The West’s theatrical wardrobe: Mask of self-interest

Combining personal interviews with women living in the slums of Nairobi and local NGOs and published research, this essay argues the West should continue to bear the brunt of the blame for underdevelopment in Africa.

Just on the outskirts of Nairobi, one of Sub-Saharan Africa’s largest slums sprawls out alongside a hill and down into a valley. Amongst the sea of corrugated tin roof tops, flags designating communities wave along with clouds of kicked-up dust that never seem to settle. Waves of heat emanate from above the slum and warp the Nairobi skyline in the near distance. A train just manages to push itself along the British built rail leading to Uganda, but for close to a million people, the tracks have ended here.

Kibera is not without contradictions but in some respects, it has better living conditions when compared to the smaller but more notorious Korogocho slum a several kilometers away. As if to deliberately antagonize residents, the lap of ultimate luxury sits atop the same valley and just touches the crumbling rail. Italian conifers are tall, kept neatly trim and conceal the razor wire and broken bottled lined walls of a multimillion dollar villa owned by former President Moi. Within the very heart of Kibera, guides parade tourists about eager to gage a level of poverty previously unknown to them and snap an occasional photo when deemed appropriate. Basic commodities such as water are sold at three times the price than in the city. Korogocho is similar, but few Westerners (including international NGOs) rarely venture into its urban jungle.

It would appear that the real value of life in societies deeply rooted in injustice is secondary to those who initially sowed the seeds. Along the road and next to the Kibera entrance is a large billboard with a picture of an affluent family in a modern kitchen eating a brand name chicken, a biting reminder of an unattainable lifestyle for the near million living in the slum. And one has to wonder what would inspire President Moi to settle within a stone’s throw to abject poverty on such a scale? Is it just fatalism that anchors Kibera’s residents? Such questions are passim throughout Africa and the world for that matter. Perhaps the answer lies somewhere in what Pinnacle Relief co-founder Joshua Kungu Nguujivi of Nairobi said,” Poverty is three-folded. One, the white man brought poverty to Africa and then taught the black man handout mentality. Two, African’s are lazy. If Africa is to be helped, we are not going to change through handouts, IMF, or the World Bank. We are only going to change if the West is honest with Africa. Three.” I, for one, believe the West should and continue to bear the brunt of the blame for the “underdevelopment” in contemporary Africa.

Plutarch wrote that the inequality between the poor and the rich is the oldest and most fatal affliction in any society. Given the disparaging conditions and the extreme inequalities throughout modern African history, one has to question what forces brought about such afflictions. While ignoring its own protocols, the West sets unattainable standards on Africa as its laws impinge development. According to Joseph Sitiglitz, former Vice-President and Chief Economist of the World Bank, if a country doesn’t respond to certain criteria, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) will suspend aid. This includes funds from donor countries. In other words, and according to an article by Ignacio Ramonet (Le Monde Diplomatique, February 2005) if Sweden donates funds to build schools, the IMF will suspend aid money because the allocated IMF loan budget didn’t take into account extemporaneous expenses such as teacher salary and maintenance. Another example is the UK’s Jack Straw (Le Monde, February 23, 2006) who wants Africa to follow Europe’s lead on Kyoto but fails to recognize Europe’s and Canada’s own dismal implementation of the protocols.

The West has a contradictory and in some respects, an epistemic love affair with intellectualizing the co-existence of the haves and the have-nots. In the 19th century, Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarianism and Daniel Ricards and Robert Malthus’ horrid pragmatics did their best to explain the devil’s waltz. Later on, Herbert Spencer introduced social Darwinism which effectively further eschewed responsibility. His was not surprisingly eagerly adopted by American business elites such as John D. Rockefeller, themselves masters of exploitation. Incidentally, one may speculate if Diego Rivera intentionally painted Lenin’s face in his Rockefeller center mural to provoke the industrialist’s skewered belief system. Not surprisingly, the mural never saw the light of day, but the act itself has engendered a posthumous life.

Like the manipulating and cunning Richard III, the West has continuously wrangled its hands in the accumulation of riches, prestige and most remarkably, a seemingly frivolous play of power and pride at the expense of millions, past, present and future. The fate of the continent was and is in the hands of ignorant politicians and corrupt businessmen. In 1975, Dick Clark, chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on Africa made the statement, ”I knew nothing about Africa. I had not been there, had not studied it and wasn’t particularly interested…(Gleijess, 2002).” The West brought along with its colonies a macabre stage, and a disinterested wider audience, to Africa. Having laid the groundwork of silence, the West’s involvement today is in many respects, just as horrendous as Leopold’s Congo. It would seem to me that the colonization of the past has taken on another face (globalization), a veritable costume change for the third act, but just as sinister and perverse as the amputated hands that nevertheless continue to decor the set.

