That was the way of the world, but it seemed an African peculiarity that whenever a town or city grew bigger it got uglier, messier, more dangerous, an effect of bad planning, underfunding and theft. And a feature of every settlement was the sight of African men standing under trees, congregated in the shade. They were not waiting for buses, they were just killing time, because they had no jobs. They must have had gardens — most people did — but the farm work of planting and hoeing was presumably done by their womenfolk. In Kenya, whenever I saw a well-formed tree near a village or town, I saw men under it, doing nothing, looking phlegmatic and abstracted.
Even the most prosperous towns in this part of Kenya had the bright signboards and relief agencies, the offices and supply depots — people doling out advice and food and condoms. The merchandise of the gang of virtue. This was true in Kericho, its large leafy tea estates softening its green hills and valleys. Maybe such places attracted missionaries and agents of virtue because they were so pleasant to live in? Maybe communications were better here than in the remote bush? Whenever I saw a town that looked tidy and habitable I saw the evidence of foreign charities — Oxfam, Project Hope, the Hunger Project, Food for Africa, SOS Children’s Villages, Caritas, many others, with saintly names and a new white Land-Rover or Land Cruiser parked in front.
As this was a coffee-growing area, any one of these vehicles could have belonged to the satirical figure of Dickens’s Mrs Jellyby and her African Project. She had said, ‘We hope by this time next year to have from a hundred and fifty to two hundred healthy families cultivating coffee and educating the natives of Borrioboola-Gha.’
Mine is not a complaint, merely an observation, because hearing horror stories about uneducated starving Africans, most Americans or Europeans become indignant and say, Why doesn’t someone do something about it? But much was apparently being done — more than I had ever imagined. Since the Kenyan government cared so little about the well-being of its people, concerns such as health and education had been taken up by sympathetic foreigners. The charities were well established. Between the Bata Shoes retail store and the local Indian shop, you would find the office of World Vision or Save the Children — ‘Blurred Vision’ and ‘Shave the Children’ to the cynics. These organizations had grown out of disaster relief agencies but had become national institutions, permanent fixtures of welfare and services.
I wondered — seriously wondered — why this was all a foreign effort, why Africans were not involved in helping themselves. And also, since I had been a volunteer teacher myself, why, after forty years, had so little progress been made?
An entire library of worthy books describes at best the uselessness, at worst the serious harm, brought about by aid agencies. Some of the books are personal accounts, others are scientific and scholarly. The findings are the same.
‘Aid is not help’ and ‘aid does not work’ are two of the conclusions reached by Graham Hancock in his The Lords of Poverty: The Power, Prestige and Corruption of the International Aid Business (1989), a well-researched account of wasted money. Much of Hancock’s scorn is reserved for the dubious activities of the World Bank. ‘Aid projects are an end in themselves,’ Michael Maren writes in The Road to Helclass="underline" The Ravaging Effects of Foreign Aid and International Charity (1997). One of Maren’s targets is the charity Save the Children, which he sees as a monumental boondoggle. Both writers report from experience, having spent many years in Third World countries on aid projects.
While these writers are kinder to volunteers in disaster relief than to highly paid bureaucrats in institutional charities, both of them also assert that all aid is self-serving, large-scale famines are welcomed as a ‘growth opportunity’ and the advertising to stimulate donations for charities is little more than ‘hunger porn.’
‘Here is a rule of thumb that you can safely apply wherever you may wander in the Third World,’ Mr Hancock writes. ‘If a project is funded by foreigners it will typically also be designed by foreigners and implemented by foreigners using foreign equipment procured in foreign markets.’
As proof of that rule of thumb, the most salutary and least cited book about development in Africa is an Italian study, Guidelines for the Application of Labor-Intensive Technologies (1994), revolutionary in its simplicity, advocating the use ofAfrican labor to solve African problems. After describing the many social and economic advantages of employing people themselves, working with their hands, to build dams, roads, sewer systems and watercourses, the authors, Sergio Polizzotti and Daniele Fanciullacci, discuss constraints imposed by the donors. Donors specify that purchases of machinery have to be made in the donor country, or bids restricted to firms in the donor country, or that a time limit is placed on the scheme, which ‘encourages the tendency towards large contracts and heavy spending on equipment.’
Labor-intensive projects are few in Africa because so much donor aid is self-interested.
Passing enormous smooth boulders, as big as three-story houses, we came to Kisumu. Kisumu was a port on the Winam Gulf of Lake Victoria, a rail head, a ferry port. But the train was defunct and the ferry was so irregular and in such bad repair that it was useless. I had thought I might stay here a few days and take a ferry to Uganda, but that was out of the question.
Kisumu was now just a bus stop. In its market there were the usual children hawking boxes of tea and containers of milk, women roasting ears of corn, and people selling huge heaps of old shoes and second-hand clothes. Even Africans did not find the second-hand clothes at such markets expensive. Most of them used to belong to you, they are the old dresses and T-shirts and shorts and neckties and ragged sweaters and blankets you put in a box and handed in at the church for collection — the Salvation Army, the Blankets for Africa, or whatever. You thought they would be doled out to needy people — but no, they are sorted into bundles: socks, shoes, slacks, blouses, skirts, T-shirts, sweaters, and so forth. These bundles are sold cheaply to market traders, who become the distributors, stacking them on their stalls and reselling them.
When my own clothes got ragged I too bought clothes in the market. It was my way of not looking like a tourist or a soldier. And I got fond of my second-hand shirts, one of which was bright red and lettered Top Notch Plumbing.
I spent the day in Kisumu, just walking around because I had been cramped in the bus seat. I walked to the old jetty, where there was no ferry, and the railway station, where there was no train. I noted that the market was full of charity merchandise: nothing made in Kenya, no textiles, only a few clay pots.
Leaving Kisumu on the afternoon bus to the border, I saw a booming Kenyan industry: just outside town, shop after shop of wood-workers, all of them making coffins — the freshly cut raw wood, reddish in the dampness, the men sawing it and nailing the long boxes, everyone hard at work. And the finished coffins were stacked or standing upright, lots of them. This was the busiest local industry I had seen in the whole of Kenya: the coffin-makers and their lugubrious product, a perfect image for a country that seemed terminally ill.
I made a note of those coffins, and sketched pictures of their shapes and sizes. But I also noted that, sitting in these buses watching Africa go by, getting off whenever I liked, I was traveling happily, in a state of great contentment, following the honks of the geese — on this particular day, the Egyptian goose, Alopochen aegyptiaca, prettily named but wild geese all the same.