All in the Cause of Duty

All in the Cause of Duty This is a story of one man’s involvement in efforts to speed-up third-world economic and social...

Author: Nicholas | Bennett

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All in the Cause of Duty This is a story of one man’s involvement in efforts to speed-up third-world economic and social development in all its forms. In Nicholas Bennett’s forty years working on educational development and reform, he has taught school and walked around Africa with no money; launched Uganda’s first five-year plan; helped pilot an education reform in Thailand, whilst at the same time working for human rights, and training in non- violent action. He has spent six years in a remote corner of Nepal designing and implementing a Ghandian-type development program through action oriented education. He joined Jerry Rawlings’ revolutionary spirit in Ghana, only to see it captured by middle class respectability; fought corruption in Cameroon; and cried as the Ethiopian Government saw the destruction of its neighbour as more important than the feeding of its starving people. It is also a story of real people and their lives, and the challenges faced by his wife, three daughters and a son, as the family moved from one remote or difficult location to the next. Nicholas Bennett can be contacted at [email protected]

© 2006 Nicholas Bennett All Rights Reserved

ISBN 978-1-84728-488-4

All in the Cause of Duty

Nicholas Bennett

Contents Introduction ......................................................................................iii Beginnings ......................................................................................... 1 Looking Back: Looking Forward .................................................... 18 Flies in the Sugar ............................................................................. 29 Educational Reform......................................................................... 40 In Defence of Human Rights ........................................................... 49 Development Strategies................................................................... 54 The Dualistic Divide........................................................................ 64 The Journey, Not the Destination.................................................... 74 Driving There .................................................................................. 84 Walking the Precipice...................................................................... 92 Dealing with Corruption................................................................ 104 Coups and Curfews: It’s a Risky Business................................... 118 The Joy of Life .............................................................................. 130 Share a Meal and Find a Friend..................................................... 148 Television: Junk Food for the Mind .............................................. 160 Rural Development........................................................................ 163 Holidays......................................................................................... 175 More Educational Reforms............................................................ 194 Things Happen............................................................................... 215 Whitewashing the Ivory Tower ..................................................... 231 It Takes All Sorts........................................................................... 239 A Never Ending Road ................................................................... 269

Introduction I have had the extraordinary good fortune in spending most of my life travelling and living in one beautiful and fascinating country after another, and experiencing both the happiness and the suffering of their populations along my way. In our world many thousands of languages are spoken, and there is an even wider range of cultural practices. People that I have met eke out a living from the tops of mountains to the salt flats below sea level, and everywhere in between. They grow crops, keep cattle, catch fish, work in factories, and carry out menial tasks. They live in tents, in caves, in mud huts, in stone houses, and cardboard and plastic slums. They wear leaves, leather skirts, tunics and pantaloons, and everything else that can cover their nudity. They live in single parent, monogamous, polygamist and polyandrous families. They follow animist, Christian, Moslem, Hindu, Buddhist, and other religions. They are divided by caste, by class, by sex and by age, and often have to put up with unnecessary violence in their daily lives. Most are poor, many are malnourished, suffer from potentially curable diseases, and die much younger than necessary. From an early age I decided that I would spend my life travelling from one remote and exotic place to another, and at the same time helping ordinary men and women develop out of their poverty whilst avoiding turning them into second rate copies of Western man. I began a lifetime of learning about the aspirations of the poor with a nine-month walkabout around West Africa when I was seventeen, continued with courses on economics and development at university, and was ready to become an ‘expert’ at the ripe age of twenty two. At first I thought that appropriate and sustainable development would be easy, and that through a combination of school-

ALL IN THE CAUSE OF DUTY

ing, health care, and economic opportunities everyone would rapidly escape from their poverty, but the longer I lived and worked in the developing world, the more I understood that since each person’s problems were different, the solutions to their problems would also most likely have to be different, too. I had initially believed that economic development was the panacea for poverty reduction until I started to make long term development projections, l and realised the impossibility of raising per capita consumption everywhere in the majority world to U.S. levels. Simplistic projections show that for this to happen, using existing technologies, we would have to multiply the combustion of fossil fuels by about fifty times, the use of iron a hundred fold, the use of other metals two hundred fold, and of course by the time these levels are reached the standards in the U.S. would again have tripled, and the world’s population would also have tripled! It is unfortunate that most of those in positions of authority in donor and lender agencies blind themselves to the impossibility of Western style economic prosperity for all, and refuse to accept the fact that growth based development strategies often merely widen income differentials and accelerate environmental degradation without eliminating absolute or relative poverty. If the above projections are in any way realistic, few of those at the bottom of the economic pile in the countries where I have been working would be able to reach acceptable levels of consumption in their lifetimes, and thus radical alternative development strategies are essential if they are to find hope for a better life for themselves and their families. For much of the past forty years I have worked as an advisor in some of the most fascinating, dangerous, or remote places in the world. I have walked over much of West Africa, lived through many coups, curfews, and revolutions, spent years in a small village in the Himalayas, a three-day walk from the nearest road, helped in the overthrow of dictatorships, and led non-violent and human rights campaigns wherever I have found injustice. I have lived for five years in Uganda, two years in Paris, nine years in Thailand, and seven in Nepal. After a couple of years in Washington, D.C., I spent seven years in Ghana, three in Cameroon, and three in Ethiopia. I have found it essential to devote several years working in each coun-

INTRODUCTION

try I have lived in, in order to get some idea of the social, cultural, and economic realities of the people I am supposed to be helping before being able to give any meaningful advice. It is often also necessary to begin to understand and speak their language. For most of my career I have been working with local educators and teachers to find ways to reform educational systems to make them more a force for sustainable human development, particularly for those living and working in rural areas. In each country where I have worked I have always been ignored by the powers that be until I have proved my worth. As my knowledge of a country and its education system increased, so did the insults from those who felt threatened by my presence, but also my satisfaction from giving hope to those who previously had no hope. I never claimed ownership of the ideas and projects that I developed, and was always happy when others felt that they had initiated the successful programs that I had worked on. In addition to my work in the half-dozen countries where I have lived, my advice has been sought in around twenty other states, in some of which I managed to find committed local officials to help develop and implement more appropriate educational and economic strategies. On this long journey I have come across many extraordinary men and women, especially those working in villages and urban slums, as well as a few people in positions of power. Without these I would have achieved nothing. My career has been full of contradictions, as I have been an expert whilst believing in the wisdom of ordinary people in local communities, an advisor aware of the damage that external advice has caused in most developing countries over the past decades, and a bearer of large credits to finance the programs that I have been involved in whilst believing that all aid should be untied grants. Whether as an expert, an advisor, or a bearer of bounty, I have enjoyed my career, and found great satisfaction from my work. The book does not follow any chronological order, but uses stories drawn from my experience in any of the twenty or so countries where I have worked, to lead into a discussion of alternative educational and developmental strategies. It moves backward and for-


ward in time, and jumps from country to country, to show both the commonality of many of the problems and the need to look for specific country- or even community-based solutions. The book integrates amusing or interesting vignettes from my 40 years of living and working in African and Asian countries, with radical approaches to economic and education development. It is thus both a travel adventure and a serious study of development. The alternative educational and developmental ideas I elaborate on in this book are based on the genesis of my own writings and experience over these four decades. In the last chapter of the book that I wrote about my West African walkabout, ‘Zigzag to Timbuktu’ (1963), I outlined the elements of a community-based nonmaterialistic development strategy, a strategy I have been refining ever since. In 1968 I started to challenge the effectiveness of existing school systems with my article, ‘Primary Education in Rural Communities: An Investment in Ignorance?’ which I followed with dozens of articles and several books. Some years later I elaborated an alternative rural development strategy in my book, ‘Barriers and Bridges for Rural Development’ (1977), followed by an article, ‘In Defence of Human Rights’(1979), where I showed the clear relationship between social and political rights and meaningful development. From 1979 to 1985 I put many of my ideas into practice in the Far West of Nepal, where I lived and worked in an area several days’ walk from the nearest road. It was there that I realised the importance of action, not words. This was followed by more than a decade attempting to radically and rapidly reform national education systems in a number of African nations. I have always been supported both in the development of my ideas and in the non- conventional way I have lived and worked by important people in high places. Of course my greatest supporter of all has been my wife and mistress, who has accompanied me from the highest mountain to the deepest gorge whilst raising our children and teaching yoga at the same time.

Beginnings When I was 17 years old I left England without money, to walk, canoe, and hitch from the Ghanaian coast to Timbuktu. I had wanted to experience another culture, another way of life from that which I was used to in London. I spent several months with the people, sleeping in villages, city lorry parks, and amongst elephants and mosquitoes. Though it was a time of momentous change throughout the continent of Africa, with country after country gaining a semblance of independence, it was of also the last days of a non-monetised way of life. There were still cultures on my route whose people were yet to be encumbered with clothes, many that were still using cowry shells instead of money, and some that were still trading in slaves. When two to three sacks of cowries were needed to buy a bicycle, capital accumulation is difficult. Wealth and status was often expressed by the feasts that a person could provide his fellows, rather than by what he possessed. Signs of the coming blue jean culture and its inherent division between those who were linked to the metropolitan power and those to a traditional mores were everywhere. I have been rowed across a river by a naked fisherman to a dinner given in my honour by the new elite in their dinner jackets. It is this dualism, and the inherent strains that it produces, that has confronted me during the forty years I have spent living and working on development activities in Africa and Asia. Witchdoctors were everywhere, and often more influential than Christian or Moslem religious leaders. One produced the downfall of a leading Ghanaian banker, the first of a whole stream of doubleyour-money tricksters that have flooded the developing world ever since. The banker merely had to borrow money from his bank overnight, bury it in a magic place, and the next morning it would be

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doubled. The first night the money disappeared as the witchdoctor’s deity was insulted by the small amount of money that was offered, and same thing happened with a larger amount the second night; and the third night when enough to bankrupt the bank was buried, both the witchdoctor and the money disappeared. Since then the World Bank and other development agencies have been burying everincreasing sums of money, as Africa sinks to deepening levels of despair. Like the witchdoctor, we development professionals have been building our careers on tomorrow’s promise. I made a long detour on a hard-seated mammy wagon, along washed-out red earthen roads, into the steamy jungle of western Ghana to visit one of the most famous and powerful witchdoctors of that time. His was a two storey cement block house in the middle of a large mud and thatch village. During my days of waiting, drinking palm wine and being eaten by mosquitoes, a villager who had intruded into his shrine died through his magic. Shortly after this he invited me into his house. On one wall there was a picture of Christ on the cross, with his blood flowing down the wall, and next to him was a life-sized portrait of Queen Elizabeth; a second wall was covered with what looked like dried body parts, and the third was a tunnel to his inner sanctum. After explaining to him my mission, as is the custom in most traditional societies, he let me know that he had an especially useful gift for me. He handed me a multi-coloured beaded talisman on a leather thong to hang around my neck. “This is very powerful fetish and will either give you very good or very bad luck, whether good or bad depends on you. It must, however never be opened, as one who does so will die immediately.” Despite being arrested in various places and jailed in others, and having four very inquisitive children, no policeman nor child has dared challenge the power of the witchdoctor and opened my fetish. Good luck, with touches of bad, has pursued me throughout my career. I have worked through half a dozen military coups, had the books I have written publicly burnt, been evacuated in a tank to return on a moped, lived in one of the most beautiful places in the world, high in the Himalayas, but in a mud house with no water or electricity, and had my letters opened and my telephones tapped. Throughout all this, my family and I have thrived.

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Witchdoctors and shamans have been my companions throughout my travels. Some, in order to show their power, have taken out and replaced their eyes, others have passed a knife through their bodies without even leaving a scar, yet others have physically wrestled all night with the sickness that had overcome one of my colleagues. Though their methods have been different, and some have seemed more evil than good, all have been rooted in the culture and community that they serve. Today’s witchdoctors are far more powerful than those of the past, but lack their roots. These witchdoctors bring some good and often more bad luck, not just to one young man lost in an African jungle, but to untold millions. Sitting in the comfort of their airconditioned offices in Washington, London, or Paris, with their godgiven models of reality, they play with the lives of those they never see and cannot feel or understand. To be so poor that one cannot feed one’s family; to be frozen and then beaten and robbed sleeping in the street, to be forced to sell one’s daughter merely to survive, or to be moved from the land one has always occupied to provide electricity for some urban fat cats, are facts that we in the comfort of our middle class homes can know but cannot feel. It was because of the power that I and many of my colleagues inadvertently found ourselves wielding, that I sometimes felt uneasy working for the World Bank, the main training centre and home of today’s witchdoctors.

What Did I Learn from Prison? In my African walkabout it was impossible for me to know when I had crossed from one country to the next, let alone to respect international frontiers. The only border posts were on the few roads existing, and there was no sign of frontier police on the paths that I was taking. Often passenger trucks would stop a few hundred meters from a frontier, let all the passengers off, and pick them up a couple of hundred meters the other side of the border. This was the best way to avoid having to ‘dash’ the frontier police. Two weeks after crossing into Mali by village path I reached Mopti, a bustling port on the Niger River, where I was arrested as an

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illegal immigrant and taken to the local jail. As the Mopti police had no idea what to do with me, it was decided that I should be sent to Bamako, the capital. The next day, my police escort and I were loaded on top of sacks of stinking dried fish for the two day truck journey through the burning Sahel. On arrival in Bamako, remembering the travel stories I read as a child, I demanded to be taken to the British ambassador, where my smell, and the weevils dropping from my clothes and running across his carpet, did not encourage the full support of the crown. The ambassador in fact shouted at me to get the hell out of his office. Returning to jail, my captors had no idea what to do with me, their first white prisoner since their stormy independence from France a few months earlier. When France had offered independence to its African colonies, it was only Guinea and Mali that had refused to join the French community. The French had immediately withdrawn all their personnel and financial assistance, thus many services were not working, and there was considerable anti French (white) sentiment. Not the best time to be in a Malian jail. Perhaps I was a privileged prisoner, but I do not remember the jail to be too uncomfortable. I shared a mud walled room with three Malians, sleeping on a mat on the floor, and shitting in a clean hole with a wooden cover in the corner. Several days later my passport was returned to me, stamped “Transit Visa refused, must leave Mali today.” Following some further days of negotiation it was finally agreed to add “via Timbuktu, and Gao,” even though everyone knew that it would take me more than a month to leave Mali along the Niger river and across the desert. On my arrival in Timbuktu several weeks later I was rearrested, but since I had reached my goal I was not too worried. These were the first of many negotiations I have been involved in, working with local authorities and agencies and governments. At the outset I learnt to hide my weevils and cover up my smell with the fresh scent of the jargon of the moment, whether it is meeting basic human needs, or poverty reduction, or human development. For much of the past forty years I have been involved in designing and helping implement projects or programs with similar objectives, but adjusted, usually drastically, to different cultural and economic environments. The packaging changes but the objectives remain

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much the same. I also learnt that given uncertainty over the process of change, the eventual goal is more important than the intermediate steps, and that it is important always to be clear and open with partners over this goal. It is the destination that is important, not the route taken to arrive at this destination. Too often we development professionals persuade our clients to agree to conditions we know cannot be met. Both Government officials and donors, by agreeing to the impossible, have their short term career needs satisfied, much as my captors and I did forty years ago.