In order to understand why colonialism and imperialism should bare the burden of the blame for Africa’s woes, one doesn’t have to look that far into the past. From slavery, to the establishment of indentured state servitude, to second and third class citizens and outright racism, to the underdevelopment of infrastructure, the West’s efforts to thwart Africa is like an orchestrated and finely tuned looting machine. Fascist colonial states united with the Catholic Church and business savvy individuals worked hand in hand during the 30’s and 40’s to “de-Africanize” and separate Africans from their roots (Rodney 1972, 273). This in turned encouraged internal strife and further pitted local communities against each other, sometimes without the direct involvement of the “white” man. Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s ,The River Between, demonstrates how colonial influence, not the colonies themselves, separates two communities through heritage and tradition of polytheism and circumcision to Christian ideals and Western education. The novel’s protagonist, Waikayi, is forced to negotiate and comprise the two systems and perhaps symbolizes African’s modern dilemma of living amongst opposing forces, contradiction and changing times. The reader, however, is left to wonder whether or not the adoption of Western thought and Christian belief is so much the issue since it is not revealed whether or not there is a veritable comprehension of what those systems are, how they operate, and how they can integrate into a traditional based society. If anything, the colonial education system sought to create a class hierarchy by delegating low skilled labor to Africans, thereby, stunting development while promoting the worst form of alienated individualism without regard to social responsibility (Rodney 1972, 280). This system of exploitation continues today. In the 1980 “Perambulator” album, Fela Kuti sings that after acquiring a colonial education and 35 years of service, the black man remains without property and prosperity, at best he has a bicycle, “if he no tire, dem go tire am, dem go dash am one gold wrist watch, 35 years of service all im property one old bicycle.”

The French were at the forefront of subjecting African society within the educational construct and today they continue to rewrite their own history despite facts that point to its devastating affects. On February 2005, the French National Assembly passed a law requiring public schools to recognize, in particular, the positive role of the French colonies in North Africa. The basis of such a law and its deliberate attempt to force the educational system into recognizing its authority is not consistent with the freedoms of speech they profess to adhere. After much protest and a year later, Jean-Louis Debre, President of the National Assembly, said in an interview by Patrick Roger (Le Monde, January 27, 2006), “I would like the political message to be clear, precise and without ambiguity. It is not a law that can carry judgment on historical fact. It is not legislation that should dictate scholarly content.” The words positive role were subsequently removed, but the efforts set into place has severely damaged the French image, particularly in former French colonial states.

The decolonization of Africa set another scene en route, and during the 1940’s, Africa became an amalgam of wider aspirations and greater possibilities. Whereas the colonial states previously sought to draw distinctions among people under its rule by defining them into categories, post-colonial Africa saw a fragmented but steadily growing and unifying movement engaged in revitalizing local belief systems. Eventually, the distinctions and separations indoctrinated by colonial rule became impossible to manage and somewhere along the timeline, decolonization inevitably involved a transition from an empire into a free-for-all global market system (Cooper, et al. 1999 ). But to whose benefit?

Since 1980, social and health macro-economic indicators have eroded and eradicated a middle class. Coup d’etat upon coup d’etat and the resulting mass exodus of refugees seemed to have blurred already contingent international borders. Impoverished “democratic” states without infrastructures are forced onto the world economy whether they like it or not. The resulting destabilizing factors are numerous; the establishment of macroeconomic and ultraliberal cadres, extreme privatization, incoherent structural adjustment programs, disguised social plans, exploitation of labor, unstable prices of raw materials, commercially disadvantageous measures, outright fraud, multinational interventions, debt explosion, lack of vision, and arms trafficking. There is no real independent African state in the political sense and the independence of the 1960’s has evolved into a twisted mass of citizens, managers, factions, and military leaders, all striving for upward mobility through any acquisition of power by any means possible. African state heads behave more like presidents of a consular administration of a company than of a nation. Pierre Franklin Tavares (Le Monde Diplomatique, Jan. 2004) writes how in Liberia, multinationals and state officials orchestrate ethnic conflicts to obtain and conserve commercial lumber interest. Elf president Loik Le Floch-Prigent negotiated deals with UNITA while simultaneously financing MPLA 200km outside Nairobi, the East African Standard officially claimed 221600 acres belonged to Kenyatta, 114600 acres to Moi and 31600 to Kibaki. In essence, half of all arable land in Kenya is controlled by 20% of the population. And in an interview by Jean-Christrophe Servant (Le Monde Diplomatique, February 2004), Rou Kimani, head of the Mungiki association of the Mau-Mau inheritors of the Rift Valley, protesting the land appropriation says “A lot of us are foreign in our own country.” The Mau-Mau fought the colonists and today, the Mungiki are fighting Del-Monte and their national and international political emissaries.

