Food for Thought
I recently read The Ukimwi Road by Dervla Murphy -- the account of a 60 year-old woman who rode her bike from Kenya to Zimbabwe in 1992, interviewing the people she met along the way. It has some great insights, and here are some of my favorites:
Is it not time we quit Africa – cutting off the corrupting flow of billions of dollars, withdrawing the thousands of parasitical ‘experts’ and leaving Africans free to sort out their own future? What is our continued meddling achieving for the Africans? Aren’t we merely prolonging the process begun a century ago, of undermining their self-respect and self-confidence? The argument about global interdependence at the end of the twentieth century doesn’t convince me that Blacks must be forever locked into our manipulative Rich Man’s economy. Africa is after all a continent and not long ago was self-supporting. The notion that if given enough ‘aid’ – financial and technical – the Africans can soon acquire a Western lifestyle is simply absurd…
…The graftings on to Africa of Western systems of education, administration, justice, worship, agriculture, industry and commerce have demonstrably been a failure. None has taken. All are systems so profoundly alien to Africa that they have provoked every sort of collapse – moral, political, economic. Nor is there any reason to hope that in time those graftings will take. Why should they? Why should a complex civilization slowly built up by one race be assumed suitable for instant adoption by another – by peoples who a century ago or less were without written languages, wheeled vehicles or a cash economy? Western civilization being more advanced gives us no right to assume it can solve other peoples’ problems – an inherently racialist assumption. Yet we still treat Africa as our forebears did in the 1890s, operating behind a different screen with the same (or worse) greed. Now it is our ‘duty’ to deliver irrigation schemes, factories, grain silos, motorways, agrochemicals, multi-storey hotels and conference centers, multi-party democracies and human rights (our own code of human rights, which some Western countries find easier to preach than to practice). All this denies African civilization its own dignity and integrity… (pg. 263)
A quote from Ugandan professor Ali Mazrui, whom she quotes a lot:
It certainly looks as if the whole post-colonial euphoria about ‘modernization’ has been a mere illusion of modernity, a mirage of progress, a façade of advancement. The reality behind the façade is grim and devastating. Africa is bleeding; Africa is starving. The reasons lie in a hundred years of colonial history and a thousand years of African culture…I think a partial reversal of Westernization is already under way. The schools as major instruments of Westernization are under strain and ceasing to be efficient transmitters of Western culture; the villages are being forced back into areas of self-reliance, because the wider national set-up is unproductive. People are losing faith in currencies not only because they are valueless but because they are susceptible to abrupt change altogether. The money and cash aspects of economic life, which came with colonialism, are losing the sanctity they had…Personally I think that a partial reversal of Westernization is not bad…I’m not unhappy that the ancestors are fighting back, that they are saying, ‘Your pact of the post-colonial era is inappropriate and therefore we shall make sure your roads won’t work, your trains won’t move, your telephones won’t ring, your schools won’t educate, and your soldiers will take over power every so often. We pronounce a curse upon all your post-colonial arrangements until a new compact of African authenticity is devised.’ I’m not unhappy about that curse. (p. 264-5)
…It would be absurd to suggest that sub-Saharan Africa could now be flourishing had true independence been granted. Not one of the leaders allowed to take over had a coherent policy about where their country should go, and by what route, once the national flag had been raised. All were sitting ducks for the World Bank and IMF – even Nyerere, behind the scenes, for all his posturing about ‘self-reliance’. However, the present shambles would certainly be less shambolic had genuine self-reliance been encouraged by the retreating colonial powers. It is inconceivable that new cash-crop plantations can help to alleviate Tanzania’s poverty. Some employment is of course provided, thus slightly alleviating the poverty of a few hundred families at the cost of all the ills traditionally caused by migrant labour – plus, now, the spread of AIDS. But such projects only happen because the bulk of the profits flow West. Africans should be employed producing food for Africans; not until enough has been produced (including a stored surplus for drought years, as was the habit in pre-Communist Tibet), should any labour be deflected to cash crops grown by Western consortia. That is a truism. Yet African governments seem too befuddled to see it – befuddled by the miasma rising from the swamp of IMF and World Bank calculations and arguments. (Or can it be that the majority of Black politicians are happy with the opportunities for personal gain inherent in neo-colonialism?) Certainly economists are among the most dangerous animals on earth, skilled at making situations look so complicated that only their own solutions can solve the problems they themselves have created. And by combining insidious bribery, blackmailing bluff and intellectual hypnosis they can pressurize even well-meaning leaders into consistently betraying their own people by collaborating with the West. (p. 174)
