim to large areas of their parishioners’ lives. The Nigerian priest in Wales will look toward the African Diaspora in the cities first and then to Nigeria for inspiration of how to conduct his pastoral duties. The local church, low on morale, and the state secularised to the point of ignoring the Christian church as a possible source of opposition (all state eyes will be on the mosque), will offer no counter balance to the most potent African presence there has ever been in Europe. The African evangelist – many who are now being funded by congregations in Africa – will be here to lay claim to the European soul.

Let me try and extend this wild speculation.

Europeans have steadily transformed their institutions into rational-bureaucratic models that are far less reliant on charismatic power than they used to be. The church which historically laid claim to bureaucratic power on the basis of its hold of the charismatic-transcendental realm has seen the both these positions undermined fundamentally. The African church, on the other hand, whether Catholic or Protestant, is only in the early stages of its rise: its claims to domination of the charismatic-transcendental or the soul are unlimited and are supported by more people every year. Soon I suspect its boundaries will begin to bump up against those of the African state which being weak and lacking strong ideological or moral foundations shall be absorbed ever more into it. The church’s innate drive to expand, under the banner of evangelisation, will have a huge impact on Europe. The entry of African priests, immigrants and missionaries will be lead to their domination of the terms under which the soul and its salvation can be approached by individual Christians. No longer will the division between church and state be automatically assumed; no longer will the European state have a beaten and pliant church to co-exist with. It will be dealing with a dominant, dominating force.

Since this is an out-there speculation, surely there is no harm in extending it slightly.

Let us for a minute assume that the increasing pilgrimages by European Christians to churches in Africa is the leading trend of an amazing rebound in the European public’s desire for spiritual nourishment (just look at Madonna and Kabbalah, and the energy of the American southern Baptists). If this happens, as the African church grows in Europe, the binary nature of the two groups shall once again be on show. You will see on one hand an African led soul-revival that shall in effect be the anti-power to the bureaucratic-rational forms of European state power. It shall be power vs. anti-power; state vs. church; and utility vs. transcendence.

The image of Africa in Europe, as a place of darkness, has always relied on more than the image of death and suffering that has been such a large part of its historical experience. This image in the European imagination has been attributed to the African lacking a soul or possessing a perverted one. Now, the growth of the African church in the vacuum left by its European counterpart will overturn this idea of darkness. Africa’s problems, increasingly part of the European public’s ‘we can help and its not fair’ posture, will, in combination with the upsurge in the fortunes of the church, take on a kind of holy aspect.

Meanwhile, Europe’s secularism and tortured anti-materialist, you-can-believe-and-do-anything rhetoric has the effect of consigning it to spiritual darkness or nihilism. And at least one bridge to the light shall be provided by Africans and their churches. From the historical position of Europeans using African misery and ‘savagery’ as a measure of their affluence and ‘civilisation’, we shall move to a Europe whose definition of its fallen soul is reliant ona comparison to Africa’s enlightened one.

Though this will not necessarily mean that the tangible forms of Europe’s state power will be African or answer to Africa’s political institutions, it will nevertheless be a colonisation of the European in that part of the contest that has always mattered the most between this ying and yang relationship: the soul.

That brings this speculation to an end. I enjoyed it seeing as I was procrastinating all afternoon and had no ready access to other entertainments.

Dr. MMK or: How I Learned to Start Worrying and Hate the PhD

I have slept only about three hours in the last few days as I struggle to finish a chapter of my so-called doctorate. Being the master procrastinator that I am, I have spent a substantial amount of this time on this very blog as I am doing now … sigh.

I can now announce to all and sundry that I hate my thesis. It is the most loathsome, evil and uncooperative little shit that has ever existed. I have been in a book filled, stuffy room all weekend swearing to it that it better behave or I shall refuse to cooperate should it ever want to be published. Bugger!

I just do not see how I can actually produce 55,000 more words. I keep checking the word counter every two minutes only to find that what I have already written is shrinking as I edit. Oh, the woe of it all. Now what am I to do? Where shall I find nice, thick footnotes?

Then there is this little issue of needing to be original. When I first started this torture it sounded grand; like the type of thing that I had been wishing to do throughout my school life. Well that is all in the past now. The demand for scholarly originality is one of the most fiendish S&M rituals ever invented. How was I to realise that other than exercises in word play that no one cared for and the claim to slivers of meaningless intellectual territory, there is actually very little that the average doctoral student produces? My friends were all in on the joke and I can see their cute little faces sniggering away. “Kima, you belong in grad school” they said in serious we-love-you tones. And I ate it all up, all of it, every single morsel. But I’m not angry, I shall get even by encouraging every unsuspecting sucker I know to sign up for a doctoral programme and then I will seat back and laugh my head off. Hahahahahahahahahaha…

I gave up a good income, free weekends, and vacations for this. How is that for having my head up my a#$^? Well, let me get back to it now. If I never blog again, just know that it is because I have made a solemn pledge to never write another word or read another book. I shall then have become what I now regard as the most blissfully happy creature on earth: illiterate, apathetic, materialistic and suffering from attention-deficit disorder brought on by the sheer amounts of TV and Hollywood films consumed.

Tonight I sleep. Tomorrow, being the great self deluder, I shall no doubt rise with the normal megalomania that has me winning the Nobel by 45 and getting offered dozens of prestigious chairs in philosophy the moment I am done with this chapter.

The Escalation of the Will: Western Power in an Age of Symbols

Since September 11 2001, the March 2004 Madrid bombings and last week’s attacks in London, the West, led by America, has been in a war of wills. It little understands the nature of this war but has waged it fiercely with unparalleled military and economic might. The opponents, the remnants of al Qaeda and other international terrorist groups understand that they cannot parry the physical means of the US and have instead opted for a symbolic showdown. America and the West are losing this war.

The more they draw on superpower means, in the material sense, the faster their fortunes will decline. Two centuries after Carl von Clausewitz warned of the escalatory nature of war, which inexorably leads to the total employment of all resources to striking an enemy, Western military and political leaders still regard this escalation as mostly physical.

However, this is not so when battling terrorists driven by ideas that they believe are transcendent and rooted in the moral domain. For such an enemy, escalation is a matter of the will and the resulting violence is largely symbolic despite its human costs. The aim is not to ‘win’ in the traditional military sense, but rather to display that the material and secular responses of the West are inadequate when arrayed against the moral will. This is why the suicide bomber – of whom there might have been some in London on 7/7 – is such a potent symbol for his aim is to draw a direct comparison to the F-16 and the B2 bomber.

Westerners regard their political communities to be the most morally upright on the planet. Terrorist attacks have the consequence, and perhaps intention, of drawing a response that clashes with this self image. In the many wars that America has fought in the last century, its defeats have come when there has been a sustained collision between its ideals and its actions. This is why Guantanamo Bay and the revelations of torture at Abu Ghraib buoy the terrorists since they read like the signposts to defeat.