Things Are Not as They Seem to Be I decided to visit a village built on stilts over a lake, which was not easy to reach. I had to take a truck ride along the beach at low tide, and then an hour’s trek through a swamp, and into the edge of the forest. I was thus not surprised that most of the villagers had never been to school, never left the district, and never seen a white man before. All the houses in the village were made from split bamboo, with thatched roofs. Most of the villagers were farmers, on what looked like very fertile land, but some were also fishermen and palm wine tappers. Until I met an ex serviceman who had served on a U.N. peacekeeping mission in the Congo, and aptly called Congo, I was followed by hordes of children everywhere I went. They would even try to watch me shitting to see the colour of a white man’s faeces. Congo soon scattered my entourage, and as he was one of the few people who could speak English, we soon became friends. He even found me a hut on the edge of the village which I could use during my stay. The only price that I had to pay was to drink with him. He drank anything with alcohol in it: palm wine, beer, and local whiskey, and he drank plenty. It was only the tradition of pouring the first and the last part of every drink as a libation to the ancestors, and the gods, which saved me. My libations grew larger and larger as the day turned to night. One evening we walked to a neighbouring village where there was a travelling group of actors performing. Though I could not understand a word, the theme of the play was clear. It was a story

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about the mishaps of a white man, Tommy, who drank so much palm wine and spirits that he misbehaved in every way imaginable. He chased the local women as his trousers fell down, he went into the wrong hut at night only to be driven out by a furious, cutlass wielding house owner, and he peed and vomited in public. The title of this Shakespearian epic was “Tommy No Good O” which was also the theme of the highlife song that was sung after each of Tommy’s mishaps. The audience loved the way the play made fun of the white man. As the only white in a sea of black faces I felt somewhat uneasy at times, and before the show was over I asked Congo to return with me to his village. As we walked back through the forest, the crickets and frogs were out in force frightening away the spirits of darkness, whilst the drone of the mosquitoes, as they dived for my ear, put paid to any chance of conversation. There was no breeze, no respite from the sticky heat that surrounded us, except the dripping dampness from the trees. I had drunk too much that evening, and my limbs and head were so heavy, and I hardly noticed the huge snake that slithered across the path in front of me. Not so my drinking companion Congo, who with one swift stroke of his cutlass decapitated the primeval beast. Slinging the corpse over his shoulders, he said that it would be delicious roasted. Back in the village the fire was stoked, and a wooden frame made to roast and smoke the snake, heating even further the still sticky air of the night. More spirits were served to wash the dry snake meat down, more fantastic claims made of women overcome and men beaten in this forgotten corner of Africa. Apart from the two of us, squatting near the smoke of the fire to keep the mosquitoes at bay, the village seemed asleep, bamboo huts fading into the darkness. The bottle was empty, and I had chewed enough snake for one night, so I staggered to my hut on the edge of the village, dragged off my sodden sweat drenched clothes and lay down on the bamboo shelf in the corner, only to find the outline of another body already there. Oh my god, I must have gone to the wrong hut, I thought, I must sneak out without waking the sleeper. I got up shakily, only to be caught by a thin black arm and pulled down on the shelf next the

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body of the woman, for it was a woman, already there. The night was black, and she was even blacker, so I could only see the outline of her shape. She took my hand and carried it to her head, over her tight curls, high cheekbones, flared nostrils, and full lips, and then down over her strong shoulders and firm full breasts. Her stomach and hips were wound in a belt of beads, and were those of a young woman still un-stretched by childbirth. I was in a state of complete excitement with this extraordinary woman, as dark as ebony, whom I could touch but could not see, but I was also terrified that a husband or father would storm into the hut, cutlass in hand, ready to cut into shreds the violator of his wife or daughter. After a passionate but rapid coupling she pulled herself away from me and disappeared into the darkness from where she had come, still not a word spoken or a body seen. I fell into the deepest sleep, so deep that even the drone of the mosquitoes could not waken me. I finally woke with the sun, only to be filled with the strongest longing to see and possess again this coal black angel of the night. But who was she, how could I recognize her, and even if I found her, how could I communicate with her, as I was completely ignorant of her language and customs. There must be fifty or more huts in the village, each with wives and daughters, and each with a threatening husband, brother, or father. I spent the day wandering the village, staring intensively at each female I saw between the ages of fifteen and thirty, hoping for some sign of recognition, so much so that most of them would turn away, embarrassed by my attention. My friend Congo noticed that I was not my normal self, and asked me what was wrong. I told him that I had a hangover from our excesses the night before. No problem, he said as he called a passing palm wine tapper, and purchased a pot of frothing wine. After the libation to the ancestors and the gods was poured, he passed the jug to me, to quench my thirst and numb my longing. We drank together most of the afternoon and evening, finishing the rest of the snake, and moving onto a dinner of dried fish boiled in palm oil, served with sweet potatoes, followed by copious quantities of beer mixed with the local spirits.

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The village quietened as house after house went to sleep, and even the frogs and crickets got tired of their calling. I bid farewell to Congo’s family, and again staggered to my hut in the darkness of the moonless night, disappointed that I had not found the woman of my dreams, and feeling that if I continued drinking like this I would soon turn into an alcoholic. I entered the hut and stared into the emptiness, not even the shadow of a body on the sleeping shelf in the corner. I took off my clothes and lay down on the mat, covering my nakedness with a cloth. I could not sleep, as the sticky heat of the windless night was oppressive, as was my thirst from my drinking excesses. Half drowsing, I was startled by the creaking of the bamboo door of my hut. A shadow passed through the darkness, and someone sat on the bamboo shelf next to me. I stretched out my hand and felt the shape of a woman’s body, tightly wrapped in a cloth tied above her breasts. I was about to welcome her, but she nervously pressed her finger to my lips, conjuring up the image of violently angry relatives if I did not remain totally silent. How happy and relieved I was to re-find my unseen fantasy of the night before. I pulled her towards me, and held her still clothed body against my nakedness. Much to my surprise as I unwound her cloth I realised that this was no childless girl, but a young woman in her prime. Even with this realization I was unable to stop myself. After an active but silent lovemaking she slid off me, got up, collected her cloth, and slunk out of my hut as quietly as she had arrived, again not a word spoken or a body seen. I slept badly the rest of the night, with nightmares of drowning in a black sea of nakedness engulfing me so that I could hardly breathe. I woke late, when the sun was high and the flies were crowding over the dried sweat on my body. I threw a bucket of cold water over myself, re-awakening my obsession, now twice as strong as the day before. After dressing I wandered up and down the village, again staring at every woman I saw, wondering which my nocturnal visitors were and why they came to my hut at night. I searched my memory for some small sign that would enable me to recognise them, but had none. How could I find one or other of my seduc-

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tresses? How could I arrange to meet them somehow, somewhere, in the days to come? I became increasingly obsessive as the day progressed, and by evening had no thoughts of anything but my fantasy visitors. In the end I decided that I had to confide in Congo. I needed the courage of alcohol to admit my nocturnal trysts. I poured smaller libations than usual as I drank with Congo. After a while I told him that the strangest things had been happening after I left him each evening, and, missing out most of the details, I told him of the women I found in my hut, and my longing to be with one or other again. I asked him how I could find them, since I had neither seen nor spoken with either. He pressed me for details, for clues to their identity, playing along with my obsession. He said he did not know who they were, but offered to find me someone else for tonight if I wanted. I took offence at his offer. But after a while, sensing my growing unease, he admitted that he had been selling nights with me to the local women who wanted to have a lightskinned child, and experience sex with a white man. Though I could not see my black companions, they could see my whiteness, and found this very exciting, and thus my price was high. He thought it unwise for me to contact one or other of my companions, as their husbands would be unlikely to take their wives’ infidelities lightly. He again reiterated his offer of a new companion for tonight, which I angrily refused. I was so shocked that my companions of the night had only been with me for my value as a stud. I did not return to my hut that night, and early the next morning I gathered my things, packed my rucksack, and set out through the swamp to catch a truck on the beach. My obsession remained, and I stared at my fellow female truck passengers, wondering if one of my seductresses was following me to town. Gradually this obsession faded, but the memory that things are not always as they seem to be followed me throughout my career as a development expert. The phenomenal growth of cities throughout the developing world has made obsolete much of the morality that used to hold traditional societies together. The fabric of the family has disintegrated, along with urbanisation. Women and children often stay in the village whilst the men work on plantations, in mines, or in in-

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formal occupations in the cities. Prostitution has increased, as have the men and women who enter into casual relationships to get the enjoyment and support they need in their new environment. Both men and women have far more partners than was the case in my early days in Africa, accelerating the spread of AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases. Drink and drugs help overcome inhibitions of today’s youth just as it did for me four decades ago, and makes the use of a condom unlikely, even where there is an awareness of the danger of AIDS. HIV AIDS has reached epidemic proportions in much of sub-Saharan Africa, with one third of the population already sero positive in several Southern African countries and destined to die over the next decade. One third, one out of three men, women, and children we know will be dead within a decade, a similar level of mortality as that which occurred during the Black Death in Europe in the seventeenth century, and all because of the same alcohol and sex that entrapped and obsessed me in my youth. Much of the pointless violence that is destroying the development promise in many of the poorest countries has its roots in alcohol or drugs. A normal man is incapable of slaughtering women and children, but a drunkard can throw his own children against a wall, and beat his own wife unconscious. A normal man will go out of his way to help the vulnerable, but someone who is drugged can be led to excesses of cruelty on the innocent, including amputation of the limbs of children. Drink helps someone forget the problems that surround him in his life, but it also numbs him from getting an awareness of the cause and extent of his problems, an essential prerequisite if he is to take action to solve these problems. The French development guru, Rene Dumont, even went so far as to argue that drink is one of the main causes of Africa’s continued under development. Drink and drugs would, if they were any other commodity, be what economists call the engines of development. In Cameroon several different makes of beer can be found in villages far from the nearest road, where little else but cigarettes, matches, and kerosene are available. In Burma military officers are paid in heroin or amphetamines when cash is not available. In Columbia the cocaine economy is larger than any other. Even in California the most im-

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portant cash crop is marijuana. Development is thus often not what it seems to be, and does not always result in an increase in human satisfaction, but in human suffering. We development professionals must thus be wary of simple measures of success such as growth in national income. How is this income generated, to whom is it distributed, and what is it used for is far more important than its absolute magnitude. In order to try to capture these issues, the United Nations developed a measure that includes important factors such as infant mortality, primary school enrolment rates, and life expectancy, amongst others. These human development indicators are still not widely used, as it is difficult to collect all the statistics that are needed on time, and there is nothing inherent in the weight given to the different elements that make up the index. It is so much easier to use absolute measures that satisfy the globalisers, such as national income, budget deficit, and balance of payments, even though this hides what really is happening in a country.

Guns and Non-Violence My first overseas professional assignment was in Uganda in the mid-sixties. This was shortly after its independence, at a time when the British colonial officers were packing their bags, but before there were many local graduates to take over, and thus I was given a great deal more authority than most twenty-two-year-old graduates. I helped prepare and launch Uganda’s five-year plan, and even at that time realised the importance of grass roots involvement in any development activity. I spent many weeks on the road launching the plan, getting people from all over the country to believe that the plan was their plan, and that they should work together with the Government in its implementation. Even in Uganda and throughout much of my career the gun has ruled supreme, as other power sources that are important in many of the richer countries do not exist. The educated middle class was often not sufficiently large to effectively demand political rights, trades’ unions were in an embryonic state, civil servants did not have the security of their colleagues in the West, what media existed

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was controlled by the state, and large corporations rarely existed. Those who controlled the guns thus controlled the state. My first personal experience of the power of the gun occurred one morning in 1966, when I found my office surrounded by armoured cars and ferocious looking soldiers. Idi Amin, who was head of one faction of the army at that time, a faction that did not like my Minister at all, had decided to take over the building where I was working for his personal Headquarters. I negotiated with him from a position of considerable weakness, and we finally agreed that we would cohabit for six weeks, and then my team and I would move out. I never liked Idi Amin, despite his crude charisma. Other leaders I have known have had an aura of sophistication and wisdom which enabled me to relate to them even if I did not respect or like them. Idi Amin was uncouth raw power. In retrospect I considered myself lucky to have survived this short cohabitation! At that time I was leading a small team of Ugandans who were carrying out a manpower survey, and preparing a manpower plan designed, in an orderly fashion over fifteen years, to replace most of the Asians and Europeans occupying key positions in government and the economy with Africans. Two years later Idi Amin staged a coup against Prime Minister Milton Obote, and rapidly drove out most of the foreigners, resulting in instantaneous Africanisation. So much for our well- prepared long term plans! From this I realised that if we want to have an impact we have to work in the present. There are too many unknowns about tomorrow, and far too many about next year. For my work to become effective I had to aim for short term returns, rather than making medium or long term plans. It was also the first of many occasions where violence has destroyed much of what I had tried to do, along with many of my Ugandan colleagues who either disappeared or were killed in the aftermath of this coup. The power of the gun has haunted me throughout my working life. In Uganda we lived through a six month dawn-to-dusk curfew which allowed the troops, who were at that time loyal to the government, to root out and murder their tribal opponents. Too often we would see the dead as we drove to work in the morning. In Thai-

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land there were three military coups during my stay. One time I found myself with my family between two warring groups, firing at each other, as we drove through the deserted streets of Bangkok. In Nigeria I had to bluff my way out of the country as the soldiers took over the airport. In the Central African Republic I was evacuated in a tank as the army mutinied. In Cameroon, heads were displayed on roundabouts as a warning to government opponents. My swansong was in Ethiopia, where the army destroyed the economy, and killed and maimed tens of thousands of its youth in a pointless war with its neighbour. Closer to home, one Sunday morning when we were living in Thailand I was out with my children and my wife was alone in our house. A young man came into our compound and wandered around nervously. My wife, thinking that he was one of the many students who frequently came to meet and discuss with me, invited him into our house, and told him to make himself at home as I would be back shortly. Not noticing the gun he had in his hand, she asked him whether he would like coffee or tea. He was so put off by my wife’s lack of fear, and her non-confrontational approach, that he must have thought that there was some kind of trap, so he got up and fled our house. He went to our neighbour’s, tied up the two maids there, hijacked a taxi, loaded it with TV’s and other valuables, and took one of the maids hostage with him. The other maid escaped and called the police. There was a shootout at the end of our road, the hostage was injured and the gunman killed. Despite the guns that have followed me throughout my professional life, I have encouraged friends and colleagues to resolve problems in a non-violent way. I have been jailed for leading and participating in non-violent anti-war activities, helped prepare students for the non-violent demonstrations that overthrew the military government in Thailand in 1973, and created a non- violent human rights movement when the military staged a comeback there a few years later. In the mountains of Nepal I helped establish a Ghandian basic education program designed to lead the local people to solve their own economic and social problems non-violently. In Ghana I sat calmly for three days and nights outside the office of a key government Minister, who had promised to see me and then did not

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keep the appointment, and in Ethiopia I frequently and publicly challenged the Prime Minister over Ethiopia’s war with its neighbours. I have run training programs on non-violent methods of social change, and helped create the first international network of trainers in non-violence. The nineteen-sixties and -seventies were a period when new freedoms and new ideas were blooming throughout the developing world. It was a period before globalisation in the interests of the rich had become the one size that was supposed to fit all, and before peacemaking involved providing dysfunctional leaders with increasingly dangerous weapons of mass destruction. There was a widespread interest in non-violence, not merely as a tool for protesters, but also as a method of civilian defence. Military strategists were seriously considering using non-violence as a key element of their national defence strategies. One Easter, the Sunday Telegraph, a serious conservative newspaper in Britain, published articles by friends of mine and me, as well as devoting its leader to a discussion of the potential uses of non-violence. It is a sad reflection of the progress of the past thirty years that such a mainstream public discussion of alternatives to supporting the industrial military complex is now unthinkable. There is no money to be made from peace or non-violence, but tens of billions of dollars of subsidies from selling weapons of mass destruction that kill, maim, and poison are there for the taking. In 1955 the leaders of several of the largest newly independent and non-aligned nations got together in Bandung, in Indonesia, and issued the Bandung declaration of non-alignment. This declaration was made for countries that were ‘neither capitalist nor communist,’ and included a commitment to resolve problems between members in a non-violent way. Such a declaration would be quite impossible now, as there is hardly a country that is free from the tentacles of the ‘One Size Fits All’ capitalist economic model so forcibly promoted by the US and its European allies.

