Dead Aid

Dead Aid by Dambisa Moyo is both a valuable book and an infuriating one. The book is essentially a polemic against aid to Africa. It argues that aid not only does no good, but it actively undermines development.

In many cases, this is true. And Moyo is certainly right in advocating alternative methods for financing development in Africa. These ideas are discussed in the second half of the book, and summarized as “trade, FDI [foreign direct investment], the capital markets, remittances, micro-finance and savings.”

But in the first and most controversial half of the book, where she makes her case against aid, Moyo steamrollers not only nuances but some basic points, some of which she even acknowledges in passing before brushing them aside.

1.The West hasn’t really given a lot of aid: 0.22% of donors’ GDP in 1997. Moyo notes that Western countries have given a trillion dollars to Africa over the course of fifty years. This sounds like a lot, but if you divide a trillion by fifty years and by fifty countries and by, say, ten donor countries, you get $40 million per year from each donor country to each country in Africa. Not much. That’s why the prospect of poor countries defaulting on their loans doesn’t seem likely to create a worldwide financial crisis, as she suggests.

2. The West sucked enormous resources out of Africa, and owes something in return. Slavery was the basis of the great (and continuing) fortunes of some American families, and resource extraction still enriches foreign companies and countries. 

3. A lot of the aid given to poor countries has already been repaid. Moyo lumps together grants and low-interest loans, but there’s a difference. She disparages loan forgiveness, but in many cases countries have already repaid their original loan several times over. In some cases, as she says, poor countries are paying more to service their debts to donor countries than they’re getting in new aid. “Forgiveness” is like the forgiveness of a loan shark who lets you off the hook only after you’ve paid $1,000 on a $100 loan.

4. A lot of the aid was paid to businesses in the donor countries. The US government buys surplus corn and dumps it on the market in Haiti. The US farmer gets rich and the Haitian peasant is driven off the land and into the slums. Or the money is paid to a US contractor to build a dam or a fancy conference center that the poor country must then pay to maintain.

5. A lot of this aid wasn’t even meant to help development. As Moyo quotes President Kagame of Rwanda, “The primary reason [that there is little to show for the more than US$300 billion of aid that has gone to Africa since 1970] is that in the context of post-Second World War geopolitical and strategic rivalries and economic interests, much of this aid was spent on creating and sustaining client regimes of one type of another, with minimal regard to developmental outcomes on our continent.” This is why aid continued to flow to Mobutu even though it was well known that he was stealing it: he was our guy. In fact, we installed him. And that’s why it’s disingenuous of Moyo to call it “amazing” that aid continues when it’s not helping the people.

6.If you believe the author of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, aid to poor countries was expressly designed not to be repaid. A permanent debt gives rich countries permanent leverage over poor countries, and according to John Perkins, leaders have actually been assassinated for refusing it.

7. Eliminating “unfettered” aid doesn’t have to mean abolishing all aid. It’s true, of course, that aid without accountability is destructive—but that’s not an argument for the abolition of aid, just for better control mechanisms. The World Bank, where she worked, has notoriously been more concerned about getting money out the door than tracking what was done with it.

8. Moyo is talking about governmental aid, not humanitarian or charity-based aid. Those kinds of aid have their problems, too, God knows (see Lords of Poverty and The Road to Hell) but they include some promising initiatives, like microfinance and person-to-person lending of the kind done by Kiva. But one can easily forget that that’s not her subject, especially when she disparages Bono and others who have raised money for emergencies.

National Black Writers’ Conference

On Saturday I walked to Medgar Evers College by way of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden and sat in on two panels at this year’s National Black Writers’ Conference.

This was the tenth anniversary for the conference, and it seems to have gotten more press than usual this year: an article in the New York Times (though Tayari Jones, one of the participants, noted that several comments on the article were “disturbing’—not to say racist) and a mention on NPR.

I picked two panels to attend because they included writers I already knew and liked: Meena Alexander and M.G. Vassanji speaking on “Literary Encounters: East Meets West” and Chris Abani and Maaza Mengiste on “The Impact of War and Natural Disasters in Literature by Black Writers.” I got to meet each of them afterwards, and came away with signed copies of Quickly Changing River, The In-Between World of Vikram Lall, Hands Washing Water, and Beneath the Lion’s Gaze.

(Meena Alexander had disappeared in the time it took me to buy her book, so I had to be satisfied with exchanging it for a presigned copy. I was pleased, though, to find that it included two poems she read during the panel: “Four Friends” and “Nomadic Tutelage,” an homage to Audre Lorde.)

James McBride was also on the war panel. I hadn’t seen him before, or read his work, and was fascinated to hear his description of how the movie of his novel Miracle at St. Anna got filmed. Spike Lee called him up one day to propose the idea, they made a handshake agreement—two black men from Brooklyn, of about the same age—and for the next year McBride wrote the script and discussed it with Spike Lee in various restaurants. No money changed hands. As usual, Spike Lee had great difficulty raising money for the movie, and in the end it came mostly from Italy. (McBride was scathing on the subject of how pathology is the only kind of black story that sells—using Push and the movie Precious as his main examples.)

