I and a few other Peace Corps Volunteers went to a reception in Cotonou to mark the 50th anniversary of USAID, which is a federal agency that gives away money to people in third-world countries. It was held on the lawn of what I believe is the USAID director’s house. The American Ambassador, the Peace Corps director, the aforementioned USAID director, and various other important American and French personages were present. There were also a good number of Africans who are high up in the aid universe.
What you did was you wandered around the lawn and snatched as many hors d’oeuvres and glasses of fine wine as humanly possible. The trick was to position yourself where the people walking around with trays passed most frequently. You had to occasionally pretend to be interested in a display about some project that USAID has recently funded, or in the career advice that some drunk white guy in a suit was giving you.
You also tried to only talk with the other Peace Corps Volunteers. It was not hard to find them. The invitation said you could wear Western or African formal attire. For want of the former, we all went with the latter. (African formal attire is basically colorful pajamas.) We discovered too late that everyone else at the soirée, with the exception of a couple Africans, wore suits or evening gowns. You could also spot Volunteers by looking for the people who seemed underfed and in need of a haircut.
For these and other reasons, the expats generally regard us as white trash. The exceptions are the expats who were once in the Peace Corps, but the overwrought chumminess some of them have toward you can be just as bad as condescension, because the whole time you’re wondering whether in a few decades you’ll also be that much of a douchebag about having been in the Peace Corps.
Around the lawn there were displays about various USAID-funded projects — distribution of condoms and mosquito nets and seminars on why you should use them, that kind of thing. You saw well-composed photos of nameless black children looking pitiful and flat-screen monitors running slick slideshows of statistics about USAID, like how many million condoms they’ve given away in the past five years, and everywhere the corporate logos of USAID and its partners, including Peace Corps.
I’m sure that USAID’s money has saved lives here. But condoms and mosquito nets are not the story of African poverty. Outside the compound walls you see the bodies of the few who make it to old age, their bodies absolutely destroyed by decades of carrying backbreaking loads and working the rocky soil with nothing but medieval tools and human muscle. You do not see how this body is still alive or how this person could have endured so much pain. It was so they could eat, so their children could eat. They know that they will never know another life but, like all people, they dream that their children’s lives will be better than their own.
And then you see the people who are, by self-appointment, in charge of improving the villagers’ lives. They are milling about a manicured lawn behind high walls and armed guards, sipping wine and sampling caviar from a butler’s tray, each talking up what his organization has been doing to save the Africans.
No matter your intentions, you cannot have an academic understanding of poverty. The people in the suits do not understand it. I do not understand it. I live at close quarters with village poverty, but the fatal thing about poverty is that you cannot escape it. You have no choice. I chose to live here and I could choose to not live here, and so no matter how much I know about the villagers and sympathize with them, I can never get it. I can never know what it is to have no say in the course of your life. None of the Westerners in Africa can.
When you get to some specific problems, like malaria, Western aid can do some good. But it breeds a perverted culture. It makes aid workers think or pretend to think that they are the benevolent guardians of people they don’t know the first thing about. There is something sickening about that kind of arrogance.
The last temptation is the greatest treason:
To do the right deed for the wrong reason.
– T. S. Eliot
Well said. Too well said.