The Road to Hell
THE ROAD TO HELL
The Ravaging Effects of Foreign Aid and International Charity
MICHAEL MAREN
THE FREE PRESS
THE ROAD TO HELL
The Ravaging Effects of Foreign Aid and International Charity
THE FREE PRESS
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Copyright © 1997 by Michael Maren
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Maren, Michael.
The road to hell : the ravaging effects of foreign aid and International charity / Michael Maren.
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FOR MY PARENTS BILL AND BUNNY MAREN
The evil that is in the world always comes out of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence, if they lack understanding.
—Albert Camus, The Plague
Behold how the Infidel lays traps for you [Somalis] as you become less wary. The coins he dispenses so freely now will prove your undoing.
—Sayiid Mohamed Abdille Hassan (The Mad Mullah), 1920
CONTENTS
Author’s Note
On the Spelling of Somali Words
Introduction: Darkness and Light
1. Land Cruisers
2. Far from Somalia
3. Fixers
4. Potemkin Villages
5. Death in Mogadishu
6. Crazy with Food
7. Geneva
8. Selling the Children
9. Creating Dependency
10. Withdrawal Symptoms
11. Pigs at a Trough
12. Feeding the Famine
13. The Mogadishu Line
14. The Self-Licking Ice Cream Cone
15. Running Toward Rwanda
16. Merchants of Peace
Somalia Timeline
Index
AUTHOR’S NOTE
This book would not have been possible without the assistance of many people in the U.S., Africa, and Europe. Because of the nature of this investigation and the unsettled state of Somali politics, some of them cannot be named, and others can only be partially identified. They know who they are.
Thanks are due to Scott Malcomson, Jonathan Larsen, and Amy Virshup, all formerly at the Village Voice, for backing me on several trips to Somalia and making much of this reporting possible.
In Somalia, Mohamed Jirdeh Hussein, proprietor of the Sahafi Hotel, offered advice, contacts, and credit when my funds began to dwindle. Thanks to my crew: Abass, who was with me day after day as translator and became a friend; Osman, who drove like a maniac and kept us moving through the mean streets of Mogadishu; Hassan, Nur, and Abdi, who watched my back.
A number of my colleagues were also instrumental in the completion of this book. Special thanks to Joshua Hammer, Keith Richburg, and Mark Huband. Photographers Steve Lehman and Peter Jones worked with me on several projects. Thanks to Richard Ben Cramer for guidance and for suggesting I write this book in the first place. Ken Menkhaus, Bernhard Helander, and Michael Madany were generous with their extensive knowledge of Somalia. Matthew Bryden devoted months of his time to answering my endless questions.
Julie Lang, Jennifer Meagher, and Ted Hannon helped with research and transcriptions. Thanks also to Linda Rubes, Barry Shelby, Tami Hausman, Chris Lavin, Judy Hart, Patrick Dillon, Marc Aronson, Amina Abdi Issa, Daphne Pinkerson, Thomas Keenan, Don Wallace, and my friends at soc.culture.somalia. The Charlotte Geyer Foundation provided some funding.
Finally, I want to express my deep appreciation to Bruce Nichols at The Free Press for patience way beyond the call of duty, and to my agent, Flip Brophy, for hanging with the project for nearly a decade.
Some elements in this book are based on material previously published in The Village Voice, Penthouse, Forbes Media Critic, and The New Republic. A few names have been changed to protect sources.
ON THE SPELLING OF SOMALI WORDS
While the Somali language has a rich oral tradition, it did not receive an orthography until 1972 when Mohamed Siyaad Barre, in what will likely be remembered as the only enduring accomplishment of his regime, assembled scholars and linguists to create a standardized system for writing Somali in the Latin alphabet. Still, English-language publications use a random array of spellings for Somali words and names. In part this is the result of Somalia’s diverse colonial heritage. The Somali people were colonized by the Italians, British, and French, each of whom spelled the words as they sounded to them. Thus Somalia’s capital is spelled Mogadiscio by the Italians, Mogadishu by the English, and Muqdisho in proper Somali. In addition, the wide use of maps from the French Michelin company has extended French style into areas beyond French influence so that the town of Beledweyne is often spelled as Belet Uen.
For this book I had originally intended to solve this problem by using proper Somali spellings in every instance. This quickly proved awkward. For example, the name of Somalia’s most famous warlord would appear as Maxamed Farax Caydiid. And some readers found it confusing when I referred to Muqdisho instead of Mogadishu. The towns of Baidoa and Bardera are more properly written as Baydhabo and Baardheere, but using these spellings would have proved puzzling to anyone who routinely followed press reports from Somalia.