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Other Temptations During my initial walkabout I spent some days travelling with a Ghanaian magistrate from village to village, not to dispense justice, but to collect money for cases yet to be thought of by his constituents. Better to have the magistrate on your side. It was obvious that having me with him increased the amount he could collect, and honourable man that he was, offered me a share of his earnings. Despite my penniless state, I thought it better to refuse. A few years later when I started my development career, I thought I was ready to face the temptations and diversions that would be thrust on my path throughout Africa and Asia, but realized later that I was not fully prepared either for its magnitude or its frequency. Rarely a year has gone by over the past four decades without some direct or indirect attempt to influence my decisions, from my employers, contractors, consultants or clients. One Christmas I was unwrapping a bottle of whiskey from a school building contractor, throwing away the paper as I did so, only to be challenged by one of my daughters for putting money into the bin. I realized that the inner wrapping consisted of U.S. $100 bills. Another time a painting, which turned out to be valuable, was left on my doorstep, and another time a sack of groceries. All these were not designed to buy any immediate favour, but merely to have an influential friend in case one was needed in future. Quite obviously these gifts had to be returned to the contactors and consultants, which involved considerable embarrassment. Other offers were far easier to refuse, but more difficult to deal with, including a share in a $250,000 kickback on a fake book contract in Nigeria, and a part of $50,000 from a fund for the reconstruction of earthquake- destroyed schools in Nepal, which had never left a Minister’s personal bank account. In this latter case, instead of the support that I had expected from my employers, I was reprimanded for drawing attention to corruption, when this was not in my job description. Obviously time to change employers.

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As I gained experience in the development business I became aware of a much more insidious and damaging form of corruption that was affecting both my colleagues and I, that of the ego. We became important by having access to a President, or Prime Minister, or Minister, opening ourselves to manipulation by the more skilful of these leaders, to support the interest of their party, or clique, or clan, rather than meeting development goals or strategies. This access would in turn increase our status amongst our development colleagues, because we and not they had this privileged relationship. We were being bought through our egos just as others were being influenced through their flesh or their purses. Again a need to change employers. It was once suggested by a Prime Minister of Thailand in the mid 1970’s that a notice be posted at the airport: “Country Closed for Repairs.” It was clear at that time that the Thai and Western cultures were in collision, and there was the danger that Thai’s would be turned into second class copies of western man. In many of the less robust cultures in Africa, the culture and the economy are even more vulnerable. In several African and Asian countries the main economic activity is foreign aid, and in their capital cities the most profitable industry is serving the foreign development professionals sent to manage this aid. We development specialists have chosen our profession for a multitude of reasons, most of which are not altruistic. Like those in other occupations, we want to remain employed. Unlike these other professions, we have to create our own jobs in the projects which we design, and this can lead to insidious forms of corruption. Too often there is mutual back scratching. Government officials approve the projects that we propose, as long as we include vehicles, overseas travel, and even consultancy assignments for these same officials. The decisions taken can be as distorted as if more open bribes were offered. Often far more projects are approved than can ever be implemented, as it is the goodies that motivate, not their likely development impact. Quite obviously, we development professionals carry our own cultural and economic baggage with us, and often have an impact

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very different from the one we intended. We usually earn considerably more than we would get in our home countries. We live in big houses, and drive expensive cars, which in turn results indirectly in creating temptations amongst colleagues and ordinary citizens from the countries in which we are working, who see no reason why they should not have the same salaries, mansions, and cars as us. Our very presence can tempt our colleagues to accept or even demand kickbacks and other perks. It is our behaviour more than our words that are followed, and are our lasting heritage. Too often we development experts believe that someone will be better off merely because he manages to produce more or to earn more, even if this leads to stress and addictions. Someone who likes to pass the time with his wife, his friends, and his children, or live a simple life, or meditate for half the day, is usually considered downright lazy.

Looking Back: Looking Forward I worked in Uganda from 1964 to 1968 for the Ministry of Planning and Community Development, on the preparation of a five year social and economic development plan, along with the Government’s long term political strategy…the ‘Uganda Path to Socialism.’ We produced a booklet, translated in several languages: ‘This Is Your Plan,’ and travelled around the country along an excellent road network, holding meetings on the plan in each town. There was plenty of food for all, except for those living in the arid Northeast. It was said that the soil in the central region of the country was so fertile that merely by spitting out part of a banana would produce a tree with a huge bunch of bananas in little more than a year. There were substantial exports of coffee and cotton, and a growing production of tea, and winter strawberries, the beginnings of an industrial base with sugar and textiles, and an incipient tourist industry. Just as in Ghana, the small Ugandan elite believed that Uganda would make it. I lived in Entebbe near the airport, about twenty miles from the commercial capital Kampala, and would often be disturbed by the landing and taking off of planes. Returning in 1978 for the first time since I fled the country ten years earlier, as the leader of a team charged with evaluating the impact of United Nation’s assistance to Uganda, I was met at the steps of the plane by fawning officials from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and whisked through the unrecognisable new, but empty, hallways of the airport, to the first VIP lounge anyone had deemed me worthy of. Stuffed sofas, shag carpet, glass tables, and fearful officials. Tea and biscuits were served, then more tea and biscuits, and even more tea and more biscuits. Embarrassed officials disappeared, only to return even more embarrassed with yet more tea. I

LOOKING BACK, LOOKING FORWARD

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asked what we were waiting for, only to be answered by long silences. My questions became increasingly insistent as the official responses were more and more reticent. Finally my official minders had to admit that they were trying to find a vehicle with sufficient petrol to take me the twenty two miles to Kampala. I had to contact an old colleague of mine to take me to my hotel in Kampala, which had once been the proud bearer of the Sheraton emblem. I undressed for a shower. No water, but two empty jerry cans were waiting for my attention. I called the reception to complain over the lack of water, only to be told that they were not surprised, as they had not seen running water in the hotel for several years, but that I could take my jerry cans to a standpoint in town. I put my jerry cans in the queue, and within half an hour they were full of fresh cool water. Luckily the hotel lifts were still working, as I was on the fifth floor. Hungry from my water-carrying exertions, I called down to the restaurant for some food. They only served matoke (boiled plantains) and beans, and this only from 8 p.m. to 8.30.pm. So much for my anticipation of five star service. I went for a walk in Kampala, before the matoke dinner was served, along what was once a bustling commercial thoroughfare. There used to be hundreds of Asian-owned shops and restaurants, and crowds of window shoppers and cars blocking every intersection, but now an eerie silence reigned. Kampala had become a ghost city….my first post- industrial, post-neutron bomb town. Only one shop in the whole of the city had anything to display, just one pair of large red woman’s high heel shoes. Where had all the people gone? Gone to their farms, every one. The Uganda shilling had become valueless. Farmers were paid with Government IOUs, which were never honoured, and were no longer willing even to pick the coffee or cotton, which were left in the fields to rot. Teachers, nurses, university professors, and other civil servants could buy nothing with the salaries they earned, and were forced to migrate out of the city to land that they could farm. The report I produced on the evaluation of the U.N. support to Uganda was not what was expected. I pointed out that the United

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Nations Development Program had strange bedfellows, as Libya and the PLO were the only other organizations providing any assistance to Uganda. The main body of my report showed, clause by clause, how Uganda, a signatory of the U.N.’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, was in contravention with thirty seven of the forty provisions of the declaration. My report was neither acknowledged, nor evidently welcome, as the promised follow up consultancies were never forthcoming. My departure was as eventful as my arrival. I had a seat on the one weekly commercial flight out of Entebbe. Every seat was occupied on this old Sabena plane, which started to take off on time. Suddenly it skidded to a halt and returned to the terminal. Three ministers and their girl friends decided to take the flight, and were packing their bags in Kampala. Nine unfortunate passengers were offloaded, and an hour later the ministers, each with two women in tow, arrived. Ghana in 1960 was a marvellous place. Everyone was optimistic and full of hope for the future. Everywhere that I went there were sign boards, radio programs, and songs telling us how Ghana would make it. The gold mines were working efficiently; cocoa production was at an all- time high, as were the prices. Though most of the roads were made of red African mud, the network was well maintained, and it was possible to travel from one end of the country to another without any police corruption barriers. The school system was the pride of West Africa, and places were available to some poor, as well as the better-off boys and girls, and the community development and adult literacy programs were held up as examples for others in Africa to follow. A number of very comfortable hotels had been commissioned, and negotiations were underway for the construction of the Volta hydro-electric dam. Kwame Nkrumah, the first president of Ghana, was active in both the creation and expansion of the Organization of African Unity, and of the non-aligned movement. I did not return to Ghana until 1985, after a gap of twenty five years. At that time I was asked to bring my own duplicating paper and stencils, and to pay the secretaries who would be working for


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me in soap and toothpaste rather than cash. Everyone was concerned with where the next meal for their families would come from, and no one was even speculating whether Ghana could make it or not. People thought that everything had already been tried and had failed. Cocoa production was half what it had been in 1960, and the prices one quarter. The gold mines had been nationalised, and were producing insignificant quantities legally. Accra was known as the city of half a million pot holes, and in Kumase, the second city, the pot holes were deep enough to swallow all but the bigger trucks, and the taxis had to be specially adapted to enable them to ply even the main roads. In the four-storied teaching hospital in Accra, all sterilisation of instruments, and cooking of food, was done on charcoal braziers, as the electrical heaters had long since disappeared. Everyone who was managing to maintain a semblance of a middle class life style was involved in some kind of scam. Even the honoured representatives of the development community were involved in the parallel economy. A United Nations Development Program representative was operating a bar and night club across the road from his office; and the World Bank representative at the same time was not only using official cars to bring contraband goods in from neighbouring Togo for sale to local traders, but was also changing the foreign currency of visiting World Bank staff into the local currency at the official rate, which he then took to an underground black market trader under a tree near the airport who paid him four times that rate. Obviously both were trying to demonstrate the benefits of entrepreneurship!

Faces of Globalisation A couple of years ago in the far south of Ethiopia, a thousand or more kilometres from Addis Ababa, far from the nearest road, along a sandy trail through acacia trees and deep elephant grass, a man leapt onto my Land Cruiser, naked but for a sub machine gun and cartridge belt. Driving became difficult as my concentration continuously wandered from the rutted track to the naked torso and genitals hanging almost in front of my face. I could not frighten him off, as I frequently had to do with children, because of the dangerous

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weapon hanging on his back. After a few kilometres, reaching his destination, he jumped off. Further along the track we arrived at a village where a group of young men were preening and decorating each other with carefully applied white paint over their entire bodies from head to toe. They were all completely naked except for the guns that each carried with pride. Meanwhile their women were away in the fields trying to eke out a living from the parched soil. When I first arrived in Ghana in 1960 there was a tribal conflict taking place in the North East of the country between two warring tribes who had been fighting on and off over land for many years. That particular clash was the most serious that had taken place for some time, with many round huts burnt, and five people killed. When I returned to Ghana twenty five years later, the same tribal conflict had flared up again, but this time thousands of huts were burnt and hundreds killed, and teachers and health workers were forced to flee the area. This second time round, machine guns instead of bows and arrows were the weapons of choice on both sides. In the latter part of the 1970’s I was involved in a project designed to bring basic literacy and health services to the hill tribes in the North West of Thailand. This involved trekking into their heartlands, staying with them, and helping them become conscious of the major problems affecting them in their daily lives. Above all they wanted to be freed from the control of the Kuomintang troops who had been left behind after the Second World War, as the Chinese nationalists fled to Taiwan. Like many of the poor throughout the world, their biggest problem was the abuse of power by the local authorities; in this case, a foreign army. The Kuomintang was firmly in control of the opium trade. As a foreigner, I had to flee the area whenever an opium caravan was in the vicinity. These caravans consisted of several hundred mules loaded with opium, with accompanying guards, armed with the latest weaponry. Whenever they passed through a village they would steal the animals and food stocks on their way. We used often to spend our Sundays on Koh Chang, a beautiful deserted island in the Gulf of Thailand, a few hours drive from Bangkok. Arriving at a nearby fishing harbour, we would squeeze


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our way through the tightly packed wooden houses around the bay, and walk along a rickety bamboo pier, through racks of squid stretched on frames to dry in the sun, to negotiate with a sleepy boatman to take us in his motorized canoe for the forty-five minute trip to the island. There we had a hot dry island with a hill in the middle and sandy beaches and coral all to ourselves, except for the angels of death. Towards evening, wave after wave of totally black B-52 bombers would take off from a nearby military base loaded with bombs to be dropped from on high on unseen targets in Vietnam and Cambodia. The aircrew would return from an evening of destruction to drown their shame in alcohol and drugs in the arms of a Thai prostitute in a loud go-go bar. The scenery in Ethiopia is breathtaking. Craggy mountains stretching as far as the eye can see. Fertile valleys and plateaus with waves of golden grain in the sun and the wind, interspersed with dry scrubland, where herds of camels and goats somehow make their living. No matter what road one takes, destroyed tanks litter the countryside. Hundreds of rusted carcasses of tanks in the South from the Ogaden war with Somalia, further hundreds in the North from the civil war against the communist regime, huge numbers in the North and East from the war with Eritrea, and a smattering of upturned tanks from the West from some argument with Sudan. Each of these tanks must have cost several hundred thousand dollars, such a waste in a country that cannot feed its people even in a good year, and has a major famine with hundreds of thousands of deaths every five or six years. At least the rusted tanks can be seen, but not the millions of mines, which still kill and maim at random. The world is awash with weapons of human destruction, weapons that are actually used to kill and destroy. Thanks to globalisation and the free trade in weaponry, hundreds of thousands, if not millions, are killed each year from mankind’s most awful creations. Bombers and tanks, mortars and machine guns, and mines each more deadly than its predecessor, are willingly sold to profligate killers that pillage the countries they claim to govern. Keep markets open, let free trade flourish, no matter what horrors it may cause. Arms embargos are rarely maintained, as weapons manufacturers carry great political clout. Only after Ethiopia and Eritrea had been

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fighting for more than six months was an arms embargo imposed, and within a few weeks of the first cease fire it was lifted.

