The Road to Hell (2 page)

The starving African exists as a point in space from which we measure our own wealth, success, and prosperity, a darkness against which we can view our own cultural triumphs. And he serves as a handy object of our charity. He is evidence that we have been blessed, and we have an obligation to spread that blessing. The belief that we can help is an affirmation of our own worth in the grand scheme of things. The starving African transcends the dull reality of whether or not anyone is actually starving in Africa. Starvation clearly delineates
us
from
them
.

Sometimes it appears that the only time Africans are portrayed with dignity is when they're helpless and brave at the same time. A person about to starve to death develops a stoic strength. Journalists write about the quiet dignity of the hopelessly dying. If the Africans were merely hungry and poor, begging or conning coins on the streets of Nairobi or Addis Ababa, we might become annoyed and brush them aside—and most aid workers have done that at one time. When they steal tape decks from our Land Cruisers we feel anger and disgust. It is only in their weakness, when their death is inevitable, that we are touched. And it is in their helplessness that they become a marketable commodity.

A
s I got to know the people in my Peace Corps group, I learned more about why people had joined. We were refugees from failed marriages, broken engagements, and other traumas. We all needed time to figure out what we wanted to do with our lives. The Peace Corps was a temporary escape, like joining the French Foreign Legion but with a much shorter commitment. Most of us associated the Peace Corps with JFK and carried with us a nostalgia for the dream that died in Dallas in 1963. Those of us in our early twenties at that time were the first post-Vietnam generation, slightly too young to have been drafted, but just old enough to have been politicized by the war.

In the post-Vietnam world, the Peace Corps offered us an opportunity to forge a different kind of relationship with the Third World, one based on respect. Vietnam had sowed within us enough suspicion of our own culture to have us looking for answers to the world's problems in other cultures. As Americans, we claimed a certain distance from Kenya's colonial past. We were self-consciously anticolonial. Most of us would have early experiences with colonials and other expatriates who spoke in flippant and demeaning
generalizations about “the Africans,” We were even shocked by experienced volunteers who talked about how the kids didn't learn or how you have to be firm with your hired help lest they steal everything you own. We bristled when Kenyans called us “Europeans,” by which in fact they just meant “white people.” Our country, after all, had not been a colonial power in Africa.

On several occasions Kenyans came and shook my hand while declaring that we, Kenyans and Americans, shared a historic bond, both of us colonized people who had thrown out the British. It was a profound misunderstanding, one which I never bothered to contradict. It was, I wanted to think, at least true in spirit.

But the reality was that the colonial experience of the European powers had taught us how to view Africa. Many of us discovered just how deep our Western prejudices ran, built as they were on the literature of colonialism. Certainly there had been an early 1960s, romanticized view of African independence movements that deified the likes of Ghana's Nkrumah, Guinea's Sékou Toure, Kenya's Kenyatta. But it was difficult to hold those notions when the icons of independence showed themselves to be incompetent, corrupt, and worse. This “new” Africa of bold revolutionary heroes was, in retrospect, just another chapter in the same Western mythology that gave us Tarzan and further evidence of the patronizing relationship between the powerful and the powerless.

By the time I arrived in Africa, a second generation of African leaders was taking command. Hypocrites were replaced by tyrants and madmen such as Uganda's Idi Amin, and Jean Bedel Bokassa and his Central African Empire, men who killed their enemies and kept them in refrigerators for snacks. The very week we arrived in Nairobi, Bokassa threw himself a multimillion-dollar coronation in Bangui, the capital of his impoverished country. A wave of nostalgia for colonialism was beginning to surface among expatriates and even among some Africans.

This nostalgia played perfectly into my “experience” with Africa, shaped by films like
Khartoum, Beau Geste, The African Queen, Casablanca
, and a selection of Tarzan movies. These images endured despite my having read Frantz Fanon, Chinua Achebe, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, and other African thinkers. We arrived in Nairobi to find that our white skin was an immediate passport to the best clubs and restaurants in town. We soon learned the joys of drinking on the verandah of the Norfolk Hotel, or of visiting game lodges in Kenya's national parks. The lure of the hedonistic colonial lifestyle became even more seductive when we were sent out beyond the metropolis to the towns in the hinterland. There we found refuge in the
colonial sports clubs with their billiards tables, dart boards, and squash courts that the servants of the Crown had carved out of the wilderness. There, in the remote colonial refuges, we could gather with a few other expatriates—and even some Kenyans—to talk about, complain about, and even ridicule the Africans for their inability to grasp what it was we were trying to teach them. We had effortlessly become what we had so recently despised. The fit was easy, all of it redeemed by the big idea of aid. They needed our help. We were there to serve.

My first two years were spent as a secondary school teacher in an isolated village in the district of Meru on the eastern slope of Mount Kenya. I was dropped off by a Peace Corps staffer who left me standing outside of a little wooden shack with my duffel bag in hand. I gazed across an idyllic scene of thatched roofs, lush greenery and majestic hills. Then as I watched the old Land Rover rattle away down a rutted dirt road, my mind focused on a single thought: My god, I'm going to be here for two years. What have I gotten myself into?

The experience was overwhelming, so much in fact that I never really had the time to worry about the economic development of my hosts. They seemed to be getting along fine without me. It was I who needed help. I was the one who had to adapt to life without running water or electricity. I had to get used to living in a place where the nearest telephone was ten miles away.

The people in the village were endlessly amused by my ignorance about agriculture. I couldn't plant maize or raise chickens. They snickered when my uncalloused hands couldn't hold a scalding hot glass of tea.

