Equivocality

[Second published revision, 31/1/08]

Eventually I realized that I knew nothing about Africa.

I’d heard something about millions of people starving, about AIDS, about war, corruption, and drought. I’d seen the infomercials. I’d caught snippets of Live-8 on television, and I couldn’t avoid the GAP’s huge advertising campaign. Donate money to the cause, Bono told me. But all of it was just a bit too mythical, heavy on pathos but shy on fact. There remained for me the central unanswered question: what is wrong with Africa?

So I went there, landing in Morocco and working my way through the countries along west edge of the Sahara desert, through Mauritania, Senegal, and Mali. Three months into my journey, I didn’t feel like I’d learned very much. I had only discovered that there were a lot of beggars in the streets, that everything from the plumbing to the automobiles was run down and badly maintained, and that masses of men stood around all day because they had nothing to do. I’d heard some interesting stories, but I hadn’t made a single African friend. In fact I had spent most of my time thoroughly insulated from Africa in ridiculously overpriced foreigner hotels. I was a tourist. I was frustrated.

Since I had no idea what I was looking for, it didn’t matter where I went. Ghourma-Rharous was simply the next town along the piste, the sand track, heading east through the Northern desert of Mali. I knew no one there, and nothing about the town itself. I had only a scrap of paper with the name of someone who might be able to put me up. It all felt like a highly unlikely beginning when the overloaded Toyota pickup roared off, leaving me just outside an unknown town on the edge of the Sahara desert, more than 100 kilometers from the nearest paved road.

 

***

 

The town glows tan and brown and yellow in the sunset, the colors of mud houses and sandy streets. It is not very big, a few thousand people sandwiched between the river and the dunes. There is no electricity, no running water, no utility poles or pavement, yet the main streets are lined with beautiful old trees which must be watered by hand. The buildings feel like an extension of the desert, like the whole town just grew out of the sand. Such a village could have been built on the banks of the Niger river any time in the last thousand years.

Mohammed Gakou, the owner of the name written on my scrap of paper, is 40ish, skinny, geeky-looking with big glasses. Educated and eloquent, he worked for many years as a journalist in cosmopolitan Dakar. Now he has returned to his remote home town to be the director of communications for the Ghourma-Rharous office of Islamic Relief, a UK-based international NGO. Everyone knows him simply as Baba.

His house is built of mud-brick, like most of the buildings in town, and lies inside a dusty courtyard delineated by mud walls. The interior walls of the house are a finer type of mud-clay plaster and the floors are cracked concrete; the mud ceiling is supported by log beams. Baba led me through a door of corrugated iron into a room with mattresses on the floor and walls covered in colorful woven mats, blankets, and traditional Malian cloths.

"Please," he said, "put your pack down." And just like that, I become a houseguest in the desert village of Ghourma-Rharous, Mali.

And now I am sitting with my host on the big dune behind the town as the day finally cools, watching the buildings glow in the sunset, and the river sparkle beyond.

"This is a beautiful place," I say. "Life seems very pleasant here."

"Not for everyone," he says.

I ask him what the biggest problem is in Ghourma-Rharous.

"Hunger," he says simply.

The rice is harvested in October. By April it runs out, and then more must be imported. But people in this region are poor, and don’t have enough money to buy all they need.

"It’s not obvious to me," I finally say. I had expected shanty-towns, or people with distended bellies. I’ve seen photographs of these things in other places, but so far everything seems normal and orderly here in Ghourma-Rharous.

"People are very proud here," says Baba. "They don’t like to show their suffering."

"But still there must be some signs, if people are really that poor."

Baba pauses for a moment, and looks thoughtful.

"See that old woman over there, gathering wood in the desert?" He points to an old lady in dark rags, carrying a bungle of twigs. It must have taken her hours to collect that much wood from the sparse desert brush.

"Yes," I say.

"If she can find enough, she will sell it as firewood and buy rice for her family."

I stare across the sand and the mud-walled town for a long time, thinking about this. I’ve never gone hungry in my life. What is so different about Africa that this should be so?

 

***

 

"Enclavement," says the man on the left, emphatically. The word translates, roughly, as isolation. "Look," he says, gesturing with his hands, "in the capital a coke costs 200 francs. Here, it’s 350, or even 400. Everything is expensive here. And no one can sell anything, because they can’t transport it to the outside world."

"But there’s nothing for people to sell," I tell him.

"Yes, that’s the problem," says the one in the middle. "What these people need is commerce. Look, the people here are mostly Toureg—"

"Songhai," interjects the one on the right, "the Toureg are actually a minority,"

"—and the Toureg are traders, traditionally," continues the one in the middle. "They raise animals in the desert and then sell them. The government needs to develop commerce here."

"Actually, the people in the river towns are traditionally farmers," says the other one.

These three are twenty-something school teachers, assigned by the government to a seven-month training stint in Ghourma-Rharous. They were sitting outside in plastic chairs as I walked down the sandy main street in the hot afternoon, and invited me to tea as I passed by. I have asked them why they think people are hungry here.

"Listen," says the one on the left. He’s got a degree in Philosophy. "It doesn’t matter what the people did traditionally, this is an age of trade. You can’t just grow food for your family now, like people used to do. Everyone needs money these days. And this place—" he gestures with his hand to the mud walls, the sunlight burning through the doorway, the lively street outside, "—is too isolated for the development of trade. The government needs to build a road here."

