by M G Vassanji
But how different the country has become, since socialism was kicked aside, when the generation of idealists has aged, when collective concerns have been replaced by individualistic ones. We are at Ali’s house, also in Oyster Bay, some six of us. I met Ali at a reading at Novel Idea, the bookstore that’s a sign of the new times, following which he’s organized this luncheon on a Sunday. Nadir shows up and Walter, and Abdu, a media person, and his wife, Jane, a medical doctor, and Mehboob, a publicity and financial consultant. We sit in the living room in a circle; wine flows freely, the conversation is loud and passionate, about the status of the country and its future. The leadership is held up in utter contempt—what do you say of a government that cannot pay the medical interns their allowances, threatens them when they protest, and immediately gives its own members a handsome raise in their own allowances? Is there hope for the country? Abdu asks. He is pessimistic. He’s made a documentary on a serious cultural issue but to have it shown on the national station he’s required to bribe someone. He will not do it. Walter, the father-figure in this crowd, scolds him. It is better to show the film, even if you have to bribe—what use is a film in storage? What contribution do you make by your obstinacy? Abdu has children studying abroad and he wonders if they will return. What opportunities can the country offer them? He accuses the older generation of idolizing Nyerere, whom he blames for the nation’s current complacency and hostility to entrepreneurship; and surprisingly it is the Asians among us who defend Nyerere’s old order, however flawed his policy of socialism. What Nyerere bequeathed to the country was a sense of nationhood, the people’s sense of themselves as Tanzanians, that the neighbouring countries envy. The irony of course is that with the broad brush of racist generalizations of the period, most Asians were portrayed as greedy Shylocks and exploiters, with long straws to suck the blood of the poor, and it was Nyerere’s nationalizations of private property that largely contributed to Asian flight. Still, among the Asians, in Tanzania and abroad, Nyerere has left a deep impression, he is still respected, even loved, for his honesty and humility. He was a man of the people.
Time flies, it gets dark. The snacks Ali had provided for a plain lunch are long gone. Walter gives me a ride back, and I tell him I’m hungry, rather hoping that we might get a quick something on the road. Come home, he tells me, we’ll eat there. He calls Frida to tell her to order barbecue chicken, and we drive to his home in the dim, old section of Nyerere Road—where he’s lived as far back as I’ve known him—park the car and walk through a dark alley, climb precariously up the dark stairs to the second-floor apartment. It’s late, Frida has stayed up, and it takes a long time for the chicken to arrive; meanwhile Walter’s feeling sick from the wine he’s had, and he lies down on the sofa as I watch the news on an Iranian channel, and soon he falls asleep. When the chicken arrives, I eat by myself, as Frida sits beside me, chatting, and I then leave.
22.
Omba-omba: The Culture of Begging
IN 1961 AS THE “WINDS OF CHANGE” ushered in the country’s independence, a euphoric slogan was heard around the country: Uhuru na kazi, meaning “freedom and work.” The idea was common sense. We had our own flag and anthem, we had our beloved president; no longer were we an insignificant part of the British Empire, a pink smudge on the map, overseen by the colonial government and His Excellency the Governor, in a hierarchy where the white man, the bwana, was superior. But freedom came with responsibility; there was a price to self-respect and dignity: hard work. We would have to work for ourselves to make progress. In the years that followed, growing up in the postindependence heyday, we schoolboys and schoolgirls of the nation were exhorted by another slogan: be self-reliant. Jitegemee—“Help yourself.” And yet another one: Nyerere’s words, “It can be done, play your part.” There were many self-help projects in the country. It was implicit in the mood of those Cold War years that it was shameful to be reliant on other nations more powerful and consequently to be subject to their demands. The British and the Europeans were, after all, the former “colonial masters.” What sort of independence was it if we had to go to them, begging bowls in hand, in order to feed ourselves? If they still told us what to do? In 1965 West Germany stopped its military aid to Tanzania in protest against an East German consulate in the country; the government said, So be it, and refused to accept all West German aid. The conflict was resolved in a few months, but the East German consulate remained, standing large and solid, on Upanga Road. Tanzania did need military aid from West Germany, especially after the scare of the army mutiny of the previous year. But this was a matter of principle. We ran our own country.