He had the answer – the only answer – to AIDS. If every man could have as many wives as he wanted there would be no running around with dirty girls, monogamy was an unnatural restriction. Polygamy had always been part of African culture, African men weren’t able to think of having only one woman, AIDS was a direct result of Western interference with African culture…[he] began to attack the decadent West where men practice a cruel form of polygamy which discriminates against women. Unwanted wives are thrown out, instead of every wife being cared for, throughout her lifetime, as in Africa. His wives were a man’s property, yes, but they were also inferior dependent weak beings. Even wives who were barren or mentally defective or crippled should never be thrown out…for any woman polygamy had to be a lesser evil than divorce. The missionaries’ worst damage was making men throw out all but one wife. If that sort of brutality was Christ’s message he was a bad man and Africans lived better lives before they ever heard of him. (p. 181-2)
Having pedaled almost 3,000 miles along ‘the ukimwi road’, I was by now sharing fully in the Africans’ anger at the shameless development of the AIDS industry. At Entebbe there is a White-run Virus Research Institute, one of three in the world, where all enquiries about the ethical standards applied to its work in Uganda are side-stepped. Other Western academics briefly visit Africa to pick up information painstakingly gathered and collated by African colleagues. They then fly off to present these findings – apparently the result of their own research – at one of the AIDS industry’s numerous and extravagantly run international conferences. These jamborees encourage AIDS ‘experts’ to mouth earnest platitudes and relay dramatic statistics for the benefit of the media, and to read papers written in impenetrable jargon for the benefit of each other, all by way of competing for funding for the next unconstructive project. Unconstructive, that is, for AIDS victims in Africa or anywhere else but lucrative for the experts. Meanwhile, out in the bush, the genuinely caring and knowledgeable Whites – always too busy to attend conferences – cannot afford basic medicines to relieve the agonies of the dying…Another variant of the AIDS industry…requires the insertion of ‘an AIDS component’ into a larger donor project, AIDS in Africa having become a ‘good fund-raiser back home’. (p. 252)
Is it not time we quit Africa – cutting off the corrupting flow of billions of dollars, withdrawing the thousands of parasitical ‘experts’ and leaving Africans free to sort out their own future? What is our continued meddling achieving for the Africans? Aren’t we merely prolonging the process begun a century ago, of undermining their self-respect and self-confidence? The argument about global interdependence at the end of the twentieth century doesn’t convince me that Blacks must be forever locked into our manipulative Rich Man’s economy. Africa is after all a continent and not long ago was self-supporting. The notion that if given enough ‘aid’ – financial and technical – the Africans can soon acquire a Western lifestyle is simply absurd…
…The graftings on to Africa of Western systems of education, administration, justice, worship, agriculture, industry and commerce have demonstrably been a failure. None has taken. All are systems so profoundly alien to Africa that they have provoked every sort of collapse – moral, political, economic. Nor is there any reason to hope that in time those graftings will take. Why should they? Why should a complex civilization slowly built up by one race be assumed suitable for instant adoption by another – by peoples who a century ago or less were without written languages, wheeled vehicles or a cash economy? Western civilization being more advanced gives us no right to assume it can solve other peoples’ problems – an inherently racialist assumption. Yet we still treat Africa as our forebears did in the 1890s, operating behind a different screen with the same (or worse) greed. Now it is our ‘duty’ to deliver irrigation schemes, factories, grain silos, motorways, agrochemicals, multi-storey hotels and conference centers, multi-party democracies and human rights (our own code of human rights, which some Western countries find easier to preach than to practice). All this denies African civilization its own dignity and integrity… (pg. 263)
A quote from Ugandan professor Ali Mazrui, whom she quotes a lot:
