The immorality of Aid to the "Third World"
The debate as to the true impact and value of aid and development assistance to the so called Third World countries continues. I would like to add to it, by suggesting that often the provision of aid and development is not only not unhelpful, but immoral.
The Justification of Aid and Development Intervention
People in the aid and development business rarely take account of the counterfactual argument.1 More often they look at a condition at the beginning and end of their intervention. Then they try and explain all changes according to the impact of their intervention. They rarely consider what might have been had they not intervened.
For example, a development plan may be drawn up for a country or region. Various economic indicators are chosen that are thought to show the presence of economic advance. Policy makers take credit for the advances made, and find excuses for their failures. Their underlying assumption is that an economy is somewhat like a machine that ought to behave predictably according to their rules. Their other assumption is that without their intervention things would not have changed.2
This rather crude way of treating peoples as parts in a machine, enables those carrying out interventions to take credit for whatever changes are occurring while rarely taking sufficient account of what might have been the case if they had not been there!
Such is just one basis on which relief and development aid continues to be justified. It can also be justified on the basis that:
a. Western people value "equality". To achieve a theoretical equality someone should not have what someone else does not have. The greater the difference between what person X has and what person Y has, the greater the effort required to give Y more.
b. Donor countries have aid budgets that are drawn in advance and then must be spent. The same applies to voluntary groupings such as churches which consider it appropriate to give away a certain proportion of their income and charities whose whole existence depends on the continuation of the aid / development machine.
c. There are those who for various reasons make it their business to present guilt traps to people in wealthier nations so as to create moral-pressure for them to contribute finances to aid and development initiatives.
I am often asked about the value or otherwise of aid and development initiatives. Those who promote them use simple arithmetic to demonstrate how advantageously such resources are utilised. They frequently fail to grasp some of the broader and frequently disadvantageous consequences of the use of aid and development funding. I am attempting in this paper to examine these so as to show just how deleterious the overall impact of outside interventions into the Third World can be.
I am considering these under three heading. Firstly; the problems of wealth, secondly; destabilising distractions, thirdly; situations created.
I have lived and worked in Zambia, Tanzania and Kenya in the last 15 years. When referring to the "Third World" or to "Africa" I do so on the basis of my experience in these three countries as supplemented by broader reading. I consider that what I write has much wider application across Africa and the Third World in general.
A. Problems of wealth.
While wealth itself may not be a bad thing, the way it is acquired is important.
1. The African lottery? While playing the lottery is popular around the world, its helpfulness to human society is more questionable. Very few people indeed come to win a lottery while very many put their hope and much time and energy into participating in it. The prospect of a big win thus draws attention out of all proportion to its actual size. Those who do succeed and win vast amounts of money often meet many problems.
Such is the nature of Western money and how it reaches Africa. There are usually a few people who hit the jackpot, but they come to be well known in a "poor" community. They manage to convince a Westerner to be a major donor to their interest or project. The story they tell in order to achieve this may or may not be true. Large amounts of money received (what may seem to be little money in the west can be vast in a place where a month's full time wage can be £15.00) create many problems. Vast numbers of people are distracted from or lose the motivation in their day to day activities and orient themselves to this lottery.
2. Dubious loans. The offer of large loans of money with little to pay back in the early period is too much to resist for people around the world. People are frequently tempted to take out loans to satisfy immediate needs or to invest in businesses that later prove questionable. The paying back of loans later proves to be an enormous burden. In some cases a bailiff can be forced to take property by force as repayment. Such people can be deeply troubled and sometimes pauperised by such thoughtless loan taking.
There is always a question in such a situation as to who is actually guilty. The one who has accepted such a loan can be forced to repay, but there is also an extent to which the offering of such a loan is immoral. Their interest rates are often incredibly high. Their aim is to trap the gullible.
I suspect that recipients of loans in the third world rarely understand how repayment is to be achieved. Even if they do understand, there is a good chance that they will have doubts as to its likelihood. Yet there are many reasons why they will not or even cannot refuse a loan.
a. Repayment can often be delayed, and is sometimes cancelled altogether.
b. Even should a key leader responsible for accepting a loan perceive its problematic nature, if others come to know that the loan is being offered they will not understand this and will pressurise him to accept.
c. A person accepting a loan is rarely personally liable for its repayment. He will use various means - such as other loans - to reply if need be. An organisation such as a government or a church is left to repay the loan.
d. Repayment seems to be a long way off when a loan is taken out. etc.
