by Diane Bennett
The poor can’t sleep
Because their stomachs are empty.
The rich have full stomachs,
But they can’t sleep
Because the poor are awake.
-Copper miner
Lusaka, Zambia
I have been privileged to work with some of the poorest people in the world in South Sudan. Their daily life is a constant struggle to feed, shelter and clothe their families. I have been, quite literally, the rich person who couldn’t sleep. So I was pleasantly surprised to read In the River They Swim, a collection of essays edited by Michael Fairbanks, Malik Fal, Marcela Escobari-Rose and Elizabeth Hooper, providing first-person case studies in going from poverty to prosperity that are informative and inspiring.
The title is based on a Sufi anecdote about three ways to know a river: to read about it, take a long journey to see it, or to enter it and be surrounded by the reality. Each essay plunges the reader into the river of being poor and overcoming it. Each essay left me wanting to hear more from the author, (except Rick Warren, author of the foreword).
The essays are not intended to be systematic or comprehensive and often leave the reader hanging with unresolved issues, much like real life (and unlike most aid reports). For example, Eric Kacou’s essay “Deciding What Not to Do” gives insight into a trade policy decision a Minister of Trade has to make (or not) that can substantially affect the financial progress of his country and the livelihood of five hundred thousand of coffee-growing families. The essay leaves the reader hanging as the author prepares for a meeting …
The book aims to be “the antithesis to the search for solutions in the next big theory of global poverty.” Instead it powerfully illustrates the power of individual creativity and resourcefulness.
Malik Fal, a Senegalese executive for PepsiCo in east Africa, describes his family’s struggles with poverty and racism in “Locomotives, Needles and Aid.” His father’s school experience under colonial rule included a teacher’s daily denigrating assertion, “Whites make locomotives; Negroes cannot make simple needles. Whites are civilized; Negroes are savages.” As his father “earned everything the hard way,” he worked his way through French engineering school, rising out of poverty through hard work. Malik compares the challenges of his father with his post-colonial business experience where Africans still struggle to receive equal treatment. Yet he himself overcame the odds anyway.
15 Comments
I think Oxfam’s commentary on the World Bank’s book on poverty may be relevant: http://www.oxfamblogs.org/fp2p/?p=292
You have me intrigued enough to buy this book. Thanks.
Also, I can imagine why you might not like Rick Warren’s introduction, but I suspect that introduction will result in many people buying the book and, hopefully, with good effect.
Ironic that Oxfam is mentioned in this context.
Have they ever anywhere been part of any march from poverty to prosperity ?
Hard to imagine.
@ Laura Freschi
“Whites make locomotives; Negroes cannot make simple needles. Whites are civilized; Negroes are savages.” As his father “earned everything the hard way,” he worked his way through French engineering school,”
Laura I suspect if you ever get a chance to see a locomotive assembly line- – Bombardier makes them in Canada, Trinity Industries in the U.S. – - you will find that most of the workers are not white or at least many are not. What’s the point. I am a bit suspect of putting racist comments in the mouths of other races to make them more palatable.
While it is true that few black countries make complex engineering products it is not true that few blacks do and there have been black engineers in the U.S. for a long time.
What some people take for being an accurate characterization of the ability or at least the current state of racial advancement of one group or another strikes me as singularly not the case or at least very shallow in its point of view.
I am no doubt older than you, otherwise you would remember when Italian American immigrants were signaled out for their “swarthy” or olive skin and had most of the same uninspiring qualities attributed to them as the blacks today. (The blacks at that time still were under the heel of a more severe racism in the South). So it was that Italian Americans were considered dirty, uneducated, oversexed, hot headed, characteristics that it were felt permanently excluded us from the main stream. If it needs to be said more clearly for you we were even called “niggars of Europe” about as explicit in its racism as one could be. It was hard to get into an ivy league school in those days for someone like you and me, no matter how good ones grades. All this in spite of the Roman empire and numerous other achievements in the sciences and arts by Italians over time. It was not about achievement or potential.
That is why I am a bit skeptical when I hear such remarks about other groups. Poverty and class make it difficult for any group to contribute in dominant social spheres controlled by the majority. Like us the blacks have made their first inroads in entertainment and sports Sinatra and Marciano preceding Italian American success in business, politics and American science. Black achievements in these fields are truly astounding enriching our culture no end and I am sure as Barack Obama is showing that given the chance they will leave their mark on other aspects of the culture as well. In the meantime remarks like the one above are truly ugly and debilitating no matter who said them or had to hear them.
SS
That’s my comment and characteristic moniker above.
SS
Hi SS
Your intention is good enough but I suggest you read the blog post once more. Remember paying attention to periods and commas.
To SS,
As the author of this piece, I quoted Malik Fal’s essay comparing colonial Senegal with a contemporary business situation. The essay illustrates some of the subtle ways that race and prejudice continue to be a factor (in Africa) today.
