FROM THE ARCHIVES:Nuala O'Faolain wrote a regular weekly column in The Irish Times for more than a decade in the 1980s and 1990s which led, in a roundabout way, to her frank memoir Are You Somebody? and her subsequent books. In this excerpt from one of her columns 20 years ago she also displayed her willingness to face up directly to difficult questions, in this case about international aid to the developing world. – JOE JOYCE
I HAVE been to only three African countries and I have not seen much of aid in action. But what I have seen has raised questions in my mind.
One day, for example, I was visiting a project where an Irishman, funded by the EC, Apso (ie the Irish taxpayers) and an Irish voluntary agency, was teaching an African community to put barbed-wire fences around its gardens. A few Africans were directly employed on the project and one of them was hanging around the yard looking sheepish.
“He shouldn’t be here at all,” the Irishman said. “I’ve sent him home for a few days, just to think and reflect. He shouldn’t be here.”
The African had hurt his ankle in a fight when he was drunk. But he had told the Irishman that he had hurt his ankle falling off his bike. “So I’ve sent him home to just think about the difference between truth and lies. I will not have him lying to me.”
The African would not be paid while he was at home.
We will leave aside the question of whether it is possible to transfer notions of honour across so wide a cultural gap – the Irishman does not speak the local language – or whether it is right to use money to coerce someone who has no money, or whether all aid workers, as they strive to do their jobs, do not necessarily find themselves in a neo-colonialist position.
The Irishman wanted nothing but the good of the people and for his project to succeed. And it was succeeding. The fences were surviving, whereas previous attempts by the local government to get the peasant farmers to put up fences had failed.
It had succeeded because the project was selling the fencing, not giving it away free. The people were under the impression that they were paying the market value for it. They had bought it, it was theirs, and therefore they were looking after it. But in fact the fencing was being subsidised by the project. On the market, it would be much dearer.
What the organisers hoped was that the idea of fencing would catch on before the project ended, the Irishman went away and the people found out the truth. This deception was all right because it would lead to development. The African worker’s deception was not.
Another point arises. The technique the Irishman was teaching is a very simple one. There were thousands and thousands of unemployed Africans in the same country who could teach it themselves. But they do not bring in the aid money . . .
To go back to the Irishman running the barbed-wire scheme – he made me wonder what we would be like if we had been developed ourselves: if good people had come in here in the 1920s and 1930s to teach us communication skills, or hygiene, or how to co-operate with each other, or how to pasteurise our milk or how to promote low-tech medicine or the like.
We could have done with all that but, of course, it was not fashionable at the time, or maybe we were not backward enough or poor enough to merit it. How would we have liked it? Would we not have hated it? There is, or was, a foreign foundation doing personal development work in Ireland but it operates in the greatest privacy because it knows that even though what it is doing is needed and good, it is inherently patronising to be doing it at all.
Yet we assume that Third World countries want anything and anyone we can send, and we assume that we and the rest of the rich world can manipulate them towards development, without harming them. Is this so?
http://url.ie/4j5c