Well, another Easter. By rights we should expect great events this weekend as it has also been the weekend of the equinox, a full moon and the prophet’s birthday. It is raining gently this morning, thus ruining several thousand planned days out to the beach (but maybe not, because the rip tide is very dangerous, going to the beach is more like ‘going to a restaurant on the beach’. The best restaurants on the beach are east of here in one of the old capitals, Grand Bassam.
I am in Abidjan and may go out to visit one of the churches to hear the singing, as I used to do in Kampala. The Namirembe choir in Kampala has a beautiful Easter repertoire of western classical and Luganda religious songs which are becoming classics in themselves with their mixed musical style.
‘Simmanyi’ (‘I don’t know him’ sung by Petro/Peter the apostle) has amazing power when sung by a strong choir in the very English-looking cathedral on one of the hills overlooking the city, yet it has traditional roots in its call and response style.
In other countries there is dancing as well as singing in the Catholic churches, something which quite a few popes have struggled to cope with. It is said that when the church was having problems in Mobutu’s day with his call to African ‘authenticité’ there was a Mass created in Kinshasa with leopard skin hats, tasselled fly whisks and strong tom-tom drumming and dancing. The white priests apparently were as enthusiastic as the Congolese and being Congo the whole congregation was soon dancing.
After all, aren’t all they all, western and African branches of the Great Mumbo-Jumbo as the Victorian explorers and earlier (Like Mungo Park) described African practices? (It was only later that the term was used to mean incomprehensible speech, like Latin in the masses).
In the last few weeks I have moved around our small circuit of three offices ending up back here as caretaker over the holidays, my fate at my age, I suppose, while the rest of the staff, all younger, have their holidays. I will get a few days away shortly and will probably finally get to Monrovia, and possibly Conakry.
I went to look after one of the field offices for ten days, part of the way on the UN helicopter with the Russian interpreter who lived in London but can’t remember where, but speaks English, French, Russian, Spanish to us and reads (in one flight, … I watched him ) Italian, German and Portuguese. His job is ‘interpreter’, naturally. In colonial days the French system had such a post and you could be liable to transfer wherever an interpreter was needed, and it is said that occasionally the bureaucracy forgot that an interpreter needs to know the actual language where he is and posted their only Khmer expert to Devil's island French Guyana or similar.
With the head of office recently while I was ‘doing’ the Duekoué office, I took a short, pretty expensive, but worthwhile drive into Guinea. It was to the town of Nzérékoré (lots of accents in French speaking countries) which had its decade as UN/NGO city dealing with refugees from Liberia and, sometimes, Sierra Leone and Cote d’Ivoire.
The town is still peppered with locally manned NGO offices now with not a lot to do, and after a decade of the most intense aid project presence, still has no working electricity supply and no air service accessible to the people, though it is as distant as you can get from Conakry the capital at the coast.
This happens a lot. Agencies do almost nothing to boost the local infrastructure preferring each to have their own electricity supply, import their own fuel, set up their own mail and logistics services. The most egregious case was in Juba in the early eighties. Juba was a sizeable town, a regional capital, less than 200km from Uganda, but there was no working petrol station and putting a letter (remember ‘letters’?) in at the Post Office would be the last you ever saw of your letter (or, more realistically, you could actually go and see your letter every day as it never left).
Meanwhile, I used a Nairobi post office box number and got my mail through Norwegian Church Aid on their twice monthly flight and we imported fuel in barrels, demanding that it be tax free, for our own agency’s use only. (… this nonsense still goes on, leaving local authorities with utterly no revenue to work with in NGO-infested towns)
Of course, one of the main results of this was massive theft from our hardly hidden barrels, usually by people working for our organisations.
We wouldn’t pay to photocopy preferring to do it ‘free’ in the agency offices so no one set up a commercial enterprise.
Like Juba, Nzérékoré and similar towns full of expatriates, agencies and vehicles, instantly atrophied to nothing when they all left.
I seemed alone in believing that if we meant what we said as agencies we would help the commercial sector to provide fuel, simply by becoming their reliable customers; I almost slipped there into jargon to say ‘partners’!
We had vehicles going up and down to the airport all day but no one ever offered to carry the mail bags (the Post Office like everywhere else in the government sector never received funds from Khartoum, and what little they did get went into paying staff arrears so there was a vicious circle in operation).
This hasn’t changed a lot. UNICEF, for one, has abandoned any pretence at developing local enterprise demanding that procurement be done through a centralised office in Copenhagen (who were unable in my experience to conceive of what a school-kit might mean, or what a school in Africa was like) with six months’ delivery time.
[There are pitfalls though with any approach … in Goma after the volcano, local procurement, when finally permitted under stringent tendering rules, was often through one canny trader who was the quickest at importing; the local economy was not actually benefiting much.
