We are currently in Nairobi, returning from an excursion to Zanzibar for a music festival, seafood, and tropical beaches. More on that later. Now, we would like to address an elephant, not the savanna or forest elephants, but one of the elephants in the room.
On a typical Ugandan afternoon, we are walking along one of the ubiquitous red, muddy roads in a rural village, when three small boys appear out of the banana grove with machetes in their hands. "Give me my money!" one shouts to us and holds out his hand. We try to ignore him. "One hundred!" chimes in another. The other boy is silent - he is too busy peeling a large piece sugarcane with his machete. We chuckle slightly and keep walking. We know that we will encounter an identical gaggle of kids 100 meters on, who will appear bearing sharp implements, ask for money, and then fall into laughter.
This peculiar phrase, "Give me my money," is repeated daily by Ugandan children to passing white foreigners. The phrase begs many questions. Is "my" merely a poorly chosen possessive pronoun, or is this something deeper? Is this a demand for post-colonial retribution by the legacy of an exploited population? Is the child expressing the lopsided trading structure of developing and developed countries? Perhaps this is simply a communal view of property? Or a symbol of the longstanding foreign aid from the developed world to many African countries?
Probably this is simply an example of poor English and an encounter between poor people and people who are richer than any villager's wildest dreams. Our skin color tells them that we are rich and they are right. The phrase is an ill-executed business venture, a simple plea to get what they want and we have, like us broadcasting our resumes when we are desperate for employment, even for positions for which we are not qualified and have almost no chance of getting.
Witnessing widespread poverty has a deep effect on one's emotional and mental state. We all know that poverty exists, but it is usually a concept. When one travels, the concept becomes a reality. People react in a variety of ways to this reality; they react with humility, pride, sorrow, guilt, anger, irritation, confusion, or even paranoia. Humility comes from knowing that your own wealth is largely a product of the place in which you happened to be born. Pride is the result of knowing that your bank account is full, that you and your ancestors did something right. Sorrow and helplessness often accompany scenes of widespread poverty, like watching a legless man crawl up to you in the hot sun from 100 meters away, only to wave hello to you at your knees (this happened while we were haggling with a truck driver for a cheaper ride). Guilt and anger come from pondering solutions to poverty, observing the historical legacy of North-South relations, and at the fact that so few of our resources (human or other) are channeled into humanitarian purposes. Irritation, confusion and paranoia come from the constant harassment that can be traveling: you are a target, a walking dollar sign, a young, tremendously rich person who must continuously bat away advances from all directions.
In Uganda, there are many hardworking subsistence farmers, many thousands (perhaps millions) of small business owners, as well as many people with vast tracts of idle time. From the western viewpoint, this is a vast waste of potential.
One story comes to mind. On a sweltering afternoon, we strolled into Bigodi to arrange a wild-life walk in a local wetland sanctuary. Having decided to do the walk the next day, we idled away the hottest hours in an empty restaurant, drinking warm soda and chatting with the proprietor. After a while, we decided to play pool on the uneven pool table under the thatched roof in the front of the establishment. In no time, an audience of twelve people had gathered, including kids on break from school, old men, and men of working age. These observers huddled close and expressionlessly watched us play. Good shot, bad shot, scratch, jump shot: nothing riled the crowd. They only politely moved out of the way when we were setting up a shot and about to whack someone in the head with a pool cue.
We played a single game (Cindy somehow won despite being ignorant of the rules), and walked back to our campsite through small fields of banana, cassava, rice, coffee, maize, and other crops. We realized that not only did our "fans" not have 500 shillings (25 US cents) to play a game of pool, but that the best thing to do, indeed the only thing happening that afternoon, was to watch us play pool.
One story comes to mind. On a sweltering afternoon, we strolled into Bigodi to arrange a wild-life walk in a local wetland sanctuary. Having decided to do the walk the next day, we idled away the hottest hours in an empty restaurant, drinking warm soda and chatting with the proprietor. After a while, we decided to play pool on the uneven pool table under the thatched roof in the front of the establishment. In no time, an audience of twelve people had gathered, including kids on break from school, old men, and men of working age. These observers huddled close and expressionlessly watched us play. Good shot, bad shot, scratch, jump shot: nothing riled the crowd. They only politely moved out of the way when we were setting up a shot and about to whack someone in the head with a pool cue.
