Three Cups of Tea: A View From Waziristan

I wasn’t going to get involved in the whole Three-Cups-of-Tea-Mageddon.  (You can find links to 130 and counting blog posts here courtesy of the very excellent Good Intentions Are Not Enough site.)  I was like “okay, the guy’s a douche and he made a bunch of money off of his douchery, next conversation please.” But then I heard from a friend of mine who has a particularly interesting perspective: he’s from South Waziristan.

He said that he had heard of Three Cups of Tea when it was published, but that he had never gotten around to reading it as he was busy with the demands of getting a university education.  (Okay, he didn’t say it sarcastically. That’s my garnish, if you caught it— and he’d be the first to admit that he is unusual in this respect compared to most other young people from Waziristan.)

When this Mortenson kerfuffle broke and my friend had a chance to read some of the stories about what was wrong with the book, many including excerpts such as those quoted by Aid Watch, he told me he was “shocked” by the portrayal of Waziri men.

He told me about the cultural implications of the saying that the title of the book got its name from, at least from his perspective as a young Waziri man.  He said that according to the Wikipedia entry on Three Cups of Tea, the expression comes from a Balti proverb: “The first time you share tea with a Balti, you are a stranger. The second time you take tea, you are an honoured guest. The third time you share a cup of tea, you become family…”

He told me: “Carol, with full confidence I would like to say that you will have not to wait till the thrid cup when you come in contact with the Waziri tribe… You will become a member of the family on the first cup of tea.  Once you come to their home, then your safety and welfare is something sacred to them.  Their culture, custom and tradition require them to sacrifice themselves for the welfare of their guest.  This is the reason why I am being proud to be a Waziri.”

I asked him if it would be okay for me to share some of his thoughts and some of his words on Usalama, on condition of anonymity, and he said yes.  He said it would be “a good thing for people to know what the facts [are]… The outside world looks at us with a specific lens, and we are unable to counter [those perspectives], as we do not have proper exposure” and it can be very dangerous to speak out on many issues.

He stressed the importance of mentioning in this blog post that “this perspective is from Waziristan.”

I could frame this with my own analysis or try to contextualize, as my friend’s perspective is obviously also informed by his own background—but: 1) I’m not that interested in the Mortenson thing and 2) I’ll leave that to you—the whole point of this post was to provide an anonymous platform with which to present a young Waziri’s thoughts on Three Cups of Tea, not mine.

My friend says he now plans to read the book for sure.

Questions from Europeans and Americans to Kenyan Tourism Site

Original Lead-In: These questions about Kenya were posted on a Kenyan Tourism portal and were answered by the website owner.  I came across them through a Kenyan classmate of mine at Yale.

Update: Thanks to my ever clever friends on Twitter, particularly Brett Keller, it quickly came to my attention that the whole Q&A is a hoax.  See, for example: http://www.snopes.com/travel/foreign/olympics.asp.

Just as I was about to delete this post altogether, I saw a note from Tom Murphy to keep it up solely based on the fact that it is funny.  I decided I agreed with him and didn’t delete it.  And because I totally bought the whole thing, based on my day-to-day interactions with Americans and their completely inaccurate presumptions about Africa (and my classmate from Kenya also believing it to be real), maybe it does actually speak to many of the stereotypes that Westerners have about Africa.  And, just as relevant, maybe it speaks to many of the stereotypes out there of Western tourists, as Brett pointed out.

In any case, these are some questions you can ponder as you chuckle at the Q&A below:

Q: Does it ever get windy in Kenya?  I have never seen it rain on TV, so how do the plants grow? (UK)
A: We import all plants fully grown and then just sit around watching them die.

Q: Will I be able to see elephants in the street? (USA)
A: Depends how much you’ve been drinking.

Q: I want to walk from Nairobi to Nakuru – can I follow the railroad tracks? (Sweden)
A: Sure, it’s only two thousand kilometres….take lots of water.

Q: Is it safe to run around in the bushes in Kenya? (Sweden)
A: So it’s true what they say about Swedes.

Q: Are there any ATMs (cash machines) in Kenya?  Can you send me a list of them in Nairobi and Mombasa? (UK)
A: What did your last slave die of?

Q: Can you give me some information about Koala Bear racing in Kenya? (USA)
A: Aus-tra-lia is that big island in the middle of the Pacific.  A-fri-ca is the big triangle shaped continent south of Europe which does not…oh forget it.  Sure, the Koala Bear racing is every Tuesday night in Koinange Street.  Come naked.

Q: Which direction is north in Kenya? (USA)
A: Face south and then turn 90 degrees. Contact us when you get here and we’ll send the rest of the directions.

Q: Can I bring cutlery into Kenya?  (UK)
A: Why? Just use your fingers like we do.

Q: Do you have perfume in Kenya? (France)
A: No. We don’t stink.

Q: I have developed a new product that is the fountain of youth.  Can you tell me where I can sell it in Kenya? (USA)
A: Anywhere where a significant number of Americans gather.

Q: Can you tell me the regions in Kenya where the female population is smaller than the male population? (Italy)
A: Yes, gay nightclubs.

Q: Do you celebrate Christmas in Kenya? (France)
A: Only at Christmas.

Q: Are there killer bees in Kenya? (Germany)
A: Not yet, but for you, we’ll import them.