In the twentieth century, the moral space in war steadily increased in importance; losing legitimacy at home or abroad now hastens defeat. Reports from Iraq – of Abu Ghraib, civilians killed at roadblocks or the common video shot of the grieving mother – directly bear on the battle to possess this moral space. U.S. soldiers acting as many invaders have throughout history have nevertheless revealed in powerful symbolic terms the tension between America’s rhetoric and its actions.

The contradiction has sapped American will in the sense of lowered civilian support for the occupation and revealed the vulnerability of its self image to the real world costs of superpower. The beheadings of westerners, 9/11 and the London attacks bear a simple message: with only blades and belief, the world of the powerful can be unmade. It is strange that America, a country noted for its mass export of movies about rich, high-tech bad guys with a penchant for hypocrisy always defeated by the under-resourced everyman, finds the connection between symbols and real world outcomes so difficult to grasp. By ceding the political direction of the war to the Pentagon, the U.S. is now acting like the bad guy who lovingly strokes an irresistible weapon even as the imprisoned hero is dreaming up an unlikely reversal involving a wooden stake and a huge dose of faith.

War is produced and sustained by a trinity of forces that exist in a state of constant interaction: the heart, the hand and the mind. These are present not only in the individual soldier, but also in society as a whole. The heart represents the passions of the civilian populace, the feelings of hostility and antagonistic intention. The hand is used to physically eliminate the enemy’s forces, it symbolizes the military. The mind stands for reason, which Clausewitz argued governs all war since to take the field according to his famous dictum was to pursue politics by other means. The U.S. needs to carefully consider the balance between these forces since its opponents’ trinity is balanced in an entirely different fashion.

George Bush’s forces are supremely prepared to use the hand – witness the array of high-tech weapons and the administration’s huge increase of the military budget. But it is in the heart, that this effort will be won or lost. Those who attacked London, like the 9/11 bombers, understand that they cannot mount a ladder of escalation based on the means of the hand. The escalatory logic they are engaged in is based on symbolically demonstrating their greater will to prevail, and the West’s moral vacuity. The real war then is not of Western soldiers versus terrorists, it is between the heart and the hand or between symbol and object.

So what is the state of America’s heart? For too long, America’s conduct has deviated from its ideas about itself: ‘we are good, non-imperial folk who everyone wants to emulate’ goes a common refrain. When the realpolitik policies of a Kissinger are considered, it has made for a nation sometimes profoundly at odds with itself; with dishonesty at its heart. It is this dishonesty that is the terrorist’s greatest weapon. It allows even those who do not support terrorists to say “the chicken has come home to roost.” Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo strike Americans as un-American while the rest of the world, observing the action and reaction, sees a bully’s hypocrisy.

The way forward need be rooted in a vigorous self honesty and not in the blinkered approach that so many politicians believe Americans need. When it comes to civil liberties for example, the Bush administration must be honest enough to admit that living in an open society means terrorists will manage to periodically carry out successful strikes. Most people are prepared to take this risk rather than live in the security provided by authoritarian government. Soldiers who are found guilty of abuses in Iraq and elsewhere must be prosecuted fully and the chain of responsibility pursued to its ends no matter how high up it travels. Lies and self deception never made for a lion’s heart, which America needs for this fight.

For America to out-escalate the terrorists in this war of the wills, a clear sense of right is needed. And for that to be reached, an abiding notion of wrong must also be determined. Not only the wrongs of others but, just as importantly, those of the United States itself. By admitting mistakes in the War Against Terror and refusing to lie in bed with dictators, America’s moral purpose shall be clarified and strengthened. Then it will be left to the hand, the military, supported by a population whose will is strengthened, to hunt down the terrorists who using only box cutters challenged America’s honesty.

© MMK

Gordon Brown Announces 25.5% of UK Budget To Be Spent On African Aid

(Report from the Reuters Wire Service)

Gordon Brown, Britain’s famously ambitious Chancellor of the Exchequer, yesterday announced that aid flows to Africa will be raised from 0.47% of the UK national budget to a whopping 25.5%. This will be effective immediately. Speaking at the Make Poverty Campaign Rally in Trafalgar Square, Brown emotionally announced that for too long Africans have suffered from the injustice of poverty and that a civilised world could not just stand by and do nothing.

“Africans must each have a bowl of maize meal everyday, schools to teach sustainable skills like brick making and condoms in case they feel like a little sex in the afternoon given that jobs are hard to come by and entertainment much in demand,” Brown thundered.

Looking back on the continent’s fifty years of independence, Brown expressed outrage at the poor record of governance that had destroyed so much hope after all the good work that the British had put into places such as Kenya.

“We did a real job helping them deal with terrorists, just like we are trying in Iraq right now,” he said. “In fact we killed more than a 100,000 of them, maimed and tortured scores more and suspended legal protections for another three million … this was the kind of responsible government that was demanded at the time and by jove we supplied it” he added.

Brown lamented the kind of weak-kneed government that the Kenyans presently have, promising that he will leave no stone unturned to help arm the Kenyan army so that it could pursue its disarmament campaign in the northern districts with more effect. “Just look at the job our General Erskine did on those bloody savages” thundered the chancellor.

In attendance was Kenya’s slightly befuddled Minister of Foreign Affairs, Chirau Ali Mwakwere, who nevertheless applauded enthusiastically. He reminded Brown that even though the rains had come this year and there was plenty of food, there was a possibility that they would fail in 2006 meaning that more food aid was needed now. He also lamented the British government’s inefficient delivery of sexual health aids to Kenyans: “How am I supposed to utilise my right to sleep with my wife without getting her pregnant if you do not deliver those condoms?”

Brown was apoplectic with rage that the African right to having safe sex was being betrayed by a callous, consumption obsessed and racist western society. He assured the minister that condoms would be had by all as would all the food, roads, schools, social halls, sports stadiums and clothes required by the deserving poor of Africa.

Launch of Kwani? III – The Funkiest Literary Journal This Side of Heaven

On Thursday 14th July, Kwani? III was launched at the Carnivore’s Simba Salon. It is available for sale online, in Nairobi and assorted bookstores abroad. I think that it is the most exciting and innovative literary journal anywhere in the world. But I must admit to some bias since my piece – Blood & 100% Human Hair – is in this issue. In any case, visit the Kwani? site and take a look at some excerpts so that you can make up your own mind. If you know of a bookstore in your area that would like to carry some for sale, please write to me or use the address on the Kwani site.

Africa Needs More Millionares – Not AID Workers

Africans should get off the AID band wagon.