Many are exasperated by any Western involvement and view the altruistic aims of occidental organizations with disdain. The United Nation’s attempt at establishing human rights initiatives and setting deadlines for this goal is viewed by many as an excursion into contempt. According to Joy Samake, a businesswoman in Sierra Leone, “…the United Nations has failed to create conditions of peace. This organization was founded by whites to regulate their problems after WWII. It has not been able to adapt to the needs of Africa and developing countries (Lobo, 2006).” The West and many of its enterprises has a duty to be honest with Africa but continues to fail miserably. Oxfam just recently criticized Tony Blair’s Africa Commission Report for not living up to its promises, and worse, actually ignoring many of its own appeals. Though the IMF debt has been written off in many of the developing countries, conditions tied to the waivers makes for unjust trade policies that further stunt growth potential in already fragile and emerging markets.

Everywhere, everyone is fighting for a share of the cake. The EU is currently forcing the overture of unfair industrial free trade in Africa while offering no substantial cuts in agriculture. There is something to be said when an orange from Spain in an upscale grocery store in Nairobi is cheaper than those produced in the country. But the disaster is more deeply rooted than economics and trade because these apocryphal institutions (Bob Geldof), continue to deny the African a voice in a global arena supposedly erected in their honor. Child soldier turned rapper, Emmanuel Jal, who learned how to fight at the age of eight and whose experiences in Sudan are unimaginable to many, is considered a musical prodigy in Kenya and in many parts of Africa. He was denied greater audience in Live8 because he hadn’t sold the minimum requisite number of albums set forth by the organizers. He was instead allowed to perform a few minutes on a stage in Cornwall, far away from the crowd drawing venues at Hyde Park. It would appear that Geldof’s Long Walk for Justice ended at the ticket booth.

Black or white, the human condition in Africa is at odds and I truly believe the policies of the past (including pre-colonial conflict) have fomented the environment in which many are forced to live today. Africans are obviously not without their share of hatred and exploitation that has furthered exasperated the despair from within. Like the West, the condition of life and its values in respect to heritage and culture is a contentious affair between the haves and the have-nots. But according to an article by Jeevan Vasagar in the South African Mail & Guardian, the attempt to bring the two closer is slowly advancing, at least on the surface level. On March 5, 2005, Arrisal Ag Amdagh, a powerful chief in Inates, Niger liberated en masse, his 7000 slaves. Slavery in Niger was only declared illegal by the state in 2004 but the practice remains prevalent throughout the region. However, Amdagh claims it was his religious convictions of Islam that forbids enslaving fellow Muslims that drove him. The fate of the former slaves remains questionable, faced with no prospects, no land and no income, they find themselves in a state of liberated limbo. Amdagh’s sudden abolitionist gesture, according to the article, means he now stands a better chance of receiving humanitarian aide given the drought and lotus attacks that had just recently devastated his crops. Self-interest, genuine or not, knows no color but wears the same mask.

In the meantime, a group of women in Kibera have organized themselves along with local NGOs to find solutions where and when Kibaki’s government and tied international donor aid has failed to deliver. Progressive micro-finance initiatives by the likes of Africaid have helped expedite concrete steps to a better life. Circulating minimal funds for the likes of 38-year old Mary Khasa means more than just generating an income, it also means being able to survive in conditions most of us abhor. She was able to purchase a sewing machine and material, and rent a booth. She is closely followed by Africaid who assist managing her small enterprise. Her success is relative, but essential, because it provides a hope to those that have been repeatedly forgotten, cast aside, and left to fend for themselves under the auspices of multi-million dollar villas and nonsensical commercial interest and tasteless advertising. It means people are turning away from the international and government policy and looking at themselves and those in their immediate surroundings for help and reliance. More generally, it means the West and the powers-to-be continue to fail Africa.

Works Cited
Cooper, Fred. Decolonization in Africa: An Interpretation. Afrikaner Encyclopedia: 573.
Gleijess, Piero. Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa 1959-1976. NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2002: 331.
Lobo, Ramon. 'Une paix boiteuse a Freetown' Courrier International, Issue 799, February 23, 2006: 31.
Rodney, Walter. Education for Underdevelopment 1972: 273, 280.

* Nikolaj Nielsen is currently pursuing a masters degree in journalism as part of a programme commissioned by the European Community; Erasmus Mundus Master's of Journalism. He specialises in conflict and war reporting and study at the University of Amsterdam, Netherlands.

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