Q: Are there supermarkets in Nairobi and is milk available all year round?
A: No, we are a peaceful civilisation of vegan hunter-gatherers.  Milk is illegal.

Q: Please send a list of all doctors in Kenya who can dispense rattlesnake serum.  (USA)
A: Rattlesnakes live in A-meri-ca, which is where YOU come from. All Kenyan snakes are perfectly harmless, can be safely handled and make good pets.

Q: I was in Kenya in 1969 and I want to contact the girl I dated while I was staying in Mombasa.  Can you help? (USA)
A: Yes, but you will probably still have to pay her by the hour.

Q: Will I be able to speek English most places I go? (USA)
A: Yes, but you’ll have to learn it first

Mbuyuni Development Youth Group: A Contribution to A Day Without Dignity

This post is a contribution in support of the Day Without Dignity counter-campaign proposed by Saundra S. at the blog Good Intentions Are Not Enough.  Please read the post about the counter-campaign at the link above, and please see the post that showcases and summarizes all the Day Without Dignity posts here.

In the summer of 2008 I got a Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship to study Swahili with Yale in Mombasa.  While there, I became friends with a shop owner who spent all of his spare time on the weekends administering a community based organization in his town about 45 minutes by matatu outside Old Town.  He invited me up for a visit.  The organization, Mbuyuni, works on a number of small-scale projects in the neighborhood, including clean up, trash collection, and recycling.  They also run a tree nursery, make soap to sell from the arobaini trees in the neighborhood, and assist with the neighborhood’s school for children that can’t afford school fees or for whatever reason can’t go to the primary school just down the road.

Mbuyuni needed things.  They needed work gloves, work boots, office supplies, and an mkokoteni (hand cart, seen in photo below, which they were only renting at the time).  Without having been to visit them, however, I wouldn’t have been able to even guess about the things they needed.  The next time I went with my Swahili professor to Nakumatt, the large supermarket in Mombasa, I picked up some of these things for them.

The photo above of one of Mbuyuni’s volunteers is pretty representative of the attitude and enthusiasm with which the group approaches their work.  The area is pretty rural and “poor” in terms of cash income and capital, but people in the neighborhood were happy and generous, didn’t have mortgages and student loans to worry about, and were in need of administrative and technical skills more than anything else.

In the photo above, an Mbuyuni volunteer shows me his rubber sandals.  This kind of footwear is very popular and very available in the region, and is perfectly suitable for walking around Mombasa and the neighboring villages.  Plus they’re easy to wash.  The group emphasized to me their need for work boots and work gloves, which would allow them to safely navigate the pieces of broken glass and other debris they sort through as part of the garbage collection and recycling work they do every weekend.  At no point did they request or suggest that people from half-way across the world send worn out second hand boots or cheaply made cloth shoes liable to fall apart after a few days working in them.  In fact, their primary interest in me was the following:

• My ability to draft prose in English, particularly grant proposals
• My computer skills and ability to assist them with typing and printing documents instead of, for example, trying to submit proposals on paper that were drafted in pencil
• Taking and printing photographs for them to use in showing potential donors what kind of work they do
• My leverage as an American to make contacts with companies and people in the US that might want to buy their soap, baby trees and plants, and jewelery they fashioned out of plastic debris and coconut shells from the garbage clean up.

A line of trees in Mbuyuni's nursery

I have been in touch with my friend from Mbuyuni since I got back, helping when and how I can.  The current project is one in which I will be helping the organization set up a blog in which it can discuss its work and its members can hopefully discuss some of their ideas about international development aid.  I’m currently in the process of exchanging ideas with the administrator of the organization and reviewing and translating materials they gave me written in Swahili.

I think the main point of all this is just to emphasize that you never know what people need unless they tell you– it’s not very constructive to send free things that are either unneeded or would take away from the local economy.  And I think that’s what the Day Without Dignity counter-campaign is all about.

That doesn’t mean you have to drop everything and devote your life to aid work or African Studies or anything like that.  But what would be good is if people– donors– would do some research and educate themselves about the organizations they give to and the people and places who are supposed to benefit.

Writing this on the 43rd anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. feels relevant to me as one of his quotes has come to encapsulate much of how I see international development aid: “On the one hand, we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life’s roadside, but that will be only an initial act…  True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar.  It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.”

Lifting the Poverty Curtain’s post for A Day Without Dignity also emphasizes that aid and charity are not solutions in themselves and that dignity plays a central role in what poor people know to be key in poverty alleviation.  (Please read the post, it is excellent.)  I have written previously about the need to change the way we think about “development” on a broad scale.

The bottom line here is that people who want to help should not fall into the Whites in Shining Armor trap.  On April 5, don’t go shoeless.  And don’t buy shoes made by an American company so that profits go to that company and potentially hurt local businesses abroad when free shoes suddenly become available.  Something you can do instead that would be more helpful is educate yourself about international assistance and afford the people you want to help a bit of dignity by acknowledging that they are not helpless, passive beneficiaries of your benevolence.

Reflections on DRI’s New Directions in Development Conference: Professor William Easterly

Below are some of my thoughts on Professor Easterly’s talk at the NYU Development Research Institute‘s New Directions in Development Conference on March 4, 2011. More posts to follow as they get written.