What we need is for Africans leaving school to make profits. We don’t need more NON-Profit organisations!

Imagine how crazy it is for poor nations to have almost everyone getting educated rubbing their hands in excitement at the prospect of spending their lives doing NON-Profit work, when in all rich economies, people clamour to get into business for PROFIT, INNOVATION and ENTERPRISE.

They frantically look for goods or services that people might need, and fight for venture capital financing by proving that their idea will use the least money and produce the most profit!

We on the other hand have such gaping holes in our markets for all sorts of goods and services and yet the NOT-for -Profit route is what appeals to many of us. Call it intellectual sloth, or perhaps it is just being rational to choose the perks of NGO employment. But if the primary unit of economic activity and growth is individual economic growth, then we need as many people making profits (i.e. trying to find the most efficient way of spending our country’s savings to create more wealth) for our economy to grow.

We have to reject AID and encourage entrepreneurship and provide incentives for business in our countries.

In non-profit work and in government ventures the measure of success is how much money has been spent on a project (you often hear politicians bragging about the size of the project in terms of spending as they doll out taxpayers’ money – it is never their personal money).

On the other hand, the measure of success in a for-profit venture is invariably the size of the difference between what was made and what was spent, and the expectations of future profits when people buy company shares. The aspiration is to increase efficiency, find better ways to do things – faster, easier, cheaper – so that customers remain dedicated to their products. (There are benefits for everyone: owner, employees and customers)

We need to regard our problems as profit making opportunities rather than angles with which to beg from the West. That means getting off the paternalism of Western charity so that we can own and solve our problems.

Martin Luther King and Hope

I have just watched a BBC program called ‘Days That Shook the World’ which today explored the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968. Whenever I have encountered MLK in the media, I have always come away newly struck by his power and the hope that he faced the world with. I was not born when he was killed, and am far too prone to indulge in a kind of cynical politics that never survives a single sentence he uttered. I went looking for what I think was his greatest speech, “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop”, which was made the night before he was murdered by James Earl Ray. Listening to it, I am left to wonder about what place hope has the collective of individuals and communities that are Kenya. It makes me ponder what social spaces we own that allow us to create transcendent communities in the sense that they can exist in a spirit of fairness and justice despite all the obstacles in our paths. It is quite soppy to write in this fashion but as always, after listening to MLK I felt deeply the suffering and hope that attended black people in their awful march through American history. It gave me a sense of the scale of the revolutionary triumph that the Civil Rights Movement represented. And the extent to which in those years – and perhaps even in these – black people became a community made holy by its being larger than the sum of its oppressions and disadvantages. If only I could dare hope that Kenya too is marching in similar fashion through its dark days but toward brightness and with hope a constant companion. I suspect this is the case or at the very least I pray it is.

Listen to Martin Luther King’s “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop.”

The Indian Shopkeeper

This morning, I went to my local corner store here in London which is run by a family of Indian immigrants. Since it closes at 2pm every Sunday, I asked whether it was because of some government regulation. ‘No’, came the answer,’ I work everyday of the week and take Sunday afternoons off to relax’. He has been following the same routine for the past 15 years he added. Other than being awed at the level of commitment and persistence this implied, I was struck by the fact that most of the shop’s clients live in a large council estate nearby. I asked what he thought of working so hard to serve people who in the main do not work and are taken care of by the state. His answer was very brief and all the more profound because of it: ‘People here have been destroyed, there are druggies in here all the time shouting and abusing me. But we just ignore them, agree with them and continue working’. That is the difference between people owning themselves and building their lives on that understanding and those who are owned by the state.

Andrew Mwenda on the Impact of Foreign Aid on Uganda

I recently watched a documentary on the BBC by Andrew Mwenda, a Ugandan radio journalist and Museveni opponent, which analysed Uganda’s relationship with aid. Uganda has been presented as an aid success story by donors and its government, and has even had its debt cancelled in the past. Half of its budget comes from foreign aid and President Museveni was famously announced by Thabo Mbeki and Bill Clinton to be part of an African renaissance in good governance. Read on for the reality…

Andrew Mwenda:

“I was excited when I heard that British Prime Minister Tony Blair had set up a commission to research solutions to the problems afflicting Africa – I felt it was an opportunity to breathe new ideas into the debate on Africa’s backwardness.

However I was disappointed.

After months of work they came up with the same old mantras: doubling aid, cancelling debt and reducing trade tariffs and subsidies.

They’re ignoring reality. For the last 40 years, Africa’s been getting more, not less, aid – we’ve received more than $500bn. But we are getting poorer not richer.

Let me show you, through the experience of my homeland Uganda how these recommendations don’t – and won’t – work.

Donor support

Uganda is considered one of Africa’s economic success stories. Yet we rely on foreign aid for nearly half the country’s budget.

You would assume that Uganda cannot fund its own development. But that’s not the case.

The government has got money, but chooses to spend it on political patronage and its army. It doesn’t even collect the taxes it is owed.

Allen Kagina, the Commissioner General of Uganda’s tax authority, acknowledges that Uganda collects only a fraction of the tax it could.

Uganda was forgiven its debts… as a consequence, government indulged itself in very luxurious expenditure… and invaded Congo and Sudan

She does believe the URA could fund the national budget – it would be “difficult but it is achievable.” And she also said that Uganda should aim to reduce donor support.

But Tony Blair is talking of doubling aid to Africa. Yet some African economies are so small that the amount of aid they’re getting is already skewing the economy.

Foreign aid enriches politicians, bureaucrats and aid workers, whose consumption fuels inflation.

The Ugandan government is receiving so much foreign aid that the economy is unable to absorb it. Treasury bills have to be used to suck the money out of the system. As a result, the Central Bank is holding $700m in treasury bills, and the interest on that per annum is $120m – which is incurred by the tax payer.

All in all, a very expensive exercise.

Fair trade

Uganda’s Finance Minister Dr Ezra Suruma said the country does consider finding better ways of managing aid to be “very important”.

“The problem is what we do with it – whether we invest or consume it,” she added.

“We need to invest more in equipment, technology, infrastructure and so on. Aid must be properly used to increase our capacity to produce more income.”

And what of Blair’s other proposal, fair trade?

Changing tariffs and subsidies in Europe and the USA will not lift Africa’s business out of the doldrums.

Again, why don’t we learn our lesson? This has been tried already and hasn’t worked.
Under the Cotounou Agreement for preferential trade with Europe, for example, Uganda has a quota to export 50,000 metric tons of sugar to the European Union – duty free.

But it’s never been fulfilled. In fact, not even one kilogram of Ugandan sugar has been exported to the EU. We can’t even grow enough sugar in Uganda to satisfy the domestic market.

It’s the domestic environment that holds trade expansion back.