I agree that these demeaning comments are intolerable. I admire Malik Fal and his father for bringing them to our attention and applaud how this family has succeeded in spite of such attitudes.
Regardless of who we are (age, race, nationality, etc), many of us have been the victims of prejudice of one type or another. How we handle them is what makes the difference.
Nice book, it seems. Although my first reaction to the title of this blog was that it kind of feeds into the sickening meta-narrative of “natives” needing “outsiders” to inform them of what they are missing and then provide the same for them.
But may be such provocative lines are what we need to awaken the Continent’s Mugabe’s and al-Bashir’s from their alternative universes.
@ Ken
“But may be such provocative lines are what we need to awaken the Continent’s Mugabe’s and al-Bashir’s from their alternative universes.”
Racism in the service of race. Such a nice twist on an old theme.
SS
Enticing enough to suggest to the book club; if i can convince them to return to this genre so soon after it was required reading!
@ Diane Bennett
Diane, the problem is parading it across the headline rather than a sensitive treatment in the text of the sort: Surmounting racist denigration throughout his life like the teacher who repeatedly told him “Whites … Negroes… ,”no matter how bitter his feelings Malik’s father did not attribute this treatment to all whites nor allow them to prevent him from succeeding.
Now that would be a sensitive treatment. Suppose instead of my treatment of the Italian American experience to Laura I led with a headline of the type:
‘NEGROES OF EUROPE’ CHALLENGE REAL ‘NEGROES’ TO BUILD TRAINS RATHER THAN DANCE ‘THE ELECTRIC SLIDE’
As you say in your response about racist remarks ,”How we handle them is what makes the difference.”
SS
I like the post, and it has made me curious about the book. But i deeply disagree with the title the author has chosen. I know it is supposed to be eye-catching, but at the same time it defeats the whole purpose of the post. I am sure that there could be better, more attractive ways of “titling” it.
@ Friends
I do prefer to be positive when possible, so after criticizing the title for its insensitiveness and lack of real precision (it is only Sub-Saharan Africans who don’t make locomotives, not negroes in any sense) I went back and looked at the book. This unfortunate title does not figure on the book cover nor apparently even on the Chapter it is about in favor of a much kinder and subtler “Locomotives, Needles and Aid.” So perhaps someone got carried away in the rough and tumble world of fighting for careers, attention and web audiences. The author’s original intention in any case seems at second glance much better.
But let me say also why I still think the title is so unfortunate in addition to the scars my own experience has left me which I mention above. A 28 year practitioner of international aid I have often sat at donor meetings in Africa, Asia and even Eastern Europe where the very people we are supposed to be aiding were left out. These were by no means meetings where sensitive information transpired, often project meetings, though certainly not all, or strategic meetings on how to best help the country. Participants seemed unaware that colleagues were working on the next floor, or even the same floor, were being systematically left out. It didn’t have as far as I could see so much to do with racism as jingoism- – we know better than they — but in any case a mixture of both seemed at play.
So it is that a title like this one frightens me about the whole aid project in spite of what may be good intentions on the part of the author, because it says to a whole class of people, in spite of the correction made in the text – this is not about you, anyway you wouldn’t understand.
SS
@ Diane Bennett
What’s with the remark about Rick Warren? Don’t like him? Didn’t like what he had to say?
Greetings All-
Very interesting blog! By way of context, please note that the intention of this essay, perhaps not the impact, was to sharpen our alertness to the many ways in which all of us, despite our good intentions, sometime slip into behaviors and attitudes that demean and affect others.In other word it is a call for vigilance to our own innate ‘mental conditionings,’ and as such, I agree that the title of this blog, which highlights some of the racial tensions that are surrounding the discussion, perhaps over-emphasizes a particular aspect of the piece at the expense of many others.
I speak about how potentially-crashing childhood incidents have (positively in his case) affected my dad. How set ideas in my own life have had the potential of derailing my own attitudes[eg. the Parisian cab driver incident...]. And how we must all ‘check ourselves and our deep intentions’ as often as possible, with the toughest scrutiny.
By way of comment as well, my family was not actually poor, as one of the bloggers suggested. Both my grandfathers were quite affluent (one, Abdoulaye Fal, was a ‘Chef de Canton’ in St Louis -Senegal- who owned property and was a local notable. The other, Wagane Diouf, was a renowned business man who owned a number of construction ventures in Senegal and across French West Africa. I had a privileged childhood and went to French-Swiss boarding schools as well as Ivy League US universities later on.
So the piece was not meant to be a rags-to-riches fable.
Rather, it was meant to expose some of the insidious ‘underlying mental models’ we must all watch out for as participants in the greatest battle of our time, the battle to end [or significantly reduce...] poverty.