The Stop and Start of Saving Africa

From Stop Trying to Save Africa...

Last fall, shortly after I returned from Nigeria, I was accosted by a perky blond college student whose blue eyes seemed to match the "African" beads around her wrists.

"Save Darfur!" she shouted from behind a table covered with pamphlets urging students to TAKE ACTION NOW! STOP GENOCIDE IN DARFUR!

My aversion to college kids jumping onto fashionable social causes nearly caused me to walk on, but her next shout stopped me.

"Don't you want to help us save Africa?" she yelled.

It seems that these days, wracked by guilt at the humanitarian crisis it has created in the Middle East, the West has turned to Africa for redemption

I remember them. I wasn’t one of them, but sometimes I took the literature they were handing out.

I interact with the ones here now from time to time, the ones who fly in for a month or two and ask me where I’m from and how long I’m staying. Now that I'm here.

How can I answer that question when I can’t say I plan on going home anytime soon? (Mom and dad, I promise I’ll visit in December.)

Now that I'm here when I never thought I would end up here, because I had no intentions of saving anyone. I do what I can, when I can, but I’m never more aware of my limitations than when I’m trying to help.

They fly in for internships and fact-finding missions or to pick out children to adopt in much the same way my friends and I in New York take the subway to the pound to adopt stray dogs.

Some come here with the casual breeziness that you might lighten your step as you get on the subway, as I did, but I don't think many leave that way. And if they do, it's their fault. Their loss.

The article leaps from the microcosm of idealistic college kids without the means or understanding to save anything to the problems of how the media portrays Africa:

News reports constantly focus on the continent's corrupt leaders, warlords, "tribal" conflicts, child laborers, and women disfigured by abuse and genital mutilation. These descriptions run under headlines like "Can Bono Save Africa?" or "Will Brangelina Save Africa?" The relationship between the West and Africa is no longer based on openly racist beliefs, but such articles are reminiscent of reports from the heyday of European colonialism, when missionaries were sent to Africa to introduce us to education, Jesus Christ and "civilization."

It's true that these articles ring sour, but these articles aren't as much the problem as these:

How to Save Africa, in the New York Sun, a pretty respectable rag.

Saving Africa has rightly become a popular concern, uniting Bono and Bill Gates, Angelina Jolie and Pope Benedict XVI. Despairing of academic skepticism, the intellectual force of this movement, Jeffrey Sachs, appeals directly to the people promising $110 per head to end destitution and disease in Africa. Who could resist such a humanitarian bargain?

When did saving people become a bargain?

But don't worry, it gets worse.

Industrializing Africa is the only way to solve its poverty.

Really? Because I thought one solution couldn't really work for an entire continent.

Before the Industrial Revolution all societies were caught in the same Malthusian Trap that imprisons Africa today.

I thought we were done comparing pre-Industrial Europe and Africa....

The African environment has always created high disease mortality. This was a blessing for Africa's living standards.

No comment.

But much of Africa is still trapped in its Malthusian past.

That's right. It's like there's a crazy time machine the rest of the world doesn't have access to that took us back to the 1800s. But somehow, it's also like the writer of this article got on a time machine that took him to academia 60 years back.

And the next bit, about Uganda, is particularly good:

If Mr. Sachs' Millennium Project succeeds where most of its effort is concentrated, in reducing mortality, then it will further erode living standards. In Uganda, for example, at incomes that are the equivalent of $3 a person a day, the population is still growing at 3.5% per year. Given the heavy dependence of Uganda on agriculture and natural resources, population pressure has ensured that even with improved crop yields, incomes have stagnated over the past 40 years.

Fourteen percent of children born in Uganda die before the age of five. If the Millennium Project reduces such deaths to American levels, that alone will increase the population growth to 4.2% a year. Without sustained economic growth, this is just a recipe for more miserable living conditions.

To achieve sustained growth economies, Uganda would have to switch employment to manufactures and services. Despite the astonishing low wage of these economies — apparel workers in East Africa still cost about $0.40 an hour compared to $10-$20 in America and Europe — industrialization has escaped Africa.

These are the people who are trying to "Save Africa" in a way far more insidious than the doe-eyed college girls with a megaphone. These people have posts in front of podiums and access to newspaper columns, they are the ones to be afraid of.

The first essay, "Stop Trying To Save Africa," doesn't mention anyone like Sachs particularly, but does discuss aid more generally,

There is no African, myself included, who does not appreciate the help of the wider world, but we do question whether aid is genuine or given in the spirit of affirming one's cultural superiority. My mood is dampened every time I attend a benefit whose host runs through a litany of African disasters before presenting a (usually) wealthy, white person, who often proceeds to list the things he or she has done for the poor, starving Africans. Every time a well-meaning college student speaks of villagers dancing because they were so grateful for her help, I cringe. Every time a Hollywood director shoots a film about Africa that features a Western protagonist, I shake my head -- because Africans, real people though we may be, are used as props in the West's fantasy of itself. And not only do such depictions tend to ignore the West's prominent role in creating many of the unfortunate situations on the continent, they also ignore the incredible work Africans have done and continue to do to fix those problems.

I agree completely. Unfortunately, the media houses usually fly someone in and out for a week or two to do stories who is too dizzy and jet lagged and disoriented by the difference to get past his own experience of it and write about something besides his liminal perspective. And the college students don't stay long enough to realize people dance a lot.

And cultural superiority? I wish I could say it wasn't affirmed through aid. But until bags of rice don't say USAID on their side, and benefits aren't planned just because a donation is made, it will.

I hope people will realize Africa doesn't want to be saved. Africa wants the world to acknowledge that through fair partners

with other members of the global community, we ourselves are capable of unprecedented growth.

I hope that chance comes. But how long will the wait be?