At Ugachick – which produces 400,000 chicks each month and produces meat which it sells both in Uganda and surrounding countries – managing director Aga Sekalala wants to expand – but he needs affordable credit, and with interest rates up to 18% this is not available.

Then there’s the physical infrastructure.

Last week someone stole the electric cable linking Ugachick to the grid. It took five days to fix it, and it only happened then because Ugachick provided the manpower to carry the poles.

“The infrastructure, the roads, power – all of this is our headache, when it should be the government’s,” he said.

Entrepreneurs like Aga should be the engines for creating wealth in Uganda.

If he expanded, so would his contributions to the revenue. He’s energetic and ready to move forward.

But there is no imperative for the government to help him. Any financial gap in the budget, and they only need to turn to the international donors to fill it.

Unsustainable debt

If only foreign aid could be shifted from lining corrupt politicians’ and bureaucrats’ pockets to developing private enterprise, then Africa would have hope.

And what of the third of the Blair Commission proposals – debt cancellation? Many people think that debt cancellation is a clear cut solution to Africa’s indebtedness.

But think again. Common sense tells you it’s wrong to reward bad economic behaviour.

My friend Ben Kavuya, a money lender here in Kampala, deals with bad debtors by taking their property, their collateral.

He believes if you forgive bad debts it teaches bad lessons, creating a culture of defaulting. That’s certainly exactly what happened with Uganda.

In 1998 Uganda was forgiven its debts through the Highly Indebted Poor Countries Initiative.

As a consequence, government indulged itself in very luxurious expenditure – increasing the size of Parliament – and invaded Congo and Sudan.

And not only that, it went on a renewed borrowing spree and today, seven years later, Uganda’s debt has more than doubled and now it is unsustainable.

Parliament is so foreign aid-dependent that even the chairs and desks are funded by Denmark.

And worse, with so much of our country’s budget in the hands of the foreign aid donors, the power of Ugandan voters to hold our government to account has been usurped by international creditors – precisely because he who pays the piper calls the tune.

In this way, foreign aid undermines democracy.

Foreign aid does not help the poor out of their misery – it exacerbates their problems and prolongs their agony.

Taxpayers in the west should not be asked to pay to keep corrupt and incompetent governments in power.”

Story from BBC NEWS

7/7/2005: London’s Terrorist Attacks

The city is at a virtual standstill and is eerily calm in light of the multiple bombings this morning. I was on the way into the city centre by bus when we were ordered to disembark and told that there had been an explosion on a similar double-decker bus and several on the underground.

Sirens have been wailing all day and the police presence is overwhelming. Word is that there have been at least 45 fatalities and hundreds more injured – this after the euphoria that gripped Londoners after yesterday’s new that the city had won the right to host the 2012 Olympic Games. The sidewalks are littered with a slow moving crowd trying to get home on foot since there is no public transport available. Once in a while I am coming across a person sobbing but otherwise calm reigns.

I have the sense of a place with a very intact cultural memory of violence, whether from World War 2 or from the IRA campaigns I cannot tell. However, I sense that the public mood will become less calm tomorrow after the initial shock has worn off.

It is strange the effect politicised violence has on people. If this had been a particularly bad train or bus crash that left a similar number dead, the institutional reaction – whether by the media or the state – would be far more muted. But now there is the urgency of a political community attacked. Everyone here feels targeted. Everyone I have spoken to has commented about their distance from the bombing sites, the extent to which their daily routine might have exposed them to a violent death had they not done a little something differently at the last instant.

Violence creates a public intimacy, a coming together and those responsible for waging it draw an ire multiplied by its group character. Everyone I have spoken to, and I have spent much of the day chattering away, has been saddened by the loss of life and limb but I have also detected an unmistakable euphoria. This latter feeling is natural. It is the knowledge that you are in the middle of great events, no matter how terrible they are. An ordinary day had been made extraordinary by the violence of the bombs and their intention. For the day, you are not one individual in a featureless mass of millions, but rather a part of one heaving, injured, self conscious organism.

Having said all that, I am sad that ordinary folks had to die today. Whenever I think about the scale and importance of the lives of people I love, and then consider those who were killed today, I am forced to conclude that a single human life is far more important than the ideas and hatreds that lead to such violence.

Choking on Aid Money in Africa

I just had to share these two links:

Choking on Aid Money in Africa
By Erich Wiedemann and Thilo Thielke
DER SPIEGEL 27/2005 – July 4, 2005
URL: http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,363604,00.html

Does aid work? Yes – for Britain
By Chukwu-Emeka Chikezie
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,1072-1675882,00.html

Handy Advice if You Are About to Apply For a Food Aid Job

A few years ago, I read Michael Maren’s The Road to Hell: The Ravaging Effects of Foreign Aid and International Charity and it fundamentally changed my attitude to aid. The book should be required reading for every literate person and I highly recommend it. Peter Uvin’s Aiding Violence: The Development Enterprise in Rwanda is just as important a read. Uvin demonstrates how NGOs and other aid organisations contributed to the strength and survival of a Rwandan regime that turned genocidal in 1994. Last, but certainly not least, is Graham Hancock’s Lords of Poverty: The Power, Prestige, and Corruption of the International Aid Business which is the classic in this small, but critical genre. Below is a speech by Michael Maren delivered to a group of Cornell University graduate students who were preparing to work in international development during the early 1990s.

The Food-Aid Racket

by Michael Maren

As you prepare for and look forward to careers in international development, I am compelled to issue a warning. With the hindsight of someone who spent five years in the development business, I’m going to tell you that the development industry hurts people in the developing world. Its greatest success has been to provide good jobs for Westerners with graduate degrees from institutions like this one. I don’t expect that any of you will take my advice and start looking for careers elsewhere. AndI’m in no position to criticize you for going ahead and working in development even after you hear me out. You see, I had a pretty wonderful career in the aid business. I can’t remember ever having more fun. In fact, I was having so much fun that I didn’t want to stop, even after I realized that our programs were hurting the very people they were supposed to help.

In 1980, when I was twenty-five years old, I was hired by Catholic Relief Services (CRS) to administer food-for-work programs–programs that feed people in exchange for their work on local development projects–in Kenya. I was given a beautiful garden apartment in a nice neighborhood in Nairobi, a brand-new Land Cruiser, a great office, and almost a million dollars in a U.S. Agency for International Development (AID) grant to oversee the programs. As I began the job, shiploads of U.S. government surplus rice were leaving a port in Texas and heading to Mombasa. Meanwhile, CRS notified the country’s parish priests and government officials that this rice was available. All they had to do to receive it was fill out a one-page application describing their proposed project and specifying the number of “recipients”–the number of the project’s workers who would receive sacks of rice in exchange for their labor. Thousands of applications were submitted.

