The Aid behemoth is another face of Western engagement with Africa,
playing against its more depredatory faces in much the same role of
conscience that the missionaries played for the military/slave-running
complex in earlier centuries, and just as controversially. You do not
like the West's 'infinitely elastic sense of its fundamental and
messianic goodness', but I do not see that it impinges upon anyone's
dignity, either as an African or as an African country. For instance,
today there are probably thousands of African missionaries bringing
the Good News back to a 'reprobate' West. One would expect that such
soul-saving missions can only be driven by a fundamental and messianic
sense of goodness on the part of the proselytizing Africans -
furnished of course with a Christian modesty. Yet, no matter how many
churches Africans open in Western cities, Euro-Americans are entitled
to ignore them... to walk past open church doors, to reject their soup
kitchens, free books and Bibles, and to switch off from televised
sermons on the route to Heaven. African Aid workers - or missionaries
- can raise billions of dollars from their impoverished countries to
evangelize poor, hell-bound Westerners without affronting the average
Westerner's sense of dignity, because when the advice of how to get to
Heaven is offered, they can simply ignore it. So I suggest that
African dignity is not so fragile as to be shattered by Western
messianic delusions, or Bono-inspired fundraisers. What destroys
Africa's dignity is what happens when the Aid, however diseased,
arrives in Africa. It is the abject dependence on Aid that is so
crippling to dignity.
There are gross imperfections in the Aid system, of course, but their
'Mercy Industrial Complex' is only rallying to a series of crises that
our 'Black Analytical Complex' has all but ignored. Bono did NOT
answer a job advert for 'African Messiah' - to use your paradigm. He
created the job-spec. That creative ether that moulded an imperfect
solution to the crises of deprivation is still available. In other
words, if Bono is doing it wrong, then we ought to do it right. - And
not just talk about doing it either. If a stranger is carrying my baby
upside down, I ought to take her back and cuddle her right.
How na?
Chuma.
On Nov 11, 4:49 pm, Pius Adesanmi <piusadesa...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> Ogugua, Ogugua, Ogugua,
>
> How many times I call you? Take your time o. You have missed a lot of things here. You have completely missed what Moses and Tony are saying but that is the mildest of your misses. Go and read that job ad again. How do you, an African, feel when you encounter that phrase about the re-invention of charity? Now, that's a new one. Think about that phrase in terms of its deeper implications for your dignity as an African.
>
> We are talking charity and its underlying philosophy here in the West, you are talking foreign aid. Not exactly the same, although I'm opposed to both. Look, Ogugua, charity along with its discursive frames and actualities in the West, is fundamentally a source of the self, of the Western self. There is a huge Mercy Industrial Complex out there that would not exist if there wasn't this self with an infinitely elastic sense of its fundamental and messianic goodness. And it is frustrating when colleagues brush these issues under the carpet and brandish the example of one village that received Jeffrey Sachs's mosquito nets as evidence of the alleluia value of charity like you are doing here. What next will you make a case for? When the Nigerian politician or government official steals money, buys rice, and distributes it to the people, oho, so we should focus on the fact that the sacks of rice will feed some villagers and forget the overall corrupt frame of
> the enterprise, abi?
>
> To colleagues who live in America and pretend to be strangers to the feel-good triumphalist philosophy of charity that is all around them, I have always said: wait till your five-year old returns from school and tells you that his peers have been looking at him "one kain" since the day their teacher asked them to bring sachets of Uncle Ben's rice and leftover packets of cookies for the food donation basket that will be shipped to "the hungry people of Africa" - always a blanket Africa. When that has happened to your child, Ogugua, come back here and lets debate charity.
>
> By the way, Ogugua, I am sure you have not noticed that the lucky candidate who gets the advertised job of Director of Water Programs is also expected to go to Africa and teach villagers hygiene and sanitation. Perhaps that includes teaching them how to stop wiping their behinds with leaves after doing the big one in the bush? Perhaps they will be taught to use toilet paper while singing char char charmin!
>
> Anyway, "curing their ills" and teaching "them" hygiene and sanitation is an independent area of discourse that I can't get into here. At any rate, if you have no problem with charity, I don't imagine you'll have any problem with American 18 year-olds telling you that they are going to teach elders in your village how to be clean, abi?
>
> Pius
>
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