The Beautiful Tree (6 page)

Over a year later in April 2003, I was ready to start the research—promising to examine in more depth the phenomenon of private schools for the poor in India, in a range of African countries, and in China, too. The John Templeton Foundation was taking a risk: I might find nothing at all—perhaps the few schools I’d seen on my sporadic visits were just that: not the tip of the iceberg but the totality of what I might find. I suspect some of their academic referees told them that. But they funded me anyway. Beside me from the beginning was Dr. Pauline Dixon, the vivacious and entertaining economist from Newcastle University, who had come to academia later than most after spending several years as a jazz pianist. She was my indispensable support throughout, involved in researcher training, data collection and analysis, and writing up the final results.

The first study up and running was in the Old City of Hyderabad. We created a research team based in a small nongovernmental organization, the Educare Trust, in Hyderabad and trained them in how to collect the data. We then selected 3 (out of 35) zones, Bandlaguda, Bhadurpura, and Charminar, to which the secretary of education, Dr. I. V. Subba Rao, had directed me as being amongst the poorest. These three zones together had a population of about 800,000 and covered an area of about 19 square miles. Finally, within these three zones, I instructed the team to focus only on schools found in the “notified slums,” according to the latest census and municipal documents, defined as areas that lacked amenities such as decent sanitation and clean water supply, adequate roads, and electricity.
⁶

In addition to looking at urban Hyderabad, I also wanted to see what was happening in rural India. Again directed by the secretary of education, I sent my research teams four hours down the road to the Mahbubnagar district, one of the two worst performing of the 23 districts in Andhra Pradesh on a range of educational indicators, such as literacy rates, proportion of children in school, and retention of students. My team selected five subdistricts in Mahbubnagar, three of which were wholly rural, and two of which had some urban population in small towns. Again the focus was on these poor areas, through which we could usefully effect comparisons between both rural and “small-town” India with metropolitan India. Also in India, I conducted research in the notified slums of North Shahdara, East Delhi, reportedly one of the poorest areas of the capital city.

The studies were up and running in India. My teams were going down every street and alleyway, calling unannounced on every school they found, to collect its details and to see what was happening in the classrooms. I couldn’t wait to see what they would find.

But what about Africa? Would I find the same things there? One of the first countries I visited for the research was Nigeria. I’d called universities and think tanks across sub-Saharan Africa, asking for research partners to help me in my work. The proposal from the University of Ibadan, Nigeria’s premier university, in association with a Lagos-based think tank, the Institute for Public Policy Analysis, seemed particularly interesting. I couldn’t wait to visit, to see whether I would also find private schools for the poor in that country.

3. A Puff of Logic, Nigeria

I first met Dennis Okoro in July 2003 at an education and development conference in London. Dennis was recently retired as chief inspector of schools for the Nigerian federal government. He was a charming, warm man with a soft, lilting voice and shiny bald head, who looked very much younger than his 67 years. Over a beer, I told him that I wanted to research private schools in poor areas of Lagos. He dismissed this idea straightaway: “There are no private schools for the poor. In Nigeria, private schools are only for the elite.” The only problem here was that a month before, I visited Nigeria to meet with the University of Ibadan team; we went into the slums of Lagos and found private schools—everywhere, just as in India. (I’d been really excited by my find. The Ibadan team had been very surprised; they had been skeptical about finding any schools like the ones I’d found in India, and had in fact agreed to the research because they knew they would find very little. Now after our preliminary visits, we’d signed a contract and they were ready to get started on the detailed research.) It was a difficult situation to handle. One wants to be respectful of elders; above all, one doesn’t want to appear arrogant—“I’m saying I know your country, educationally speaking, better than you do, although you were chief education inspector for 10 years, and I’ve only visited once.”

So I pussyfooted around the issue: “I’ve found private schools in the slums of Hyderabad, won’t they also be in Lagos?” No, he was adamant: “You might find some charities helping out, but no private schools. Public schools are for the poor.” Sensing my disappointment, he then hit on the solution: “Ah! It’s a problem of definition. In your country, you call your elite private schools ‘public’ schools, but
our
public schools are government schools. So it’s a matter of terminology. They’re not private, but
government
schools in the slums.”
Quod erat demonstrandum.
For Mr. Okoro, the puzzle of these oxymoronic private schools for the poor “promptly vanished in a puff of logic.” Steeped in our quaint British terminology, I’d been told that these schools I’d come across in the slums were “public” schools, and had assumed that this meant
private
schools. Elementary, my dear Watson.

I could see that there was no convincing him. I’d seen for myself something in his country and in other places too. He said they definitely weren’t there, not in Nigeria and, by implication, not in any other country. So I dropped the issue and we went on to other matters, and further beers.

A week after my conversation with Dennis Okoro, I was in a taxicab winding slowly through snarled traffic over the low, sweeping highway viaduct to Lagos Island and then to Victoria Island. I peered through the window, as so many visitors must do, at the shantytown sprawling out into the waters below. Wood huts on stilts stretched into the lagoon until they met the line of high pylons, where they abruptly stopped. Young men punted dugouts, skillfully maneuvering their long poles over and into the water; women paddled canoes full of produce down into the narrow canals between the raised houses; teenage boys stood on rocks in the water and cast their fine nets; large wooden boats, some with outboard motors, carried men out below the highway and beyond. Across the top of the shantytown was a thin drifting smog, giving all a surreal veneer, a dystopian Venice. Thompson Ayodele, the director of the Institute of Public Policy Analysis in Lagos, who had responded to my invitation to conduct the research and organized the University of Ibadan team, told me, “That’s Makoko.” This was exactly the kind of place that I wanted to visit, to find private schools. “You won’t find private schools there!” he laughed, outraged at the idea. In any case, he added, “Too dangerous.” In fact, he’d never visited, but said that it definitely wasn’t safe for outsiders to venture. “There’s no police there, anything goes,” he said, with a finality that he felt should have been the end of the matter.