I took some of the U.S. AID money and customized the Land Cruiser, adding extra-large fuel tanks and a really nice stereo system, and then I set off across Kenya to inspect the proposed projects. It was a dream come true. I was driving absolutely free across one of the world’s most beautiful landscapes. I was so awestruck by my own good luck that sometimes I’d stop in the middle of a huge empty wilderness, or beside a herd of giraffes or elephants, and just yelp with delight.

I was having so much fun running around starting food-for-work projects–water projects, agriculture projects, forestry projects–that I completely overlooked the most obvious problem: I knew nothing about agriculture, forestry, road building, well digging, dam building, or any of the projects I was approving. But nobody seemed to care. Only once did anyone in authority at CRS ever go and look at a project. When I’d return to Nairobi every few weeks, my boss, who let me work completely unsupervised, had only one question: How many more recipients did you sign on? More recipients meant more government grant money, which meant we could buy more vehicles and hire more assistants.

When I slowed down for a moment to consider what was happening, it became clear: aid distribution is just another big, private business that relies on government contracts. Private voluntary organizations (PVOs) such as CRS are paid by the U.S. government to give away surplus food produced by subsidized U.S. farmers. The more food CRS gave away, the more money they received from the government to administer the handouts. Since the securing of grant money is the primary goal, PVOs rarely meet a development project they don’t like.

Of all the aid programs, those involving food delivery are especially prized by PVOs because they generate income, are easy to administer, and are warmly received by the public. Yet most food aid has little to do with need and everything to do with getting rid of surplus food. Kenya was not a country facing starvation when I worked there. Many of the projects I started were in the rich agricultural land of the central and western parts of the country. In fact, around the world, only about 10 percent of food aid is targeted at emergency situations. PVOs publicize situations such as the one in Somalia in order to raise money from the public, but most of their work is done in areas where there is plenty to eat, because there are simply not enough starving people to absorb all of our surplus food. Also, it’s easier to distribute large quantities of food in more developed areas.

Harmless as this might at first sound, sending food to areas where there is already food creates serious problems. It decreases demand for locally produced commodities, subsidizes the production of cash crops, and fosters dependence among those who receive the aid. Since PVOs can only operate with the approval of the host government, they typically end up supporting the government leaders’ political goals, rewarding the government’s friends, punishing its enemies, and providing fodder for a vast system of political patronage.

That’s exactly what happened in Somalia, where the government and the generals had been playing games with food aid for more than a decade before the Marines arrived. I was working for U.S. AID in Somalia in 1981, when we started pumping food into that country. It was clear to many of us, even then, that the program was working to prop up a corrupt dictator and turn nomads into relief junkies. Refugees poured over the borders and into camps, where they were fed day after day, year after year, by PVOs, while little effort was made to break their growing dependence. In 1987 a World Food Program report stated that Somalia had actually produced a surplus of food that year, yet PVOs continue to distribute free food and collect U.S. government money for administering the delivery. Inevitably, indigenous food-distribution networks withered and died. The country’s economy adapted to foreign aid–not to production. Meanwhile, the PVOs and corrupt government officials got fat and rich.

No one questions private voluntary organizations. Not the U.S. government, which needs to get rid of the food and wants to keep its aid bureaucracy functioning. Not the host government, whose officials often profit from the aid racket. Not the public, which sees aid workers as so many Mother Teresas. And not the press–especially not the press–which has, in recent years, become an integral part of the aid system.

The press’s role in that system is to convey to the West the PVOs’ view of Africa. And because the distribution of food aid is first and foremost a business, it is not surprising that the priorities of aid organizations dominate the West’s image of the continent–an image of helpless nations in need of our support.

This is not a new phenomenon. Aid workers are simply the latest in a series of recent western vanguards in Africa, each of whom put forward the image of Africa that best suited its own interests. The first Europeans to form a vanguard in Africa were the naturalists. Because of them, early European views of Africa emphasized the continent’s natural history. Later, as missionaries began to outnumber explorers, Europe began to see the continent through the eyes of those who were out to save its soul. And as Europe developed political and mercantile interests in Africa, merchants and traders were at the vanguard. At that time, Europeans were concerned with turning Africans into loyal subjects, workers, producers, and citizens of empires. No one really worried about feeding them.

Historically, the press has been willing to uncritically accept whatever image of Africa the western vanguard has been selling. In the case of the PVOs, the press has bought their line because reporters are as dependent on aid organizations as the organizations are on them. It would have been impossible, for example, for the press to cover Somalia without the assistance of PVOs. There’s no Hertz counter at the Mogadishu airport, and no road maps available at gas stations. If a journalist arrives in Africa from Europe or the United States and needs to get to the interior of the country, PVOs are the only ticket. journalists sleep and eat with PVO workers. When they want history and facts and figures, they turn to the PVOs. In press coverage of Somalia or almost any other crisis in Africa, it is always the PVOs who are most often quoted and are regarded as the neutral and authoritative sources–as if they have no vested interest in anything but the truth.

A typical example of the connection between journalism and the aid system is this analysis from a February 22, 1993, story about Africa in the New York Times:

The greatest danger now to Mozambique’s tranquillity, almost everyone agrees, is Mozambique’s tranquillity.

Lacking scenes of carnage and starvation to disturb Western television audiences, Mozambique is having trouble competing for attention with Somalia and the former Yugoslavia.

The article goes on to quote numerous CARE officials whose primary concern is to raise more money to give more aid to Mozambique. The article never considers any alternatives to aid. No aid worker raises the possibility, for example, that Mozambique’s economy might improve if the country focused on exporting goods. No one mentions that in the absence of carnage, Mozambique might be a good place to invest. No one is talking about creating permanent employment for Africans. The only discussion is about raising more money to send experts there and preserve the jobs of expatriates and create more jobs for graduate students from programs like this one. The people who are called upon to diagnose and comment on Africa’s problems are the very people who stand to profit from the diagnoses.

I know that you don’t want to be part of this problem. You’ll tell me that you can change all of this, that you want to work within the bureaucracy to reform the bureaucracy. But in a couple of years you’re going to be in Ouagadougou or Gaborone making a very good salary. The years will pass and you’ll find yourself with two kids in an expensive private school in New England, and you’re going to have perfected skills that aren’t very useful outside of the Third World. You’re going to think about quitting, about raising hell, but you won’t be able to. Because by then you, too, will have become part of the never-ending cycle of aid.

Harper’s Magazine Foundation 1993
Harper’s Magazine
August, 1993

Go to http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,363604,00.html to read Choking on Aid Money in Africa by Erich Wiedemann and Thilo Thielke in Der Spiegel.

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.