What has happened since then? A new term came into circulation, donor; it denotes a benevolent, foreign entity that looks after you; and the head of state’s job description apparently includes touring the world seeking more aid from “the donor community.” The donors make demands on economic policies, and surely they have their political and strategic motives behind their beneficence. A few years ago, I heard a news report that at an international conference, the Tanzanian president had told the audience that his country was so poor it could not afford mosquito nets for its people. Immediately a benefactor came forward, a Hollywood actor, with an offer to donate the nets. For those of my generation who have not forgotten the calls for self-reliance and dignity, who volunteered to build houses during our vacations, and recall the pride we felt at Nyerere’s rebuff of a pushy foreign power, this is humiliating. Surely there are enough wealthy people in the country, those who own office towers and insurance companies, who own mines and export fish, who could make the donation? According to a news report in the Citizen, wealthly Tanzanians own a few billions stashed away in offshore accounts. How can a government that purchases costly military equipment, and pays its members lavish travel allowances, say it cannot afford mosquito nets? One wonders, how does the leader of a nation feel, making that statement at an international conference? Have we lost all dignity?
Here I must answer a rejoinder. I left the country after high school, therefore I missed the hardships that others endured in the years that followed. What right do I have to show this outrage? It is easy for me, in the comfort of my situation in North America, to condemn the nation’s reliance on foreign aid. To which I answer that leaving a place does not sever one’s ties to it, one’s feeling of concern and belonging. We are tied to our schools, our universities, our families even when we’ve left them—then why not to the place of our childhood, of our memories? Surely a returnee has some claim to the land which formed him—which is not in some godforsaken corner of the globe but in the centre of his imagination. And surely distance lends objectivity, allows one to see a place as the world sees it.
I often find myself protesting that media images to the contrary, Africa is not simply wars, HIV, and hunger; people don’t simply drop dead on the streets out of sickness and hunger. (Just as I had to explain to my host family in New Jersey, way back when I was a student, that lions didn’t come roaming into our sitting rooms.) I speak of East Africa, of course. Despite hardships there is life there; people sing and laugh and play music; they go to school, they get married. In many towns, the markets are abundantly full; life is teeming, so much so that Toronto, upon my return, often feels rather moribund. Sitting on my couch at home I sometimes find myself, a modern-day Don Quixote, sparring with the television, railing against reporters who fly from one starving place to another, presumably in helicopters—with all good intentions, how can one even question that?—and, with the brand-name pained expressions and sober voices that we know so well, point at the distended belly of a toddler, the fly-covered nose of a child, the shrivelled buttocks of an old man. Why don’t you go somewhere happy, just for a change, I protest; report on a wedding, a taarab concert, a school games day; show a well-endowed man or woman (but not a fat politician). People do celebrate, not only in Texas but also in Temeke.
Once, on a visit to Durban, South Africa, I was asked to speak to a high school cl
ass. The teachers and principal advised me to explain to the kids my occupation. I began to do that, but I found it difficult to sound convincing. Why wasn’t I a doctor, a pharmacist, a politician? And so I changed tack and told them the importance of telling stories: we should tell our stories so we can be a part of the world community; if we don’t remember our histories, if we don’t tell our stories, then the world tells our stories—and do you know how the world sees Africa? Wars, HIV, and hunger. Is this how you see yourselves? The class—some of the girls at least—looked aghast. Really, sir, is that how they see us? When I finished, a girl came up to me and said, “Sir, one day you will hear from me. I will become famous.” Bravo. Tell it to them.
