Giving by Bill Clinton

Bill Clinton’s recent book Giving: How Each of Us Can Change the World brings together examples of how people are giving time, money, and skills to change the world for the better. Some of my favorite people and organizations are discussed — such as Kiva, Ashoka, ONE, ShoreBank, and Sustainable South Bronx — as well as many that I didn’t know about. It’s a bracing wake-up call for for those who think the country is mired in apathy.

In addition to his own Clinton Foundation, Clinton devotes considerable space to the medical missionary work of Paul Farmer, whose book The Uses of Haiti I reviewed at length for Transition. There’s also a chapter on Heifer International, whose marketing I have admired for years. Heifer not only brings home the personal impact of even small gifts, but its attractively produced “magalogs” make giving a donation feel like shopping for a friend. It was good to read that their work is as effective as their marketing.

Clinton discusses organizations that have given books for needy schoolchildren in Zimbabwe and Nepal, but doesn’t mention Books for Africa, which has been doing excellent work for years. When my mother visited me in Zimbabwe in 1990, she brought a suitcase of medical instruments of the sort that American hospitals use once and discard. I was pleased to see that an organization called Doc to Dock is now collecting and distributing them on a much wider basis.

Change in Zimbabwe, at last

When I first went to Zimbabwe, in 1990, I had spent the previous several years raising funds for political prisoners in South Africa and Namibia. I was an admirer of Robert Mugabe because of his support for the ANC, and because he had overturned the expectations of people who expected him to be a tinpot dictator. He had improved health and education in the rural areas, welcomed foreign investors, and given farms back to white commercial farmers who had fled the country. I was troubled by the massacres a few years earlier in Matabeleland — in retrospect I should have been a lot more troubled — but I thought Zimbabwe could have ended up with a leader much worse than Mugabe.

By the end of my six months in the country, I had changed my mind. It was an election year, and thugs belonging to the ruling party’s “youth league” were intimidating and beating up supporters of the opposition. The opposition candidate for vice president was shot, though he survived. Other people who were inconvenient to the government tended to die in car crashes, sometimes in collisions with armored vehicles.

Joshua Nkomo, the widely respected leader of the ZAPU party, had been harmlessly neutralized as a minister without portfolio. I saw him at a ceremony for the tenth anniversary of the country’s independence — a huge sad man in a suit, staring at his lap. Meanwhile the ruling ZANU party was finishing construction on a new and brutal-looking tower in Harare.

Eighteen long years later, Zimbabwe’s economy is in ruins and its people starving. When I was there, the largest bill in general circulation was a blue note worth twenty Zimbabwean dollars. As I recall, it was worth about ten dollars. In January this year, the government printed new money:

On Jan. 18, Zimbabwe’s reserve bank put a $10 million bill into general circulation, a maroon-tinged piece of paper with a sketch of water gushing through a dam that might well have symbolized the escaping value of the note itself. Worth enough at the time to buy a chicken, it now will barely buy a few eggs, with a value of about 40 cents.

As I write, Mugabe has admitted that ZANU has lost control of Parliament, but he has not yet stepped down. I hope he does so soon, that there is a peaceful transition of power, and that foreign governments and aid agencies provide the country with help that actually promotes development and not debt and dependency.

Paul Theroux

I caught the end of a Brian Lamb interview with Paul Theroux about his book Dark Star Safari, an account of Theroux’s journey down the east coast of Africa, from Egypt to South Africa. Theroux is an uneven writer, but his best work, like The Mosquito Coast and My Secret History, is excellent. And as Lamb pointed out, he has spent more time learning about the rest of the world than nearly any other contemporary American writer. (More than any I can readily think of, aside from the half-crazed William Vollmann.)

It’s a little startling to think that Theroux, with his well tailored suits and mid-Atlantic accent (he lived in England for years), was traveling through Africa in the backs of trucks a couple of years ago, when he turned sixty. Lamb asked him how he felt about growing older, and he said “What age means to me is that it’s a fraud, that age means nothing.” So long as you’re healthy, I suppose he’s right. As someone once said, “How old would you be if you didn’t know how old you were?”

Honoring Achebe

The other night Jenn and I went to an event sponsored by PEN, to honor Chinua Achebe on the 50th anniversary of the publication of Things Fall Apart. It was a rainy evening. We waited for a long time outside the Town Hall on 43rd Street, and Jenn spotted our old friend Dorla, a regular from our storefront bookstore. She was there with her fiancee Kevin, and she told us that her friend Sadio—we always used to see them together—is studying in Finland, of all places.

It was strange to think, even after all my work on A Basket of Leaves, that modern African literature is only about as old as I am. But it was comforting and even inspiring to be in a big auditorium full of people who care about books, especially with so many Africans and Africans Americans there. Chris Abani spoke about discovering Achebe’s work as a boy, because his older brother used to copy out passages from Things Fall Apart to impress girls. Chimamanda Adichie (her voice deeper than we expected) spoke of growing up as a professor’s daughter in Nigeria, and how Things Fall Apart was the first book she ever read where the characters looked like her and had familiar names. Edwidge Danticat and Ha Jin were there too, and Toni Morrison spoke about an anthology of African literature she created for Random House around 1969. It was beautifully designed and edited—she had brought a copy to show—but due to the politics of the textbook business, or general lack of interest, almost no one bought it. I think times have changed in the last fifty years, at least a little.