Some Combative Comments On ‘Those Who Would Steal African Humanity’ Post

I thought that some of the comments made about my last post, Live8 and Those Who Would Steal African Humanity, were provocative and fun. It proved to be quite unpopular with some readers, which is all good but I am anxious to hear what Africa means to you.

It seems to me that Africa is more an idea than a place for Africans and non-Africans alike. It has never really been a place as much as it has been a type of darkness, a nightmare, a project and a cause. Of course there are many in Africa who are poor or starving or are the victims of horrific political violence, but these afflictions only confirm what has been thought of Africa since the period of slavery and colonialism. When King Leopold II of Belgium murdered over 10 million Congolese between 1880 and 1920, effectively halving the population, he claimed to be saving them from their wretchedness and poverty. I mention this not to claim that this is the goal today, but rather to emphasize that Africa as a hell has been an old idea that was used enthusiastically to dominate and exploit its occupants. Now it is an idea being trotted out in the very countries that just a few decades ago ruled it: this time to save us.

See I did not grow up in Africa. I grew up in very specific places: Ngummo Estate, Mombasa, Lenana School, Kibera and Westlands. I became African only at specific moments, most very rhetorical and sentimentalised. The Nairobi I consider my home town is full of poverty, but that is only one aspect of it. In the worst slums are flexible, assertive and innovative people. The demands of life are too urgent for anyone to seat around and wait for Geldof’s consciousness raising. Nairobi, outside of its growing NGO aid junkies, is not waiting for Geldof’s or the West’s attentions. Everyone is trading, making use of every shred of skill and effort that they possess. Trading, dealing, morphing into whatever ethnic, religious, sexual, national being that will confer the most advantage at particular moments. Nairobi, I find despite its crime and poverty, is innately a hopeful place. So many of my relatives have migrated there with nothing but an address and are now working and producing wealth for themselves. They would appear to be poor, and believe themselves to be so, but they are building lives and their hopes rest on their own abilities and not the government or the donors. If anything, the government is their constant roadblock: they encounter it at every turn with its corruptions, red tapes and oppressions.

Anonymous said…
While we wait for the revolution to be televised, what harm is there in getting a few dollars that we would never have seen anyway?

MMK said…
Ah yes, why not indeed get the aid cash and run? Because there is nothing for free. An entire generation of Africans has grown up begging and I think this has killed much greatness and potential. Aid is pennies on the dollar when compared to the money that a people with a sense of ownership over their lives would make. Just look at the flow of remittances by Africans outside the continent and those sending money from the cities to the rural areas for instance, it dwarfs aid flows by several factors.

Anonymous said…
An interesting perspective. Would it be better if the west just left Africa to its own devices? I thought part of the G8 aims is to enable fair trade by lifting the west’s imposed restrictions and opening the markets for African produce.

Not Glossy said…
Insightful commentary, thank you. It would appear though that celebrities have all the answers for us (everyone)… and thus we have no need for thought or even true debate.

Fred said…
MMK, I’ve read some of your stuff and watched your BBC debate today with the other Martin of Save the Children. Yes, you have a point. Of course we have to live with the fact of life, that there is no such thing as free lunch. Yes, it’s about music, exhibitionism and megalomania – but it is also about harnessing non-official Western resources and tapping on what they love best (e.g. music) for a good cause. They might as well do the same for gay rights, gender parity, and climate change so if they choose to do it for Africa, why is it a problem? It may be a simplistic approach, but it is welcome. It should be part of a concerted effort. It would be foolish to consider this as a panacea. Africans should also put pressure locally on their politicians like Biwott and Uhuru to give up part of their ill-gotten and unfairly acquired wealth, including cash stashed abroad in banks and investments not to mentions the thousands of acres owned by the Kenyatta family and generations of white settlers like the Delamares. OFM, Lecturer, CU.

andy said…
This is wonderful writing. It reminds me of the people who I met when I went to Africa in 1989. They were (and are) people of wisdom and immense capability that we in the west should learn from. They were they kind of people who could face and solve problems. At the time they were standing up against apartheid (and for a new future). Now they are leaders in the new South Africa. I just wish I could get on a plane and go spend more time with them. I think I visited your blog once before and didn’t make it back. This time I’ll mark the spot and be sure to return again.

el pupo said…
just a note to say I *love* your blogging.

owukori said…
The West has appropriated everything African for the past 500 years – now as you say even Africa’s problems. Excellent post and look forward to more

Anonymous said…
Am I missing something here? Pennies on the dollar are better than no pennies at all?
Arguably it would be better if Africans took control of their own affairs and created great potential. Newsflash – they have failed to do so for the past 30-40 years! So while we wait for the revolution, we will gladly accept the few pennies that your revolution has failed to supply. Who has chosen to get the fish instead of learning to fish?

Anonymous said…
Africans do not hold the exclusive rights and monopoly suffering and exploitation. It is interesting to see Africans argue for their place in this category given the fact that they have failed spectacularly to address their economic, social and political status in the past 30-40 years.

andy said…
Interesting anonymous comments…
1. The “failure” that you speak of really involves a relatively short period of time, considering that it took the Western world centuries to develop the political economies that you see today.
2. The “failure” dates back to just after the end of the colonial period. Are you thinking, “Look what a great and wonderful boost that colonialism gave to Africa? Why didn’t you make more of it?” Perhaps you don’t understand African history, or you just think African history is a subset of Western history (sort of a poor, handicapped version that is embarrassing the rest)?
3. You say Africans have failed to take control of their own affairs but ignore the point: that the West has never released control to Africans. That’s the point here (the control is tightening further).
4. You speak of spectacular failures, but in fact there are many spectacular successes in Africa. Those should be brought to light, though people who wallow in ignorance seldom learn anything that is uncomfortable or truly new.

dt said…
Great article!
Reading the comments thus far, perhaps the greatest challenge faced by the continent both from within and without is the tendency to lump all the countries together rather than address each country in its individuality. Even when Africans themselves speak, they speak as though they are a whole. You don’t hear such grouping coming from other continents. Singaporeans refer to themselves as Singaporeans not as Asians or South East Asians. Same goes for a British. He/she refers to him/herself as a Brit not as a European, or an indigene of the European continent. Last I checked not ALL African nations are poverty stricken with children dropping dead from the commonest causes. People talk of the ‘African problem’ the solution seekers in turn mouth its corollary the ‘African solution’. Africans themselves commit the same error in judgement; Africa is not one country for crying out loud! Perhaps what we really need is a great lesson on the axiom ‘every man to himself/every country to herself’ Perhaps if each man was left to his demise, he would think up the best means for his survival. With regards to your insightful piece, may I add that no one has stolen Africa’s humanity. It is us who handed it to them on a silver platter by the vice of not understanding the why’s of our very own existence. After all, like the old saying goes, “When you fail to think, someone else will do it for you”

MMK said…
It was a lot of fun going on the BBC and I offered up a much harder position that I usually adopt because I felt that a sceptical African voice was needed on the day. When I arrived at the studio, I met with Wangari Maathai – the Kenyan Nobel Peace Prize laureate – who is a wonderful person but who sadly was mouthing the same old begging sounds that every prominent African seems to make automatically.