"So, you think that if there was a paved road to Rharous, that would solve all the problems here?"

"Certainly."

The other pauses for a moment and sips his tea from a small glass, then leans forward in his wire chair. He’s wearing dark jeans, plastic sandals, and a button-down short-sleeved shirt of pink and white checks. I can see the sweat forming on his brow, but then, all of us are sweating in the intense afternoon heat. "Isolation is a problem, yes. But the government is not doing enough to develop this region."

I ask what the government should be doing.

"They could make things cheaper here, for example."

"So you think it’s the government’s job to develop this community?"

"Yes."

"Not the people’s job?"

"The people are too poor! They have no money for anything."

"And the government does? Isn’t the government broke too?"

"No, the government has lots of money," says the philosopher.

"Really?"

"Yeah, they get it from other countries." That much is true. Actually, Mali could not exist as a sovereign state without a massive annual influx of foreign aid.

"Okay, so what’s the problem then?" I ask.

"The politicians are corrupt."

"Ah."

"They pocket the money themselves. It never reaches here."

"I’ve heard stories about that sort of thing," I say.

"The problem—" the philosopher is on a roll again, "— is that there are too many intermediaries. Like when they give out rice. The politicians take money. The transporter takes money. The local governors and prefects take a cut. We need to get the money directly to the people." And he slams his fist into his hand for emphasis, and nods gravely.

"And what would the people do with this money?" I want to know,

"Huh?"

I turn to the one on the right. "What do you think the problem is? Isolation? Commerce? Do you think a road would help?"

"A road would be good, yes."

"But?"

"People need education. The reason they don’t do commerce is because they don’t know how. No one can read. No one can do accounting. We need education."

"And here you are, teacher."

"And here I am. But this is Ghourma-Rharous, the main town. There are schools here. Most of the population of Rharous cercle lives in the bush, in tiny little communities."

"There aren’t schools there?"

"Not many. Not enough."

"So you think we need to build schools?"

"Yes."

"What about teachers?"

"We need teachers too, of course."

"Where will you go after you finish your training here? To a little bush community?"

"No. Back to my home province in the South."

"Right. But if we had more schools and teachers — that would solve things? That would alleviate the poverty?"

"It would help," is all he’ll admit.

Isolation. Ignorance. Lack of infrastructure. Corruption. I’ve heard all these reasons before. I’ve also heard draught, overpopulation, unfair trade policies, lack of clean water, desertification, AIDS, and others. Each of these has at one point or another been claimed as the problem, the basic problem, the magic bullet that will solve all of Africa’s woes.

 

***

 

It’s 1:00 PM, lunch time at Chez Gakou. Baba, his wife Aiesha, and myself sit on plastic chairs around a large steel bowl, while the children squat on the dusty concrete floor. Aiesha lifts the lid off the bowl and pours brown sauce over our rice. Two small silver river fishes, each about the size of my hand, have been boiled whole into the sauce. To this she adds several big spoonfuls of "butter" from a metal can, a horrible greasy palm-oil margarine that will keep in the heat. Still it’s a status symbol here, absurdly cheap for me but expensive to the locals, and Aiesha makes sure to put lots on my side of the bowl.

"Bon appetite," says Baba, and we all dig in. I’ve been given a spoon, while everyone else uses their right hand.

Rice is food here. If you’re lucky, you eat it three times a day. Often there is sauce with the rice, some sort of brown or orange gravy. More affluent families can afford a fresh a fish or two in their daily rice. For the relatively rich, or on special occasions, there is meat in the sauce, unidentifiable chewy chunks of what originally might have been part of a goat, sheep, or cow. I always cringe inwardly when someone tries to honor me by serving meat.

Yet this gory meat is very good for the families who can afford it. Rice alone has many calories, but few other nutrients. A great many people in this part of the country develop all kinds of diseases as a result. Hair starts falling out from lack of zinc, goiter develops from lack of iodine, night blindness from vitamin A deficiency. Fish or meat are good supplements, but they are unaffordable to most, so the local diet needs to be supplemented with beans, or corn, or vitamin-enriched oil, and iodized salt. Or vegetables, but this is not a vegetable culture. Vegetables don’t keep, they must be washed in bleach-water before consumption, and besides, they’re not rice.

"Baba," I ask as we eat, "you used to live in Dakar. Did you eat things other then rice there?"

"Oh yes," he says, "you can get anything in Dakar."

"Such as?"

"Mmm… there are great patisseries there. I used to eat a croissant every day for breakfast. And when I was a student there, I used to eat the shawarma at the street stands all the time."

"Ever eat Asian food? Like Japanese food? Or Thai food?"

"Yes, I’ve eaten Thai food."

"Did you like it?"

He makes a face. "Not really."

"So what’s your favorite type of food?"

Baba pauses and chews, thoughtful. "Rice," he says. And five-year old Hasi grins his big childish grin at me with rice between his teeth, and another mouthful ready in his greasy hand.

In my wanderings around the village, I begin to ask people what their favorite food is. Most just stare at me as if they’d never really thought about it, then say "rice." A favorite food! In order to have a favorite, one would have to have a choice.

 

***

 

Malnutrition is gross when you see it on television. Distended bellies, patchy hair, crusts around the eyes and on the scalp. When I actually encounter these things, the situation is so perfectly ordinary that there is no room for disgust.