Loans have been used over many years to keep a stranglehold on Third World economies. This forces the countries concerned, and to a lesser extent the organisations or people concerned, to follow close instructions and thus effectively be under the thumb of the wealthy nations. It is time to accept that responsibility should fall on the giver of a loan and not only its recipient. The offering of a loan can indeed be immoral.
3. The brain drain. Brains usually follow money. The encroachment of the West into many Third World countries means that these countries have two sectors. There is the international (sometimes called formal) and then the local (or informal) sector. The latter represents the indigenous peoples genuine efforts at helping themselves. But the most capable of the local people are the ones who jump into the international arena. In this sector salaries may be much higher indeed. Corruption and misunderstandings are also rife.
The appropriation of the best and most able people into the international sector perpetuates the poverty of the indigenous sector. Sadly the scale and nature of operation of the formal sector is usually so out of proportion to that of the informal sector that those who have succeeded in it have little useful wisdom to share with those left "at home". That is, management and operational techniques learned by people who have functioned in the formal sector, are of little help to them in their interaction with the informal sector, because of the vast gap between the two.
B. Destabilising distractions
Large and/or unpredictable inputs into any system easily have a destabilising affect. The development of an effective indigenous system of operation is hindered or entirely prevented by unpredictable and ill placed outside inputs. This applies to businesses, voluntary associations such as churches and governments.
1. Perpetuating superstition Ongoing poverty in the third world is often ascribed to peoples being primitive or superstitious. It is less often realised that the policy of the West in dealing with such countries is often responsible for perpetuating (or even creating) such superstition.
I will take my working definition of superstition here, as the failure of people to see "rational" cause and effect. Superstitious people are said to be those who ascribe phenomena to spiritual rather than physical agencies. This happens and is perpetuated in circumstances beyond the normal reasonable grasp of someone's understanding. Hence rural people are said to be particularly superstitious due to the unpredictability of the rainfall and climate that they depend upon.
One effect of civilisation is that more and more of life is predictable as people's lives are further removed from the elements. Superstition is not necessitated to the same extent as an explanatory theory in such a predictable environment.
It is extremely difficult for any such predictable system to develop consistently in the Third World today. People do not understand how things that have a great impact on their lives are done, as they are done by foreigners and in foreign ways. Local innovations are swamped by the intrusion of foreign ideas with financial backing. Those who succeed are not the diligent and hard working who follow well thought out plans, but the lucky and those who can sweet talk foreigners. Significant amounts of income are achieved only through corruption. Money comes either in trickles or in windfalls.
Such erratic and unpredictable events do not help anyone in the slightest to acquire a rational understanding. Rather they substantiate and accentuate superstitious beliefs of causality. Foreigner's ways remain mysterious and to a people historically steeped in witchcraft, are interpreted as being magical. This kind of belief is an affliction to Christianity, which sets out to teach monotheism. It is certainly a major hindrance to many kinds of social progress.
2. Distraction from "real" issues. All sorts of development initiatives are demanding of people's time. They make it difficult for people to prioritise what is important in their lives. Often the possibilities of financial and material reward arising from a "new" project being introduced from abroad are too high to resist. Vast amounts of effort are put into getting a share of the cake, to the neglect of everything else. "Problems" that should be solved with careful discussion, planning or wisdom are solved with money.
Numerous examples of this that are happening in the Third World today could be cited. The proliferation of child sponsorship schemes does away with the need for careful family planning. The availability of loans for agricultural inputs obviates the need for budgeting. Finance that might have brought business growth is invested in education (a means of helping one's children get a share of the pie). Hospital bills eat up capital that may have been invested in something productive (dying can be very expensive when a family feels obliged to take even a terminally ill person to die in an expensive hospital as happens in some parts of Africa). Children who may have been learning useful things from their grandparents are instead stuck in classroom waiting for poorly motivated teachers to drone on and on about things that are meaningless to their everyday lives. Late-teenage girls who should have husbands and homes instead have boyfriends and abortions.
In today's Third World those who work hard to help themselves in honest ways are all too quickly despised by those who succeed in milking the aid machine. In the meantime things that require order and effort to be held together are falling apart.
3. Destabilising It is not an enormous exaggeration to say that whatever a foreign donor touches, falls apart. The king who found that everything he touched turned to gold, soon discovered that this was not always a good thing. The foreigners hand that always carries money has a similar impact.
