|
Abstract
When I returned from my last trip to Africa I asked the Prime Minister to commission
a new version of the Brandt Report. Dismayed at the continuing chaos of Africa and
our confused response to the many tragedies I had witnessed yet again I felt that an
attempt to understand the newer factors at work in Africa was necessary before we
could even begin to compose a workable solution to the terrible conditions of the
lives of the poorest and most wretched people on our planet.
Willy Brandt along significantly with Britain’s Ted Heath had written the seminal
development document of his time. He had tried to analyse the structural and
economic differences between our world the successful North and theirs, the
impoverished South. It is possible to argue now that
Brandt’s task was perhaps easier than our own. He lived in a political world of fixed
certainty. A stasis of terror. The apparently predictable solidity of the Cold War
powers, where the agreed battleground would be us in Europe but the battle would be
held in abeyance for now under the damocletian threat of what was called Mutually
Assured Destruction, with the wry but perfect acronym MAD. A rare example of
Pentagon humour.
Whatever pertinence Brandt had for his time - and it was significant, the unfortunate
reality was that at that point of their lives, although all of Brandt’s commissioners had
influence, none held power. Brandt could only suggest, he could never implement.
Besides, the fixed world of which Brandt spoke soon dissolved in the collapse of the
Soviet Union and a newer stranger more fluid, less predictive world emerged from the generally benign chaotic aftermath of the unlamented Cold War and our own
murderous 20th century.
It was into that world that I stepped when I returned again to Africa. 20 years ago
when I had first pitched up in Ethiopia almost by accident and frightened by what I
was doing and feeling out of my depth and sickened by what I saw, I still understood
that this was Brandt’s world. Here was the tyrannical Marxist regime, here a civil war
played out by competing proxy interests, here was grotesque environmental
degradation and here the biblical millions, huddled in their hungry misery suffering
under the common historic whip of the African condition.
It was difficult to see a resolution to the slow crucifixion of a continent then. What
influence could one possibly have upon the great powers. How were the Kremlin
walls to be broken down, the Pentagon to be breached. Live Aid was a decent attempt
at a Jericho like trumpet blast but although we then began talking seriously at the
highest level about Africa (and it seems almost ridiculous now that the first time the
UN debated Africa was in 1986), very little could be moved, conditions could be
temporarily tempered, but African thug puppets or racist regimes would remain in
power bankrupting their people, we could ameliorate some of the effects of our
onerous trade policies, but Africa that almost overwhelmingly beautiful continent
would stay in a convenient chaotic state enabling us to shrug and turn, and leave it to
its misery, removed from the stately progress of the rest of our world. And that can be
no longer tenable.
20 years ago next year I stood in the death camps of northern Ethiopia. As far as I
could see in the denuded and blasted moonscape about me, people, often naked
streamed out of the hills and plains in long lines to a place they’d heard others had
come to sit and wait and die perhaps, until someone found them and could maybe
help. Often they were tiny scraps of humanity, aged 5 or 6 whose parents had long
since collapsed on the unmarked trails but had urged them to continue on.
In the camps nations huddled. Elders tried to look after the youngsters until they died
of the many diseases rampaging through the weakened immune systems of the
starving. Grain was consumed whole. For the tiny ones in the throes of starvation and
dehydration the effect of the unhusked grain was to tear the lining of the stomach
walls so that in the next spasm of diarrhoea the child would shit its stomach directly
onto the dirt floor in a violent, bloody and agonising purge.
These wizened old men and women aged 2 or 3 died about me in a thick stew of foul
stench and a pandemonium glut of delirious flies. Pity was too soft, too, too indulgent
that people should die of want in a world of surplus seemed so intellectually absurd,
so morally repulsive that an absolute rage, an entirety of anger, a consuming shame in
my and our complicity was the appropriate response. This was not the happenchance
of environment, nor the accident of an indifferent God, this was the malignant hand
of humanity laid bare. That anger has lasted 20 years.
I tell you this and describe it thus not to shock but to engender again that shame
within me. Long years of becoming acquainted with the theories and statistics of
development serve ultimately only to numb the senses to the agonising end of those
small 3 year olds.
For in order to help us live, the mind must censor the senses. And this had become
my awful, unwanted expertise. So tonight I need to recharge again those batteries of
shame, in order to be able to speak to you.
On my most recent visit to Africa journalists would ask ‘Was it worth it, nothing has
changed in the 20 years since Live Aid? It was a decent if inevitable question. But
things had changed utterly, it was of little interest to the poor and weak, because the
consequences of change - death for the poorest and weakest - remained the same.
But in those 20 years things had got worse. Africa had uniquely grown poorer by
25%. A typical African country today has the GDP of a town of 20,000 in the UK.
Half of its people subsist on 65 pence or less a day, this at a time when we
grotesquely pay each individual cow in the EU $2.50 per day in subsidy. The U.N.
was spending $1.3billion a year on peacekeeping but a fifth of all Africans lived in
countries riven by civil war. This instability helped spread Aids which unknown in 84
was now killing 6000 a day. The dead can’t plant so people were starving again. Only
one in 400 victims was taking anti-retrovirals. Net investment south of the Sahara
was a pathetic $3.9 billion and was worse than in the past 6 years. Why?
The conditions I encountered 20 years ago were largely those of the Cold War. Proxy
states in Africa were doing the dying for us. If they had Mengistu, we had Mobutu;
and all had the ancient hunger, poverty and instability still with them.
But now amongst the southern peoples of Ethiopia last year I felt a different, newer
despair. Here everything was green, but about me the ruined people of a ruined land.
They were used to the irregular rain falls, and would normally allow for the
subsequent crop failures and food shortages by profitably selling their coffee on the
world market and buy in whatever food they needed to make up that year’s shortfall.
Except this year coffee had collapsed by 70% because Vietnam, a country they had
never heard of, had entered the market a continent away and depressed the world
market price. They began to starve. Donors responded generously enough to allow
the government to feed them 68 percent of what is required for human beings to live,
but is in fact a policy of slowly managed dying. So far so normal.
The superhuman heroics of the few young African doctors and nurses in the ill- lit
shed they called a hospital defies description. This shack served a million people with
no equipment or medicine of any note.
|
|
Related documents
- 169Kb ~ 1 min (26 pages)