It certainly looks as if the whole post-colonial euphoria about ‘modernization’ has been a mere illusion of modernity, a mirage of progress, a façade of advancement. The reality behind the façade is grim and devastating. Africa is bleeding; Africa is starving. The reasons lie in a hundred years of colonial history and a thousand years of African culture…I think a partial reversal of Westernization is already under way. The schools as major instruments of Westernization are under strain and ceasing to be efficient transmitters of Western culture; the villages are being forced back into areas of self-reliance, because the wider national set-up is unproductive. People are losing faith in currencies not only because they are valueless but because they are susceptible to abrupt change altogether. The money and cash aspects of economic life, which came with colonialism, are losing the sanctity they had…Personally I think that a partial reversal of Westernization is not bad…I’m not unhappy that the ancestors are fighting back, that they are saying, ‘Your pact of the post-colonial era is inappropriate and therefore we shall make sure your roads won’t work, your trains won’t move, your telephones won’t ring, your schools won’t educate, and your soldiers will take over power every so often. We pronounce a curse upon all your post-colonial arrangements until a new compact of African authenticity is devised.’ I’m not unhappy about that curse. (p. 264-5)
…It would be absurd to suggest that sub-Saharan Africa could now be flourishing had true independence been granted. Not one of the leaders allowed to take over had a coherent policy about where their country should go, and by what route, once the national flag had been raised. All were sitting ducks for the World Bank and IMF – even Nyerere, behind the scenes, for all his posturing about ‘self-reliance’. However, the present shambles would certainly be less shambolic had genuine self-reliance been encouraged by the retreating colonial powers. It is inconceivable that new cash-crop plantations can help to alleviate Tanzania’s poverty. Some employment is of course provided, thus slightly alleviating the poverty of a few hundred families at the cost of all the ills traditionally caused by migrant labour – plus, now, the spread of AIDS. But such projects only happen because the bulk of the profits flow West. Africans should be employed producing food for Africans; not until enough has been produced (including a stored surplus for drought years, as was the habit in pre-Communist Tibet), should any labour be deflected to cash crops grown by Western consortia. That is a truism. Yet African governments seem too befuddled to see it – befuddled by the miasma rising from the swamp of IMF and World Bank calculations and arguments. (Or can it be that the majority of Black politicians are happy with the opportunities for personal gain inherent in neo-colonialism?) Certainly economists are among the most dangerous animals on earth, skilled at making situations look so complicated that only their own solutions can solve the problems they themselves have created. And by combining insidious bribery, blackmailing bluff and intellectual hypnosis they can pressurize even well-meaning leaders into consistently betraying their own people by collaborating with the West. (p. 174)
He had the answer – the only answer – to AIDS. If every man could have as many wives as he wanted there would be no running around with dirty girls, monogamy was an unnatural restriction. Polygamy had always been part of African culture, African men weren’t able to think of having only one woman, AIDS was a direct result of Western interference with African culture…[he] began to attack the decadent West where men practice a cruel form of polygamy which discriminates against women. Unwanted wives are thrown out, instead of every wife being cared for, throughout her lifetime, as in Africa. His wives were a man’s property, yes, but they were also inferior dependent weak beings. Even wives who were barren or mentally defective or crippled should never be thrown out…for any woman polygamy had to be a lesser evil than divorce. The missionaries’ worst damage was making men throw out all but one wife. If that sort of brutality was Christ’s message he was a bad man and Africans lived better lives before they ever heard of him. (p. 181-2)
Having pedaled almost 3,000 miles along ‘the ukimwi road’, I was by now sharing fully in the Africans’ anger at the shameless development of the AIDS industry. At Entebbe there is a White-run Virus Research Institute, one of three in the world, where all enquiries about the ethical standards applied to its work in Uganda are side-stepped. Other Western academics briefly visit Africa to pick up information painstakingly gathered and collated by African colleagues. They then fly off to present these findings – apparently the result of their own research – at one of the AIDS industry’s numerous and extravagantly run international conferences. These jamborees encourage AIDS ‘experts’ to mouth earnest platitudes and relay dramatic statistics for the benefit of the media, and to read papers written in impenetrable jargon for the benefit of each other, all by way of competing for funding for the next unconstructive project. Unconstructive, that is, for AIDS victims in Africa or anywhere else but lucrative for the experts. Meanwhile, out in the bush, the genuinely caring and knowledgeable Whites – always too busy to attend conferences – cannot afford basic medicines to relieve the agonies of the dying…Another variant of the AIDS industry…requires the insertion of ‘an AIDS component’ into a larger donor project, AIDS in Africa having become a ‘good fund-raiser back home’. (p. 252)
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