Voluntary groups such as churches or self-help initiatives may be thriving, until someone puts in outside money at which stage infighting, jealousy and suspicion take over. Someone's productive small business is destroyed by the importation of cheap foreign products. A relationship between husband and wife turns to arguing and fighting resulting in both turning to drink when the wife gets involved in a women's project for making money independently of her husband, funded from a distant land. A chief or headman accustomed to serving his people changes his behaviour radically when he realises that those he needs to serve in order to enrich himself are foreigners who have little clue as to his peoples problems. Those insisting on the imposition of unfamiliar moral codes are not there to see their impact. For example, the ruling that was brought banning corporal punishment in schools so as to continue to acquire donor funds, that caused chaos in Kenya in 2001.3
People revert to telling lies and half-truths in order to protect their well-being and that of their families. A foreign intervention promises x on the condition of y. Y is clearly impractical and the foreigner would realise as much if he were to hang around long enough. There are two options. Telling the truth and watching the money go somewhere else makes you look a fool. Better to tell a lie, get the money to feed your family, and hope that the things that fall apart in the process will somehow come right in the end.
Once lying to foreigners has begun it soon gains respectability and becomes the norm. From here on the foreigner no longer realises that his activities are destabilising. What he has in view is the formal sector, which gradually grows as a foreign implant rife with corruption and lies. Meanwhile the local sector on which most people depend struggles to survive alongside it.
4. Taking responsibility from people From time immemorial children have been the responsibility of their parents, or other adults under whose protection they fall. This is no longer universally the case. Child sponsorship schemes have proliferated in Africa. One centre alone may adopt hundreds of children. Details vary, but the overall aim is to ensure that a child gets a good education and upbringing despite the poverty of the parents.
Parents now find themselves beneficiaries of a small windfall as a result of having children. The whole family can live off the "relationship" this child has developed with a white donor seen in a photograph. A small team of people become foster-parents on behalf of donors from many miles away. The African parents are no longer left to bring up their own children, and the child has learned to despise his parents as he knows from early on that his well-being is dependent not so much on them as on that image on a picture. He has achieved the peculiar status of being African through and through yet also being American, Swedish or British while living in the mud hut with his parents.
The implications of this kind of upbringing in an age when African countries are apparently "independent" are hard to imagine. Is a child not being taught from year dot, that he is unfortunate to be born in Africa, but that all good things come from abroad? Is there not a risk that such children will never come to value their own country or people, until they have first learned to despise those who gave them a hope, that later dwindled and died?4 These child sponsorship schemes certainly save lives and give someone a "quality" of life that they otherwise wouldn't have had. But I am dubious as to the long-term effects of the unnatural mind-set that children will remain with.
5. Inappropriate relinquishing of donor responsibility The counter-factual must here be considered. The development aid activities that go on relieve the rich man's guilt burden. When he sees and hears of "the poor", he assures himself that he is playing his part through having given some money. Now he can sit back, relax and get on with life. This focusing on finance as the "only" means of helpfully intervening in the Third World precludes other thought and action that may otherwise be very helpful.
The alternative to these kind of projects need not be seen as "do nothing"! Perhaps, should such an easy way of relieving one's guilt by passing on the surplus of one's economy not have been so easily found, alternative courses of action would have been sought out and found to bring disparate ends of the human race together? In the current state both sides conveniently relinquish themselves of esponsibility. Third world parents, because someone else is looking after their children. Donor-nations because they are already "doing something". Meanwhile, little that is helpful is being done.
Thinking people in donor-nations perceive these problems. Because this is the way work in poor countries is defined, they may choose not to get involved with the "poor". Even should they go to the "poor", they might have enormous standards of charitability to live up to in order to gain an audience. They will have an enormous task of breaking through their peoples reputation of only being interested in providing money.5 They can be left standing aside, in tears. Is it surprising that there are not more people interested in long-term commitments to Third World nations these days?
In reality there are many ways of contributing to life in the Third World apart from giving out money. These ways need to be opened and explored for the sake of the Gospel of Jesus Christ and the unity of the human race in the future.
C. Situation created
Continuous pre-occupation with foreign donor funding "creates" situations that would otherwise not be there. Many of these may be extremely unhelpful to general social progress.
1. Creation of dependence. Enormous international trade has in recent years brought great inter-dependence of peoples in distant corners of the world. Given the advantages of trading and the benefits that accrue to all when specialisation of task is allowed, this is generally seen as a good thing that brings a net gain in economic standing of the world's people. In other words, co-operation has many advantages over the alternative scenario in which every family would need to provide for all their own needs from a small piece of land. Nations these days depend on one another, so why is this not a good thing for Africa?