Put the People First Development professionals from North America and Western Europe assume that civil servants should be serving the people, when in fact the main objectives of many civil services in the poorer countries is to provide employment for school leavers and party loyalists. We expect that teachers, if they are paid, should be found teaching children in classrooms. It takes many contrary experiences for us to be disabused of this belief. As a rule of thumb from visits to many hundreds of classrooms in more remote rural areas in Africa and Asia, where the majority of children live, 70% of teachers are not in their classrooms at the time of such visits. Usually children are much more eager to learn than teachers to teach, and it takes years for this eagerness to be destroyed. The fact that in many African and Asian countries teachers are conspicuous through their absence already gives children the idea that one can have a job without working. I spent the first half of the 1980’s running an education for rural development project in the Far West of Nepal. Our Headquarters was in Silgarhi, a village of around two thousand caste riddled Rajputs, untouchables, and civil servants, on a ridge on the lower slopes of the Himalayas. My two story house was on a spur, jutting off the top of this ridge, and had a view of ever higher mountains in every direction. My house was made of cow dung and stone with a slate roof. The ground floor was for keeping the cattle I did not possess, the first floor was the living area, not high enough to stand up in without stooping, but from which I could get hold of any of my possessions without moving, and the attic was for cooking and keeping foodstuffs. On a terrace below this house of mine was the local land reform office. At ten o’clock every morning the office peon would drag the tables and chairs onto the grass in front of the building, so the officials could be warmed by the sun. A few minutes later the staff would


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arrive, take their places, and immediately put their heads on their desks, and have their first nap of the day. An hour or so later the peon would shake each official in turn, to wake him up, and serve his morning cup of sweet tea. This was followed by an animated discussion of the week-old newspapers, and of local personalities and politics, and a second cup of tea. Tired out from the exertions of these discussions, the land reform experts would all have an afternoon nap on their desks in the sun. Once more they would be shaken awake by their peon for their afternoon tea, thereafter would pack away their files and return home from a hard day at the office, without being bothered by any visit from the public. The peon would then drag the furniture back into the building, lock up, and return home himself. Challenged by me some months later as to why they were not actively involved in the Government’s land reform movement, they complained that they were understaffed. Visiting primary schools in Eastern Nepal one Monday, we were surprised to find that none of the schools were operating. School after school was closed. It was difficult to find out why, as most of the villagers were out working in the fields. Finally we found a group of parents, and they explained to us that their school had two teachers, in common with most of the schools in the area. One would work on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, and the other on Thursdays and Fridays. Both would take a long weekend from Saturday to Monday. The parents’ committee had been to the district education office to complain, but were not made to feel welcome, and came away empty handed. Later we questioned the district official, and he agreed that the teachers were expected to teach six days a week, from Sunday to Friday. He admitted sending the parents’ group away, as they were troublemakers. If he accepted the parents’ complaints he would have to sanction those teachers who were not working the days expected of them, which would make him unpopular with his peers. Better children are not taught than to upset the status quo. Some years later, travelling through a secondary forest in Eastern Ghana, I arrived at a primary school at nine in the morning, half an hour later than school was supposed to start. There were plenty of children around but no teachers. After some time a couple of

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groggy, hung over teachers arrived and started to teach in a desultory fashion. I asked to see the headmaster, and there was an embarrassed silence, again I asked, and again the teachers looked the other way. A third time I asked, and was shown a madman, chained to a pole in the middle of the village. Evidently the headmaster had become crazy more than a month before. The Parent Teacher Association had been to the local district office to ask for him to be replaced, but up to that time no action had been taken. When we passed through the district capital we asked the education officer why the madman had not been removed. He explained, in all seriousness, that it would be too disturbing, academically, to change a head teacher in the middle of a school year. To see your headmaster chained to a pole in the middle the village cannot give a positive educational message to the students, and cannot encourage those children who are not in school to enrol. On the same trip we visited a district hospital, and in the maternity ward were astounded to see a nurse kicking and beating an exceedingly pregnant woman who was in great pain and distress. Evidently the woman was unable or unwilling to give birth naturally, and the nurse was trying to knock her out of her laziness. In the mid 1990’s in Cameroon I developed a high profile, but short–lived, ‘Village Immersion Program.’ This initiative was designed to ensure that those working on Cameroon from the World Bank Headquarters in Washington would have some idea of the problems and expectations of ordinary villagers in different parts of the country. It was hoped that by so doing the Bank’s lending policies would not only be based on what its staff were told by Government fat cats, but would also have a human face. Under this initiative I identified villages distant from Yaounde, the capital city, but on a motorable track, and arranged for groups of three or four Washington-based World Bank officials working on Cameroon to stay for two weeks, each in separate huts, but in the same village. Each hut would be equipped with a mosquito net, a bed and mattress, and plenty of bottled water. We checked that the water in the village well was not polluted, explained the objective of the program, sought volunteers, and gave a small amount of money to the selected house owner to enable him to provide some special food for his


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guests. One group stayed in a village in the far North, and a second group in the Far East of Cameroon. The clearest finding of both groups was that villagers had absolutely no confidence in either the Government or any Government services or officials, and only wished that they would never have to meet or deal with a civil servant. Though the first village was only a five kilometre walk from a small town where there was a Government hospital, whenever any villager was seriously ill they would carry him or her nineteen kilometres to a mission hospital rather than face a Government institution. The school serving this village was a broken-walled and roofless shell, with the children sitting on rocks instead of furniture. About twenty kilometres away in the same district was the village of a leading politician. It had more than twice the number of new, cement block classrooms than were needed, and all built with Government funds. Half the population of the second village in the Far East had migrated to a less accessible area, where they would not be bothered by the constant demands of civil servants for money. They were also as unwilling to patronize the local health centre as were those in the North.

Privatisation Privatisation is one of the current mantras of development gurus, and no civil servants had taken this mantra so much to heart as those in Cameroon. Teachers sold places in the front rows of their overcrowded classrooms, parents had to pay if they wanted their child’s exercise books to be corrected, and the only way a child could complete the curriculum in an examination year was through private tuition with his class teacher. An Inspector’s main function on visiting a school was to be fed. Poor food and drink resulted in a poor report. Headmaster’s posts were sold, and those in the largest secondary schools were under the control of the Minister himself, and thus no Minister ever left the Ministry of Education poorer than when he was appointed. Identity cards, without which a person hardly existed, were only available to those who paid the proper price, as were driving licenses and visas. One time I had to delay an overseas trip, as I could not get my passport, with a new residence

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visa, out of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs without greasing the way, something I was unwilling to do. Perhaps this near complete privatisation of public services was not what the development gurus had been extolling. Elsewhere the demand for schooling is so great that private schools have become one of the leading industries. In many places one merely has to put up a sign board and eager parents come running, especially for those parts of the system where state provision is non-existent or inadequate, such as nursery schools; or for those levels which enable a child to eventually claim a place in a high quality public school. In Ghana the richer parents send their children to private primary schools, thus enabling their children to monopolise places in the highly subsidised public secondary boarding schools. In other cases children who fail to get into the subsidised public schools attend poor quality private alternatives. As an increasing proportion of the middle classes send their children to private schools, interest in and resources for improving the effectiveness of public schools wanes. In Cameroon virtually none of the higher level officials in the Ministry of Education were sending their children to Government schools, and in many parts of Nepal local leaders sent their children to private schools in India. In both these countries a smaller share of national income is devoted to public education than in other similar countries. Lessons can be learnt from the operation of private schools, which usually produce better academic results than public schools with equivalent inputs. This is largely because the owner makes sure that his teachers are present and teaching every day in the academic year. From this it is clear that supervision of public schools must also take place on a daily basis, which can only happen if parent groups are given the responsibility and authority for such supervision.

Flies in the Sugar The Bob Dylan song ‘We have to serve someone’ has made me wonder who I have been serving throughout my career; my employers, the Governments in the countries I have been based, my colleagues, or the people in the places where I have worked. All the major development agencies have their headquarters physically and psychologically far from where the social and economic development of the poorest countries should be taking place. It is the snow storm in Washington that is closer to the concerns of World Bank staff than the fog in N’djamena, and the elections in France closer to the hearts of French development officials than those in Chad. Aid bureaucrats worry when the interest rate on their mortgage climbs above 6% p.a, whilst the poor in the countries they deal with face rates of 100% a month or more. Aid agency officials send their children to private schools, and are concerned if the pupil teacher ratio exceeds 24, oblivious to the ratios in excess of 100 in many of the schools serving the children of their clients. Most of those who work for these donor and lender organisations have never felt the poverty faced by the people in the countries that they are supposed to be helping, and are more at ease talking to Government Ministers and officials who have studied in the same universities as they than listening to the people. I have worked for the Nuffield and Ford Foundations, UNESCO, USAID, and the World Bank, and have never fitted into their Headquarters culture. Though these organizations have been indispensable for my work, I have never felt that I should be serving them, and have never been interested in climbing up their hierarchies.

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Over the past four decades I have worked with twenty or so different Governments in Africa and Asia, most of which had little or no legitimacy, as they had gained power through coups or rigged elections. These have concentrated their efforts on thievery for themselves, their clans and cliques, rather than in improving the lives of their people. I have never felt that I had to serve such power grabbers merely because they call themselves the Government. I have had the honour to work with hundreds, if not thousands of dedicated men and women whose lives have been devoted to improving the existence of the wretched of the earth all over the world. Though I have done, and will still do everything I can to support these courageous people, it is not even they that I have been trying to serve. It is the tens of millions of slum dwellers, villagers, and nomads who are never sure where tomorrow’s food will come from, whose lives I have tried to improve through radical human- centred development schemes. It is the poor who are cheated by landowners, and exploited by the police and Government officials, who I have endeavoured to keep in the forefront of my thoughts throughout my career. It is these people who, through innovative education, that I hope I have helped believe more in themselves, and believe that through their own efforts, tomorrow will be better than today.

Where we Stay is Who we Are I have always travelled light, as luggage weighs me down and restricts my mobility. In my first trip around Africa I carried a small backpack that I could lift with one hand, with two changes of clothes, soap, and a toothbrush, a camera, a water bottle, a small kerosene stove and a pan, and my luxury…an air mattress. Our possessions are our security. We travel from one country to another, from one hotel to another, with great suitcases full of stuff. We carry more in our suitcases than those who we are supposed to be helping have in their houses. In so many places where I have stayed, I have been astonished by how the people manage with almost nothing. A clay pot or two, some storage bins, old tins and

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bottles, mats on the floor to sleep on, and a micmac of miscellaneous kitchen items. Even when nomads migrate with everything that they own, including their houses, they seem to have less than I, in my land cruiser driving by their side. Their wealth is not the inanimate things that they carry, but the hundreds of goats, cows, and camels that accompany them, and make up their bank account. In Ethiopia and Chad I sometimes passed nomads on the move, with their camels and buffaloes swaying across the burnt out plains, searching for fresh fodder. Their huts, firewood, food, and other worldly possessions strapped on the backs of their animals, along with their women and children. One night I stopped with a nomadic group and their herds. Their first task was to repair a thorn bush coral they had left behind on a previous journey. Only when their animals were safe from hyenas and lions did the unloading begin. Then with calm efficiency round houses were off-loaded from the camels’ backs and assembled, camels and cows milked, fires lighted, and a milk, yoghurt, and grain gruel prepared for the evening meal. Though the night was cold, I preferred to sleep in the open air rather than in a crowded hut sandwiched between rancid butter smelling, flea ridden nomads. We must leave as much of our world behind as we can if we are to begin to understand anything about the people in the places to which we travel. Our luggage is too often our link to our culture and our roots. Whenever I had foreign consultants working for me I would insist that for the first part of their assignment they leave all their documents and statistics locked in their suitcases, and travel as widely as possible on public buses, to get a feel for the realities of ordinary people in the countries they were supposed to be helping. During my time in the Far West of Nepal it was difficult for me to find places to stay whenever I made my regular supervision visits, as I came from a cow-eating untouchable caste, which was about as low as you could get. I understood why most villagers did not want me to stay in their houses, as custom demanded when their house was defiled by an untouchable, that they would not only have to repaint the entire house inside and out, but also have to carry out over

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two hundred different purification rites, in order to make their home habitable once again. Though I understood the risks of offering me hospitality, it was very uncomfortable sleeping on the floor of the cowshed, butted by goats, or woken by a cow in the middle of the night. Menstruating woman are not allowed inside any house during their monthly period, and thus also have to sleep with the animals. This was sometimes interesting, as it was one of the few opportunities I had to speak to any woman and have any understanding of their reality. For the five days of her menses a woman is not allowed in the main house, nor allowed to play any role in the preparation of food. Most looked forward to their time with the animals, as this was the only rest they got from their gruelling fifteen-hour days. In the tea shops, which were found along most of the major trails, the clay cups that my family and I used had to be broken when we had finished drinking so that no one else would be able to use them after we had polluted them. Normally untouchables like us could not be served any milk, as this would risk the life of the cow that produced the milk. When buying goods in the bazaar we had to throw our money at the shopkeeper, and he would throw the change back at us. The trails were busy thoroughfares in the months before the main festivals. All the men from distant villages would go on their annual shopping spree, mainly for salt for their families and their cattle, but also for cloth, for rubber flip flops, and for battery cells for their torches. These shopping trips would take as much as thirty days, with a dozen days spent trekking in each direction, and five or six for the actual haggling and buying. Then there were the men who were returning from years working as night watchmen in India, loaded down with gifts for their families, who they had not seen for many years. Finally there were the local travellers, wedding parties, and families on visits to friends from one or two mountain ridges, and a couple of days walk away. A thriving hotel business developed in the bigger villages, places that would regularly serve food and provide a mat on the floor for the night. After a hard days trek I would not notice when the walls

