New York  Times   
OPINION   December 15, 2005 
Op-Ed Contributor: The Rock Star's Burden
By PAUL THEROUX 
Money and celebrity gestures won't solve  Africa’s problems. 
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"_ 
(http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/21/readersopinions/bono-questions.html)  - 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."

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