African countries need aid, yes, just as many parts of the world do, including the poverty-stricken, desperate parts of the wealthiest nations. (More than half of Canada’s aboriginal population lives below the national poverty line.) But equally—I would maintain, more than that—Africa needs to be included in the world community as an equal. Not very long ago I would stare in despair at the world weather maps on TV, which showed Africa rather as the empty geographical space of previous centuries. It seemed that now Africa had no weather, just as then it had no recognizable life.
And so, admitting my comfort in Canada, which has been generous to me and given me a home from which to observe and write, and even rail at television news, I plead my ties and empathy to and my love for the place where I was born—where I walked to school and returned home drenched with sweat, went to community festivals and the excellent library, and to cricket and football matches.
Over the years serious questions have been raised doubting the benefits of foreign aid. Reams of paper have been produced of studies and statistics—foreign aid, an industry in itself, has also spawned an academic industry. Studies show, for example, that aid does not create investment. There is, in fact, a correlation (though not necessarily causal) between decreasing per capita growth in Africa and massive increases in foreign aid. In her book Dead Aid, Zambian-born Dambisa Moyo has produced a scathing critique, seeing aid as more the problem than the solution to Africa’s woes. She pulls no punches. “Aid is not working,” she says flatly. “It is these billions [of aid money] that have hampered, stifled and retarded Africa’s development.” The reasons are obvious, examples speak for themselves right across the continent. Corruption, repression, dependency, haphazard planning, civil wars, all of these have been abetted by foreign aid. Concludes Dambisa Moyo, “aid is not benign—it’s malignant.”
In the view of its patrons, Africa lies like some comatose patient, taking in infusions of aid until one day it will revive and start running. This view is mechanistic, and also patronizing. It creates a global divide between white and black, rich and poor, giver and receiver, bwana and masikini. It is worse than colonialism in the simple sense that no realistic end seems to be in sight. Africa keeps begging, aid keeps arriving, always from the West. “The most infuriating thing about the Planners,” says William Easterly in his book The White Man’s Burden, “is how patronizing they are … any time you hear a Western politician or activist say ‘we,’ they mean ‘we whites’ …” “Bono said, ‘it’s up to us.’ Sachs writes of ‘our generation’s challenge.’ Gordon Brown … saw himself telling Africans: ‘We will help you build the capacity you need to trade.’ ”
And what will the Africans do? “We are building villages in Mozambique,” says a man from the World Development Network to me in Toronto, sounding excited, and then this globetrotter puts in an aside: “Have the Africans learned to do anything themselves?” Which is a sentiment echoed by Paul Theroux in his travels: “Where are the Africans in all this? … in forty years of charity the only people dishing out the food and doling out the money are foreigners.”
The other end of the foreign-aid equation is what one observes on the ground, what aid has done to the dignity of a people since the time of independence, how pride and self-respect have yielded to an attitude of beggary. Foreign assistance—in a word, baksheesh—has created so much dependence all over the country that it’s akin to a dope fix.
In Tukuyu, the old town in the southwest that I visited, a branch road from the highway is rough and broken. The area is wealthy farm country; there is an abundance of food. On either side of this bone-breaking road are fine properties; tea is grown, and banana, and avocado and beans. And yet it’s proved impossible to get that road fixed. The residents await baksheesh to complete the repair. An elderly school trustee in the area says there are no textbooks in schools, and she cannot get to the schools because the roads are so bad. Taking a walk in the same neighbourhood, one is approached by a boy, who begs for money to pay school fees; the gesture seems casual, he thought he’d just ask and try his luck today. Walking past a school, taking me for a white man, kids come running to me, hands outstretched. It’s a habit. The white man gives.
And so this returnee cannot help asking, What happened—to the pride, the head held high, eyes on the future that belonged to us, to Africa? Is this the promise of independence? Is there an end in sight to this addiction?