Trading is not only of physical goods. It can also be affective. A major item that Africa trades is its poverty. It is the poverty of Africa that brings a high proportion of its income. This is a peculiar kind of dependence that forces Africa to remain poor in order to maintain its revenue!
This is of course one of the least pressing items to trade. Should the rest of the world come to be beset with almost any other problems, the first trading partner they are likely to drop is the one that gives them no benefits in return except for relief of conscience. Hence one problematic of dependence in the African case is its great vulnerability.
Why has Africa become "dependent" in this unique way? The foundational reason is that the African way of life does not give prosperity a physical cause. Prosperity is rather seen as arising from "blessing". The receipt of such blessing does not result in any increase in productivity on the part of the African people because they do anyway not perceive that increased economic activity is correlated to increased economic prosperity.
The above paragraph may appear presumptuous. This is not something I have learned from the scholarly literature. It is a working-conclusion that I have drawn after 15 years of living and working in Africa, most of which have been in an African village entirely with African people following their lifestyle.
2. Access to immoral life. Much of what is "normal" life in the West comes across as highly immoral in Africa. African people love clothes, and when they become available they very frequently encouraged people, especially women, to cover their bodies. Thus a kind of modesty in dress has developed across the Continent. Westerners when they reach warm climes often like to wear few clothes. Hence they and those who set out to imitate them soon appear to be immoral.
The freedom that Western women and girls have in relating to men similarly appears to be immoral. In traditional African societies the drinking of beer was carefully regulated and restricted particularly to youth. The coming of money-society has made it easy for almost anyone with such a desire to acquire alcohol. Disincentives to pre-marital sex, such as a bad reputation for a girl who is not a virgin on marriage, are eroded away in today's Westernising culture. When money is available, televisions and radios follow in its wake. Television especially exposes young people to styles of immorality previously strictly taboo or that they had perhaps never even thought of.
I do not want to enter into an ethical debate here about what is morally right or wrong in absolute terms or in the long term. For example, I am not saying that women should or should not wear trousers (American English - pants). My point is that the encounter of the West with African society is an intrusion of immorality. The impact is an immoral impact, as the predominance of teenage unmarried pregnancy, youth alcoholism etc. these days shows. Aid and development assistance being almost invariably a harbinger of the West, brings immorality in its wake.
A community's resources are usually carefully controlled in particular ways. These resources include food, houses, wives, alcohol, farmland etc. Old men traditionally control these for the benefit of all. Outside aid and development quickly bypasses these channels for the control of resources, thus making them available in immoral ways for immoral uses. Even should the resources pass through regular channels (i.e. through the elders) their nature and quantity is easily such as to defeat what was an effective system for control and distribution. For example, large quantities of resources of in-descript origin cause infighting and jealousy between elders and between communities.6
3. Perpetuates pointless institutions and activities. Resources coming into a community earmarked for particular uses begin to have a very complex impact on that community. A "normal" community is largely responsible for how it uses its resources according to certain guidelines and the decision maker's comprehension of what is good, right and appropriate. Sometimes a government may intervene, be it forcefully or by propaganda, thus distorting the original set of priorities in resource use. This usually does relatively little damage because a government of a country is relatively well aware of peoples inherent inclinations being at least to some extent representative of, locally informed about and speaking the same language as the people.
Foreign institutions involving themselves in a community through provision of tied-resources of whatever form are typically much less aware of local constraints and difficulties. The kind of scenarios that can then develop are perhaps best illustrated by taking an example of a clearly (rationally) useless "project". Let us take as example a project of painting white spots on the backs of flies, from hereon referred to as "spotting flies".
Peoples initial reaction to be told of this practice, if they can control their laughter and if it is being seriously proposed, is to acknowledge its value so as to please their visitor. The visitor may encourage them greatly to undertake spotting. He may explain that spotted flies carry less disease than un-spotted flies. People will be happy to accept this - as it is always a good thing to protect oneself from disease. Yet after spotting a few flies, especially in the absence of the visitors, people will lose interest.
Per-fly payments combined with training courses on spotting methodologies will have to come from outside for the practice to continue. This will require phones, administration, secretaries, teachers, classrooms, vehicles, electricity, food provision, road construction, housing and thus craftsmen, government approval (licences) burning of bricks and other boosts to the local economy. Maintaining a fly-spotting training centre in the hope that the practice may eventually become indigenous is meanwhile resulting in an inflow of thousands of dollars annually into the local community. Soon the community becomes dependant on this. Then there is a tacit agreement made that no one is to speak against fly-spotting, because any interference with this new industry would spell disaster to the locality.