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were black instead of the customary red brown, and would lean against them, only to have the whole room come to life with what seemed to be millions of irate flies. These establishments were not centres of gaiety, but places where huge quantities of rice and lentils were consumed in silence, often with lethal quantities of alcohol. During my first few years of mountain trekking, my body sometimes protested strongly against the stresses of endless hours of climbing and descending mountains combined with extreme ranges in temperatures. Sometimes my knees would give out, and they could only be brought back to life with a few days rest wherever I was, combined with poultices of hot limes baked in the fire. Far more serious, after one particularly strenuous day of trekking I suffered a life- threatening bout of hypothermia. I lay down in a village lane, shivering wildly and unable to move. A colleague covered me with both our sleeping bags, and when my shivering did not stop he lay on top of me. Still I continued to shiver until I was carried into a house and put down next to a roaring fire. As the years passed not only did my trekking skills improve, but also I became increasingly well known in the hills and valleys of the Far West of Nepal. It seemed that my caste had somehow changed, or the honour to have me stay in their house compensated for the subsequent paint job and pujas needed. It got to the stage where no sooner was I seen coming over a mountain ridge starting my descent to a village in the valley below, than a goat would be slaughtered to cement my relationship with the village leaders. No matter how poor a village is in the mountains of Nepal there were mats to sleep on, goats to kill, and milk to drink. In the mountains of Ethiopia, however, I felt more poverty than anywhere else I had ever been. Even as an honoured guest I usually had to sleep on skins on the cold mud floor along with the rest of the family. There were no culinary treats, merely black unleavened bread, pepper sauce, and weak millet beer. The only treat was to have my feet washed, biblical style, by a young woman of the household. At least in the mountains, the forest, the savannah, and the coast, I could usually find a village, and no matter how rudimentary the houses or huts, they were always adapted to the surrounding climatic

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conditions. The small windowless African round huts, even in the Sahel in summer, with scorching outside temperatures, are always cool inside. The woven split bamboo walled hut is ideal for the coast, as it allows the sea breeze to blow through the walls and keep fishermen and their families cool inside. The wooden Thai house built on stilts also catches whatever breeze there is; whilst at the same time protects the farmers from the annual floods. Only in the desert, where villages were far one from each other, and where the areas around water sources so foul and flea ridden, was I forced to camp. What always astounded me was that no matter how far I was from any human habitation, there was always life and always people. One time whilst camping in the Karamoja region in Northeast Uganda more than 50 km from the nearest village, I saw a near-naked Karamojong man loping across the desert towards me. Only when he was a few meters away did I realise that all was not well with him, and that he had a deep open wound stretching from his back to his side. He indicated that I was to help him. The wound looked deep enough for his kidney to fall out, and was probably a spear wound. I washed it with disinfectant the best that I could, gave him a couple of aspirins and a banana, and after fifteen minutes, much to my relief, he was ready to continue his run across the desert. I did not want to face those who had wounded this warrior, and who might be chasing after him.

Do You Like to Eat Shit? Multitudes of physically fit and mentally alert trekkers travel in Nepal every year, and are moved by the golden crops in the valleys, suspension bridges across roaring mountain torrents, and the rose coloured snow capped mountains that awe them at dawn and dusk. Terraces climb the sides of these mountains, sometimes into the sky. Peasants toil in the fields, husk and grind the wheat and millet, and walk with great loads on their backs with apparent ease. Friendly porters carry their tents, their food, and their bags, and cooks serve tea and meals at a moment’s notice. Most feel that they have found a Shangri-La.

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Unfortunately, the beauty of the scenery blinds these wellmeaning visitors from an awareness of the human condition. They cannot feel the all-pervasive caste system or the fact that women work fifteen hours a day or more. They cannot know that for three months before the harvest each year the people are hungry, nor that up to half the men in the Far West of the country have been forced to migrate to India, to return home on foot only once every decade or so. The picture postcard pretty villages, with mud walled slate roofed houses, hide the fact that the Nepali village is often a disgusting place. Many are the times that I have known that I would soon arrive at my destination from the smell of human excrement that wafted up from an unseen village. Parents put their children in front of their houses to defecate, and they do not go much further themselves. The rain washes human and animal excrement into the water sources, which are shared by humans and animals alike. Intestinal parasites and diarrhoea are nearly universal, weakening those who are already undernourished. No one will change their practices or behaviours merely because some outside expert comes along and tells them that they should. They first need to develop an understanding that an existing practice causes them problems. They then need to realise that alternatives are possible, alternatives where the effort needed for change results in visible and tangible benefits. My challenge in the education programs I have helped design or improve has been to create situations so that the people themselves get a new understanding of their own reality, which in turn will lead them into action that can benefit their own lives. The ultimate objective of rural education programmes must be to encourage the people to take action, not merely to repeat words. Far too often school programs are designed so that the participant merely regurgitates in examinations the facts that he has memorised in class. Is there any point in children and adults being able to say that they should keep their faces and bodies clean, and wash their hands before and after meals, if they come to school or adult class unwashed and with food and dirt under their nails?

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A Chinese philosopher from the fourth century BC provided me with the inspiration for my new education with the following words of wisdom: “I hear and I forget, I see and I remember I do and I understand” The following gives an example of how we applied these principles to help villagers take action to improve the cleanliness of their environment. As a part of a literacy class we put sweetened white rice on a plate, and sprinkled red tika powder on some excrement nearby. Along with the adult learners we sat back and watched as the white rice gradually turned pink. There was an active discussion of why the white rice was changing colour. Finally one of the brightest in the group suggested that flies were bringing the red powder from the faeces to the rice on their bodies and legs. Is that all that they are bringing, we asked? More discussion and finally all participants agreed that they must also be bringing some faeces. Do you like to eat excrement, we asked? Universally everyone said no. What will you do to prevent this? A plan of action is developed, their plan of action to solve their problem, and the next day they started to build pit latrines, and some even buried the soiled straw and animal dung from their cow sheds. In a later class they realised that this would also produce improved compost. Dozens of such learning experiences were developed in this program, designed to lead to a transformation in the quality of life of boys and girls and men and women in several hundred villages, some up to eight days walk from our headquarters, which was in turn three days walk from the nearest road. Vegetable seeds, fruit tree saplings, water pipes, de-worming and other medicines, lanterns, kerosene, and books had to be ready for distribution to some of the remotest places on this planet. Sometimes there were as many as three hundred volunteer porters at any one time on trails too steep for mules, to bring in the development inputs requested by the villagers.

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Cultural Sensitivity How many of us know that in many rural societies the first step in any education program is to teach the learner to read pictures. Those who are not familiar with pictures see their world as a multicoloured, three dimensional place, which has little relationship to the black and white two dimensional representation of a printed picture. Even after learning to read pictures, new picto-literates tend to see the details, and not the broad sweep of a picture. Presented with a photo of the view from her village, and asked what she sees, a villager might only be aware of a mango tree in the far distance. In this world where television and even the internet seem to be a regular part of everyone’s life, there are still many millions who have yet to see a picture. Designing education programs that are culturally sensitive is extraordinary difficult, and is usually not attempted, as it is so much easier to design curricula for the more homogenous urban middle classes, even though the more marginalized groups may be much more in need of relevant learning. It is said that when the Dutch Governor of Indonesia was once making an official visit to Bali, his servants rode ahead announcing that the Governor was coming, and that all the women must cover their breasts. As the Governor came near, following the instructions, the women lifted their skirts over their chests uncovering their pubis and buttocks in so doing. The clearest instruction can be easily misunderstood when given across cultures.

Maintaining Cultural Diversity When I started work in Ghana, the Frafra and other tribes in Northwest Ghana wore nothing but leaves to cover their sex. Purchases in their markets were paid with cowry shells, and each nearnaked trader had a pile of shells in front of his or her produce. They had never seen the written word, and they could not understand what the function of the school could be, taking their sons and daughters away from productive work, locking them in a room and shouting at them in a strange language. How could it help for your children to

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sit in a dark room all day long with many other children? Where is the commonality of these Northern tribes with the growing Ashanti, Fanti, and Ga middle classes living in and around Accra and other cities, who are determined that their children should attend boarding secondary schools with a curriculum leading to the British Cambridge School Certificate. Thailand is thought by most Thais to be a homogenous country with one culture, a culture where one curriculum can be useful for all its children and youths. This is not the case, as there are three Malay-speaking provinces in the South, and in the mist covered hills of Northern Thailand there are at least six different hill tribes, each with a language totally different in structure from Thai, and each with their own culture and customs. Some grow and use opium, and others would never touch the drug, some practice shifting cultivation, and others have sophisticated irrigation schemes. Some have their roots in Southern China and others in Laos or Burma. One evening we arrived at a run down Karen hill tribe settlement in a forest near the Burmese border. In a ramshackle wooden hut an emaciated woman was boiling a pot of wild roots to feed her five sick children and her husband. He was spending what was left of his family income and his life lying on the floor, propped up with a dirty cushion, smoking pipe after pipe of opium. It was such a beautiful crop, with wave after wave of white and pink poppies, stretching as far as the eye can see, but so destructive to so many families. It is a crop requiring great skill to plant, to weed, and to care for. It is also a crop that requires even greater skill to harvest. The grower has to gently slit the poppy bud on three sides, collect the drops of resin from each slit, and roll it in ever larger balls, ready to sell to traders or poison the lives of thousands of tribesmen as their families starve around them. Where are the cultural similarities between these hill tribes and the middle class Thais driving from their apartments and town houses to their tower block offices? Or even between this bourgeoisie and the urban poor crammed in overcrowded leaking huts at the end of fetid lanes in the least habitable parts of the cities, as often as not addicted to smoking heroin, and infected with HIV AIDS. Ob-

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viously every mother, from whatever ethnic group or class, would like her children to live a happier and more secure life than she herself, and if this can be assured through the school, well and good. But this by itself is not a sufficient commonality for the development of a curriculum that can serve everybody. There is the pretence that all children from whatever social or ethnic group have an equal chance to climb to the highest levels of the school system, and into secure employment, when this is obviously not the case. In all developing societies, the chance of success in an exam of a middle class child coming from a literate environment, with electric light, benefiting from private tuition, going to a better endowed school, is many times greater than that of a child from a rural area or urban slum, with poorly educated or illiterate parents, no electric light, and attending a school with few if any text books and unmotivated teachers. School systems create the pretence of equality of opportunity, without the reality. They justify the maintenance of the status quo. Taking this as a given, my job has been to see how much leeway there is for education to also be useful for the children of the disadvantaged.

Educational Reform I have spent my career trying to adapt or design curricula that help children and adults better cope with the world around them. Almost always reforms in education lag far behind those elsewhere in the larger society. Mainstream school systems are very difficult to change, as they are extensive in their coverage, employ huge numbers of people, and thus have a massive inertia. They are also loaded with vested interests. Those who now occupy elite positions in any country did very well from the existing school system, and see no reason why their own children should pass through a system much different from the one that benefited them. In the poorer countries more than a half of the total population is a teacher, a student, or a parent of a child who is in school. The network of public primary schools is far more extensive than any other public institutional network, except for the military in the worst type of police state. The school system is inbred, as someone who wants to be a teacher graduates from school and immediately enters a Teacher Training College or Faculty of Education. The instructors in these colleges have been trained in the same institutions in which they are teaching. It is very difficult to drop any subjects from the school curriculum, as there are teachers, curriculum developers, text book writers, and inspectors whose very employment depends on that subject continuing to be taught. Latin is still common in the secondary school curriculum in francophone African countries, more common than sex education. New fashionable subjects are added from time to time, resulting in an overcrowded curriculum that can rarely be covered in an academic year.

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There are times when vested interests are so entrenched that no meaningful reforms are possible, and at other times when external political circumstances or financial considerations make significant change possible. Part of my skill has been to grab the moment when the school system can be reformed, to make powerful allies, to generate the needed resources, and run with the regeneration of the school system for as long as possible.

School Systems To me it has always been obvious that many different curricula within one system are needed to respond to the learning requirements of the different groups of people who exist in every country. This has never happened in Ghana. The Ghanaian educational administrators modelled their schools on the homogenous system found in England. To an even greater extent, administrators in the ex- French colonies designed their school systems on what was found in metropolitan France. The ebony black Chadian child, living on the edge of the Sahara desert, had until recently learnt about ‘my ancestors the Gauls,’ and also benefited from a skiing holiday in February. The few attempts that have been made to adapt schooling to the needs of rural children, or those of a particular ethnic group, have usually not succeeded, as these alternatives have not been seen by parents as giving their children the same chance, however remote, of progressing up the school system and out of rural poverty as children in mainstream, urban based schools. What parent wants their child to attend a second class school? In order to enhance learning and to prevent there being a chasm between home and school, a child should always start his schooling in his maternal language. Even in Europe, with its huge immigrant communities, this is not possible to do. In a city such as London three hundred and sixty languages are spoken, and only a very few of the most important are taught in school. In Africa, where qualified curriculum developers are few and far between, many systems only use the language of the old colonial masters which is no one’s maternal language, imposing yet another learning disadvantage on the African child. The vast majority of children in Africa start their

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schooling in a language that they do not understand at all, whose roots and structure are not related to the language that he or she speaks at home. It is as if an English six year old boy or girl had to start his or her schooling in Chinese or Thai. There is such a proliferation of languages in Africa that a small country such as Togo, with a population of 4 million, has over 80 that are actively used. Even though most of the six thousand languages that are currently spoken in Africa are only used by a few thousand people, there are still many that are spoken by millions. In Ghana, though a hundred or more languages are spoken in a population of fifteen million, sixteen cover 95% of the population, eight cover 90%, and one language over 50%. Politicians are usually in favour of teaching in the colonial language, as they then do have to make the choice as to what languages should be taught and which not. Parents want their children to learn the colonial language, as they believe that this is a part of the way out of poverty into paid employment in the towns and abroad, and they falsely feel that the earlier a child starts to learn this language the more proficient he will become. Learning suffers, and the African or Asian child gets further and further behind his European and American peers. In one Thai hill tribe school I was very impressed by what I thought was the Thai reading ability of the children, especially as their tribal language bore no similarities to Thai. One boy was reading the textbook without a single error. It was only when I tried to discuss with him what he had read that I realised that he did not understand a single word of what he was reading so perfectly. Such reading is hardly a useful life skill! A normal, logical hierarchy of learning involves starting reading and writing in the learner’s maternal language. Given the large number of languages in Ghana, we had to train teachers in the preparation and printing of introductory reading materials in a child’s maternal language using a home made silk screen press. The child in the richer countries will probably attend school for 180 or more days a year, and have anything from 1,000 to 1,200

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hours of effective learning a year. The teacher will be trained, and if she cannot teach one day, will be replaced by a supply teacher. There will normally be 20 to 40 children in the class, plenty of books and other learning materials, and increasingly a few computer terminals. In most places where I have worked there are, according to the law, supposed to be 180 to 210 days of learning a year, but in fact a school is closed at every excuse. It is not uncommon for the teacher to spend several days a month collecting his salary. In parts of Northern Ghana schools hardly operate during the two months of the funeral season. In most places the school closes on the weekly market day. Schools close because it is raining, or even because it looks as if it might rain. Schools are closed for examinations, for preparing for examinations, and for marking the exams. Schools universally close for national day celebrations, and for extensive preparation for these celebrations. I have even found in one case the school closed for the inspector’s visit! It is not uncommon for the 180 to 210 days to be reduced to around 110 days. This would be bad enough, but since the scheduling of the academic year is not based on the agricultural calendar, children are also often absent. With the first rains the classrooms empty. Combining these factors, the child might only have 80 to 90 days of schooling a year. In towns, most schools operate on a double shift basis. One group of children attends school in the morning, and another group uses the same facilities in the afternoon; whilst in rural areas many schools operate on a half day basis, reducing the daily hours to about four, and the annual total to around 350 hours, less than one third the level in the richer countries. Class sizes are also much larger in the poorest countries, with averages over sixty. The classrooms are usually bare, and the children often do not have access to the basic textbooks, let alone any other learning materials. Many schools operate out of temporary facilities. Furniture is often non-existent, with the children sitting on mats or rocks, with their slates or exercise books on their knees. In some places I have met children walking to school with a stool and a small table balanced on their heads. Teaching is one of the most important professions that exist. We put our children in the care of the teacher for a good part of the year.

