The Rock Star's Burden - New York Times
The New York Times

December 15, 2005
Op-Ed Contributor

The Rock Star's Burden
By PAUL THEROUX

Hale'iwa, Hawaii

THERE are probably more annoying things than being hectored about African
development by a wealthy Irish rock star in a cowboy hat, but I can't think
of
one at the moment. If Christmas, season of sob stories, has turned me into
Scrooge, I recognize the Dickensian counterpart of Paul Hewson - who calls
himself
"Bono" -
as Mrs. Jellyby in "Bleak House." Harping incessantly on her adopted village
of Borrioboola-Gha "on the left bank of the River Niger," Mrs. Jellyby tries
to save the Africans by financing them in coffee growing and encouraging
schemes "to turn pianoforte legs and establish an export trade," all the
while
badgering people for money.

It seems to have been Africa's fate to become a theater of empty talk and
public gestures. But the impression that Africa is fatally troubled and can
be
saved only by outside help - not to mention celebrities and charity
concerts - is a destructive and misleading conceit. Those of us who
committed ourselves
to being Peace Corps teachers in rural Malawi more than 40 years ago are
dismayed by what we see on our return visits and by all the news that has
been
reported recently from that unlucky, drought-stricken country. But we are
more appalled by most of the proposed solutions.

I am not speaking of humanitarian aid, disaster relief, AIDS education or
affordable drugs. Nor am I speaking of small-scale, closely watched efforts
like
the Malawi Children's Village. I am speaking of the "more money" platform:
the notion that what Africa needs is more prestige projects, volunteer labor
and debt relief. We should know better by now. I would not send private
money to a charity, or foreign aid to a government, unless every dollar was
accounted
for - and this never happens. Dumping more money in the same old way is not
only wasteful, but stupid and harmful; it is also ignoring some obvious
points.

If Malawi is worse educated, more plagued by illness and bad services,
poorer than it was when I lived and worked there in the early 60's, it is
not for
lack of outside help or donor money. Malawi has been the beneficiary of many
thousands of foreign teachers, doctors and nurses, and large amounts of
financial
aid, and yet it has declined from a country with promise to a failed state.

In the early and mid-1960's, we believed that Malawi would soon be
self-sufficient in schoolteachers. And it would have been, except that
rather than sending
a limited wave of volunteers to train local instructors, for decades we kept
on sending Peace Corps teachers. Malawians, who avoided teaching because the
pay and status were low, came to depend on the American volunteers to teach
in bush schools, while educated Malawians emigrated. When Malawi's
university
was established, more foreign teachers were welcomed, few of them replaced
by Malawians, for political reasons. Medical educators also arrived from
elsewhere.
Malawi began graduating nurses, but the nurses were lured away to Britain
and Australia and the United States, which meant more foreign nurses were
needed
in Malawi.

When Malawi's minister of education was accused of stealing millions of
dollars from the education budget in 2000, and the Zambian president was
charged
with stealing from the treasury, and Nigeria squandered its oil wealth, what
happened? The simplifiers of Africa's problems kept calling for debt relief
and more aid. I got a dusty reception lecturing at the Bill and Melinda
Gates Foundation when I pointed out the successes of responsible policies in
Botswana,
compared with the kleptomania of its neighbors. Donors enable embezzlement
by turning a blind eye to bad governance, rigged elections and the deeper
reasons
these countries are failing.

Mr. Gates has said candidly that he wants to rid himself of his burden of
billions. Bono is one of his trusted advisers. Mr. Gates wants to send
computers
to Africa - an unproductive not to say insane idea. I would offer pencils
and paper, mops and brooms: the schools I have seen in Malawi need them
badly.
I would not send more teachers. I would expect Malawians themselves to stay
and teach. There ought to be an insistence in the form of a bond, or a
solemn
promise, for Africans trained in medicine and education at the state's
expense to work in their own countries.