Thus institutions and activities that are dependent on outside support are perpetuated and come to have almost a normative existence in a society, even if the activity itself is in actual fact totally useless - such as putting spots onto flies. The existence and continuity of such institutions is only extremely minimally and precariously related to their actual usefulness!
It is in this way that numerous practices these days in the Third World continue. They may be totally inappropriate, but no one will say this. They may be useless or even damaging, but unless extremely damaging will still continue as long as money keeps flowing in. People's time and effort can be being invested in numerous such useless activities oriented to pleasing outsiders, so that little or none remains for truly relevant and locally useful occupations.
Much of education as practised in Africa may fall under this category. It is perpetuated not because of its value to the local people but because of the side benefits associated with it's enabling someone to link up with the international community. It then comes to be accepted as a "ritual" with inherent "power", much as many temple rituals are considered around the world. The people themselves become convinced of its value, even though they do not know why, as sometimes even a perpetrator of lies may do his job so well as to be convinced by his own inventions.
4. Idolatory of the white man. The understanding of the "white man" these days in much of Africa is incredible. While in some ways despised or even hated for the damage he has done to people's cultures and ways of life, he is also held in enormous awe and esteem. After almost 15 years living with African people I do not always "feel" like a white man (although looking at a mirror is a crude reminder), but I all too often come to be treated as one.
The white man is in a sense, all that the African aspires but always falls short of being. He is so far "up" as to be out of reach to most. His participation in an activity adds great respectability and power to it. Some things are considered useless without his presence. He is considered capable of building aeroplanes and being able to communicate instantaneously all around the world - the mechanics of which defeat the African people (I don't understand them either, but that is besides the point). He is always loaded with as much money as he wants and floats to the top of any pile. His efforts at passing on his great powers are valiant, though clearly somewhere flawed as very few of the most devoted Christians who imitate missionaries reach the same high echelons of wealth and grandeur.
Every new money-intensive project (and this they all seem to be) adds to this same image. Given the holistic religion's worldview of the African, the white man is worshiped like a god.
This constantly perpetuated (every time a white man on the scene is shown to have money) idolatry is extremely damaging in numerous ways. Anything like "normal relationship" between black and white is rendered almost impossible. The powerful (but ignorant) white man is the last to hear the truth on a matter.
Africa is known to be corrupt. This state of affairs perpetuates corruption. Much money comes through the white man's hands. The continuity of the financial flow is maintained by a continual pretence or telling of half-truths. The outsider is thus in a state of enforced ignorance, so unable to make wise decisions as to resource use and allocation. This must be taken care of as far as possible by local people, by the process widely known as corruption.
5. Numerous conflicts and division. A state of art as described above is not conducive to unity and co-operation. Instead it is constantly producing conflict and division.
The ownership of resources plus the moral right to their use are carefully defined in societies around the world. That which someone has acquired through their own sweat and toil is legitimately theirs. The same applies to something that is acquired or inherited through acceptable traditional avenues. Things quickly become unclear when resources come as "aid" for "development"!
Legitimate ownership of aid-funds is much less easy to define. Suspicions quickly arise that a beneficiary of large amounts of foreign money has used immoral means of acquisition, for example that he indicated to the donor that the aid he receives should be for the whole group, but then intends to consume a large part of it alone.
As indicated above, access to aid money is enabled by a close association with white people. Those with a good knowledge of foreign tongues and the ability to be at ease with and socialise with whites are ahead in this game. Such access being the key to unlocking the floodgates, is itself greatly coveted and even fought over. People will go to great efforts to protect their "white-man" to ensure that funds they anticipate do not end up going in the "wrong" direction - i.e. to someone else. Little may a new visitor from the West realise just how coveted a prize he is. Conflicts over privileged access to his benevolence easily results in the destruction of what may have been along happy relationships, now replaced by extended feuds.
The patron-client system, in which many people come to be under the rule and guidance of he who has resources, continues to be very common in African. The difference today is the questionable legitimacy of the way wealth is acquired. Division quickly results, should someone who has been a follower get his own funds (e.g. his own link to the West). It is very likely that he will quickly pull out "his" people, cease to respect the authority of his previous patron and become a law unto himself.