On the other hand, in Goma once some committed NGOs got a school furniture scheme going using a constellation of local carpenters, the economy started humming again as money flowed. ]
Back to Guinea. In West Africa people have always liked bush-meat, which is usually small animals like the giant cane-rat (‘agouti’, or ‘cutting grass’) or a large hedgehog/small porcupine, or small forest antelopes. They are an important occasional source of animal protein and occupy the same dietary niche as chicken, goat or pork in other rural areas, i.e. an animal small enough to use most of it at one sitting.
Like everywhere, the trade gets out of hand –especially with urban demand - and prices rise and then grassland is burned to drive them into the hunters’ reach. On the principle that farmed animals don’t risk becoming extinct (think of cows – no one is trying to save them from extinction, though they die regularly for us) the Japanese, at who knows what expense in terms of flights, consultants, experts etc have set up an experimental agouti farm like a battery chicken shed outside Nzérékoré.
We visited it on the Sunday but found that after five years the project had never come to term – there was a lot of research and the people running it knew a huge amount (and had themselves, as we saw on the fire when we arrived, consumed a lot of agouti) but no one had tested whether it was possible to develop the market. Even a basic and important question like ‘is farmed agouti as tasty as a wild one?’ did not appear to have been seriously addressed.
For much of the short trip we were driving round the base of Mount Nimba which is the point at which all three countries meet. There are forest companies (seemingly Chinese) exploiting the timber and running the main hotel -- and some undefined other mineral activity going on with the result that what should be a park or reserve seems curiously out of bounds.
There is a legend of giant frogs on the mountain which have been known to eat people. These frogs, some local curiosity, appear on the calendars and tourist publicity and are iconic in the region, but how they inflated to being giant and anthropophagous, I don’t know (though it is a convenient story for keeping people out).
It reminded me of the old colonial story of the medical officer showing slides in the village on a large white sheet as part of a malaria campaign, being told that it was interesting, but ‘our mosquitoes are certainly not that size’.
It was refreshing in Guinea that the few police checks seemed just to be there to normal law and order reasons and not to rip people off as they do all over Ivory Coast.
Back the next day in Duekoué a foreigner went off jogging at 5.30 pm into the most dangerous piece of bush in the whole of Cote d’Ivoire without telling anyone where he was going and then getting himself totally lost in the forest by nightfall with a failing battery on the very edge of mobile coverage. He was just able to call me once to say he was lost. Luckily I was able to mobilise UN to go looking for him and we found him. Then I was able to tell him that two people had been murdered - exactly where he was running - the night before.
What was interesting is that when we asked the local people about him they said: well there was this white man who ran through the village without greeting anyone … we have no idea where he went.
Which reminds me of an earlier trip to the west. The Norwegian and Swedish ambassadors (both women) were our guests for a couple of days. The Norwegian ambassador is petite, élégante, experienced and uncomfortably perceptive. She gave us a very hard time on everything from protocol to the programme, while smiling sweetly the whole time. The Swedish ambo (resident in Stockholm) was going on and on about how they like ‘being informal and seeing what is really going on’ then lambasted us because they did not meet enough dignitaries and didn’t have a formal reception line at the dinners!
They got worked up when their schedule ran late (in village Africa!) and I got words because my assistant had set up three school visits instead of two. I insisted we should not disappoint the third school (if only because jealousies might flare up in a very sensitive area – I understood why my assistant had included all three) and told the ambassadors that it was a two-way street and their visit had value for the children and the parents as well as for them.
I then got them into a primary 1+2 class (Classe CP Unique) class, warmed the little kids up a bit and then told the kids they could ask the ambassadors questions and one little gamin who had not idea what an ambassador was or what Norway is (but they sang a praise-song to Barry, which was sweet, but also not the image I want to project) acted just like a teacher and asked them to name objects in the room!
In the same class our teacher saw nothing wrong with emphasising points by striking the desks with the stick he was carrying thus frightening the children, the ambassadors, and worrying me seriously that it was probably on the children, not the desks, that the stick usually landed.
French is the only language in common here and little kids in the village are taught to read and write in French from the beginning (and in much of the country there is no other lingua franca). Some reform of teaching in France meant that they teach both cursive and print simultaneously but to ‘avoid confusing the kids’ they don’t teach capital letters in the first year. It is weird to me and has all the hallmarks of a ‘fashionable reform’ which probably works in a truly French-speaking country when you have 22.5 children (already speaking French) in the class and a hugely qualified teacher, but is unsuitable for large classes and inexperienced, unmotivated teachers (we give them just 60 dollars a month).
I am used to the idea that all children can speak at least one lingua franca, usually Swahili, but maybe Juba Arabic or Nyanja. In Cote d’Ivoire I have seen classes of 30 primary one children with nine languages among them, and the teacher not knowing any one of the nine. Yet there is also no training in Direct Method.
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The dollar goes down and gold goes up. In Ituri they must be digging again – many boys in the last few years paid their school fees by panning for gold. It was not all done like in Blood Diamond with the cruelty and quasi-slavery … though it could be just as bad if you fell in the hands of a militia.
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A thought: How come Kosovo gets to declare independence and Somaliland doesn’t?
Barry Sesnan