To solve the problem I have compromised, using the proper Somali spellings whenever possible, and approximating them when appropriate. Thus the man known as Aidid, or Aideed in the Western press and as Caydiid in Somalia appears in this text as Aydiid. I use the proper spelling for the port of Kismaayo, which is often rendered as Chismayo or Kismayo. For the town of Gaalkacyo I have used Galkayo instead of Galcaio or any of the other variations that have appeared in print. Most of the spellings chosen for the text should be self-evident. Some of these compromises are certain to irritate Somali scholars and Somali language purists, and for that I apologize. My goal has been to communicate ideas to an audience beyond those with a specific interest in Somalia. The spellings I have chosen serve that purpose.
INTRODUCTION: DARKNESS AND LIGHT
—Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. What redeems it is the idea only. An idea at the back of it; not a sentimental pretense but an idea; and an unselfish belief in the idea—something you can set up, and bow down before, and offer a sacrifice to. …
In October of 1977, I traveled from my home near Boston to Kenya, East Africa, via Nashville, Tennessee, Nashville was the site of a Peace Corps staging, a preliminary training program to prepare a group of us for two years of teaching in Kenya. About thirty volunteers showed up, mostly young, recent college
graduates, predominantly middle class, all of us white. I was twenty-one years old, the youngest of the group.
We gathered for the first time in a campus lounge on a cool and colorful fall day, not sure what to expect from each other, completely clueless about what the next few years would bring but sure that we were about to share an amazing adventure. On that first day, we were asked to introduce ourselves to the rest of the group. Beyond the standard biographical data, each of us was to answer the question: Why are you joining the Peace Corps?
None of us had taken the decision to join lightly. The application process that dragged on for months, and in some cases years, weeded out those without a burning desire to join up. But the question of why elicited only vague and ambiguous answers about adventure, exploration, and personal growth. But then in a final flourish of certitude, nearly everyone capped his or her list of reasons with a statement about wanting to help people. The idea was to help Africans. Whatever else this adventure would be, it was built on a solid mission of charity and good will.
I don’t recall what exactly I said that day; I hadn’t really thought much about why I was going to Africa. It probably had something to do with wanting to spend a few years in a tropical climate. I would have been just as happy to be sent to Malaysia or Bolivia. I’d earlier spent a semester studying in India and had enjoyed the sights, sounds, and even the smells of the Third World environment. And graduating from college with a degree in English I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. The Peace Corps seemed like a low-key graduate program with a full scholarship and a healthy stipend. Whatever reasons I did have, I must admit that helping people was not high among them. It’s not that I didn’t care; I just wasn’t entirely certain that people in Kenya needed help. And if in fact the Kenyans did need help, it wasn’t at all apparent that any of us young and eager American kids was really in a position to offer any. None of us had ever been to Africa before, nor did we have any background in development studies. We all just knew, somehow, that our breeding, education, and nationality had imbued us with something valuable from which these less fortunate people could benefit.
It was easy to presume that people needed our help. For us, Africa was more than a place on the map, it was a location in our collective psyche. Our idea of Africa had been shaped by years of advertisements and news coverage that portrayed the continent as poor and helpless. Growing up in an affluent Western society we were invested with a stake in the image of helpless Africa, starving Africa, In public affairs discussions the term “starving Africans” (or “starving Ethiopians” or “starving Somalis”) rolls from the tongue as easily as “blue sky.” “Americans leave enough food on their plates to feed a million starving Africans.” Charities raise money for starving Africans. What do Africans do? They starve. But mostly they starve in our imaginations. The starving African is a Western cultural archetype like the greedy Jew or the unctuous Arab. The difference is that we’ve learned that trafficking in these last two archetypes is wrong or, at least, reflects badly upon us. But the image of the bloated helpless child adorns advertisements for Save the Children and World Vision. The image of the starving African is said to edify us, sensitize us, mobilize our good will and awaken us from our apathy.
The starving African exists as a point in space from which we measure our own wealth, success, and prosperity, a darkness against which we can view our own cultural triumphs. And he serves as a handy object of our charity. He is evidence that we have been blessed, and we have an obligation to spread that blessing. The belief that we can help is an affirmation of our own worth in the grand scheme of things. The starving African transcends the dull reality of whether or not anyone is actually starving in Africa. Starvation clearly delineates us from them.
Sometimes it appears that the only time Africans are portrayed with dignity is when they’re helpless and brave at the same time. A person about to starve to death develops a stoic strength. Journalists write about the quiet dignity of the hopelessly dying. If the Africans were merely hungry and poor, begging or conning coins on the streets of Nairobi or Addis Ababa, we might become annoyed and brush them aside—and most aid workers have done that at one time. When they steal tape decks from our Land Cruisers we feel anger and disgust. It is only in their weakness, when their death is inevitable, that we are touched. And it is in their helplessness that they become a marketable commodity.