On my second day in Ghourma-Rharous I round the corner of high mud wall to find a little girl of five or six years standing in front of me. She is wearing only a grimy red t-shirt, ragged and stained with something black and greasy. She is very dirty, with crusts of grime on her hands and face. Her hair is falling out; what is left is braided into a kind of Mohawk that might be adorable on a healthier child.

She stands in front of me and we stare at one another for a long time.

I feel a certain amount of guilt. I feel guilty about the two loaves of fresh bread in my bag, and the thousands of francs in my pocket. That’s human. It’s neither here nor there. While giving her my bread might be an act of kindness, in the end it would solve nothing.

Mostly I just feed sad.

The central question of empathy is always: what if that were me?

Malnutrition has consequences. It diverts one’s attention away from the long-term projects that are the only real solution to poverty. Finding something to eat – right now, today – takes precedence over school, infrastructure, conservation of declining fisheries, investments in modern equipment, over every sort of thought for the future. It destroys the ability of the body to fight off disease, resulting in a whole host of secondary illnesses. And certain nutrient deficiencies in childhood also cause permanent reductions in mental capacity. In short, lack of sufficiently nourishing food makes people desperate, sick, and stupid.

And so I stare back at the little girl. I am thinking of all that I am, and wondering what she could have been.

 

***

 

People have lived on the banks of the Niger river for a long time. The fields around the town are littered with pottery fragments, remnants of centuries of civilization. Somehow, they fed themselves.

From talking to people, I have quickly come to understand the traditional way of life. The river has a natural cycle which gives rise to an ancient agricultural method. Rice is planted in June on the narrow plains between the low river and the dunes which border it. In July and August there is an annual rain over the entire Sahel, the huge arid border region south of the Sahara desert proper. The rice sprouts in the rain, and then the river floods to cover it in a natural cycle of wet-rice agriculture. The rice is harvested by men in pirogues, the traditional long wooden boats of the region.

Rice is still grown in Ghourma-Rharous today in exactly this fashion, now known as "recession agriculture". But the system has broken down somehow, and people can no longer feed themselves in the traditional way.

"Baba," I ask my host, "is there any more land here that could be used to grow rice?"

"Sure, there’s lots," he tells me.

"Then why don’t people grow more food?"

"They lack the equipment to cultivate the land."

"Equipment?"

"Pumps. Tractors. Everything."

I can see that he’s right. The population of this region farms with machetes and wooden boats. That’s it. Modern agriculture is impossible here without additional equipment.

But aid money has been pouring into Mali since independence in 1960. That’s almost fifty years. If it were really just a matter of missing pumps, famine would have disappeared from this region long ago.

 

***

 

Starving farmers with plenty of land and water. It doesn’t make any sense, and so I am going to ask a stupid question. When the song is over.

Adema and I are sitting on plastic chairs on the sand watching the beach and listening to Saidou play. The sinking sun silhouettes the wooden pirogues tied near the shore after a day of fishing. Saidou plays a slow, hypnotic groove of sweetly shifting chords. Women are bent over at the river’s edge, washing clothes in big plastic buckets. People are bathing in the shallows; naked children run over the sand. Men are sitting out on big reed mats and drinking tea. It looks like the whole town has come out to enjoy its river in the evening cool. Saidou watches all this and smiles his big slow smile, brilliant white teeth in a dark face, grinning at the soft music of his country. He’s playing the songs of Ali Farka Toure, the musician-hero of Mali, the man who made the desert blues international. It feels like music from very far away, but somehow familiar.

The song finishes and everything is quiet. There is no sound of traffic or television.

"Adema," I say, "I think I have a stupid question."

He nods and tells me to go on.

"My understanding is that the rice here is grown in July and August, and harvested in September and October, after which, there is no more agriculture for the rest of the year. And people go hungry as a result."

"That’s right," he says.

"Ok. So here’s my stupid question. Can things be grown during the other months of the year?"

"That’s not a stupid question," says Adema, and Saidou nods in agreement. "The answer is yes. Right now, even, in the middle of the hot season, in April, one could grow things. Corn, potatoes, wheat, even more rice. It’s called the contra-saison."

"Would there be enough fertile land available for this?"

"Sure there’s enough land. Look around," and he waves at the desert. "We have lots of land. And there’s water too. The NGO we work for – the Cooperation Allemande pour le Development de Mali – all they do is irrigation. They’ve donated and installed moto-pumps in forty new fields."

"Then… why don’t the people here grow things in the contra-saison? If they’re starving."

"They lack the courage."

"What? Really?"

"Yes."

"I don’t think I understand. They’re hungry, and they don’t grow more food because – why?"

"They lack the courage. It’s a problem of mentality."

I’m finding this hard to accept. I can’t believe that starving farmers wouldn’t grow more food.

"The people here, they understand how to grow these other things?"

"Sure. There are little vegetable gardens in town, even."

"So – why don’t they grow more food?"

"They don’t like to work. You’ve seen the people here. They sit around; they drink tea all day. They’re lazy," says Adema.

"They’ve been doing the same thing for a very long time," explains Saidou. "It’s very hard to change people. It’s a very slow process."

The men sitting on reed mats; the women washing clothes; the children bathing in the river – this scene has played out here every evening for hundreds, maybe thousands of years.

 

***

 

Baba pokes his head into my room and tells me that there’s water for washing. His wife has just returned from the well with a pink plastic bucket balanced on her head, full.