“From Skepticism to Development”

William Easterly, NYU Department of Economics

Professor Easterly’s talk was centered on the idea of challenging the notion of the “benevolent autocrat.”  He first outlined four biases that inform the notion that in order to stimulate economic growth, it helps to have autocratic leadership that can enact unpopular but necessary economic reforms.

First he challenged the claim that most big successes are autocrats by pointing out that this does not address the questions of whether most autocrats are successes or whether most failures are also autocrats.  He did, in fact, make the absolutionist claim that all failures are autocrats.  (Personally I have an aversion to absolute statements and am pretty confident I could come up with at least one exception to this—if I understood how “failure” was being qualified.)

So it was around this time I started wondering what exactly we were talking about when referencing “success” and “failure.”  It took me a while to understand that growth in GDP was the measure of success for this talk.  Another question that came to mind was how exactly are we qualifying “democracy” in its juxtaposition to autocracy. Professor Easterly cleared this matter up by describing it as “something sensible.”

The second bias he highlighted was that you hear more about autocratic successes than their failures; and the third was the “leadership bias,” in which people tend to attribute successes and failures to leadership even if there is a weak or absent relationship between the leadership and certain economic outcomes.  We tend to take leaders too seriously, Professor Easterly said, when it comes to autocrats and economic growth.  The fourth bias was the bias of the “hot hand”: that hot streaks will perpetuate themselves.  In this way we end up not giving leaders credit for what happens in the future; they’re praised for growth even if that growth can only be short term.

It is around this point that I began to get the feeling the “we” in Easterly’s talk is not Western scholars and social scientists in general, but Western economists— and maybe political scientists too, given that poli-sci seems to be getting more and more fixated with economics and economic models.  I know this because I have a background in the liberal arts, international law, and, to an extent, anthropology and history—and most of the biases that Easterly’s “we” apparently takes for granted are familiar to me as assumptions that should be questioned.

Professor Easterly then listed four facts to dispel the myth of the benevolent autocrat:

1. Autocracies have lower growth on average compared to democracies, and higher variance in growth; (I briefly wondered how the Gini coefficient and other measures of inequality would fit into this)
2. Autocracies have lower income levels— “bad” institutions lead to low income (quotes are mine);
3. Global economic growth has historically followed the idea of individual rights;

Here I had a bit of a problem with the correlation/causality issue, even though I don’t think Professor Easterly was really trying to make a case for causation. What I had a bigger problem with was the fact that economic growth also historically follows slavery, imperialism, colonialism, and exploitation; and to me the connection there seems a little more concrete.  If you can exploit people overseas, you don’t have to exploit your own citizens at home so individual rights becomes more feasible.  The claim also omits the fact that the origins of “individual” rights— and by extension citizens’ and/or human rights— lie in paradigms and legal frameworks that advocated rights for particular groups of people at the exclusion of others, such as slaves or non-property owners or indigenous people or women.  Seems to me that, if anything, the correlation should be turned on its head—individual rights appear to follow economic growth, which was enabled by the denial of individual rights to people outside the sphere of political power.

4.  Even if there are some benevolent autocrats, it is doubtful that they provide a helpful model. (That I agree with 100%.)

Professor Easterly then highlighted four doubts that illustrate the holes in the benevolent autocrat theory:

1. How can we give credit to benevolent autocrats for economic growth when even the most prominent economists and scholars in the world have been unable to agree on or empirically establish what causes economic growth?
2. How can a centralized autocratic regime have the necessary local knowledge to affect economic growth at the national level?
3. Democracies actually contribute to the economic success of autocracies through FDI and other means.
4. Can autocracies “do” innovation?  (Quotes are mine.) According to Professor Easterly, you can’t plan innovation—it’s a surprise.  You stumble upon it and you need individual rights to create the environment for innovation.

Then, four surprises:

1. Countries’ top exports have changed drastically over the past ten years;
2. Public goods payoffs are often a surprise as they have unexpected repercussions;
3. Scientific discoveries often have surprise payoffs;
4. There are often surprises in the way these changes manifest at the local level

Professor Easterly then asked, shouldn’t we be skeptical? The answer, he says, is yes, but that there are three default positions in the face of skepticism:

1. Evidence: the evidence is, at best, inconclusive;
2. Ignorance: If top-down doesn’t work, then what’s needed is a system that doesn’t require that approach;
3. Values: Rights are an end in themselves; autocracy is not

An important point Professor Easterly made during the Q&A is that he was not trying to make the case that evidence shows democracies are more prone to growth; just that the evidence is inconclusive.

By and large I agree with Professor Easterly’s main points.  I am wondering where the phrase “benevolent dictator” came from because it seems like a contradiction.  To me it implies a scenario where basic human rights are generally respected, quality of life is high, and the government is autocratic.  “Benevolent,” after all, is defined according to the dictionary in my version of MS Word, as:

1. showing kindness or goodwill
2. performing good or charitable acts and not seeking to make a profit [1]

 

This hardly sounds like a recipe for disaster.  Kuwait springs to mind as an example; consistently ranking highly in the UNDP Human Development Index despite autocratic rule.  The general assessment of human rights in Kuwait is mixed—but for the most part severe abuses pale in comparison to a lot of other places.

The phrase “benevolent dictator,” then, seems inapt.  It was Pinochet and his collaboration with the Chicago Boys, which led to impressive (though short term) economic growth, that came to mind as Professor Easterly was giving his speech— and benevolent is the last word I would use to describe him.

