The Dimensions of the Problem

I have been reading Paul Theroux’s Dark Star. As you may know, Theroux is, among other things, a travel writer with a social, political and economic interest. Dark Star is his account of his East Africa trip from Cairo to Cape Town by land. Theroux had been a Peace Corps volunteer in the Rift Valley area of Africa in the 1960’s. He was a teacher at both the university level and in public schools. He is appalled at the degradation he sees over the intervening forty years. He has no schedule and takes whatever land transportation is available from where he happens to be. As a result he rides on top of cattle trucks as others do and is shot at by a band of “shifta“ (armed bands of marauders.); he rides in grossly over loaded “chicken” buses; he lives in intimate contact with much of that world, with the filth, vermin, stifling heat and masses of humanity. All this against a backdrop of the most beautiful and geologically impressive natural world one could hope for. In consequence Theroux, who speaks Swahili, the Lingua Franca of East Africa; converses with a wide variety of East Africans, including the highly educated but unemployed young people, the poor living in the massive slums of the large cities, prostitutes, medical missionaries, ministers of state and academics, trying to determine the reason for the massive economic and social dissolution he sees about him.

I commend the book to anyone who is awed by the dimensions of what must be done if we are ever to have a world in which democracy and a fair share of the world’s resources are realized. In my judgment, Africa is a continent unlike any other in that tribalism, as a method of social organization, has remained dominant far longer than on the other continents. There is the lack of a cohesive long-established culture as there is in China or India. When faced with globalization, well founded and extensive shared cultures are in a much better position to “digest” globalization by culturally accommodating it. Tribal societies, having little shared culture, are easily overwhelmed by globalization as it pits tribe against tribe, applies solutions totally inappropriate to the problem as does the World Bank and the IMF and stresses these societies beyond their ability to cohere. As a result social relationships deteriorate into the jungles of defeat, malaise and bare survival in the slums of Nairobi, where Theroux witnesses a mob stoning a presumed thief to death as people laugh at the man’s plight. Significantly, Nairobi is the city in which the last World Social Forum was held. This is the kind of thing we need to contemplate at great length and depth as we struggle for a just world.

Bob Newhard