Speaker’s Corner
Denise Horan
WHILE on holidays in various countries a few years back, I got an insight into how the world’s really poor people live. Three insights, in fact. The first was in Beijing, when we went on a tour through the hutongs (backstreets) of the city, culminating in a pre-arranged visit to a house (of sorts), where a woman told us about the conditions in which she and her family lived. Cramped living space. No running water. Very little food. Poor sanitary conditions.
A year later, a township in Cape Town was one of the stop-offs on my tour of the city. This time we visited an orphanage, where little children lay in their beds with so few staff to tend to them that most of their needs went unspoken. Later, we visited a nearby school, where teachers did their best to make life as normal and as happy as possible for the children in their care, in spite of the non-existent educational supports and facilities.
My final such experience was in a maze-like favela in Rio de Janeiro. There are so many sprawling favelas in the former Brazilian capital that there is no way of keeping track of all the people living in them. People die there without anyone knowing they ever existed.
Again, conditions were appalling; dilapidated shacks counted as houses, filthy laneways doubled as streets and sewers, hunger was etched on children’s faces.
In all three cities, we made a contribution at the end of our ‘tour’. Each time I felt sick, guilty and ashamed. Sick at the memory of what I had seen. Guilty for being a ‘rich’ westerner. Ashamed for dispensing charity to, patronising and looking down on these poor people as if they were monkeys in a zoo put there for people like me to gaze at and pity.
I was reminded of these experiences when I read an opinion column in last Wednesday’s Irish Times by African doctor, Bryan Mukandi, who questioned the way in which aid is distributed to African countries. Mukandi expressed the view – a refreshingly honest and brave one – that aid to Africa is ‘paternalistic’ and is based on the premise that African nations are somehow inferior and incapable of looking after themselves.
“Respect for a people’s dignity and right to self-determination needs to be at the forefront of any talk of aid. Paternalism just breeds resentment,” he wrote.
How true. Who are we to decide how a country should receive our charity, well-intentioned and life-saving though it may be? And who are we to presume that the natives do not know best how to help themselves once they are given the means?
Yes, there are many corrupt regimes in Africa, but as Mukandi pointed out, there is corruption elsewhere too; it just takes a greater toll on African countries because their economies are so fragile. He also noted that the reason people like Robert Mugabe have such support among their peers is not because Africa is run by a club of dictators, but because of ‘the wounded pride of men and women who sacrificed everything to be free of colonial rule only to find that they are still spoken down to’. This time by us, the aid-givers.
What Mukandi suggested is not that we stop giving aid to Africa, but that we develop an aid system that involves partnerships between the donor community and the recipient community, with the latter ‘in the driving seat’.
The world’s poorest people may be bereft of the material things that we take for granted, but they are not devoid of the same human feelings as us. It hurts them to be talked down to, dictated to and patronised, just as it hurts us.
The money I contributed in Beijing, Cape Town and Rio may have made life a little easier for a few people for a short period of time, but it stripped away yet another layer of the dignity that keeps those people human. On balance, I took away far more than I gave. Without realising it, maybe some of our aid groups are doing the same.