The battered black Mercedes—a typical taxi from the budget hotel—crawled across Third Mainland Bridge into congested Herbert Macaulay Street and turned sharply into Makoko Street. It was the national holiday, October 1, 2003. Nigeria was celebrating its 43rd year of independence—if celebrating could be inferred from the breast-beating opinion pieces about widespread corruption in the national newspapers that I’d scanned at the hotel. I was in Lagos training the University of Ibadan team who would be collecting data on the proportion of students in public and private schools and to learn as much as possible about the nature of the low-cost private schools and how they compare with their public counterparts. Thompson and his team had decided we should focus on Lagos State only, for all the research indicators they’d read suggested it had problems enough to make it worth exploring in detail. An official report said that Lagos State, with 15 million people making it the sixth-largest global city, was “faced with a grave urban crisis,” with over half the population living in poverty. They’d selected three “local government areas” for study, one randomly chosen from each of the three senatorial districts making up Lagos State. And they’d used official data to classify areas as “poor” or “nonpoor,” with the former featuring overcrowded housing with poor drainage, poor sanitation, and lack of potable water, and prone to occasional flooding. I was only interested in finding out what was going on in these “poor” areas.
¹

My University of Ibadan team was led by Dr. Olanreyan Olaniyan (known to everyone as Lanre), a quiet, unassuming but gifted young economist, with a hugely warm and pleasing personality. He had recruited 40 graduate students from the education and economics faculties at the university. Following the methods developed in India, we trained them to go out and search for all the primary and secondary schools in the selected areas. Lanre had found government lists of public and recognized private schools, but we told the researchers they were on their own as far as unrecognized private schools were concerned. We told them to comb every street and alleyway in the urban areas, visit every village and settlement in the rural surrounding areas, looking for private schools. Be warned, we said, they won’t necessarily have signboards advertising their existence: in Nigeria, there is a hefty tax on signboards, so school owners often prefer to go without. Consequently, they’d have to use their ingenuity and do detective work.

We instructed the researchers to call unannounced on the school and briefly interview the school manager or principal. Afterward, they were to ask if they could do a brief, unannounced tour of the school to look at what was going on in one classroom, and to check on school facilities. We’d role-played with our team to show them how to gain access to the schools by convincing school managers that it was worthwhile giving us their time. And then we’d taken the researchers out to some poor districts that we’d already reconnoitered to see whether they would find all the schools we had found, and to ensure that their interviews and observations matched what we had already found.

Finally, we were ready to go. But then came the national holiday, and there was only one place that I wanted to go to see for myself: Makoko. My taxi drove past fine, gated communities, outside of which security guards lazily dozed, down a reasonable suburban paved road. There was a water tap outside one of the iron gates; surrounding it, a dozen or so women and children waited their turn to fill up their assorted plastic buckets and metal bowls. Driving farther, we saw women sitting with baskets of tomatoes and peppers, yams and chilies, crowding the narrowing street. Makoko Street became Apollo Street; as it did, bustling market stalls now left barely enough space for one car to travel. As we moved slowly forward, people crowded around the car, letting us pass, but only just. Men sitting on doorsteps started calling, “
Oyinbo
” (white man). Children playfully joined in the chorus: “
Oyinbo, oyinbo, oyinbo
!”

My driver passed the rough metal gates at the entrance to two parallel and starkly imposing four-story concrete buildings. The signs indicated that this was, or rather, these were, the public primary schools, for, it transpired, there were three public schools here on the same site. The driver motioned to stop, but I told him to continue. He looked apprehensive and puzzled—“I thought we were coming to see the schools?”—but he didn’t want to lose face, so he drove on. Over a canal, where hundreds of dugouts were tied loosely together, we ventured into a street so narrowed by the market traders that we had to inch forward, carefully parting the crowds as we moved. “
Oyinbo,
” shouted the children; “
Oyinbo,
” crowed the old men. “Mr. White,” called out one young woman, looking up from dousing her small boy with a bucket of soapy water.

The paved road ended at a speed bump; beyond was just a track so muddy that it was impassable for our vehicle. My driver and I left the car there, in the safe hands of some friendly young men who had descended on us as soon as we stopped (who later, of course, demanded large, and accepted after protracted and angry negotiations smaller, sums of naira—the local currency—for their care). We picked our way carefully. The street was flooded from the previous night’s rains. The open sewers along either side had spilled out into the road; I followed my driver, squelching my way from one side of the street to the other, avoiding the worst excesses of slime and mud, human excrement, and piled rubbish. But there was no way one could avoid it altogether. A young boy squatted in front of me, defecating in front of his home on an old newspaper; when he had finished, his mother collected the paper and threw it into the stinking drain.

I asked some teenage boys sitting on the low wall outside a general store if they knew of any private schools here. They said they did (my driver translating to ensure they had properly understood) and became my guides. We followed them as they moved carelessly along the planks that crossed the sewer; I moved cautiously. Down a narrow alleyway, we followed, past stinking fish markets where women worked, gutting and preparing the latest catch. And then there were the wood huts I had seen from the highway—made of flat timbers, with slivers of planks sunk into the black waters below. Beside the huts were raised, rickety wooden walkways out over the water and alongside the narrow canals. The boys moved easily; I moved slowly, testing my weight on each plank before I proceeded. Below was filthy black “water,” swirling furiously in places, bubbling with some unknown organic matter. A pig wallowing in the stinking water looked up lazily as we passed. And a growing group of children joined us, playfully touching me, and shouting, “
Oyinbo.
”