It brought to mind an H. G. Wells short story I'd read in high school, “Country of the Blind.” In that story a mountaineer, “a reader of many books,” falls into a deep precipice and finds himself trapped in a lost valley among a race of people who centuries before had lost the use of their eyes. From his perspective, the people of the valley lead a simple and laborious life and he immediately sets out to “bring them to reason”—to enlighten them about the wonders of sight. But inseparable from the notion that he can enlighten them is the notion that he can rule them. Is that not the role, even the responsibility, of the enlightened person who lives among the blind? He recalls the adage, “in the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.”

He learns, however, that the populace has adapted itself to sightlessness. When he speaks of “seeing,” they think he is mad. They have no windows in their houses and prefer to work at night, when it is cooler. Quickly the mountaineer learns that the king of the blind is “a clumsy and useless
stranger among his subjects.” In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man can't see.

For the following twelve months I struggled to survive. I was the one who learned to raise and slaughter chickens, grow vegetables, plant cassava. I learned how to live on a diet consisting primarily of maize and beans in various forms. I learned how to shower with a bucket of cold water and cut the chiggers out of my feet with a Swiss Army knife. I learned to speak Swahili and spent my mornings with the old men at a local tea shop listening to stories about the past. These old men viewed me as a curiosity. It never occurred to them that I could bring anything of value to the village.

There were a few people who thought I could, however. A few men in the village had Land Rovers and lived in large stone houses: the local administrative chief, the preacher, the school headmaster. These men had brought me to the village. Later I learned that they had paid someone in the ministry of education some large bribes to get me there. (I was told this when I hiked to a neighboring village that had lost the bribe war.) It was their idea that a white teacher would help attract more students, school fees, and donations to the school. Which I did. (The local pastor was devastated to learn that I was a Jew. He had planned on my active participation in church services and fund-raisers. The headmaster looked at the bright side and confided to me that his biggest fear had been that the Peace Corps would send them a black teacher.) They raised money to build more classrooms. But when the shipments of cement and stone blocks arrived, the headmaster and his buddies carted them away at night and built additions to their own houses and expanded their shops in the market.

These were the people who benefited most from my presence in the village; they were educated, Westernized, and living lives far removed from most of the people in the village. They knew how to manipulate the system that ran on foreign aid. They knew how to get a piece of every contract or public project in the area. It was disheartening, and I complained about it loudly when I traveled to the town of Meru on the weekends and joined with other expatriates at the Pig and Whistle Hotel or at the Meru Sports Club. Unlike the mountaineer in Wells's story, I had a support group to remind me where I came from.

Back in the village, I learned to go with the flow and enjoy myself. I dropped any pretenses that I had anything to offer. I stopped trying to help and began to observe. And I learned some important lessons about economic development. I learned to respect people for what they did. People
usually do things for good reasons, even though it might not be immediately apparent to outsiders.

The relevance of Wells's story continued to resonate with me. The more time I spent in the village the more aware I became of the connection between the desire to enlighten, to do development work, and the desire to rule. It was difficult to sit back and watch the village leaders taking money from the farmers who worked so hard to pay their children's school fees. Yet the only thing I could have done would have been to get involved politically, to take power, to lead, ultimately to rule. (Indeed, several teachers at the school wanted me to become headmaster.) Earlier missionaries had delivered enlightenment as the word of God and had paved the way for political and economic domination from Europe. We were delivering enlightenment in the form of Western culture dressed up as education and development. Like the missionaries, we could not know what would follow.

When my Peace Corps term was up I wanted to stay in Kenya, so I went to Nairobi looking for work. I'd heard that Catholic Relief Services was looking for a Peace Corps volunteer to roam the country starting food-for-work projects. I went to the CRS office and met a smiling man named Jack Matthews. Matthews told me long stories about his work in Korea and India. He then told me that CRS had received a $900,000 grant from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) to start food-for-work projects around the country. Whoever got the job would be given an apartment in Nairobi, a Land Cruiser, and instructions to drive around the country starting projects. Of course I was interested. Kenya is one of the world's uniquely beautiful places. Few people had the money to spend a year in a four-wheel-drive truck exploring its most remote regions. I asked Matthews what I had to do to get the job.

He told me that he wanted the Peace Corps director to make the choice. The new director had only been in the country a short while and knew very few of the volunteers. When I walked into her office that afternoon, it was the first time I had ever seen her. She immediately told me that she didn't feel right choosing from a group of volunteers she didn't know. So I told her that Matthews wanted to hire me; all she had to do was phone him and say it was okay with her. I had the job that afternoon.

I moved into a beautiful garden apartment in a nice neighborhood in Nairobi. My first day on the job I drove home in a brand-new Land Cruiser. In the morning I drove to my office to figure out ways to give away bags of rice that were already enroute to Kenya from a port in Texas. Meanwhile, CRS notified the country's parish priests and government officials that this
rice was available. All they had to do to receive it was fill out a one-page application describing their proposed project and specifying the number of “recipients”—the number of the project's workers who would receive sacks of rice in exchange for their labor. Hundreds of applications were submitted.

I took some of the USAID money and customized the Land Cruiser, adding extra-large fuel tanks and a really nice stereo system, and then I set off across Kenya to inspect the proposed projects. It was a dream come true. I was getting paid to cross one of the world's most beautiful landscapes. I was so awestruck by my own good luck that sometimes I'd stop in the middle of a huge empty wilderness, or beside a herd of giraffes or elephants, and just yelp with delight.

I was having so much fun running around starting food-for-work projects—water projects, agriculture projects, forestry projects—that I completely overlooked the most obvious problem: I knew nothing about agriculture, forestry, road building, well digging, dam building, or any of the projects I was approving. But nobody seemed to care. Only once did anyone in authority at CRS ever go and look at a project. When I'd return to Nairobi every few weeks, my boss, who let me work completely unsupervised, had only one question: How many more recipients did you sign on? More recipients meant more government grant money, which meant we could buy more vehicles and hire more assistants.