Like the other rooms in the house, the bathroom has mud walls. I strip and place my clothes carefully on the dirt windowsill, trying not to get them too dusty. I crouch in the basin, African style, and scoop water over my body with a cup. It runs out through a hole in the wall, spilling directly onto the sand of the street outside.

I’ve been in Ghourma-Rharous a week now, and I miss running water. I miss being able to take a shower any time I like, without having to draw water from the well. I miss being able to stand under the running stream and feel it wash over me. But my water is wonderfully cool in the afternoon heat, and the profound silence of a town without cars or machines is something new. Just as I’m considering this, a tiny brown and red bird flies in through the window and perches on the edge of my water bucket.

I reach into my toiletry bag and grab a tube of face scrub. On my voyage I am also carrying shampoo, bar soap, shaving cream, toothpaste, deodorant, and sunblock. At home I also stock conditioner, aftershave, moisturizer, and hair gel. And that’s not counting the bottles and tubes rotting on the window sill or in the cabinet behind the mirror.

In this bathroom, for this family of five, there is a bottle of shampoo, a tube of toothpaste, a bar of soap, and a toothbrush.

In the kitchen of the house, there are exactly two spoons and one knife.

 

***

 

The community of Gossi said that a school was their number one development priority, so Islamic Relief built one with them. The NGO supplied cement, iron, and technical expertise, while the village provided local materials and labor.

"When we visited two years later," Moussa Traore tells me, "we found that the building had completely collapsed."

The usually jovial Moussa frowns at this. He is the number two agent of the Islamic Relief office in Ghourma-Rharous. We’re eating from a bowl of riz sauce under a tree in his sandy backyard, and talking about the difficulties of development projects.

"Why did the school collapse?" I ask.

"The community hadn’t maintained it. Perhaps it is because of internal conflict," he speculates. "The management committee changed after the school was finished, so that the people left in charge of the school were not the ones who had signed the contract with Islamic Relief. Or perhaps a new school wasn’t actually a priority of the community."

"Then why did they ask for a school?"

"No one will ever turn down aid money," he points out.

This story is, unfortunately, quite typical of aid projects, here and elsewhere in the developing world.

Last year, Islamic Relief undertook an ambitious project in an attempt to reduce famine. A large part of the hunger problem here, Moussa explains to me, is simple logistics: when the locally gown rice runs out, more must be obtained from elsewhere. It is not easy or cheap to transport dozens of tons of rice to communities which cannot be reached by road. This supply problem is exacerbated by simple greed: local merchants buy up scarce supplies early on, only to sell them for outrageous prices later.

The idea behind a cereal bank is simple. Early in the season, the community organizes a single large rice purchase from the agricultural region in the south of Mali, and arranges transport by boat up the Niger river. This rice is then re-sold to the local population at near-cost. Moussa’s NGO began the program by donating an initial stock of many tons of rice to each of seven village cereal banks, as well as assembling and training the local management committees. This training is at least as necessary as the rice itself, as even those who can read have certainly never been taught the most basic accounting practices. Most of all, the notion of sustainability must be carefully explained: the cereal bank must set prices each year so as to cover costs, and must never divert cash on hand to other community needs, no matter how pressing they may be.

With his degree in public administration, Moussa personally audits the accounts of two of the seven banks weekly, tracking account balances, cash on hand, and remaining rice stores. This is not possible for the other cereal banks, because of the remoteness of the communities: most of these villages cannot even be contacted by telephone. Instead, these other five banks are visited every three months by NGO representatives, who must drive long distances over desert tracks in old 4×4 Toyota trucks.

So far, it has mostly worked. The two most closely watched banks began with 35 tons of rice each, sold almost all of it over the year, and now have enough cash on hand to buy over 40 tons for the next season. Three of the other five cereal banks have fared similarly well.

But in Hamsikoma, the cash from 10 tons of rice is missing. The president of the cereal bank management committee has so far not been available for a meeting; the last time Moussa visited, he was informed that the president was out of the country in neighboring Burkina-Faso. I asked Moussa what he thinks happened to the money.

"Do you think the president stole it?"

"It’s possible. But actually, my suspicion is that, in this case, the money is actually there, but they are hiding it because they are afraid we are coming to take it back. I tried to explain to them that this is impossible. Islamic Relief is not a signatory to the bank account, so there is no way we could withdraw their money. I showed them the paperwork, but they don’t understand."

The situation is even more serious in Haribomo. When IR visited they found all the rice gone, but no cash on hand and almost no money in the bank. The mayor there explained that the rice was "loaned" to local communities.

"I think the problem here is that the mayor is also president of the management committee," Moussa tells me.

Maybe the mayor donated the rice to the starving population out of kindness, despite the grave implications for sustainability. Or maybe he did it because he’s up for re-election shortly. He acted illegally in any case, but in such an isolated place, who would be there to stop him?

"I was furious. I had papers prepared that say that the missing cash is a loan, and sent someone out there, and forced the mayor to sign them. So he is now personally responsible for the missing money."

"Do you think he will be able to repay the cereal bank?"

Moussa sighs. "I don’t know."

"What will you do if he doesn’t?"

"We will take him to the police. This project has the support of the governor of Timbuktu Region, and the President of Mali has recently declared that food security is a priority, so he will certainly be in trouble."

He pauses for a moment, frowns, and sadly shakes his head.

"But that really won’t help. I don’t know what these people will do this year when the rice runs out."