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We expect our children will be cared for in school, and will also learn something at the same time. We do not expect that they will be abused in school, either by the teacher or by the other students. All research shows that the quality and effectiveness of the learning process is more dependent on the teacher than anything else. As in every profession, there are many skilled and motivated teachers, but also others who are not concerned whether the children learn anything or not. In the early 1960’s surveys showed that the teacher was one of the most respected of professions in rural areas in Africa. More recent studies have shown the opposite. In Ghana during the economic collapse of the early eighties, teachers had to take on other work, often farming, merely to survive. When the economy picked up, and their salaries significantly increased, the teachers did not give up this additional work, and thus continued to hardly appear in the classroom. Trained teachers do not want to work in rural areas without any of the comforts and excitement of the modern world. In Yaounde, the capital of Cameroon, there are up to three qualified teachers for each primary school class, whilst in rural areas untrained secondary school graduates do any teaching that takes place. There is so little trust, or so much patronage, that almost all decisions relating to the establishment of schools, and the appointment and promotion of teachers, are taken centrally. In Chad, though it might take a teacher ten days to reach the capital from the school in which he is working, every decision relating to a teacher’s career is taken by the officials behind the iniquitous door 12, in the Civil Service Ministry. In Cameroon the task for a teacher seeking promotion is even more complex, as he needs to get the authorization from officials in three ministries, some of them more than once. It is the children who suffer from this extreme centralisation. Life is not easy for the teacher. In most of the poorer countries, when he is recruited he has to wait many months before he receives his first pay, the time when he most needs money to establish himself at his new post. Several countries are unable to pay their teachers regularly. In Sierra Leone, before the civil wars of the 1990’s, teachers were being paid around 18 months in arrears, in Chad seven

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months, and in Djibouti five months, which the Government later announced was lost forever. Even with these arrears teachers were still not being paid regularly. With irregular pay and an over centralised bureaucracy, it is not surprising that there is a lack of teacher motivation. In Chad we gave the primary school management committees funds to recruit and employ their own teachers according to agreed criteria. Teachers were paid by the committees in the school where they were working, and the committees usually found some way to pay them on time. Though their salaries were less than those of civil service teachers, the teachers’ level of motivation and commitment was much higher, and almost all these teachers could be found teaching every day, whilst their higher paid civil service colleagues were more often absent than teaching. The European or American school child may be obese, but many African and Asian children are malnourished. In Ethiopia more than 60% of children are stunted, and will never be able to fully develop physically. In Nepal I have seen children eating the chalk that is given to them for their slates; in North East Thailand I have met children on their way to school collecting dung beetles to eat; and in Ghana I have seen children fight over the roasted carcass of a mouse. Often children are so hungry in class that they do not have the energy to participate actively. They are frequently not only malnourished, but also infested with intestinal parasites. In Nepal and Ghana we gave school age children de-worming medicine, and had a contest in Nepali schools as to who could pass the most worms. Figures in the seventies were not uncommon. A school child in a rich country has access to a wide range of text and work books, readers, exercise books, crayons, and other learning materials. A school child in a poorer country has little more than a slate or exercise book, chalk or a pen. Like many other high value commodities, the text book business in the poorer countries is riddled with corruption. In Ghana the illustrations were of Chinese looking children in a specially commissioned set of primary texts, in Nigeria pirated picture perfect copies of British text books were sold at one quarter the price of the originals, and in Thailand back street

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presses were producing textbooks at half the price of the Government printer. Many of the Francophone Ministers of Education have been ‘bought’ by French school book publishers. Books are so valuable that container loads of books purchased for free distribution in Chad have turned up in the markets of Benin, several thousand kilometres away. In another case, in Guinea, amongst twenty five containers of books purchased from a French publisher, three contained no books, but merely Mercedes Benz cars. I have at times recommended pirating much of the content of texts produced by international publishers in order to reduce the costs of the texts to affordable levels. It is better to break copyrights so that all children can have access to some textbooks than maintaining inflated profit margins of first world publishers Given the inappropriate curriculum taught in a foreign language, the short academic year, the frequent teacher absence, the lack of basic teaching learning materials, and the hunger of many of the school children, it is surprising that the rural child manages to learn anything from school. In Chad, taking account of repetition and dropout, it is necessary to invest twenty seven pupil years of education to produce each eighth grade primary school graduate.

Non-Formal Alternatives to Schooling The learning in school is often not the most effective way for transmitting appropriate knowledge, skills, attitudes, and practices. Well designed non-formal literacy programmes can be better adapted to the particular needs of rural children and adults. Since literacy programs do not carry the same load of vested interests as the school, they are more open to innovation, often showing the direction school reforms might take at a later stage. School children, especially those in primary school, are a captive audience. They go to school because their parents send them, whether they like it or not. This is not the case with participants in non-formal literacy programs for children or adults, where a participant only attends because he or she is motivated to do so. Opportunity costs for the literacy learner must thus be reduced to a minimum. Classes need to be held at a convenient time and in a convenient place, minimising

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time spent on travelling to class. For example, we designed the Cheli Beti (small girl) functional literacy class in Nepal, which was normally held early in the morning before the girls became involved in their daily chores of collecting water and firewood and taking the animals out to pasture. Literacy classes for adult men and women take place late in the evening, after the day’s work was over and the evening meal eaten. The space used by a literacy class is also important, and often the school is not appropriate. Too often the school building is far from the village, designed more for the convenience of teachers and administrators than for the children. Literacy classes cannot take place in a distant classroom, but must be held somewhere convenient for the learner. It is unlikely that adults will travel far in the evening after a hard day’s work. Other forms of motivation are important. The learner needs to feel proud of his or her participation, must find it fun, and must believe it to be useful. I have joined processions of learners as they snaked through dark village lanes late in the evening, led by singing literacy participants, many with bright lanterns. Even the tiredest learner cannot resist joining such a group. In other places the facilitator motivated participation by naming the environment; “Ram’s House,” “Baobab tree,” and even “Kwame’s cow.” Everyone wonders what these signs are, what the symbols mean, and have to go to class to find out. The curriculum, or what is taught, has to take account of what the learner wants to learn. Many adults are interested more in skills that help them improve their livelihood, or increase their income, than just reading and writing. Reading is a skill like any other, if not used it is easily forgotten. We would not teach someone who lives in a desert to swim. Why do we continue to teach them to read in a literary desert, where no printed reading materials are available in any language? In order to motivate the learner, and allow learning to take account of different socio-economic activities, in both Thailand and Nepal each lesson was produced on a loose-leaf sheet. Learners were provided with an empty file, and each time he or she attended class, would be given the day’s lesson to put in their file. Instead of being discouraged by the enormous difficulty of the last

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pages of a text book, they would instead see their learning increase day by day, as more and more sheets are added to their files. All good curricula have involved potential learners in their development. Nevertheless, every curriculum must have objectives far wider than mere local concerns, such as national unity, learning a language of national communication, modernization, changes in health and hygienic practices, and non-violent resolution of conflicts. Inevitably any form of education, whether school or nonformal, inadvertently helps destroy cultures that have been in existence for many centuries, and marginalize local languages. Who are we to decide that some cultural practices should not be maintained? Recently in Southern Ethiopia we had to decide what should be preserved with the Karo, where the men spend their days painting each others naked bodies whilst their women work in the fields; or with the Mursi, where the women beautify themselves by distorting their lips with ever larger lip plates, making their mouths increasingly dysfunctional; or with the Hammer, whose women welcome being whipped by their male relatives till their backs are scarred and bleeding. The ethical question of what cultural aspects should be supported by the school and what should be discouraged, is one of the big career challenges I never managed to resolve.

In Defence of Human Rights I accepted a six month consultancy in Thailand in 1970 and stayed nine years. The country at that time was very different from the Thailand of today. Deeply rooted traditions still predominated, despite urbanisation, an outward looking middle class, and the presence of tens of thousands of U.S. troops resting from the killing fields of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. Village monks continued to advise as to when crops should be planted and harvested. Almost all young men spent several months or years as monks before they entered the larger society. The temple was the heart of any community, around which everything else rotated. There were more than half a million monks in a population of 36 million. There were 44,000 kilometres of canals, and only 24,000 kilometres of roads, and more water buffalo than cars, trucks, and tractors combined. Communication was oral and almost always face-to-face. Senior civil servants would still sometimes go into their boss’s offices on their knees. There were very few books published in Thai, and even fewer bookshops. All radio and television stations were controlled by the state, or by the military, and the ownership of TV sets was not widespread. There was a growing middle class, mainly urban, often of Chinese origin, who had been demanding political rights since the early 1930’s. Apart from a short period of Japanese occupation during the Second World War, Thailand had never been colonised. Thai was thus the national language, and was spoken in its different dialects by around 85% of the population. Few people challenged the monarchy, and even fewer the position and authority of the present King.

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Given the above, I was surprised that all the academic analyses of Thai problems and prospects at that time were being done from a western academic perspective. No one was writing about Buddhist economics or non-violence, or on building a new education system on the foundations of the monastic education that already existed. There was a lack of comparative analyses between a water- based transport system and one based on roads, or whether local communities could be empowered in their own development. No one had looked at the destructive impact TV was having on family life, culture and community. I therefore decided to try to analyse Thai problems from a Thai perspective. Because of the radical nature of many of the ideas I was developing, and because my main translator was a leading student activist in his own right, with his own following, I soon had large numbers of students coming to our house to discuss these Thai-based ideas that I was working on. I thus knew many of the student activists who were, in 1973, organising a series of demonstrations against the military government in power at that time. I was able to help them find appropriate non-violent strategies for these demonstrations, which eventually, after a lot of bloodshed, led to the military leaders fleeing the country. The contrast between the non-violence of the students and the callous killing by the soldiers produced an upsurge of middle class opposition to the military officers in power. It was one thing to overthrow the military using non-violent methods, and quite another to influence the Government that came in its place, a Government controlled by elitist bourgeois politicians. The student leaders were full of socialist ideals, and believed that their mission was to create a more egalitarian and just society in Thailand. Much of the propaganda that was coming out of neighbouring communist states was appealing, and the use of Thailand as a base for U.S. attacks on Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia appalled many young students. Above all they were nationalist and sought Thai solutions to Thai problems. They did not just talk and write about the society that they wanted to create, but many also devoted time to informing poor people of their rights, teaching school in remote rural areas, or running functional literacy classes for urban workers.

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On the other hand, the urban middle class wanted a constitutional democracy which would allow them to play a significant role in Government. For them such a democracy was an end in itself. The last thing that they wanted was to have to listen to egalitarian fantasies from young students hardly out of their teens. However, given the role these students had played in overthrowing the military, they could not be completely ignored. The new Government proceeded to neutralize my student activist friends by placing them on pedestals and massaging their egos, whilst it quietly consolidated its control of all the instruments of state power, and only later began quietly to rein in, and in some cases kill, the most extreme of the activists. Too late my friends realised an opportunity lost is lost forever. Paranoia set in, and they gradually forgot that their success in 1973 was because they had used non-violent tactics. They began sprouting revolutionary jargon and carried hand guns, even though few knew how to use them. They continued to flock to our house, and I always insisted that they leave their guns outside as I tried to convince them that the means used to reach any goal must be consistent with the goal itself. But to no avail, the divisions in Thai society continued to widen, and the military regrouped, ready for their comeback. Violence was in the air. A large demonstration took place outside the campus from where the most active students came, and the military were itching for revenge. Many of us tried to defuse the situation by arranging for monks to surround the demonstrating students, but were too late to prevent a military attack. In the ensuing battle several hundred young people were killed, and a repressive military government took over. All pretence at conciliation was dropped, with the immediate arrest of around eleven thousand activists who were jailed throughout the country, most of who had done little more than organise to protect their rights against those who were stealing their land or from policemen and other officials who had been misusing their power. Many thousands of students fled into the forests in the north and north east of the country to join the Communist Party of Thailand in its armed struggle against the mili-

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tary Government. It was clear that the repressive activities of the Government resulted in some of the most serious divisions ever to occur in Thai society, divisions which took more than a decade to heal. Three books that I had written were amongst the 129 titles banned by the new Government, and whenever they were found they were publicly burned. I will always remember buying a newspaper with a picture on the front page of a bonfire of books where the title and my name could be easily read. I realised that I could neither leave the country nor sit quietly doing nothing whilst many of my friends languished in jail. I decided that I had no alternative but to organise a campaign from within the country for human rights and justice for those who had been arrested or were otherwise suffering from a misuse of military state power. There existed a relatively inactive organisation at that time called ‘The Coordinating Group for Religion in Society’ composed of Buddhist, Catholic, Protestant, and sometimes Muslim religious thinkers, and the members of this group agreed to take the courageous step of providing a cover for those of us who were ready to actively campaign for the release of the thousands of political prisoners, and a reduction in state terrorism. For three years a small group of young lay men and women and monks worked day and night with me, establishing countrywide information networks, discovering where all the detainees were being held, and publishing a bimonthly ‘Human Rights in Thailand Report.’ Equally important was the creation of international support groups, with visits from foreign lawyers and parliamentarians, and frequent media events so that there was always coverage of Thai human rights activities in the international media. Throughout this period my colleagues and I were living under constant threats to our lives. My letters and those of my family were opened, our phone was tapped, I was followed most of the time, and I was banned from speaking in any university. Telephone tapping at that time was not as sophisticated as nowadays. The tappers would close our phone for their breakfast and lunch break, and confronted with the challenge of having to translate for their superiors hours of the near nonsense conversations my nine year old daughter had with her girlfriends, they often cut the phone at other times also. Sometimes they even interrupted a call to ask us whom we were talking

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to! Once I knew that my calls were tapped, the telephone became an ideal tool to feed misinformation to the military police. Often we exaggerated the extent of high level international support for our activities. The government did not only arrest activists, but also many high level and high class officials were dismissed or sidelined. In so doing an elite group was created who did what they could to undermine the military Government. They did not have the courage of the young activists who put their lives at risk on a daily basis, but were happy with what we were doing and provided us with frequent, but secret, support. One day, arriving in my office I found on my desk a list of all the eleven thousand detainees and where they were being held. I still have no idea where this list came from, or who provided it, but it enabled us to let the families of detainees know where their loved ones were, arrange for monks to visit them, and provide some assistance to the most needy. When the Government tried to throw me out of the country there were many in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs who objected to this, arguing that it would be very bad for the country’s image to expel a U.N. official. I thus managed to stay until the high profile group of student leaders were released, along with most of the other eleven thousand detainees. A week later I left the country. The Coordinating Group for Religion in Society was the first politically active non-governmental organisation in Thailand. There are now hundreds. It was the first organisation which actively preached and used creative non-violence. A couple of its activists are still involved in non-violent training after more than a quarter of a century. It was also non-hierarchical, a pattern that is now used by anti-globalisation organisations everywhere. ‘The sign of a good leader is, when the task is done, the people say that they did it themselves’. For me, perhaps the greatest lesson that I learned from my struggles during this period was that there could be no lasting economic and social development that would have an impact on the mass of the population if basic human rights were not succoured and protected at the same time.