DT – You could not be more correct. Africa is not a single country. But it is taken to be a blank slate on which anyone can write whatever they wish. The aid mongers, the West and our governments have mostly preferred to treat Africa as a space of unceasing suffering and helplessness. This is what keeps the monies flowing.

Andy – Ah, yes, the historical perspective is crucial. Just reading history, of whatever region, it becomes clear that war and corruption have been the rule rather than the exception and that the development of prosperity and peace has been a lengthy road.

Anonymous said…
Let get real, spheres of control are multifaceted; those spheres were most African governments have the ability to affect the have failed in a spectacular manner. You know the classic comparison case, the one between Ghana and Malaysia; you know the one about them being practically identical in all economic/health indicators in 1958 when they acquired independence from the same British government. The same economic/health indicators are not remotely comparable now 40 years later. One country has made huge economic gains while the other is still wallowing in abject poverty and is considered a success case when compared with its neighbours. I will let you guess which country is which. Maybe while you’re at it you can explain how the English never let go of the reigns of power and that is why Mugabe is busy laying millions of his fellow country men destitute by flattening their homes, the Zimbabwean form of ethic cleansing, perhaps those evil colonialists have been running round the country side in Darfur killing and raping. The Belgians are the ones that run amok in Rwanda and murder close to a million folks. Hey, it was those evil westerners that emptied the state coffers of most countries in Africa in the tune of billions of dollars. Those animals, they just gave Museveni the right to go over the Ugandan constitution and give himself one more term as president. These animals they are relentless, they made Mswati of Swaziland want to spend money on a presidential plane that was more than the countries budget on education. See, you understand that these Africans are innocent hapless children who despite their best efforts can not make any positive decisions, the west has robbed and beaten them into murderous, thieving but well meaning people. Like Children who have no understating of consequences of their actions these Africans can not be held responsible for failing to make any positive change in those little things they could change.

lex said…
Your argument is nothing but a string of eloquent self pity. Whilst it is obvious that Live8 or a decision to abolish debt will not make Africa’s plight disappear, the Western attempt should not go unwelcomed. Yes, there is no such thing as a free meal, but this constant banter about the thievery of ‘African humanity’ clearly reeks of a wounded pride. Whatever the West may have done in the past, its current attempts with Live8 can only be seen as a positive. Allowance for support nurtures the path to recovery – your desperate grip on all the suffering and struggle that has happened only adds to its suffocation. And all for what? To fulfil some arrogant self indulgent fantasy about overcoming the apparent ‘inverse inferiority’?

MMK said…
Lex – Methinks you misunderstand what I am trying to say. If anything, I am railing against the self pity of those in Africa who come to the West cap in hand attempting to parlay African poverty into an opportunity to gain Western charity. Their efforts are mirrored by a self serving aid industry and the appetite to turn the African into a cause and nothing more by a growing stable of rock stars and politicians. I am not about wounded pride, but I also know that pride is an absolute requirement if Africans are to triumph over their problems. I see this pride everytime I am home and I see it compromised and attacked daily by the beggary of our leaders. Surely Lex, you can join me in recognising that at the end of the day Africa’s march to wealth and stability will come from African effort. Live8 and similar efforts are an attempt to get around this fact. What recovery is this that you speak of? Aid has been in the card for decades, always with new strategies for “accountability, transparency and results” but this has never worked. The only wealth that has been built by aid has been among aid workers and local political elites. The poor, if anything have grown in number. So should I be grateful for this latest effort?

Critical Mass Vancouver said…
I think “Make Poverty History” is a pretty arrogant catchphrase. But there is so free lunch, and idealism is not stupid. All energy is of the sun, literally, and it never stops. I don’t think that honour is really such a wonderful thing. I don’t think that we do much useful by speaking of people in anti-democratic situations as a ‘nation’. I don’t know much about Africa except imperial history and genocide history. My part of the world, in Vancouver unceded Coast Salish Territory, the Aboriginal people were very rich because it is very green and rains a lot. I don’t think that Africa is really such a poor place. So much wealth flows from there and many believe it is the cradle of humankind. But it is a truism from the TV that there are starving babies in Africa which everybody already knows about OR nobody can do anything about it anyway. I wish your criticism was less about a media personality of this single unified/disunified entity called Africa whose honour and ownership of the problems have been besmirched. I think it should say that this is another straightforward attack under the deception of aid. It is about disempowering billions of people. Or it should be more positive and say that we should not be so simplistic and not assume the stupid things the Rock Stars say for the cameras, but every bit counts and lets make work what we have. Get specific and get less media spectacle more community. Anyway I just worry that while you are speaking truth to power you are not contradicting the worst part: that nothing can change. They kill optimism by overusing it and invoking it in a way that, beyond the shallowest sense, will evaporate under the weight of reality. You kill optimism by mostly being critical of their naive idealism. Let’s focus more on the Fair/Free Trade issues rather than the charity. Debt cancellation is not Charity but legally required in the case of onerous debt [that debt, which is in many cases the type of debt in Africa, where a dictator or other unaccountable ran up the bill and now the majority are expected to pay for what wasn’t their will]. I think it would be great to be more critical of specific western colonial nations and get them to change their policy. Like American Drug companies or European Manufacturers that suck out raw materials and keep the value added activity in Europe. But I know almost nothing about this stuff, solidarity is a good thing but a locals need to lead. I think that the rock stars can perhaps be reformed to see this. There are no limits to their ignorance because of how they are sheltered on a pedestal. But mostly they are just trying to help and if someone with a more thoughtful program asked them they would prefer to help with that. It seems that the Live 8 is somewhat ‘better’ than the 1980s version which was only about aid, not the debt and fair trade. Those are facts that are already known in the television sphere. Why not pin that tail. Is it really such ‘progress’? Or is the assumption still about a kind of charity superiority racism as you contend. Anyway, good to see a thoughtful blog, keep it up!