To highlight my general agreement, though, I will end with an excerpt from the introduction to my Master’s thesis at Yale, written in the spring of 2009:

… the debate over whether democracy or totalitarianism is better for economic growth and development, with proponents on both sides, is out of date and misses the point.  Both sides have significant empirical evidence to back them up, indicating that context is key and regime type is not necessarily determinant.  What both sides of this debate should be aiming for is an analysis of how economic development on the one hand and respect for human rights and the rule of law on the other can be pursued in such a way as to be mutually reinforcing.

---

[1] Encarta® World English Dictionary © 1999 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. Developed for Microsoft by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.

You Wanna Be Mr. Alienation? You Can Be Mr. Alienation

In the spirit of the recent post by A View From the Cave, which was a refreshing reminder for me not to take myself too seriously, I thought I would pass on the sentiment from the man who taught it to me most effectively when I was a kid– Paul Simon.  Certainly the world would be a better place if more people took Lorne Michaels’ advice.

[Please watch on Hulu: I can't seem to figure out how to stop it from playing automatically when you visit Usalama's homepage, and I know how annoying that can be.  ]

A Less-Than-Inspiring Churchill Quote

“I do not agree that the dog in a manger has the final right to the manger even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.”

To the Peel Commission (1937)

[From Wikiquote]

Update: Huh. And interestingly enough I just read this story, appropriate given the above quote’s topic at the Peel Commission:

Deputy Foreign Minister claims Israeli occupation is in place “as of right, not force”

Why Southern Sudanese and Darfuris deserve attention and protection and northern civilians don’t

In my frustration with the failure of international media to start covering the anti-government protests in Omdurman and Khartoum with even a fraction of the zeal with which they’ve pounced on Egypt, I wondered why the Satellite Sentinel and Enough Project weren’t drawing the same attention to northern Sudan as they have to other parts of the country. Clooney and Prendergast and the Enough Project had done such a good job of bringing attention to Darfur and the southern referendum, albeit often with serious misunderstandings and misinterpretations of the politics and history of the regions, it seemed natural that they should be the ones to say, “Look! Look what these guys are doing now!“

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.  But I find it hypocritical and insulting, even cold, to northern Sudanese.  To me, drawing international attention when all eyes are on Egypt would possibly help deter mass violence against civilians.  Al Bashir’s not an idiot.  I’m not suggesting the Sentinel or Enough Project take any real action, just that they do a little bit of yelling and draw some attention to it, since Western activists are so good at that when they want to be.  Drawing the line between war crimes and genocide on the one hand, and crimes that may be the result of “political protest” on the other, can be a really shallow distinction.  Particularly when the West has spent so much time and energy railing about “saving” two other major regions of the same country from the government.  So, just because crimes against humanity are committed outside the context of civil war, they’re under the purview of the state and none of our business.  Seems to me to be a huge gray area in the Responsibility to Protect framework; a gap that politicizes Western activist involvement in other people’s wars.

Note that it was Westerners that decided to shout that what was happening in Darfur was genocide—something they did not do with the civil war with the south.  And note that a grossly over-simplified picture has been painted of both conflicts, in which the bad evil Arab government teams up with bad evil Arabs in other parts of the country to commit genocide against the innocent, just-trying-to-get-by African population.  Nowhere in this Western narrative is it pointed out that both of these conflicts are also political in nature and origin.  What makes the north different?  Why are Darfuris and Southern Sudanese worthy of attention and protection and not northerners?  I could write a book about it.  Maybe I will one day.

Mamdani put it succinctly:

“Where mass slaughter is termed genocide, intervention becomes an international obligation; for the most powerful, the obligation presents an opportunity.  But if genocide involves an international obligation to intervene, war and counterinsurgency do not, for they are an expression of the normal violence of the state… Labeling performs a vital function.  It isolates and demonizes the perpetrators of one kind of mass violence and at the same time confers impunity on perpetrators of other forms of mass violence.”  [Saviors and Survivors, p. 281.]

Projects like the Sentinel want to say no, mass violence against civilians is wrong, period, moving beyond the sentiment that genocide is the only exception to the principle that state sovereignty trumps the responsibility to protect civilians.  But apparently the context still has to be civil war, because mass violence against civilians outside that is just politics—and an expression of the normal violence of the state.

[Some videos are becoming available on YouTube, like the one below from the University of Khartoum.  Operation Broken Silence has also posted some photos from their associates on the ground.]

Bewilde(red)

When I saw a story being posted on corruption in the Global Fund yesterday, I couldn’t help but remember this rant I wrote a few years ago.  It’s directed more at the companies that gave money to the Global Fund, but I thought I would post it anyway.

This is an abbreviated version, as the original is eight pages long.   I don’t usually apologize for or go out of my way to provide a disclaimer to my writing, but this is a rant and it was written at a time (October 2007) when I was still in my self-righteous human rights activist phase.  The tone is therefore a bit preachy for my taste these days, but in the interest of letting my former, more naïve self still have a voice, I’ve tried to resist the temptation to edit too much.  But I don’t necessarily still agree with everything I wrote here at the time.

Bewilde(red): A Polemic

Bewildered: Past tense of bewilder: verb. To confuse hopelessly, as by something complicated or involved.