 

***

 

At the very edge of the inhabited desert, just past the last mud buildings of Timbuktu, stands a huge monument of white marble. It was funded by international donors and erected by the Malian government in 1996 to mark the peaceful end of the Touareg rebellion. Its three white arcs must have been magnificent once, a graceful gateway to the dunes beyond.

Today the monument is decrepit, trash-strewn and covered in graffiti. Half of the marble facing has fallen off. This beautiful thing is crumbling back into the sand.

It was to that backdrop that I had a conversation late one evening with a Canadian aid worker named Miranda. She’s lived in West Africa for six years now, beginning in the Peace Corps in Mauritania where she worked in health education. This involved such thankless tasks as trying to convince people to wash their hands with soap before eating to reduce the spread of disease. After that she moved to Mali, married an African, and wrote a book on basic health practices, a picture book where the mother has to deal with life events such as keeping the baby hydrated when he gets diarrhea. She’s currently trying to raise funds to get it translated into several more local languages.

Development, she told me, is not about things. You could build a modern house for every single African, with good plumbing and nice paint. You could give each of them a television, a computer, a car. There would be a huge ceremony; presidents and dignitaries would cut the ribbons live on international television and proud Africans would express their thanks as they moved into their new homes. The world would congratulate itself on its kindness.

In five years you would come back and find the houses crumbling. The balconies would be scarred and blackened from cooking fires after the gas ran out. The computer and the stereo would have been sold for food, though the television might remain. The shower would be clogged and the toilet would no longer flush, but it would not matter because the inhabitants would be taking care of all their personal hygiene in the back yard. The cars, if they still ran, would be in dangerous disrepair, right back to the sorry state of African vehicles today. And the house’s inhabitants would once again be poor and desperate.

Development is not about things.

 

***

 

I want to know if there was ever a time when people weren’t starving here. I ask Amouk Oise, who works for the government as a regional agricultural consultant.

"Yes. There used to be enough to eat."

"What’s changed?"

"Many things," he tells me.

"Population increase?"

"Yes, definitely. But not just that. There used to be other food sources, but not anymore. For example, people here used to eat a wild plant known as ‘cram.’ But the animals like it very much too, and they began to eat it as they ran out of grass. Now it’s virtually gone."

"Why did the animals run out of grass?"

"Well, for one thing, the drought."

The word doesn’t mean much to me, because I live in a modern industrial nation. Here in Northern Mali, the food supply depends on the weather. When it doesn’t rain, nothing grows.

"Is there other fertile land that can be used?"

"Yes, lots," he tells me.

"Who owns that land?" and I gesture to the desert outside the window, millions of hectares of it.

"The state."

"So it’s available for cultivation?"

"Yes, but it needs to be irrigated."

"Do you mean mechanized irrigation? Moto-pumps?"

"That, and other methods. Damns. Canals. Water management generally."

"With water management, this land could be used to grow food?"

"Well, one needs fertilizer too. Otherwise you can only use a new field for a few years."

"Chemical fertilizer?" I clarify.

"That would work. But chemicals are expensive, and also it is very hard to transport them out here. We’re a long way away from everything."

"So what do you suggest instead?"

"Well, there is a technology called ‘forced composting.’ Basically you take manure and straw and water, put the mixture in a tank during the hot season, and then you have fertilizer when you need it during the rainy season."

"Sounds great."

"We think it will work very well. But only two percent of our farmers use this system now."

"Why?"

"Partially, because it uses a lot of water, and the farmers have no way to transport it. We lack wagons, and water containers."

Equipment again.

"Would microfinance help here? Loans so that people could buy the equipment?"

"Definitely. Also," he adds, "it requires coordination. The plants need manure to grow, and the animals need the chaff and straw to eat. Livestock and agriculture are closely interconnected—" and he twines the fingers of his two hands together, "—remember that."

"Let me see if I understand," I say, looking up from my notes. "There’s enough land, but it needs to be managed and irrigated, and fertilizer production needs to be set up. That requires pumps and wagons and such. So," I finish, "the first thing you need is agricultural equipment."

"No. The first thing we need is education."

"Education?"

"Yes. We have to teach the people how all these new methods work."

There are half a million people living across half a million square kilometers in the northern desert of Timbuktu province, of which Rharous cercle is a part. Many have never in their life been to school, and fewer than 20 percent of them can read.

"My agents have to go out to the farmers and show them these new techniques. They must physically work with them for a season."

"Do you have enough agents?"

Amouk laughs out loud at this question.

"We’re supposed to have three agents per community. There are nine communities in Rharous cercle. That means we need 27 agents. We have four."

"Why? Why don’t you have more agents?"

"This is Mali," he says, shaking his head, "the government is very poor."

 

***

 

Baba is smoking a cigarette and we’re both reclining on a mattress on his mud roof, my roof now, the roof where I sleep every night to escape the heat. I love sitting up here, in these quiet starry nights. There are no car noises to disturb my evenings, no streetlights to hide the sky. The moon is nearly full tonight, and you can see almost the whole town from up here.

"This is a wonderful town," I’m telling him. "Everyone’s been very kind to me."

"I’m glad," he says. "The small villages are not like the big cities. I’m glad that you’ve been able to experience that."

He’s right. Just walking down the street here is a very different experience from, say, the capital of Bamako. No one yells "tubab!" at me, the children only very rarely come up and ask me for "bic" or "cadeaux," and I have yet to run into the outrageous "skin tax" prices. Generally, I’ve been treated far more like a human being here, and less like a walking wallet. It’s refreshing, and for the first time in Africa, I’m starting to make real friends.