Z said…
How can you condemn people for trying to create a fairer world? This isn’t about charity, it isn’t about ‘saving Africa’ it’s about extending a hand of friendship, not laying claim to Africans problems but recognising them and saying you’re not alone. People are tired of giving aid, seeing that it makes no permanent change, Live 8 is about changing trade laws to help, instead of hindering African economic growth, not just aid and debt relief. From where I was standing, I thought the point was to tell the world the truth, educating people, showing them just how complicated the whole situation is, am I wrong? There are people who want to give money for their own sense of moral self-righteousness, that’s true. There are also people who just want to help, people who’ve done their share of soul searching, triumphed over their own demons, and in the end just want the people of, not just Africa, but anyone else who’s ever suffered for whatever reason, to know that whatever you think of the rest of the world, some people in it actually give a shit. Stop being so damn cynical and realise that some people just want to help, even if they can’t or don’t know how, when something like this happens they go along with it and they do whatever they can to support it, just because it can be interpreted as ‘an exercise in white, Western megalomania’ doesn’t mean every person in that crowd is there for their own self gratification, like I said, some might just happen to give a crap as well.

Anonymous said…
A quick reminder for our Anglo-Saxon musicians and politicians: HISTORY MAKES POVERTY, union jackasses-

http://www.philosophyfootball.com/view_item.php?pid=262

Live8 and Those Who Would Steal African Humanity

Word on the street is that Gordon Brown, the British Chancellor of the Exchequer will march with protestors in the ‘Long Walk to Justice’. So who and what precisely will they be marching against? Poverty?

This is simply an exercise in white, Western megalomania. Now that the age of empire has passed for these British Isles, now that the economic consensus will brook no extremes of the right or left variety, now that there are no great foes to contend with, there are only two extreme conditions that remain in a world that has moved to the ‘middle’: Western self aggrandizement and African suffering. To the liberals and assorted ‘put Africa right’ brigades, they exist at the centre of the moral universe. Africans shall live or die according to their wishes. Now we are to be saved, but it could be just the opposite as it has been in times past.

They will be marching to display the rude health of their souls and to confirm their power and magnanimity over the huddled, miserable wretches of Africa. The monies that they give, no doubt in the billions of dollars, will be used to maintain and extend a vast system of spiritual and material privilege. Every dollar shall confirm their superiority and the inverse inferiority of the African. And of course because they are a pragmatic people, each dollar shall be used to employ that army of aid workers who would otherwise be flipping burgers or working in retail. Statistics will be thrown about with wild abandon. Eyes will get misty at the thought of ‘30,000 children dying everyday of extreme poverty’. Pledges will be made by mouths set grimly in the emotion of the moment. The rhetoric will be high flown and every speech will include words like Humanity, Universal, We, Justice, Suffering, History, Community, Brotherhood…

These words will be used to strip Africans of their problems in the name of brotherhood. Geldof and company will lay claim to the very last thing so many Africans own: our problems. And it will be terrible and evil beyond imagining for owning your problem is at the heart of what it is to be human. It is when we wrestle and suffer and triumph over our problems that we are most human, but this alas is not to be if the soul stealers on show succeed. I do not want anyone to suffer needlessly. I would prefer everyone to live in a democratic, prosperous community that knows no war or want. But these are conditions that must be battled and struggled for; they have never arrived as a gift from a stranger. And all those who promise them have always turned out to be thieves or murderers if not both. Geldof and the Live8, the G8, these governments and the eager little, statistic spouting NGO types are thieves of African humanity.

Live8 and Emmanuel Jal

On Saturday July 2nd, Live8 concerts will be held in ten cities around the world. They will feature the biggest and most famous names in pop. Performing in London, at Hyde Park, will be the African Children’s Choir, Annie Lennox, Bob Geldof, Coldplay, Dido, Elton John, Joss Stone, Keane, The Killers, Madonna, Mariah Carey, Ms. Dynamite, Paul McCartney, Pink Floyd, Razorlight, REM, Robbie Williams, Scissor Sisters, Snoop Dogg, Snow Patrol, Stereophonics, Sting, Travis, U2, UB40, Velvet Revolver. What jumps out at me instantly is that none of these artists is African. On Wednesday night, I happened to catch up with Emmanuel Jal – a young Sudanese rapper and currently the hottest act in East Africa – who was performing at the Ritzy. It turns out that he was publicly invited by Fran Healy, the lead singer for Travis, who had been in Sudan to “see the plight of Africans for himself”. Healy, who has stoutly defended Bob Geldorf against charges that the Live8 is nothing more than a careerist prop, promised Emmanuel that he would be part of the line up at Hyde Park tomorrow night. But this will not be the case. Emmanuel told me that Geldorf had informed him in no uncertain terms that he could not participate. Only artists who had “sold more than 4 million records” would get on stage Sir Bob informed young Emmanuel.

A former child soldier in war-torn Sudan, and a strong talent, Emmanuel should be what Live8 is all about. His debut album, Gua (‘Peace’ in his native Nuer language), ‘fuses staccato rapping in Arabic, English, Kiswahili and Nuer’, and is an incredible piece of work.

This is what Live8 has to say about itself:

“This is not Live Aid 2. These concerts are the start point for The Long Walk To Justice, the one way we can all make our voices heard in unison. This is without doubt a moment in history where ordinary people can grasp the chance to achieve something truly monumental and demand from the 8 world leaders at G8 an end to poverty. The G8 leaders have it within their power to alter history. They will only have the will to do so if tens of thousands of people show them that enough is enough. By doubling aid, fully cancelling debt, and delivering trade justice for Africa, the G8 could change the future for millions of men, women and children.”

But of course the concerts or the Long Walk to Justice or the pledges of aid or debt cancellation have nothing to do with Africans and poverty. This is all about a self obsessed, cynical use of suffering to prop up fledgling pop careers for those like Geldorf; cynical political machinations by the Blair types who understand that there is much mileage to be made from ‘helping Africa’ when they are deeply unpopular on other fronts; and an aid industry that has become hopelessly addicted to living high off the proceeds of suffering. If only that snot nosed boy with a Kwashiorkor-distended belly and perhaps a couple of bullet wounds knew how many people he feeds, clothes and houses in luxury. If only he knew how much aid he has given to the washed out, mediocre types who clamour to help him.

In all the major concerts, there will be few if any Africans on stage. The closest thing to one in London will be Snoop Dogg who was brought in at the last instant to add a dash of colour to the proceedings. Then there will be the African Children’s Choir. These are kids from the nKomazi region on the northern border of South Africa. We are told by their founder, Ray Barnett, that AIDS is devastating their villages, that they are all orphans and that “their story is that of so many children in sub-Sahara Africa.” The purpose of their attendance will be to show the world the plight and hope of all African children.

I have no doubt that they are quite talented and all that, but they are not going to be on stage as artists. They are a project. Just like Africa and Africans are projects. We have long since shed any vestiges of human independence and ability and have become walking sores, diseases and killing machines according to our ‘friends’. Emmanuel or any other African musician must not be allowed to perform in front of the hundreds of millions who will be tuned into the concert broadcasts. For that to happen, it would be revealed that in fact Africa has minds, opinions and a life outside the beggary and misery that is the staple food of the Geldof types.