Malawi was in my time a lush wooded country of three million people. It is
now an eroded and deforested land of 12 million; its rivers are clogged with
sediment and every year it is subjected to destructive floods. The trees
that had kept it whole were cut for fuel and to clear land for subsistence
crops.
Malawi had two presidents in its first 40 years, the first a megalomaniac
who called himself the messiah, the second a swindler whose first official
act
was to put his face on the money. Last year the new man, Bingu wa Mutharika,
inaugurated his regime by announcing that he was going to buy a fleet of
Maybachs,
one of the most expensive cars in the world.

Many of the schools where we taught 40 years ago are now in ruins - covered
with graffiti, with broken windows, standing in tall grass. Money will not
fix
this. A highly placed Malawian friend of mine once jovially demanded that my
children come and teach there. "It would be good for them," he said.

Of course it would be good for them. Teaching in Africa was one of the best
things I ever did. But our example seems to have counted for very little. My
Malawian friend's children are of course working in the United States and
Britain. It does not occur to anyone to encourage Africans themselves to
volunteer
in the same way that foreigners have done for decades. There are plenty of
educated and capable young adults in Africa who would make a much greater
difference
than Peace Corps workers.

Africa is a lovely place - much lovelier, more peaceful and more resilient
and, if not prosperous, innately more self-sufficient than it is usually
portrayed.
But because Africa seems unfinished and so different from the rest of the
world, a landscape on which a person can sketch a new personality, it
attracts
mythomaniacs, people who wish to convince the world of their worth. Such
people come in all forms and they loom large. White celebrities busy-bodying
in
Africa loom especially large. Watching Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie recently
in Ethiopia, cuddling African children and lecturing the world on charity,
the image that immediately sprang to my mind was Tarzan and Jane.

Bono, in his role as Mrs. Jellyby in a 10-gallon hat, not only believes that
he has the solution to Africa's ills, he is also shouting so loud that other
people seem to trust his answers. He traveled in 2002 to Africa with former
Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, urging debt forgiveness. He recently had
lunch
at the White House, where he expounded upon the "more money" platform and
how African countries are uniquely futile.

But are they? Had Bono looked closely at Malawi he would have seen an
earlier incarnation of his own Ireland. Both countries were characterized
for centuries
by famine, religious strife, infighting, unruly families, hubristic clan
chiefs, malnutrition, failed crops, ancient orthodoxies, dental problems and
fickle
weather. Malawi had a similar sense of grievance, was also colonized by
absentee British landlords and was priest-ridden, too.

Just a few years ago you couldn't buy condoms legally in Ireland, nor could
you get a divorce, though (just like in Malawi) buckets of beer were easily
available and unruly crapulosities a national curse. Ireland, that island of
inaction, in Joyce's words, "the old sow that eats her farrow," was the
Malawi
of Europe, and for many identical reasons, its main export being immigrants.

It is a melancholy thought that it is easier for many Africans to travel to
New York or London than to their own hinterlands. Much of northern Kenya is
a no-go area; there is hardly a road to the town of Moyale, on the Ethiopian
border, where I found only skinny camels and roving bandits. Western Zambia
is off the map, southern Malawi is terra incognita, northern Mozambique is
still a sea of land mines. But it is pretty easy to leave Africa. A recent
World
Bank study has confirmed that the emigration to the West of skilled people
from small to medium-sized countries in Africa has been disastrous.

Africa has no real shortage of capable people - or even of money. The
patronizing attention of donors has done violence to Africa's belief in
itself, but
even in the absence of responsible leadership, Africans themselves have
proven how resilient they can be - something they never get credit for.
Again,
Ireland may be the model for an answer. After centuries of wishing
themselves onto other countries, the Irish found that education, rational
government,
people staying put, and simple diligence could turn Ireland from an economic
basket case into a prosperous nation. In a word - are you listening, Mr.
Hewson?
- the Irish have proved that there is something to be said for staying home.

Paul Theroux is the author of "Blinding Light" and of "Dark Star Safari:
Overland from Cairo to Cape Town."

Possted by Miriam V.