Development Strategies I always thought that it was clear who was poor until we had to present the findings of a poverty survey and assessment that the World Bank had carried out in Ghana to a group of lecturers and professors at the University of Ghana. We started with a definition of poverty: people with a food intake below a certain level, substandard accommodation, illiterate, and never visiting a health centre; and went on to discuss where in Ghana most poor people lived. Much to our surprise we were interrupted by the professors, who claimed that our definition of poverty was flawed and that they were also poor. Five years earlier, we were told, university staff had been provided with a petrol allowance which had since been withdrawn, they no longer had free medical treatment at the university hospital, and now had to pay for the rent of the university bungalows they occupied. They could no longer make ends meet with their salaries, and were thus most certainly poor. Here we were faced with a group who were amongst the more wealthy Ghanaians, claiming in all seriousness that they were poor, and confusing their relative poverty to what they had earned some years before with absolute poverty. Since almost everyone considers that they are poor, it is difficult to implement programmes and projects to alleviate poverty, as they are almost always hijacked by more powerful and more vocal groups. In the 1970’s it was the fashion to try to reduce poverty through integrated rural development projects. We carried out an analysis of one of these projects in Nepal to see what proportion of the money spent actually benefited the poor directly. After subtracting the costs of foreign and Nepali experts, construction of offices, project vehicles, overseas study tours, equipment, and meeting al-

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lowances, it was just six percent of project resources that reached the hands of the poor. It is not surprising that the poor remain poor. Every so often we read that there are a billion poor people who live on less than a dollar a day, and two billion more living on less than two dollars a day. It is, of course, impossible for us to visualise a billion of anything, except that is a huge number, nor to feel what it means to have to find food, clothing, and shelter with only a dollar a day, which is a very small amount. If I only had a dollar a day to cover all my expenditures, and was aware that others of my countrymen had fancy cars and big houses costing more than a million dollars, I am sure that I would become a revolutionary and persuade my fellow sufferers to rise up and claim a larger share of the national pie. If I was an Ethiopian ex-soldier, mutilated in some pointless war, forced to beg and sleep in the streets, and I saw the rich in their stretch limousines pass me by, I am sure I would be ready to be a suicide bomber. But this rarely happens, the poor remain poor, the exploited remain exploited, and the rich continue to flout their richness. This is for several reasons. First, the poor live from one meal to the next, and never have the security of having food for a day, a week, or a month on hand, which would be necessary if they joined any uprising. Secondly, they live in fear: fear of being jailed or beaten up by police or soldiers; fear of being thrown off their land, or out of a job by a local businessman; and fear of being sick and unable to earn the next day’s food. Third, they inherently accept their oppression as the way things are, and have an almost inbred subservience to their oppressors. In Nepal I have seen a feudal lord demanding a greater share of a poor crop, and the peasants still bowing to him, thanking him, and kissing his feet. It is very difficult to have any real conversation with the poor, as they will always look at you to guess what answer is expected, and will only speak when they are sure they have the right thing to say.

Foreign Aid? When western politicians talk about Foreign Aid or Foreign Assistance they suggest that the millions or billions of dollars that they provide developing nations are helping to abolish poverty from the

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face of the earth. Thanks to this assistance the hungry will be fed, the sick cured, and the illiterate educated. Closer to the ground it is clear that this aid is used for everything but poverty reduction. Military equipment, highly paid foreign experts, and commercial loans to cover imports from the donor countries are all considered as foreign aid. Snowploughs mistakenly given to tropical Uganda, and other redundant or sub-standard equipment that the donor country wants to offload, are classified as foreign aid. Aid is used to force the opening of markets in the poor countries to both the useful and useless products of the wealthy countries and multinationals, whilst the donor keeps his markets closed to textiles and farm products from the recipient. It is also used, under structural adjustment, to force sovereign governments to reduce public employment and the safety net that this sometimes involves. It also provides the foreign exchange, which enables the rich to import expensive cars, fly to Paris to have their hair done, and send their children to private schools in Switzerland. Perhaps the cynic’s definition of foreign aid is closest to the truth: ‘What the poor in the rich countries give to the rich in the poor countries.’ Every few years foreign aid donors rediscover themselves and their purpose, and shout from the rooftops that all their activities will henceforth be designed to reduce poverty. What once was called Structural Adjustment, and which has become so discredited in recent years, has been renamed as Poverty Reduction Strategy. This new vehicle is surprisingly like the old model it has replaced, with its macro framework and its conditionalities, and is as far away from the direct concerns of the poor as were the old structural adjustment programmes. This was only to be expected, as this new strategy has been designed by the same IMF and World Bank economists as its predecessor. I sent a memo to all the staff of the World Bank on the ‘Emperors New Clothes’ when all the Bank’s sycophants were extolling the poverty alleviation functions of this new type of loan. This memo was widely read but not welcomed. Of course, no loan that has to be paid back by the poorest countries of the world can ever get them out of their poverty trap. Currently the aid bureaucrats keep themselves in business by giving new loans with their left hand and forgiving old debt with their right.


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The western economic model is based on the idea that economic growth can continue for ever. It is thus necessary within this model to constantly create new desires that previously did not exist. Neither television sets, nor mobile phones, nor MacDonald’s, emanate from our inherent desires, thus a need for these has to be created through advertising and other means. One need leads to another, and no sooner do we have our TV sets than we need a fridge and a car, and on it goes. Whilst the rich are consuming larger and larger slices of the cake, fewer and fewer crumbs get left for those who do not even have enough to eat. I found it increasingly difficult to be working for the World Bank as I inadvertently became a messenger for the Washington consensus. By assisting in designing effective education and health projects for World Bank financing, and becoming appreciated by clients, I inadvertently helped open the door for other more pernicious World Bank policies and loans. The Washington Consensus is the belief spread by the IMF, the World Bank, and the U.S. Treasury that market forces, if given the freedom to thrive, will ensure rapid economic growth and improved incomes for everyone. Under these open market policies many economies have grown, but so have inequities. These so-called free market forces have led to obscene levels of wealth and mind boggling inequity. Bill Gates, the richest man in the world, is richer than around sixty countries. At the same time one fifth of the world’s population are living in abject poverty. In most countries that are implementing the Washington Consensus, economic inequities have grown dramatically, and social and political harmony reduced. It is clear that the use that is made of a growing national income is far more important than the national income itself. I really don’t know how anyone can seriously believe that an extra U.S. $25 going to someone who only earns U.S. $25 a month has the same value as the same U.S. $25 going to someone who earns U.S. $25,000 a month.

The Fisherman and the Development Worker A Thai fisherman was sleeping on the beach in the shade of his boat, and a Development expert came to speak to him:

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“Why are you resting?” he asked. “I have already been out fishing, and have caught enough fish to feed my family,” the fisherman replied. “But if you went out fishing again you could catch more fish.” “And what would I do with these fish?” “You could sell them, and with the cash you may buy a bigger net.” “What would I do with this net?” “Catch more fish.” “And what would I do with these fish?” “Sell them and buy a motor for your boat.” “And why would I buy a motor?” “To catch even more fish.” “And what would I do with these fish?” “Sell them and buy another boat.” “And why would I want another boat?” “So you can employ other people to catch fish for you, which would enable you to have leisure and rest.” “But I am already resting!!” Economists tend to forget that people are the main means and the end of development, and not the production of goods and services. The fisherman is satisfied with his small catch, and the stress of increasing his production merely to arrive where he already is at does not seem to be in any way appealing to him.

Limits to Growth In chasing after economic development and wealth creation as an end in itself, we seem to have forgotten the wisdom of both the east and the west. The Upanishad of the 8th century BC is one of the most important Hindu scriptures concluded that even if someone owned all the wealth in the world, they could still not obtain what they most wanted…immortality. One of the key messages of Buddha was that clinging to things can only lead to suffering. Some centuries later the Greek philosopher Aristotle stated that ‘wealth is evidently not the good that we are searching for, as it is merely useful for the sake of something else.’ Final the Christian New Testament states that it


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is as hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven as for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle. In the late 1970’s a group of European and African Prime Ministers and Presidents formed an independent commission called the Club of Rome, and carried out the first really detailed study of the long term global potential for economic growth, and produced an extremely significant report entitled ‘The Limits to Growth.’ As growth was obviously limited, the main issues of the 20th and 21st centuries would be redistribution questions within and between states, and not increasing these incomes per se. Unfortunately, like many good and clear ideas, those of the Club of Rome were totally ignored by political leaders everywhere, as all have a very short term perspective, whilst issues relating to the future of mankind are long term. Today’s leaders also hope that if the economic cake could continue to expand, they would not have to face painful distribution decisions. As the years have gone by, more and more intellectuals and activists are realising that either we limit economic growth or nature will do it for us. It is clear that our planet can only have a future if the unbridled consumerism that is rapidly spiralling throughout the world can be replaced with an alternative that can also ultimately lead to human satisfaction. Climate scientists are already arguing that the consumption of energy from non-renewable sources in the richer countries has to be reduced by 60-70% if catastrophic global warming is to be avoided.

Buddhist Economics Since the early 1970’s I have been writing and lecturing on Buddhist economics. A person’s satisfaction can be seen as a function of the achievement of their desires divided by their desires. Western economics aims to increase satisfaction by increasing the achievement of desires. Buddhist economics aims to increase satisfaction by reducing desires. Western economics needs a large scale of operation in order to reduce production costs, where money is the unit of measurement of these costs. The Buddhist approach involves a system of economics where people matter, where minimum basic

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needs are met, and where small is beautiful. I have called this the ‘economics of enough,’ which in simplistic terms can be paraphrased as follows: ‘he who knows when enough is enough will always have enough.’ One problem of the Western economic model is that desires for things can grow as fast, or even faster, than the achievement of desires, and thus satisfaction can decline even when consumption is increasing. In the Buddhist model it is very difficult to determine what the minimum needs of ordinary laymen and women should be. At least it is clear that the core teaching of Buddha shows adherents a way to reduce suffering by understanding that everything is impermanent, and thus is not worth desiring. Obviously it cannot be expected that ordinary people will be able to reach a state of Buddhahood, free of all desires, in this lifetime. If people were asked whether they would prefer good health and a long life, or larger incomes, most would almost opt for good health. If given the choice they would probably like to live in a clean environment, with clean air, fresh water, and chemical free food, even if this means that they have less money. What people really want is happiness, but of course happiness is difficult to define and quantify. Friends have tried, without much success, to work out an alternative way of measuring development .through the creation of a new composite indicator of Gross National Happiness. Instead of trying to put a money value on all the social and economic activities in a country, they are trying to put a happiness value on all the activities. This is not proving easy, as one person might get a great deal of happiness from one activity, say looking after a small child, and someone else might find the same activity as boring. The London School of Economics recently did a study of 22 developed and developing countries in order to grade them according to various measures of happiness, such as the number of times people laughed and smiled each day. Surprisingly, it seemed that Nigeria, one of the most corrupt countries in the world, and also poor, was the happiest country. None of the richer, developed countries were in the top ten happy countries.


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Self Sufficiency Perhaps the man who has had the greatest impact on the evolution of my own ideas has been Mahatma Gandhi. Though a Hindu, he devoted much thought to this issue of minimising desires, and almost until his death was testing himself to see how free of desires he was. His most important economic principle was self-reliance and the creation of Village Republics, and as an example, he believed that all should be able to weave the cloth that they need to clothe themselves. He understood that self-reliance prevented a concentration of economic power, one of the main impediments to the development of a more sustainable economy. Of course, self-reliance and self-sufficiency are not efficient. I may be good at farming and poor at weaving. According to western economics it is not efficient for me to weave cloth for my own clothes in such a situation. By trading my vegetables for someone else’s woven cloth, both of us could either have a greater level of consumption with the same labour input, or the same level of consumption with a lower effort. We are led to believe that it is always better to do things efficiently, and we can only compete if we do so. More often than not the concept of efficiency is pernicious, and is a key factor that is used to justify many of the extremes of the market economy. It is efficient to put many people out of work, as long as the total quantity of goods and services produced increases and their price falls. Who consumes the larger share of this increase in production of goods and services is a question that is too rarely raised, and what happens to those who are put out of work even more rarely. In Buddhist economics it is more important that there is meaningful employment for everyone, than in increasing production and consumption. Economies of scale result in greater efficiency in Western economics, whilst in Buddhist economics small is beautiful. How small can a self-reliant group be? It should be large enough to have most of the more important skills represented, but not so large to enable there to be concentrations of economic power. In ancient Greece an ideal size was thought to be a unit of 5,000 free men, and a total of around 50,000 when slaves and women were in-

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cluded! With such a population, all the main skills needed to satisfy minimum basic needs could be represented. In the Western model of development there is no upper limit set on consumption. The media admires those who have many palatial houses, hundreds of cars, and yachts and planes, and encourages us all to crave after more. In the Ghandian self-reliant model there is not as yet any consensus as to what might be the minimum basic needs of a person. Certainly we need a minimum food intake, which is often quantified as 2,000 – 2,200 calories per day, but then probably more than a quarter of the world’s population somehow survive and reproduce on less than this. Shelter from the rain, the sun, and the wind is a second minimum need, but then does the cardboard and plastic lean-to that tens of millions of street dwellers use satisfy this minimum? Clothing, again to protect our modesty and our bodies from the elements, is a third minimum need - but then to what extent are the hundreds of tribes who do not use clothes suffering deprivation according to their own values? A fourth need that is often quoted is the need for a basic education or literacy, but then is a school system that is external to a person’s culture more valid than the indigenous learning one finds in all traditional societies? A final oft-quoted need is basic medical care, which is even more difficult to define, as this can stretch from leaves to cure malaria to heart transplants. Even more important than what should the minimum basic needs be is who should be involved in determining these needs. Certainly not the development specialist such as I, with my large permanent house in a sea of shacks, my flashy car driving through the barefoot masses, clothes to change with the seasons and my moods, three meals a day, and a doctor to come at my beck and call. It is necessary to give a voice to the people, especially the poor, to determine their own minimum needs. The larger the basic economic unit within which we live, the more our minimum needs will proliferate. In the village society that exists today in rural Ethiopia, apart from fertilizer, kerosene, matches, and some second-hand clothes, everything else that needs to be consumed is produced locally. These minimum needs have


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developed over many generations within the village community itself, unlike in the city. There, there are a multitude of different shiny imports competing with goods and services produced by thousands of different village artisans and informal sector skilled workers. In such a situation it is very difficult to implement a basic needs strategy, and even harder to put into practice other elements of the economics of enough. In Thailand, the largely self-contained village society is long since dead. It is not, therefore, a question of protecting what exists, but fragmenting the large city units and markets so that the pressures to want can be reduced and real basic needs again become apparent. This is not as Utopian as it sounds, as the first seeds of such a fragmentation are already beginning to appear in some Western countries, where communities share some of the larger durable goods such as cars, and where an increasing number of goods and services are exchanged outside the money economy. I have never been self-sufficient or self- reliant. Though I have stayed with the poor in their huts and shared their food, I have not felt poor, as it has always been possible for me to escape back to my middle class comfort. The nearest I have ever been to feeling poor was on my African walkabout, when I ran out of money 2,000 Kilometres from my destination.