As I got to know the people in my Peace Corps group, I learned more about why people had joined. We were refugees from failed marriages, broken engagements, and other traumas. We all needed time to figure out what we wanted to do with our lives. The Peace Corps was a temporary escape, like joining the French Foreign Legion but with a much shorter commitment. Most of us associated the Peace Corps with JFK and carried with us a nostalgia for the dream that died in Dallas in 1963. Those of us in our early twenties at that time were the first post-Vietnam generation, slightly too young to have been drafted, but just old enough to have been politicized by the war.
In the post-Vietnam world, the Peace Corps offered us an opportunity to forge a different kind of relationship with the Third World, one based on respect. Vietnam had sowed within us enough suspicion of our own culture to have us looking for answers to the world’s problems in other cultures. As Americans, we claimed a certain distance from Kenya’s colonial past. We were self-consciously anticolonial. Most of us would have early experiences with colonials and other expatriates who spoke in flippant and demeaning generalizations about “the Africans,” We were even shocked by experienced volunteers who talked about how the kids didn’t learn or how you have to be firm with your hired help lest they steal everything you own. We bristled when Kenyans called us “Europeans,” by which in fact they just meant “white people.” Our country, after all, had not been a colonial power in Africa.
On several occasions Kenyans came and shook my hand while declaring that we, Kenyans and Americans, shared a historic bond, both of us colonized people who had thrown out the British. It was a profound misunderstanding, one which I never bothered to contradict. It was, I wanted to think, at least true in spirit.
But the reality was that the colonial experience of the European powers had taught us how to view Africa. Many of us discovered just how deep our Western prejudices ran, built as they were on the literature of colonialism. Certainly there had been an early 1960s, romanticized view of African independence movements that deified the likes of Ghana’s Nkrumah, Guinea’s Sékou Toure, Kenya’s Kenyatta. But it was difficult to hold those notions when the icons of independence showed themselves to be incompetent, corrupt, and worse. This “new” Africa of bold revolutionary heroes was, in retrospect, just another chapter in the same Western mythology that gave us Tarzan and further evidence of the patronizing relationship between the powerful and the powerless.
By the time I arrived in Africa, a second generation of African leaders was taking command. Hypocrites were replaced by tyrants and madmen such as Uganda’s Idi Amin, and Jean Bedel Bokassa and his Central African Empire, men who killed their enemies and kept them in refrigerators for snacks. The very week we arrived in Nairobi, Bokassa threw himself a multimillion-dollar coronation in Bangui, the capital of his impoverished country. A wave of nostalgia for colonialism was beginning to surface among expatriates and even among some Africans.
This nostalgia played perfectly into my “experience” with Africa, shaped by films like Khartoum, Beau Geste, The African Queen, Casablanca, and a selection of Tarzan movies. These images endured despite my having read Frantz Fanon, Chinua Achebe, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, and other African thinkers. We arrived in Nairobi to find that our white skin was an immediate passport to the best clubs and restaurants in town. We soon learned the joys of drinking on the verandah of the Norfolk Hotel, or of visiting game lodges in Kenya’s national parks. The lure of the hedonistic colonial lifestyle became even more seductive when we were sent out beyond the metropolis to the towns in the hinterland. There we found refuge in the coloni
al sports clubs with their billiards tables, dart boards, and squash courts that the servants of the Crown had carved out of the wilderness. There, in the remote colonial refuges, we could gather with a few other expatriates—and even some Kenyans—to talk about, complain about, and even ridicule the Africans for their inability to grasp what it was we were trying to teach them. We had effortlessly become what we had so recently despised. The fit was easy, all of it redeemed by the big idea of aid. They needed our help. We were there to serve.
My first two years were spent as a secondary school teacher in an isolated village in the district of Meru on the eastern slope of Mount Kenya. I was dropped off by a Peace Corps staffer who left me standing outside of a little wooden shack with my duffel bag in hand. I gazed across an idyllic scene of thatched roofs, lush greenery and majestic hills. Then as I watched the old Land Rover rattle away down a rutted dirt road, my mind focused on a single thought: My god, I’m going to be here for two years. What have I gotten myself into?
The experience was overwhelming, so much in fact that I never really had the time to worry about the economic development of my hosts. They seemed to be getting along fine without me. It was I who needed help. I was the one who had to adapt to life without running water or electricity. I had to get used to living in a place where the nearest telephone was ten miles away.
The people in the village were endlessly amused by my ignorance about agriculture. I couldn’t plant maize or raise chickens. They snickered when my uncalloused hands couldn’t hold a scalding hot glass of tea.
It brought to mind an H. G. Wells short story I’d read in high school, “Country of the Blind.” In that story a mountaineer, “a reader of many books,” falls into a deep precipice and finds himself trapped in a lost valley among a race of people who centuries before had lost the use of their eyes. From his perspective, the people of the valley lead a simple and laborious life and he immediately sets out to “bring them to reason”—to enlighten them about the wonders of sight. But inseparable from the notion that he can enlighten them is the notion that he can rule them. Is that not the role, even the responsibility, of the enlightened person who lives among the blind? He recalls the adage, “in the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.”