2006:  The Gap launches its “Red” campaign as a sponsor of (Product) Red. A company that was reviled by labor activists for much of the 1990s and early twenty-first century for its refusal to take responsibility for human rights and labor abuses committed under its watch now wants to help fight AIDS in Africa…

If someone is going to spend a gazillion dollars on a tee-shirt with the assumption that a large portion of the profits are going “to help people” with AIDS in Africa, it should be easy for that person to find out exactly what their money is doing besides giving them a shirt that shows they “care” while simultaneously paying for cheap subcontractors that violate basic human rights in order to make that shirt.

How does (Product) Red operate?  Essentially, the participating companies, such as the Gap or Motorola, earmark specific products as “Red” and “contribute a portion of profits from the sale of [those products] to Global Fund-financed programmes in Africa.” The Global Fund is an international nongovernmental organization based in Geneva that more or less operates as a foundation.  The organization is not a vehicle for implementation, but rather funds projects around the world that are aimed at combating HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria.  “Since 2001, the Global Fund has attracted US $4.7 billion in financing through 2008.” It has committed over US $1.5 billion in funding to support over 450 programs in 136 countries worldwide.

But there was little information on the Global Fund’s website that indicated whether the contributions from (Product) Red products were designated to particular programs. I couldn’t find any book-keeping type resources or budget breakdowns. One would assume that the Red funds go to the Global Fund’s AIDS programs as opposed to tuberculosis or malaria, and to programs in Africa as opposed to other parts of the world, because that’s the way it’s advertised, but the website did not specify. What I had wanted to find out was, generally, what the money goes to, and, specifically, what kind of programs that money is earmarked for.  I wanted to know if there were specific kinds of treatments, say, for HIV, that the contributions funded, and if those treatments involved drugs, which kind of drugs, and from where.

It’s not that I am concerned with which disease the money is going to (in fact TB and malaria are probably under-funded), or that I think the Global Fund is a bad place for the funds to go, but I felt a bit disconcerted by the fact that (Product) Red products are advertised so aggressively to be benefiting AIDS programs in Africa, and yet I couldn’t find a simple sentence or two on the Global Fund’s website attesting to this.  In international humanitarian aid, conditionality—even among smaller individual donors—is taken very seriously. If what I’ve learned about large humanitarian organizations is correct, then if even a $20 donation from a private individual is indicated to be for a specific program, that money can’t be used for anything else.  So it was surprising to me that I was unable to find a statement on the Global Fund’s website that the contributions from “Red” went to particular programs.

Since most of this information was not immediately accessible from the website, I e-mailed the organization and asked them.  The Fund responded that the proceeds from (Product) Red do indeed get channeled into AIDS programs in particular, specifically those focusing on women and children, and specifically in African countries. Okay. So you buy your Red product and part of the proceeds go to fund a project in poor poverty and disease stricken Africa, and yes it will probably help someone.  It’s better than not giving at all.

Still, you must ask yourself:  Does the “Inspi(red)” tee-shirt, the one made somewhere in Asia, or Latin America, or Africa, probably by an underage girl forgoing school and enduring abuse where she works—does your Inspi(red) shirt—the one that promises that your good intentions will be felt in the “developing world” through a generous contribution of the almost 100% profit that the Gap makes anyway through its use of indentured servitude and your purchase of it to help fight AIDS in Africa—make you feel satisfied that you are doing your part to “help other people”?

Why can a company like the Gap feel inclined to donate a large portion of a particular product’s profit to help people in Africa and yet not be inclined to do something similar to ensure that employees of its subcontractors are treated humanely and paid decently?  The short, easier answer is PR.  The Gap doesn’t care about helping other people.  After all, “(Red) is not a charity.  As its manifesto states, it is a business model.” And as King Leopold II would tell you himself if he could, a veneer of “helping other people” can be very good for business.  But the longer, more difficult answer is more elusive.

It seems to me that in the United States and much of the “First World,” we’ve gone beyond Sartre’s liberal pacifist left being silent conspirators of colonialism or neocolonialism.[1] Maybe even worse, or maybe not, depending on the way you look at it, we (“we” in the general Euro-American sense) aren’t even aware anymore of our role in cultural and economic imperialism.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said that a “true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies.  On the one hand, we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life’s roadside, but that will be only an initial act.  One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway.  True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar.  It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.”  This is how we should be thinking of the global economy and the international development aid framework.

In some ways, for all its merits, a preoccupation with humanitarian assistance and  even “development” aid—although such aid is vital and invaluable—tends to distract people—not by accident, I think—from the fact that the reason you need humanitarian aid in the first place is because of global and regional imbalances of power and wealth and the legacies of colonialism and neocolonialism.  As the former UN High Commissioner for Refugees Sadako Ogata put it, “there are no humanitarian solutions for humanitarian problems… Humanitarian action may create space for political action but on its own can never substitute for  it.”[2]

I started writing this essay because I was astounded at the success of the Gap’s (Red) advertising campaign walking around the campus of Yale in the fall of 2007.  Every time I saw someone wearing one of those “Inspi(red)” shirts I became almost uncontrollably incensed, and I couldn’t even explain to myself why.  I still don’t know what sort of conclusions I can draw here.  At first it was merely the hypocrisy of the Gap that had me typing furiously away into a dim night in October.  But as I started looking for answers to ameliorate my astonishment, I started thinking that something deeper is going on.