"I’m learning a lot," I tell him.

"Such as?"

"Well, about how agriculture works here. And also the cereal bank program. It’s a very clever idea."

He smiles broadly. "It’s a very successful project."

I smile with him and pause before replying. "Mostly successful," I point out. "The money’s all gone in Haribomo."

"True," he says.

We are silent for a moment, reclining on the big foam mattress, looking out over the moonlit town. A few lone figures move gently along the night streets, but the town is as still and dark as I’ve ever seen an urban settlement. Baba takes a drag of his cigarette and asks me what else I’ve learned.

"Baba," I say gently, "I think Rharous cercle needs a lot more than pumps."

"Of course."

"No. What I mean is, I’m not sure that giving people pumps would solve even their irrigation problems. Will they save enough money to buy fuel? And what happens when the pumps break down?"

"There’s a mechanic in town," he points out.

I’m not making myself clear. There is a lesson here, a pattern that is emerging in my mind from everything that I’ve seen here, elsewhere in Africa, and on other poor continents.

"If there’s a pattern with all these failed aid projects," I say, "perhaps it’s that not enough people are thinking of the future. That’s why they sell off aid supplies for cash, and that’s why no one maintained the school. They think only of today."

He doesn’t even bat an eye. "Why do you think that is?" he asks me.

"Because everyone is very poor," I answer.

"Exactly," he says, and takes another drag.

 

***

 

I’m sitting on a large reed mat with about twenty people, mostly women, from the nearby community of Diambourou. I’m out in the field again, this time with Moussa, having survived a harrowing motorbike ride of twenty kilometers across the raw sand.

The women are cradling their babies. Although they are very poor their clothing is beautiful: dresses, shawls, and head scarves in the fantastic colorful patterns of West Africa. They are dirty but proud. Moussa begins to speak with them in Sodai, stopping every once in a while to translate for me what he feels is an important point. He is talking to them about the micro-lending program he started with them two years ago. At that time, the NGO established the village women’s association and loaned it about $1000 to be paid back over five years. From this pool the association loans smaller amounts to people in the community, after discussing and approving their individual investment plans.

I have been asked to serve as photographer today. Moussa needs to document the results of the program – the successes – for the NGO newsletter and for the foreign donors. One woman has set up a tiny fish cooking and drying operation with her micro-credit loan. Moussa gets her get to pose with her drying rack, charcoal brazier, oil-filled pan and ladle. He stands behind them in his Islamic Relief t-shirt.

"Turn slightly," I instruct him from behind the camera, "we don’t want the logo in shadow."

I’m playing along. I understand what’s needed here, and I’m willing to do it. If I believe in the possibility of humanitarian aid at all, I have to acknowledge that marketing is just part of the game. I’ve come full circle. I’m now at the far end of those slick advertisements, the ones with the dark smiling faces. Except that I am beginning to understand a few things I didn’t know before, like how complicated the situation really is, and how many projects actually fail. It makes me uneasy to be part of the machine, but I’m not sure what the alternative might be.

And yet, there might just be real successes here.

The woman drying fish seems genuinely pleased to be working at her little enterprise. A young fisherman tells us that he bought a new net with a 10,000 CFA ($20) loan two years ago, and has already made enough money from his catch to purchase a second. Then comes a woman who decided to invest in a female sheep, which has since given birth to two fuzzy black lambs now roaming around the dirt yard. For the first time, I’m seeing firsthand an aid project which has, just maybe, actually helped people. I feel a strange thrill. It’s not so much what these women have accomplished that pleases me, but their outlook. Emotions are hard to decode across language and cultural barriers; I have learned that even simple facial expressions sometimes have different meanings than I would expect as a Westerner. Even so, listening to their patter, watching the grinning faces, trying to follow the conversations through context and tone of voice alone, I could swear that I understand what these women are feeling: pride. And hope.

Moussa then enters into a "needs assessment" with the women, as he takes pains to point out to me in English. The buzzword strikes me as odd out here in the middle of a community which probably does not own a single pen.

"How about an adult literacy program?" he asks them. "We have someone now who could teach you to read."

"No," says the headwoman. "We’re too busy with the animals and our tree garden."

Some part of me cringes at their lack of interest in literacy, but I’m very glad that someone asked them what they wanted before giving it to them anyway.

The tree garden turns out to be a patch of several hundred eucalyptus saplings sprouting from a plot of sand just up from the river, protected from goats and sheep by a low fence. I ask the women about it, Moussa translating.

"Where did these trees come from?"

"We got them from the government," they tell me.

"How did you pay for them?"

"The trees are free, from the department of agriculture."

This seems impossible to me – the impoverished Malian government couldn’t possibly keep up with the demand for free saplings. No one ever turns down a handout.

"They have to pay for a tree only if it dies," clarifies Moussa.

"When will the trees be ready to cut down?" I ask.

"Four or five years."

"And what will you do with the wood?"

"Some of it we will sell. Some of it we will burn for firewood," the headwoman tells me. "But mostly, we’ll build houses. Right now there aren’t enough houses for everyone who lives here." I think of all the temporary structures in town when she says this – the thatch shelters, the cardboard lean-tos – and the logs required to support a proper mud ceiling.

The women are obviously proud of their tree farm. Their saplings are watered twice daily using river water which is carried up in buckets. The process is hugely labor intensive, and takes hours each day. "But," points out the headwoman, "we do it all ourselves. We even supplied all the equipment ourselves."