According to a Norwegian report, in 1993 there were 224 registered NGOs—non-governmental organizations that take care of the civil order in society—in Tanzania; this number had risen to 8,499 in 2000. The number today is presumably greater by several factors. (It seems, perhaps pointedly, not to be counted anymore.) It is now a basic tenet; it is blithely accepted that the social welfare of the people is the responsibility of organizations in the private sector, the foreign-funded NGOs. As Issa Shivji succinctly states in the edited volume Development in Practice,
most of our NGOs are top-down organisations led by elites. What is more, most of them are urban [that is, Dar es Salaam] based. In the case of Tanzania, NGOs did not start as a response to the felt need of the majority of working people. It is true that many of us within the NGO community are well intentioned and would want to contribute to some cause, however we may define it. It is also true that many NGOs do address some of the real concerns of the working people. Yet we must recognise that we did not develop as, nor have we as yet managed to become, organic to the mass of the people. The relationship between NGOs and the masses therefore remains, at best, that of benefactors and beneficiaries.… Our accountability is therefore limited, and limited to a small group. In fact, we end up perhaps being more accountable to our donors than to our own members, much less to our people.… [W]e are funded by, and rely almost exclusively on, foreign funding. This is the greatest single limitation.…
Very few of us can really resist the pressures that external funding imposes on us. [Italics mine]
The government never took on, or it soon abdicated, its responsibility for the social and cultural welfare, and the health, of its people; now thousands of expatriates and their local agents provide essential—and sometimes useless—services. In this new scramble for Africa, young men and women arrive from abroad as the new benefactors, managers, and teachers, the bwanas and bibis, to hold the hands of the locals, often knowing little or nothing about the culture of the place they have come to. Meanwhile, locally educated men and women who cannot find good jobs await foreign projects to help them earn a decent living, send their own kids to good urban schools. You see them at the coffee shop of Dar’s Mövenpick (now Serena), the supplicant and the benefactor seated at a small table, the donee and the donor, one—to use crudely racial depictions—black, the other white. Often the “white” are embarrassingly young. All these workers, local and foreign, make up the urban elite, driving SUVs, visiting western-style restaurants, sending children to expensive schools, and generally living a western lifestyle, the vast majority of them in Dar es Salaam, which is currently—and this is hardly surprising—one of the most expensive cities in the world. Running an NGO is like owning a business, I am told, it’s like having a shop of one’s own; opportunists and cynics will run several NGOs at once, in any field that’s “trending.” Business people try a hand at it, for c
ommissions and kickbacks; university lecturers become “consultants.” Not surprisingly, their students take extra classes to learn how to start their own NGOs.
At the other end, in the developed world, this foreign-aid system provides opportunities for western youth to travel abroad and seek foreign experience for their resumés; and it’s an opportunity for retired people to do something in their sunset years to give worth and purpose to their lives. Africa gives and is exploited as it receives.
It can only be laudable for individuals and organizations to provide services where there are no alternatives. Relief organizations help the diseased and the disabled, orphans and victims; church, mosque, and temple bodies run decent schools. The human instinct for pity and kindness, for charity, can hardly be denied or dismissed. Even in the advanced economies there are charities running soup kitchens, sheltering the homeless and the abused, assisting immigrants, providing safe needles to addicts, promoting culture. What is unsettling in a place like Tanzania is the scale of dependence and expectation; it’s as if the majority of the population, from the university graduate to the subsistence farmer, exists with its hand perpetually outstretched, in expectation of assistance, a job, a handout. When the social sector is run by foreigners, and the urban cost of living is pushed up to accommodate their lifestyles, which are vastly beyond those of the great majority; when a total dependence is created on the “donor”—what does this do to the self-image and the dignity of a dependent population that not long ago celebrated its independence from Europe? When in order to raise funds, the donor resorts to the slick strategies of the consumer market in its home country to promote its “product,” portraying a nation at its weakest—pathetic faces, distended bellies, running noses stuck with flies, bony buttocks again—how does the world see Africa? How do Africans living abroad face their world?