“Helping other people” is not like flinging a coin to a beggar, as MLK describes it.  It is way more complex than that, and, even at that, insults the intelligence and wherewithal of the “beggar”, in my opinion.  Why do we think of it as charity?  Does the beggar not have a fundamental right to the help he needs to get to a point where he can take care of himself?  Or is it too much for people, firms, companies, inter-governmental and nongovernmental organizations, and governments to become duty-bearers in that sense?  And although the Jericho road may need to be transformed, whose responsibility is it to transform it?  How should it be transformed?  And whose input will be necessary in its transformation?  We can’t expect people to drop everything and devote their lives to researching everything they buy.  Consumers should be able to be consumers without worrying that they’re participating in a global economy dependent on slavery.

I think most Westerners are unaware that there is anything wrong with the road in the first place; that it is simply littered with unfortunate souls whose misfortune is totally disconnected from their own actions and choices.  At the same time, simply not buying from the Gap would do little to transform much of anything, I don’t think.  I’m still not sure what kind of conclusion to draw except that it annoys me that people think they are saving the world by buying a tee-shirt.

---

[1] See the Preface by Jean-Paul Sartre, in Frantz Fanon, Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 2004).

[2] Sadako Ogata, The Turbulent Decade: Confronting the Refugee Crises of the 1990s (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005), p. 25.

 

The Clooneyfication of Southern Sudan

Here’s where I might get a little controversial for some people

I will jump right in and leave the overview of the Clooney what-have-you below rather than introduce it here.  I imagine most have already seen the major discussions out there.

I don’t know what I think of Clooney’s Satellite Sentinel project in and of itself … but there’s something about it that makes me uneasy.  My biggest problem with Clooney, is, in fact, his connection to John Prendergast.  I’m not going to pre-judge Clooney’s knowledge because he’s an actor, or jump on the snarky commentary bandwagon, and I don’t doubt that he’s made a real effort to learn about Sudan.  I have no way of assessing what he knows about the place or the quality of his expertise.  I won’t pounce on the idea that he knows nothing.

But.  He is a Western pop star, a product of the Western media, and it is this very media that is playing a dangerous game with Sudan.  Not only would I worry that the project could backfire because of the technical issues critics have raised, I worry that Western political biases will color responses to data obtained by it.  Not the kind of covert, hidden-agenda type biases that indicate subterfuge of some kind, but biases that many staunch and passionate advocates of causes bring to their projects without even realizing it.

Now, as a scholar, I generally fall into the “needs more research” camp described by KM on a Dollar a Day.  I won’t pretend to have more expertise than I do but I also recognize the extent to which I can talk knowledgably about something.  I’ve been studying Sudan for five years and have written two thesis-length research papers and one book chapter on various aspects of particular regions’ history, society, and culture.  I imagine a mathematical diagram of my expertise on Darfur, for example, would look something like this:  John Prendergast < Me < Alex De Waal.

It is Prendergast-inspired zeal I have the most worries over.  In the case of Darfur, he was quoted by CNN as saying:

The Janjaweed are like a grotesque mixture of the mafia and the Ku Klux Klan … These guys have a racist ideology that sees the Arab population as the supreme population … They’re criminal racketeers that have been supported very directly by the government to wage the war against the people of Darfur.

This demonstrates a total lack of understanding of the region’s history and politics.  It also assumes that racial distinctions, i.e. Arab and African, are the same in Sudan as they are in the US.  (In fact, as Alex De Waal points out, these categories are not even transferable from Southern Sudan to Darfur.)  It is loaded with assumptions about race and ideology that may work in a Western context but simply do not translate in Darfur.  The statement also expels Arab Darfuris from their homes; these Arab herders are people of Darfur. This exclusion is a byproduct of a larger Western narrative that understands Arabs in Sudan as migrants and Africans as indigenous within the context of a “single history of Arabs and ‘Arabization’ in Sudan.”[1] But the reality is not so simple, and the Arab proxy militias, popularly referred to as the janjaweed, are probably the least studied and least understood of all the parties to the Darfur conflict.[2]

What this portrayal has done, essentially, is to wrongly equate the marginalized Arabs of Darfur and other regions of the country, including Southern Sudan, with the powerful ruling élite in Khartoum.  (Although the Baggara Arabs of the south tend to be more powerful politically and economically than the Abbala of the northwest and Darfur; Mamdani goes into great historical and ethnographic detail in his book.)  The Western narrative also pins sedentary lifestyles to the “African” groups and pastoral lifestyles to the “Arab” ones, but most Dinka and Nuer groups in the Southern Sudan and some “African” groups in Darfur are pastoral—and the ruling “Arab” groups of the north are sedentary.

My concern, then, is that in an over-simplified framework in which “Arabs” are always the bad guys, there is a tendency already to expect primarily “atrocities”  coming from one side and “retaliation” from the other.  There have been a number of stories in the past few days detailing clashes in the disputed border region of Abyei (most of them failing to note that Abyei is not participating in the referendum on southern independence) between the Missiriya and Dinka Ngok.  My concern is that without attempting to understand how local conflict resolution mechanisms might help contain violence, and without recognizing how the creation of an international border cutting through a Missiriya migration route may affect Missiriya nationality and security, what will happen is simply that (among other things) the demonization of Sudanese Arabs will continue.  And that the attempts to foist Western racial categories; Western notions of “democracy”; and Western modes of justice on a group of societies—which have their own culture and ideas of these things—will backfire.

