Seeing Red

A few months ago when I read that Bono had launched a new fashion label called RED, to which many of big fashion houses had signed up to, I was disgusted. Just another in a growing number of fashion fads selling itself on what might generously be described as Ethics Chic. Not only are you wearing the latest fashion in clothes, you can also proclaim your adherence to the latest fashion in mindsets – ethical consumerism. Be fashionable, help the poor…oh and salve your consumer conscience by buying into all things RED.

And while im in the middle of contemplating Bono and his henchmen’s forays into Africa, I have quite a surreal experience: My former worker calls up to ask my forgiveness. Again!

Patrick was, to use the local parlance, my houseboy, employed to guard the house and perform odd jobs like clothes washing, house cleaning and shopping. For this he gained a place to stay and the equivalent of USD$30 a month. I was “willed” Patrick by the French guy who lived in the house before me. Apparently the French guy had been “willed” Patrick by the Kenyan who had lived in the house before him. Both had been satisfied with his work and I took him on. He had already worked in the house for over 2 years and everything went well for about a year and a half. During that time he had gotten married and his wife was living in a different area of the country with the baby. Then one day he mysteriously disappeared, taking USD$100 with him. By rights, I should have reported him to the police, but the hope that he would come back, coupled with a certain laziness on my part resulted in my non-reporting him.

For some months I heard nothing, then I got a strange phonecall from him asking to come to the house. I agreed to this but he never showed up and ever since then, I receive calls from him every few months asking for forgiveness…for stealing the money I assume! I know that he was a quite a fervent 7th Day Adventist, I’m wondering if he is being told to seek forgiveness from church elements.

I wonder what Bono and his band of celebrity development tourists might think of employing someone and paying them less than a good shirt from Red might cost per month, and having thought about reporting to the police for stealing the price of a fashionable pair of shoes?

I read some of the articles which were written about Bono’s visit to Africa. In one, after visiting a hospital he is quoted as saying “We come from a place where Rock stars are seen as heros – these are the real heros” (meaning the doctors and nurses). Is this trite tripe really necessary? I found it not a little ironic that his next stop was in Ghana, looking at the shortage of medical personal in rural areas. The irony is that Ghana’s education plan went so well that yesterday’s medical students are servicing the health sector…not in Ghana or Togo or Nigeria but in the UK. For most young educated Africans, this is what development means: the chance for a better life and a chance to get out.

In another article he talks about his maturing views on aid, “To think when we started Live Aid, it was the first kind of aid, the response to famine in Ethiopia. Look how a whole generation has educated itself off the back of that to move from charity to justice and then to move from justice to debt and trade. It’s quite an arc and I think I’ve gone through that. That is the arc of my whole involvement.”

Finally a move towards a libertarian model of development. That’s real progress, and in only 20 years too.

Although there may be a few holes left in his thinking:
“For what was once called foreign assistance, we now need two names: one you can call mercy and response to pandemic-type aid and you can’t hold people ransom to their governments on that. Then there is other aid called investment.”

I’m not sure about not holding governments to ransom on emergency aid. Often emergency aid is profoundly disturbing to economic ecosystem of a country or region. And besides which, didn’t humanitarian aid aggravate tensions in Southern Sudan and practically cause all the mess in Somalia? As much as it is hard hearted to watch people die, there is a question of greater good. What use is it to save someone today, if in doing so you contribute to a situation which will blight their children and grandchildren.

Elsewhere in the article he states “The problems are much more complex than we thought they were and I think Africans must have been smiling and cringing at times when they saw us just thinking that money could solve their problems.”

Well Amen to that Brother Bono. Good Man. But this also applies the Holy Grail of African intervention – Emergency Aid.

But I think the point about complex problems has been slightly lost on the masses in the Make Poverty History campaign. Those without deeper involvement in Africa or African issues, are still labouring under the delusion that think can save the world by wearing plastic bangles of many colours. It’s very easy to get people excited about helping Africa and the possibilities for easing collective guilt about our relative comfort. It’s less easy to hold people’s attention for the painfully slow pace of progress, assuming progress is even made! And this is where I worry about Make Poverty History and Red, they make development a fad, a headline, a fashion. And we all know how long fashions last.

Who's Nightmare?

I just watched the film Darwin’s Nightmare, which is a recent documentary ostensibly on the link between the fishing industry surrounding Lake Victoria and the arms trade. Cargo planes flown by Russian pilots come in laden with arms and other machinery of war, and fly out with tonnes of fish fillet. That Europe, Asia and the middle east is supplying arms to Africa is nothing new…I have ran into several Russian pilots in Kigali who could never tell me what they were doing here. What was a real shocker for me, even after a few years in Africa, is how we in Europe are quite literally taking the food out of people’s mouths. The documentary highlighted, among other things, the large fish being caught in the lake, processed in factories around the shore, the fillets sent to Europe while only the carcasses are affordable to the local population.

I am generally in favour of free market capitalism but this one gave me pause for thought. In so far as I understand such things, the first step in economic growth is agricultural surplus: One produces more than one can eat, which allows some in the community to diversify their activities, then those with surplus may trade it for other goods or services. And things take off from there. How do things get so far out of whack that no one can afford the food they harvest in their own local market?

It all smacks of the fake “famine” in Ireland in the 1840s, when despite over a million people dying of hunger, boat loads of food were leaving the country, given over in payment for rent to the British landowners. People died not because there was a real famine, but because the only crop they could afford to eat had failed. Perhaps this historical context went someway to explaining my complete revulsion at the idea that while people in Tanzania went hungry, plane loads of fish fillet leave the country every day to feed Europeans. Even when the local wages go up due to employment in the fish factories, we can still pay a higher price for their food. We do our work, gain our hard currency wages, pay our taxes so that when there shortages somewhere in Africa, having bought up all the food and ensured there is no local surplus, we generously send food aid to famine victims. It’s so out of the realm of reason and decency that I wouldn’t believe it as a movie plot. We are taking food out of Africa. While people starve.

But something else was niggling the back of my brain. Why did this story affect me so much? The documentary makers had done a fine job in juxtaposing the poverty, hunger and social disintegration around the fishing communities against shots of the fillets leaving for Europe. But had I not seen and bought punnets of Kenyan strawberries in supermarkets back home? Was this not the same in principal? Why hadn’t I thought of this before? I guess I had assumed that even if there was famine or poverty in the country of origin, that at least there was enough food, enough nourishment for the agricultural communities who sold the food.

I was working on the agricultural surplus theory, which is fine unless you consider the customer having infinitely deep pockets. Like the story I heard in Ireland, where many Polish people have come for work with the intention of making a quick buck and returning to Poland in a few years with savings to buy a house. Many are finding that they have been priced out of the property market by Irish speculators. But, I digress…

The choice of fish and fishing communities as an exposé was a good one. The point is immediately clear – the fish and their nutritional value is going straight into European stomachs rather than African ones and this is what we call progress. The link with buying some strawberries or some coffee is a little less direct…we don’t consider people starving or malnourished for a lack of either of these two foodstuffs. And when we take things to their logical conclusion, why should I be any more offended at seeing fish fillets flying out of Africa than seeing its diamonds, gold or oil being siphoned off by corporations at little benefit to the many? Surely in the end the effect is the same, we are taking food out of the mouths of the hungry…directly or indirectly depending on whether its actual food or the potential to generate wealth and purchase food.

Darwin’s Nightmare may be Africa’s reality, but what is everyone’s future when we are done with plundering all of our primary producers?