"What equipment?"

"The buckets," says the woman, and flashes me that beautiful smile again.

 

***

 

It’s hot. It’s extremely hot.

There’s a good wind blowing but it isn’t helping. It’s like a blast from an oven. The air temperature is 45 degrees Celsius. The sun is obscene. Everyone else is inside right now, in their insulating mud houses, but I have a few hundred meters to go. Then I’m going to hide inside too, until the cooler afternoon.

It’s like living inside a clothes dryer.

Where the sand gets in my sandals it burns my skin. The ground, the walls, everything outside is hot to the touch and reflects heat at me. Fortunately I have a bottle of cold water in my hand, from the fridge at the NGO. They have the only generator in town, so this is certainly the only cold water in the village. Perhaps even for a hundred kilometers. I feel very thankful.

I’m drinking five liters each day and instantly sweating it all out. My clothes are constantly damp and sticky. A shower would feel wonderful right now, but that would require a truly heroic trip to the well.

Lee Kwan Yew, the former dictatorial prime minister of Singapore, was once asked to name the most important invention of the 20^th century. "Air conditioning," he said. Computers, airplanes, and nuclear weapons were all invented in the 20^th century, and yet he still chose air conditioning. Why? "Because without air conditioning, it would be impossible to get any work done in the tropics," he explained. He’s right. You can’t do anything at all in this heat. Just sitting still is exhausting. Thinking is impossible. Actually, it kind of hurts to breathe.

Finding someplace dark and lying very still is really the only option. I’ve run into plenty of authentic laziness in Mali, but there’s weather too. Any development plan here has to take into account the hot-season climate. I certainly wouldn’t work in this heat.

This is exactly the sort of thing I could never have understood from reading a book, from studying international development journals alone. It’s a phenomenon that you have to actually be here to understand.

Dear God, it’s hot. I’m amazed that I can still move.

 

***

 

Standing on the dune behind the town, all I can see is scrubby desert, but Baba tells me it was all green savannah when he was a child. I can’t believe this, so I go to see the local minister of the environment, a man named Mohammed Saidoo Maiga.

"Oh yes," he tells me. "The grass and trees are disappearing. In many places they are entirely gone now."

"Why?"

"Many reasons. People cut the trees down to make charcoal, to sell. Or to build their houses."

"Is that legal?"

"Of course not," he tells me. "There’s a three month prison sentence for taking wood from the desert. Or sometimes just a fine, if they are nice to our agents. But people do it anyway." And he repeats to me the same story that I heard from the minister of agriculture: not enough agents. Over hundreds of thousands of square kilometers of desert the laws are unenforceable anyway.

"And then there’s the drought, of course."

The drought again. I’ve read that Mali suffered a major drought from 1972 to 1974. First the plants died, then the animals began to starve. Half of all the livestock in the country died, and it took ten years for the herds to recover. Unfortunately there was an even more severe drought in 1984-85, and the herds have not returned to pre-drought levels to this day. But the drought? Is it permanent now? Again I wonder how this used to work, how a lifestyle that lasted for millennia could suddenly fail so drastically.

"Fifty years ago," Mohammed tells me, "there was more rain."

He states this amazing fact so casually that I find it hard to believe. "Really? Do you have records of the rainfall in this region? Can I see them?"

"Well," he says, slightly embarrassed, "the records are not well organized." He gestures to a precarious stack of crumbling file boxes in the corner of his office. "Most of them are in Bamako anyway. But look here: I am right now writing a report to the national office." And I read off his computer screen, "for the past fifteen years the rains have been erratic both in distribution and timing."

I think: all this used to be green.

"What other environmental problems do you have here?"

"The wildlife is being poached. Unfortunately, the ostriches are all gone now, but we think that the elephants and hippo populations will recover. We have problems with over-fishing too. But the most serious problem is that the river is disappearing."

The river is disappearing?

"From erosion," he explains. "The sand banks are sliding into the river, making it shallower. When it’s too shallow, the fish can’t survive. Also the boats can’t pass."

Wooden pinasse boats are the only practical transportation method for large deliveries, such as the grain which must be imported to feed the population, and fish is the only source of protein and other nutrients for the riverside communities who cannot afford meat. If the river dies, the communities will die also. And it’s not just a Malian problem, Mohammed tells me. All of the Niger river countries – Guinea, Mali, Niger, Nigeria – are facing the same challenge, and there are now large international projects to try to stabilize the dunes. I’ve seen some of this work myself, grass planted in grids on the sand, dividing the dunes into ten-meter squares. Apparently the grass grids disrupt the ground-level wind flow and thereby slow the slide of sand into the river, but no one really knows whether this effort will ultimately succeed.

The river banks used to be held together by natural vegetation. The processes of desertification are still not completely understood, but it’s clear that they involve some particularly vicious circles. Plants and trees hold the sand together and disrupt the eroding wind, preventing it from blowing away the thin topsoil. They also participate in the water cycle by drawing moisture from the soil and transpiring it into the atmosphere. That is to say, vegetation actually enhances rainfall. But overgrazing or drought can disrupt these fragile transition ecosystems at the edge of the Sahara. When the herds eat too many plants, there is more erosion and less rain. This results in fewer plants the following year, a feedback process which ultimately turns the land to barren dust. Eventually the herders are forced to move somewhere else to find food for their animals, and the cycle repeats.