So my problem with Clooney is not really Clooney.  It’s not even his satellite project.  It’s the danger posed by cultural misinterpretations and preconceived notions of who is “good” and who is “bad.”  The Enough Project seems to have its agenda cut pretty clearly, and Prendergast and Clooney seem to be the two-headed public face of that agenda.  But I don’t think it’s enough to be moved and passionate and draw attention to a cause.  If you are misrepresenting  the situation, or the people involved, you are creating a “truth” that is not reflective of the experiences of those who have been subject to violence.  And that can create even more problems.  What bothers me is the Clooneyfication, so to speak, of conflicts that should really be interpreted before they can be made into a narrative that a Western audience will understand.

Background for those who didn’t see the flurry

Yesterday there was quite a bit of discussion on Twitter and the web about George Clooney and his response to criticism of his Satellite Sentinel project.  The aim of the project is to monitor troop movements on the north-south border and perhaps dissuade or at least document violence.  Most of the criticism brings up technical issues; that satellite imagery is still not precise enough to be helpful, and that misreading data could be counter-productive or dangerous.  Developing Jen argues, however, that despite the lack of granular specificity the satellite images could be very useful.  KM on a Dollar a Day provides a nice summary of the Clooney ado from a knowledge management perspective.

Other aid and development bloggers were highly critical of Clooney and his involvement; Laurenist recalled how after a similar Amnesty International project in 2007, “Darfur was saved after millions of people updated their Facebook statuses with a link to blurry photos of sand.”  Foreign Policy writer Joshua Keating provided a nice overview of the general response of the blogosphere’s highly-critical-of-celebrity-activism “snark brigade.”  Texas in Africa wrote that internal political problems in Southern Sudan are more worrisome than north-south tensions or even the disputed Abyei region.

Clooney’s reaction to criticism

Most of what I picked up, at least in the conversations I read, were concerned with Clooney’s reaction, as quoted in the Daily Globe and Mail:

“I’m sick of it,” he said. “If your cynicism means you stand on the sidelines and throw stones, I’m fine, I can take it. I could give a damn what you think. We’re trying to save some lives. If you’re cynical enough not to understand that, then get off your ass and do something. If you’re angry at me, go do it yourself.  Find another cause – I don’t care. We’re working, and we’re going forward.”

This just-get-up-and-do-something—anything-no-matter-what-it-is passion is exactly what the smart aid camp and blogs like Good Intentions are not Enough (which takes on Clooney’s reaction in the post “George Clooney and Hatorade”) have spent so much time and intellectual energy cautioning against.

There was also some good conversation going on about how Clooney failed to separate the celebrity bashing from the constructive criticism, and instead took both personally. But even that I don’t feel that strongly about.  As KM on a Dollar a Day notes, he’s an advocate, not a scholar.

Another good point, which I agree with, was brought up: why is this referendum suddenly all about Clooney and his project?  While in one sense I get it, in another sense I was kind of tired of seeing the token Clooney photo in every single photo essay of the referendum I saw.  As Keating’s piece demonstrates, the indifference is notable:

“Who is that man talking?” a Sudanese journalist asked, gesturing to a white man with a group of reporters around him. When told it was George Clooney, a movie star, the Sudanese journalist looked confused and walked away.

But this isn’t really Clooney’s fault, personally—which is why what I have problems with is Clooney the image, along with the other representations of a sect of Western media and activism of which he is a part, not Clooney himself or even his Sentinel Project.

---

 

[1] Mahmood Mamdani, Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics, and the War on Terror (New York: Pantheon Books, 2009), p. 93.

 

[2] Julie Flint, Beyond ‘Janjaweed’: Understanding the Militias of Darfur (Geneva: Small Arms Survey, 2009), p. 15.

Preliminary Meanderings on Cultural Relativity

The other night I had an interesting conversation with my dad, a doctor and professor at the University of Pennsylvania (soon moving to Johns Hopkins) and brother, a first year MD/PhD student at Temple University.  Buzzing out while my brother quizzed my father on first year medical school knowledge from some home-made flashcards, I ruminated on the conversation we had the previous evening about brain development, psychology as a discipline in the West trying to become more “scientific”, and how culture shapes people’s worldviews and understandings of the meaning of things.  We noted that the attempts of psychology and psychiatry to become more rigidly “scientific”, and insist that everything has a biological origin in the brain regardless of culture, has the potential to be highly problematic.  This is because it could shut out the possibility of examining the ways in which culture and environment might shape those very biological functions.  For me, this is an area of immense interest as I attempt in my intellectual and philosophical growth to wrestle with the creation of a conceptual model in which one may understand how to navigate and interpret cultural differences.

Little brother quizzes Dad

The concept of cultural relativity as it relates to areas such as human rights and “development” has been nearly constantly floating around in my mind for years now.  There seem to be a number of dots to connect, and I simply haven’t been able to articulate what the dots are, never mind try and connect them.  I have struggled with the concept of “development”, as it implies a ladder of progress akin to the one laid out in modernization theory where those living in “developing” countries, and their societies, are somehow inferior to those living in “developed” countries.  I’ve also struggled with the argument that the human rights framework is based largely on Western values and Western legal traditions. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was passed by the UN General Assembly at a time when its membership consisted of just 57 countries, at the exclusion of non-members, colonies, and other territories. After the Declaration was passed, the American Anthropological Association criticized it as a “statement of rights conceived only in terms of the values prevalent in the countries of Western Europe and America.”  While I think it’s valid and important to point these things out, I also think the West can’t claim a monopoly on the idea of universal rights or the concept’s antecedents.

