My Beauty Best Teacher

Ken Silverstein writes in Harpers about another failure of a Top Down development project:

Back in 2000 construction began on a $3.7 billion pipeline running from oil fields in southern Chad to the Atlantic coast of Cameroon. An international consortium led by ExxonMobil and ChevronTexaco, promised the project would be a model for Third World energy projects, and would alleviate poverty in Chad and promote political reform and stability.The controversial project proceeded with the enthusiastic backing of the do-gooders at the World Bank. “World Bank involvement will ensure greater public consultation, local participation, and attention to environmental and other socio-economic issues,” said a rosy statement released during the project’s early days.The project was completed a few years ago and there appears to have been little or no poverty reduction in Chad since the oil began flowing, governmental corruption is worse than ever, and there’s been no political reform.

G. Pascal Zachary on the 'The Oracle of Africa'

While Achebe criticizes Western thinkers on Africa, he also sets himself apart from other African intellectuals by his complex stance toward the Christianization of his people. The Igbo are among the most fervent Catholics in Africa, and evangelical Christianity is also strong among them. Achebe’s own father was enlisted by Anglican missionaries to convert other “natives,” and Achebe himself benefited from the schools established by foreigners. Yet he remains alive to the damage done by Christianity and relishes how traditional spiritual beliefs persist among Igbo and other Africans.

The critiques of the colonial and the Christian legacies in Africa come together in Achebe’s powerful indictment against Western do-gooders who, he asserts, demean and diminish Africans in their pursuit of helping them. “Lurid and degrading stereotypes,” he writes, are invoked by aid workers, humanitarians and missionaries in order to drum sympathy for African causes. Yet by “dehumanizing the sufferer,” advocates of assistance for Africa, abetted by international media and Hollywood, promote corrosive stereotypes that drown out authentic African voices.

In Africa Works:

City scenes are a minor note in Tingatinga style, but the current I am most drawn to since I think the energy and improvisational flair of African urban life is often neglected in the obsessive concern among do-gooders for the social and physical shortcomings of these crowded, disorderly places.

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