Chris Abani made more startling statements than anyone else I heard. Every time he publishes a book, he says, someone tells him it will end his career. When he told his publisher the idea for his next book, he said, the man visibly flinched. “My career is entirely about rewriting James Baldwin,” he said at one point, and a little later, “For Baldwin, all love is light. The only aberration is the absence of love.”

Abani once spoke to a Hutu man involved in the massacres in Rwanda. What was the hardest thing about killing your Tutsi victims? he asked him.

“After a while the machete gets dull and you start to get blisters,” the man said, and laughed.

Was it the literal truth? Was it a joke meant to shock? Or was there was an element of both? Abani didn’t try to explain.

The Case of the Socialist Witchdoctor

In my review of Beneath the Lion’s Gaze, the new novel by Ethiopian author Maaza Mengiste, I noted that apart from Nega Mezlekia and Dinaw Mengestu, not much Ethiopian literature was available in English. This prompted an outraged reply from one reader.

Another reader, signed Selamawit T, recommended books by four Ethiopian authors, but all proved to be long out of print and nearly unavailable. She then suggested several titles by Hama Tuma.

But although Tuma was published in the Heinemann African Writers Series, only one copy of his reportedly best book, The Case of the Socialist Witchdoctor, was available through Amazon—for $245.08 plus shipping. The New York City library system had a single copy, which could not be checked out, but happily the Brooklyn library came through for me.

The title story, “The Case of the Socialist Witchdoctor,” is one of a series of “cases” that make up the first half of the book. These are not “cases” of the Sherlock Holmes type. They are court cases, intended to underline the savagery and injustice of the Derg regime that followed the overthrow of Emperor Haile Selassie.

Unfortunately, their formulaic structure makes them tedious after a while. Each one begins with a little essay on an aspect of Ethiopian society before introducing another innocent defendant. The judge and prosecutor (and sometimes the defense attorney) toy with the defendant for a while before a brutal sentence is handed down. The tone is heavily sardonic.

I was thinking of giving up on the book when I skipped ahead to the second half, called “Tales of the Highway Fire and Other Stories.”

These stories are very different and much more gripping. Like the short, taut tales in The Savage Night by the Algerian writer Mohammed Dib, they feature the characters thrown up by a repressive society—guerrillas, spies, collaborators, torturers—and underline how suspicion, secrecy, and violence can destroy marriages and families. One story even echoes the terrible choice faced by the main character in Beneath the Lion’s Gaze: whether to save a patient who will only face torture and a more painful death.

Thoreau’s pencils

In his recent novel Woodsburner, John Pipkin writes about the lives of Thoreau and other residents of Concord, the story centering around the day in 1844 when Thoreau and his young friend Edward Hoar accidentally burned down more than 300 acres of woodland.

What I found most interesting, though, was the detailed description of Thoreau’s contribution to the family pencil business. I knew that Thoreau pencils were renowned for their quality, and I once had the chance to see some of them at an art museum in Lincoln, Massachusetts—they were a beautiful shade of dark blue—but I never knew all this.

Henry experimented with new blends of plumbago paste in search of a better filling. He mixed plumbago with boot polish. He stirred in ash and tallow and spit. He added silt from the bottom of the Sudbury River. He sprinkled in manure. And then he mixed the graphite with Bavarian clay and found that, by carefully varying the ratio of the two, he could control the hardness and darkness of the resulting paste. He designated pencils of varying hardness by SS or S or H or HH. He made pencils in Carpenter’s Large, Round, and Oval sizes, black or red....

He invented a machine to slice the hardened lead cakes into thin rods. He invented another machine for drilling holes in pencil wood. To better grind the plumbago into the finest possible dust, he built a churnlike device that operated on its own once his sisters, Helen and Sophia, wound the clever spring. He devised a method for tamping the hardened lead rods into the hollowed wooden shafts. The shop overflowed with cords of pencils piled high, like a miniature forest laid low; Henry and his father walked among the little fallen trees like gargantuan lumberjacks.

Bonds of Affection

While working on my own book projects, based on Thoreau’s writings on animals, I had a couple of ideas for spin-off minibooks, one of which would collect Thoreau’s journal entries on the family’s Maltese cat Min, and cats in general. ("At Lee’s Cliff,” he wrote on Christmas Day of 1856, “I pushed aside the snow with my foot and got some fresh green catnip for Min.” Why should the cat not get a present, after all?)

Like some other book ideas I’ve had, it turned out this one had already been done, more or less.

Bonds of Affection: Thoreau on Dogs and Cats was published by the University of Massachusetts as part of its series The Spirit of Thoreau. The books are nicely produced, with handsome typography (though the square brackets are peculiar and distracting) and wood engravings by Barry Moser.

Editor Wesley T. Mott has chosen to include not only passages that deal directly with cats and dogs, but some that mention them only in passing, like this one from March 26, 1860:

The earliest willows are now in the gray, too advanced to be silvery,—mouse or maltese-cat color.