Those who realise that this is what happens, and just how much damage is done to relationships through contact with the West, try to minimise the number of people who gain access to Westerners. Hence the move to try and ensure that education can as far as possible be accessed outside of the West. One effect of this reluctance to send "good men" to visit the West is that those who do make the trip be they "good" or "bad", because of their scarcity, get a heroes welcome and an enormous slice of the cake thus further substantiating the view that the West is really only about money. This is hardly an influence to morality.7
6. Machine and technology graveyards. This is just one well-known side effect of the current tendency to try to promote development through aid. Recipients of resources reason that it is best on principle to say "yes" to whatever is offered, through fear that saying "no" may discourage the giver, which would mean a loss of the side-benefit that almost invariably arise with whatever inputs are coming. The decision to accept machines is thus not based on any economic or rational reasoning, but rather a desire for spin-off benefits and an obligation to the perpetuation of aid.
Sometimes machines of various sorts from tractors to computers have little more than scrap value in the country of origin. Transportation may however be of considerable cost, and the distraction effect of these new devices from those performing their normal task may be great. Much frustration also easily arises if those who have taken the trouble to donate consider themselves responsible to pay for the upkeep and maintenance of the introduced machines, so that they do not end up lying un-repaired and idle. All to often they very soon do. The effect of imported machines is to distract and draw people from their normal productive activities.
Conclusion
I have attempted above to point out many aspects of the immorality associated with aid practices. Some questions remain.
Why is this not more widely known? There are many reasons for this. One that I have alluded to frequently above, is that aid interventions are desired and considered beneficial by people in the Third World through their spin-off effects regardless of whether or not they "work" as intended. It is thus hard to speak against them.
Initiatives that are taken up time and time again from the West that are supposedly in the interests of the African people have here been seen frequently to be extremely damaging to the prospects of development on the continent. The solution to these difficulties, that I have mentioned elsewhere,8 lies in interventions that minimise the use of funds and are based on "religious faith" and not materialist or secular ideologies of social change or development.
The saddest aspect of the whole aid/development initiative of the last 50 years is that it has occluded all sorts of other options. The identity of the West in the third world is so strongly tied to money, as to dwarf and distort other aspects of international relationship such as religious exchange and the building of friendships across ethnic and international boundaries.
Footnotes
1. The counterfactual argument, is that which looks at what might have been had things not have been done as they were done. In terms of the provision of aid and development, what would the position of countries have been if they had not been provided with aid and development assistance? I am grateful for Deryk Belshaw for my awareness of this notion of ‘the counterfactual’. Back to article.
2. This could of course mean that rates of change would not have changed. i.e. If there was already a state of economic deterioration then the assumption is that this would not have been halted without the provision of the outside aid or intervention. Back to article.
3. I was in Kenya at this time and saw this happening. The Kenyan media announced that corporal punishment in schools had been declared illegal. There followed a widespread spate of extremely destructive strikes by school children up and down the country. To my understanding, corporal punishment has been continued. Hence we have yet another example of the separation of the legal system from actual practice, for the sake of the continued acquisition of foreign aid. Corporal punishment is declared illegal in Kenya so as to please foreign donors, but continues unabated in its schools. Back to article.
4. The child sponsorship schemes often focus strongly on providing children with education. This education that is provided is however generally rooted in foreign languages and countries, so is hard to understand for local children. They can typically only get to benefit from this education either my corrupt means or by coming to be employed in the formal or international sector. An educational system may mushroom, but then leave its students frustrated, as there are still only the same numbers of jobs available in the international sector. This sponsored child has two options. Either to despise his own people, or perhaps later on to despise those who paid for him to be brought up in such a way as to give him so much false hope and perhaps to have ruined his future. Back to article.
5. Nearly every white man who goes to Africa these days seems to do so with the intention of spending money. This makes it extremely difficult for someone not intent on spending money to be understood or valued in any other role. Back to article.
6. I am here suggesting that all money is not equal. Finance and aid that has come from outside of one’s community is perceived and understood differently from funds generated from the inside. Someone who makes $1000 through his own sweat and toil or through traditional means is considered to have obtained this finance legitimately. Someone who receives it from a foreign donor is immediately suspected of having lied to the donor, and is in the possession of funds that are not rightfully his and is therefore ‘up for grabs’. Back to article.
7. I am here referring to those African people who do manage to get to visit and be welcomed to western nations. The reluctance of people to send Africans from Africa to the west, means that the few who do arrive have a scarcity value that increases the prospects of their self enrichment.Back to article
8. See for example Jim’s Journal, November 2002. Back to article