To take one example, one of the earliest instances of a regional set of protections that applied to all residents regardless of race, tribe, gender, or religion was the Constitution of Medina in medieval Arabia, circa 622 CE. The contributions of the Middle Eastern Muslim scholars to the European Enlightenment in terms of science, medicine, education, scholarship, and the preservation of classic Hindu, Greek, and other texts, inter alia, are often overlooked. Early Islam also helped lay the foundations for frameworks such as natural rights and human rights by virtue of its scripture-based humanism. Under the Constitution of Medina ethnic, cultural, religious, and gender equality were ardently legislated.[1]

In addition, my second graduate experience included courses that made me take a serious step back and question my assumptions. Professors challenged me to ask myself how I knew what I “knew”, and challenged me to question the received wisdom of Western culture.  Not in a superficial way, but in way that made me realize how I took my own culturally-shaped values and outlook for granted.  This was perhaps most astounding to me in terms of thinking differently about gender issues such as the practices of bridewealth exchange and female circumcision.  What I thought were clear and simple human rights battles turned out to be complex ethical and legal dilemmas saturated with cultural misunderstandings and misinterpretations.  Less controversially, I also became elucidated as to the subtlety of lingual translations, and the way language and culture together, along with history and religion, shape meaning.

All of this makes it nearly impossible for me to untangle the concept of universal humanity.  So, what is it that’s the essence of “human”, and what is shaped by culture?  “I think I know what I’m trying to figure out,” I interrupted my dad and brother.  I explained my thoughts, ending with the assertion that what I want to do is try and determine what’s universally human and what’s culturally determined.  Simple.  Well, not a simple task, but simple as a concept.  My dad pointed out that Abraham Maslow already kind of did this with his hierarchy of needs model.  I said yes, but how do I know he was right?  What were his own cultural biases and did he take them into account? What are my own biases and how can I account for them in my own attempts to create a conceptual model?

Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs

We then got onto the subject of education, and schools, and for a moment there was a bit of friction over the concept.  My dad said, “I’ll tell you what has been shown.  Where girls are educated, there are fewer health problems and lower fertility rates.”  I temporarily set aside my discomfort with the idea that lower fertility rates were unquestionably a “good” thing.  I noted that there is a fixation with both the physical and metaphysical structures of “schools” and an assumption that without them, or without the students-gather-in-one-place-and-teacher-teaches structure, there is no education.  I said my point is that people talk about poor, “developing”, places or places affected by disaster or conflict as though they’re blank slates, with no politics or history.  My point is that there are educational systems that make sense in the local context already there, or at least concepts that are organic to particular places.  Our concept of school is not even that old, and came from the Prussian attempt at social organization for the purposes of ensuring a complacent and obedient citizenry, as John Taylor Gatto explains in his excellent article “Against School.”  I said you can’t just take your idea of what education is and try and force it on people who already have their own idea of what education is.  My dad said, “of course.”  So what do health and fertility look like in places where girls are educated, but not schooled?  Can there even be an objective definition of what it is to be “educated”?

I declared that there can be no moral absolutes, no pristine right and wrong with no exceptions, and that everything is nuanced and context-driven.  But this is essentially esoteric and philosophical—there has to be right and wrong in real life, even if it is context-driven. There has to be a set of attributes, needs, and functions that make human beings human beings.  It follows, then, that—despite the fact that the idea of individual “rights” as we think of them are the product of particular historical and cultural experiences—a truly universal rights framework could be established.  (This also putting aside momentarily the Western legal tradition that shapes the current framework.)  While in philosophy and even academically you can certainly argue about these things forever from safe, inconsequential places, there comes a point when there are real life consequences and implications, and sometimes people’s lives are at stake.  If there is such a thing as being human, then there must be something that makes us human; something universal.  There then has to be concrete human needs, and potentially a foundation with which to work with to better assess when something is unjust or “wrong” even taking into account cultural relativity, even if such a set of principles was highly context-specific.  My dad laughed and said I should be glad that Wittgenstein wasn’t there or he’d be waving a red hot poker at me.  Ha!

I should have taken notes during this conversation, because I can’t seem to remember much else.  After we brought the discussion to a slow, I said to my brother, “I should have live-tweeted that conversation!”  My plan is to take the questions I’m still left with—what are the dots and how can I describe them, then connect them—and continue posting bits and pieces of the puzzle.  I welcome comments, arguments, disagreements, thoughts, criticisms, etc., as the more I can broaden the discussion the more I might come to new and different conclusions through ideas and discussions I might not otherwise have had.  I hope, in the near future, to post a clearer outline of what I’d like to accomplish—just for my own intellectual clarity and, as my brother would attest to the importance of, to establish my own internal conceptual framework.  Right now that’s something I’m lacking, mostly because I have yet to explore some of these complex issues.  These initial meandering thoughts are just a drop in the ocean.

---

[1] Amyn B. Sajoo, “The Islamic Ethos and the Spirit of Humanism,” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, Vol. 8 No. 4, Summer 1995, p. 582.