We played a single game (Cindy somehow won despite being ignorant of the rules), and walked back to our campsite through small fields of banana, cassava, rice, coffee, maize, and other crops. We realized that not only did our "fans" not have 500 shillings (25 US cents) to play a game of pool, but that the best thing to do, indeed the only thing happening that afternoon, was to watch us play pool.
We arrived on the continent in the midst of the economic "crisis" in the US, with the relevant book Origins of Financial Crisis by George Cooper. The book debunks the free market myth, showing with simple examples that while the "invisible hand hypothesis" applies to commodities markets, it does not apply to lending and investment markets where rational lending and investing creates bubbles and busts. Fascinating as these concepts are to us in the West, they do not apply here in Africa, where the basic foundations of wealth-generating markets scarcely exist. There is no bailout for Africa.
Two reads offer strikingly different takes on corruption in Africa. The Fate of Africa by Meredith is a 600 page post-colonial history of the nations of Africa. The book is a mass of names, dates, cities, and improbable events, but the major thesis is that leadership in African countries has been so atrocious that all potential has been squandered. Until the very last page, Meredith describes a tangled mess of corruption from which he offers little hope.
On the other hand, in The End of Poverty, Jeffery Sachs writes about his experience with free market reform in countries all over the world. In a chapter about Africa, he argues forcefully that precious little foreign aid to Africa actually goes to helping Africans develop economically. Rather, foreign aid goes to crisis management (i.e. emergency food aid) and expensive Western consultants (who often propose solutions that assume Africa to be far more like the west than it really is). Sachs argues that corruption in Africa is not the cause of Africa's failure to thrive; that corruption is on par with similarly poor countries elsewhere in the world; and that only education and economic opportunity will reduce corruption, and not the other way around.
On the other hand, in The End of Poverty, Jeffery Sachs writes about his experience with free market reform in countries all over the world. In a chapter about Africa, he argues forcefully that precious little foreign aid to Africa actually goes to helping Africans develop economically. Rather, foreign aid goes to crisis management (i.e. emergency food aid) and expensive Western consultants (who often propose solutions that assume Africa to be far more like the west than it really is). Sachs argues that corruption in Africa is not the cause of Africa's failure to thrive; that corruption is on par with similarly poor countries elsewhere in the world; and that only education and economic opportunity will reduce corruption, and not the other way around.
In The Shadow of the Sun, Polish journalist, Ryszard Kapuscinski, interweaves his personal tale of traveling as a journalist in Africa with African political history. He emphasizes that for people who are struggling to survive, all else is irrelevant. Education has very little meaning to a subsistence farmer; rainfall, a few tools, peaceful neighbors, and a decent supply of charcoal are life.
We conclude this entry on poverty from an internet cafe in Nairobi, a place where we feel very much at home. We are surrounded by middle class Africans who move like they have places to be and socialize like they have things to talk about.
So what can we conclude from life on the ground? Our observations and conversations show that many struggle every day trying to fulfill basic needs in a place where the safety net does not exist. Regardless, people survive while demonstrating mind-boggling acumen: the man walks down a chaotic Kampala street carrying a refrigerator on his head; our guide, Bosco, grabs a metal pot of boiling water out of the fire with his bare hands; the knee high child bounds silently up the steep rocky trail from the bottom of a deep valley. Material progress comes slowly: a few roads are built, a few cell-phone towers are put up, a few schools are opened, a few opportunities are gained.
Who knows, perhaps someday the boy with the machete and the poor grammar will sit all day at a computer terminal with a little roll of fat hanging over his waistband, filling his bank account with shillings.
So what can we conclude from life on the ground? Our observations and conversations show that many struggle every day trying to fulfill basic needs in a place where the safety net does not exist. Regardless, people survive while demonstrating mind-boggling acumen: the man walks down a chaotic Kampala street carrying a refrigerator on his head; our guide, Bosco, grabs a metal pot of boiling water out of the fire with his bare hands; the knee high child bounds silently up the steep rocky trail from the bottom of a deep valley. Material progress comes slowly: a few roads are built, a few cell-phone towers are put up, a few schools are opened, a few opportunities are gained.
Who knows, perhaps someday the boy with the machete and the poor grammar will sit all day at a computer terminal with a little roll of fat hanging over his waistband, filling his bank account with shillings.
Until next time,
C and G
Love your blog posts guys - keep them coming!
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