The great sand seas of the Sahara, the dunes where nothing can grow, are expanding by 5-10 kilometers every year. In an effort to escape the expanding desert, these nomads are only bringing it with them.

"I don’t really have the means to protect the environment," Mohammed finally confides. "When one is very poor, one overgrazes the grass and cuts down trees regardless of laws. To protect the environment, one must eliminate poverty."

I think of the woman gathering wood in the desert, which she will sell as charcoal for ten cents a bag in the hopes of buying a little rice for her family. She’s permanently destroying the trees that sustain her, but she can’t stop.

The great irony in all of this is that global warming is also thought to be contributing to desertification – environmental destruction perpetrated by people who were not poor, who did know better. It is not just Africans who don’t think ahead.

 

***

 

One afternoon I come across my young friend Adbul biting into a fresh tomato. It glows deep orange-red in the late afternoon sun, and drips gooey seeds over his teenage fingers.

"Where did you get that?" I ask him.

"From the garden," he tells me.

"Can you show me?"

He turns around and begins to walk, still munching on the tomato. After weeks eating only rice and oil, the smell of a fresh vegetable is intense. He leads me to the rear of the town, where the buildings gradually thin out and the walls become lower and more decrepit. Mud buildings come apart in the rains and must be maintained; these walls have not been repaired for some years, and are strangely melted. But there is green here, flashes of plants behind the walls, and the hint of cool air. We stop at a door of corrugated iron set into a mud wall, where Abdul struggles for a minute with the twisted wire holding it closed.

Greens of all colors in the reddening light. The smell of water. Birdsong. A hidden space inside ancient crumbling walls. Vegetables of many different types are planted in little patches, each one surrounded by a low dirt berm to catch the water, which comes from a simple well in one corner – actually just an enormous hand-dug hole in the dirt, with a muddy pool at the bottom. My small friend leads me between the rows of plants, pointing out each species. "Onions," he says. "Beetroot. Aubergine," and he reaches into the foliage to show me a fat purple eggplant.

"Who owns this garden?" I want to know.

"My father."

"And who can eat from it?"

"My family. Also we sell the vegetables."

He leads me further between the plants. "Carrots, And tomatoes."

Most are still green, but after a moment he selects for me a large, flat, ridged fruit, plump and intensely colored. I bite into it and find it unlike any tomato I have ever eaten, rich and red and metallic, and blood-warm from the day’s heat.

Abdul’s family is the first generation to grow vegetables in the desert. Things change slowly, but they change.

 

***

 

At the very beginning of my stay, Baba was already thinking of the end. "I ask just one thing," he said. "Please don’t forget us. When you return to San Francisco, find some way to help us. Please."

We were sitting on his mud roof, having the first of many sunset conversations. No cars, no radio, no books. Just one white man from a rich country, and one black man from a poor country, talking about the problems of the world.

"But what can I do, Baba?"

"Something. Anything. Form an association, maybe."

"To do what?"

"To help us. Please."

There is no "Africa" for Baba. There are only the people in his community.

"Don’t forget us," he begged.

I have not forgotten. But the truth is, I don’t know how to help. My rage has turned to resignation. I feel overwhelmed. I can see all the tangles of real life in Ghourma-Rharous, and neither the place nor the answers look at all like the slick advertising campaigns. "Feed the world" has lost its meaning for me, because food alone will never solve the problem of hunger.

I have been told constantly how poor the people are as if that explained everything, but like many of the factors I have found, poverty is both cause and effect. The people here are forced to overgraze and cut down their trees just to survive, but that only makes them poorer. They use ancient farming methods out of ignorance of more productive agricultural techniques, but that same ignorance and illiteracy makes it hard for them to learn new things even when there are enough teachers. Malnutrition keeps people desperate and stupid, while lack of the most basic mechanized equipment traps the population in an endless cycle of wasteful manual labor which leaves no time for development. And even if Ghoura-Rharous manages to foster some light industry, to produce something it can sell to the outside world in exchange for rice, there are no roads to take its products to market. There are interactions here between environment, economics, politics, infrastructure, health, education, and culture. There is no single thing lacking, no single solution.

What I have learned is also very specific. It doesn’t generalize well. There are many problems that Rharous region does not have. AIDS is not a major problem at the moment, there is good access to clean water, land rights do not appear to be an issue, and Mali is not currently at war with itself or others. In other villages and other countries, different problems will interlock in different ways.

Development is subtle. It is not one thing but everything at once, and in just the right proportions, and often in the face of indifference, greed, unwillingness to change, and simple ignorance.

Yet there were moments, just a few, when I thought I might be witnessing the process of genuine change, however slight. When I visited the Women’s Association of Diambourou, I immediately noticed a difference in the people of that community, and how they related to me. I am sad to say that the vast majority of my interactions with Africans have come down to them asking me for money, in various subtle or unsubtle ways. Those who have asked me have decided that their problems can only be solved from the outside. They’re waiting for something from the government, from the NGO community, or just from white people in general. The women of Diambourou were different. They didn’t ask me for anything at all. Instead, they just wanted to show me what they themselves had accomplished.

I have actual hope for these women and their community. That is the emotion that can keep me going, not the manufactured guilt of the infomercial or the rage of witnessed suffering. This slim possibility of change is the thing we don’t see on television, because to discuss it honestly we’d have to admit that development work is complex, that it often fails, and that we are and fundamentally always will be outsiders who don’t quite know what they are doing.

At least I know that now.

 

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