The Dualistic Divide Development has failed the majority of poor throughout the third world. The gap in the incomes between the poor and the wealthy grows by the year, and the cultural divide becomes insurmountable, as those that have made it tend to ape the values and consumption patterns of the richer countries, and those that have very little remain linked to their traditional cultures. Nothing illustrates this extreme dualism more than the differences in accommodation between the middle and upper classes and the poor, between the comfortable houses of the local elite and the foreigners, and the crowded compounds and slums of those who keep the cities working. In Ghana these compounds will have seventy or more people living, cooking, and washing together; and with seven or eight crammed into each small room. When I first visited Sierra Leone there was so much overcrowding that some of the beds were being used on a shift basis, with one group of workers sleeping on them from 8 p.m to 4 a.m and another group from 4 a.m. to mid day. Every big town in Africa, Asia, and South America is surrounded by oceans of shacks where hundreds of thousands of people live, one on top of each other, eighty thousand people per hectare, contrasting with three hundred people per hectare living in large airy villas in the middle class areas of the same cities. These shacks are washed away by flash floods, burnt to cinders in massive hot season fires, and bulldozed into the dust when the bourgeoisie need the land for something else. Most of the urban poor earn just enough to feed their families, thanks to their informal sector occupations, and depend on the money lender to help them through life’s crises; whilst the middle classes are usually salaried, can afford some luxuries, and obtain

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cheap credit from a bank or their employers when needed. The poor have to buy their water at high prices from itinerant water sellers, whilst the wealthy have water flowing from taps in their houses, often at a subsidized price. When sick, the poor have to spend most of the day waiting to be seen for a couple of minutes by medical staff who show them no respect, whilst the middle classes are seen by staff without waiting, and spend much longer with the doctor or nurse. The rural and urban poor use their maternal language, or an invented pidgin, and look inwards at their own cultural roots, whilst the middle classes use the language of the old colonial masters, and look outwards to Europe and the U.S. for their values. When working for the World Bank, I of course lived in a fine house in a beautiful suburb of Accra. Other diplomatic representatives lived nearby, as did the wife of the President. Five minutes walk from our house was one of the municipal rubbish dumps, on the banks of a broad open sewer, which spewed its untreated filth into the ocean. Every morning we would see hundreds of children who should have been in school sifting through the daily rubbish of the rich, to find something that could be eaten or sold. None could be persuaded to enrol in school as their families needed their earnings to survive, but some were interested in participating in evening literacy classes, specially adapted to meet the needs of out of school street children.

Inequality Income inequalities are growing everywhere, and nowhere more rapidly than in Africa. In Ethiopia, stretch limousines and fourwheel drive vehicles have to avoid the crowds of stunted children and emaciated youth on every street corner. In the village of the Cameroonian President, more champagne is drunk than palm wine, and twenty room villas have replaced the palm-thatched huts common throughout the rest of the country. In Yamoussoukro, in the Ivory Coast, four lane highways lead from nowhere to nowhere, and a full size replica of St Paul’s Basilica in Rome stands ornately dominating the village of the President in the African bush. The Ivorian elite shop and have their hair done in Paris, whilst the people

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in the north of the country do not even have the most basic health care. In Ghana in the early 1980’s, President Jerry Rawlings became so appalled by the wide income differentials he saw around him that he abolished bank notes more valuable than U.S. $1, confiscated all bank balances in excess of U.S. $2,000, and bulldozed the central market in Accra which he believed was a hive of hoarders and profiteers. Unfortunately, despite these radical actions, inequalities continued to widen. If only social and economic problems could be solved that easily. There are even larger income differentials in Latin America and Asia. In Thailand, diamond studded mobile phones are popular amongst the elite, along with jewelled cat collars. The Prime Minister has assets of U.S. $10 billion, about 9 % of the capitalization of the stock exchange, and the net worth of his cabinet is greater than the GDP of most Sub-Saharan African countries, whilst 8 million Thais live below the official poverty line. As worrying as these income differentials are, the cultural void is being created between those who have and those who don’t. In Thailand the bourgeoisie send their children to English language schools, and they graduate fluent in English but only partially literate in Thai, and are unable to communicate easily with their countrymen and women. They take their holidays in Europe and the U.S.A., and are more aware of what is happening outside their country than within; and have values closer to those in middle America than their brethren in the central plains of their own country. The higher educated and richer citizens of Ghana and Sierra Leone have more in common with the British living in the English home counties than with their tribal brethren; whilst those in Cameroon and Ivory Coast are closer to the French ruling class than any African roots that they may once have had. If textile workers in Thailand strike when they are not paid the minimum wage, or are forced to work long hours in dangerous and unsanitary conditions, the police are sent in to beat them up. If peasants protest over an oil or gas pipeline going over their fields, or a dam that floods their land, or mines that poison their water supply, it is they that are arrested, not those who have infringed on their


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rights. The Thai worker has a minimum wage of around U.S. $4 a day at the same time as Thai newspapers are full of advertisements for cars costing U.S. $100,000 and upwards. In more and more countries this dualism is producing a breakdown in society, with the poor loosing patience with the failed promises of their governments and the rich forced to flee to safer countries, or protect themselves in walled ghettos, as society disintegrates around them. Everywhere the bourgeoisie are increasingly developing consumption patterns and values indistinguishable from those that exist in Europe or U.S.A., and vastly different from those of citizens of limited means in their own countries. They are over concerned with what their neighbours and colleagues might think of them, prudish, emotionally insecure, spiritually empty, and frequently greedy. In trying to be modern they forget the wisdom of their own cultures. They bottle-feed their babies even when they know that breast is best, they rush to a doctor with the slightest pain and expect he has a pill for every ill, but apart from alcohol and cigarettes, vehemently attack the use of any recreational drugs no matter how much these might be an important part of their own cultures. They are against the illegal lotteries on which the poor risk money they can ill afford to loose, but gamble themselves on the stock exchange. They shun nudity, but get prurient pleasure from the near-naked women who fill their newspapers, and frequently sleep with the girls from the underclass. They fear intellectuals, and those from their milieu who do not think or act like them. Above all, they want to be seen as modern. The vast majority of the population continue to use their maternal languages, they send their children to public schools, and earn their income in the informal economy or in farming. They have very little political power. Foreign donors inevitably talk to those who share their language, education, and life style, in other words with the middle and upper classes, and thus inevitably a disproportionate share of foreign assistance is devoted to resolving the problems of this class, whilst the lives of the majority remain unchanged. There has been this economic, cultural, and social dualism in every country where I have worked. The middle and upper class

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tends to monopolize political power, and it is this class that makes meaningful educational reform programs difficult to implement, as they are more concerned that their children have a bridge out of the country than learning things that help earn an income inside the country. In Ghana I was involved in developing a special program to mitigate the social costs of structural adjustment, designed to provide assistance to poor people who had suffered because of economic reforms. On evaluating the implementation of this program, it became clear that over 60% of available funding had been captured by central Government officials who were not prepared to work on a program from which they were getting no benefits. The task of helping the millions, both fragmented and linked in complex interrelations, was going to be far more difficult than I had ever imagined, especially since I usually shared no language with those I was trying to help, and thus was dependent on middle class interpreters to enable me to talk to these people. This cultural and economic dualism often leads to societies where the majority feel excluded from a share in the wealth of their nations, and thus have no stake in the peaceful development of their own countries. The middle classes have struggled to pull themselves out of poverty, and will do everything necessary to stay out of poverty. They cannot allow themselves to see any of the suffering of their fellow citizens if they are to continue to be able to enjoy the lifestyle to which they aspire. In Yaounde, one of the stars in the French development crown, there are literally mountains of uncollected refuse dividing most of the highways and streets, putrefying huge areas of the city whenever it rained. In Thailand, the newest and freshest of the Asian tigers, there are tens of thousand of people in Bangkok living under three layers of highways and an overhead railway who never see the light of day, or fill their lungs with clean air, or enjoy a minute of silence. Ethiopia is supposedly led by one of the new breed of African leaders, who is more interested in buying weapons than caring for his people. In Addis Ababa there are tens of thousands of families who spend their lives sleeping, eating, giving birth, and dying in the


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street, kept warm with a few used sacks, and sheltered from the rain with plastic bag lean-tos. Early one morning I was walking in the city on my way to attend an Orthodox Church service, and came across three small boys and a dog sleeping in the street. One of the children woke and pulled the sack protecting him from the morning frost over the mongrel dog lying next to him, and went back to sleep. We were supposed to assume that neither these children, nor the tens of thousands of mutilated and maimed ex-soldiers who begged in the streets, existed. It was so much easier to talk abstractly about balance of payments, savings ratios, and poverty levels. There are also wide inequalities in the incomes of people in different regions of every country. There tends to be a concentration of development activities in regions where the fewest poor people live. In Ghana most development takes place in the ‘Golden Triangle,’ the area in the south of the country contained between the three largest cities. In Thailand all roads lead to Bangkok, in Ethiopia over 80% of vehicle registrations take place in Addis Ababa, and in Cameroon the majority of development projects, and much of the wealth of the country, are concentrated on the Douala-Yaounde axis.

Informal Occupations It is difficult for an ordinary African to survive in the cities as urban populations explode, civil services shrink, and employment in the larger private companies stagnates. In most countries in SubSaharan Africa, around 80% of those living in the cities earn what income they have from working in the informal sector, producing a whole range products and services largely for other informal sector workers. In Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso, 88% of the economically active population are working in the informal sector, and in Addis Ababa there are estimated to be 200,000 shoe shine boys alone. Their earnings are usually unrecorded in the development models of the World Bank and the IMF. These informal workers are rarely supported by bourgeois oriented governments or by donor agencies. Street traders, tailors, mechanics, food vendors, furniture makers, shoeshine boys, hairdressers and beauticians; mo-

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torcycle taxis, newspaper sellers, masseuses, ear cleaners, woodcutters, gravel makers, letter writers, beggars, prostitutes, and drug dealers. Usually this underground economy is considerably larger than the recorded and planned economy, and thrives despite frequent harassment by the authorities, who arrest or fine on the basis of archaic colonial laws of health, hygiene, and safety. In much of West Africa there is a developed system of informal apprenticeship arrangements in this underground economy, similar to the craft apprenticeships that existed in medieval Europe hundreds of years ago. Young people live and work with a master craftsman for as long as it takes them to learn all they can from him and establish their own business. Not only do they have to carry out any manual tasks, however menial, assigned by the master, but also act as a servant to the master’s family. A parent enters into a traditional contract with the master craftsman, paying him in cash, gifts, and alcohol for his child to work for several years without salary, but with free food and lodging. There were two major problems that needed to be overcome if this system was to help young people establish themselves in their chosen craft and earn a reasonable income. First, the skills of the masters and the apprentices needed to be continuously brought up to date, as they were working in a dynamic economy where even appropriate technology was changing all the time, unlike the crafts of medieval Europe. Motor mechanics need to have knowledge of the integrated circuits which are used in all new vehicles, refrigerator repairmen should know about non-CFC coolants, and carpenters must be able to use electric hand tools. Second, it is very difficult for the apprentice, however skilled he might be, to establish his own business without seed capital sufficient to purchase a set of the basic tools he would need in his chosen profession. We designed and implemented a project in Ghana that supported the informal sector trade associations in the training of master craftsmen, giving them access to more modern tools and equipment, and providing qualified apprentices with a loan sufficient to buy a kit of the tools they would need in establishing their own workshops.


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In Ghana virtually all taxis and private cars are second or even tenth hand imports. Often these cars were so old that their floors had rusted away, and passengers needed to be careful not let their feet drag on the road. These were the only vehicles that could be afforded, and were the only vehicles that ordinary people had to rely on to get from one place to another, as the public bus companies had been cannibalised into non-existence long before. Many of the roads were un-surfaced, and in very poor condition. Mechanics used to be found on almost every street corner, providing an essential service, repairing rapidly the broken-down cars, and maintaining the mobility of poorer citizens. The socialist government thought that these garages were both messy and dirty, and thus moved them from the convenient locations where they were needed and had worked for some years, to out of town locations where it was difficult for them to make an adequate income. We had to help mobilise the various trade associations to demand from government appropriate sites from which they could run their workshops and serve their clients, and make an adequate income in so doing.

Money Changers I have opened bank accounts in all but one of the countries where I have worked, but rarely closed them when I moved on to another place. I thus still have seven or eight accounts with a couple of dollars in each scattered around the world. My favourite bank was the one in Kathmandu, a dark Dickensian hall with hundreds of clerks busily scribbling in huge ledgers. Each time I made a withdrawal, the transaction was carefully written in one of the ledgers, which was carried to the desk of an officer who countersigned it. It was then copied into two further ledgers before I was given the money. Transfers from abroad would take more than a month to be credited in my account, but they always got through. The only country where I never managed to open an account was in Ghana, which was strange, as for many of the seven years I spent in that country I was acting as representative of the World Bank, which had a big project supporting the banking sector. Every time I went to a bank to try to open an account the queues were so long and

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the clerks so rude that I gave up. As Bureau de Changes were legal, and there was one on almost every street corner, it was so much more convenient using them than a bank. Every time I had colleagues coming from Washington I asked them to bring me some U.S. dollars in cash, and I would give them a U.S. cheque in exchange. For seven years I was one of the few bankers living entirely on the basis of cash transactions. When we first moved to Ghana the economy was run down, the shops were empty, we only had electricity every second or third day, and most of the telephones in town were out of order. There was a working telephone in the house that we were renting, but no one knew the number. We could call out, but despite all our efforts with the telephone company, no one could call us at home. Sometimes we would receive a wrong number and always tried to find out what number the person had tried to call, but to no avail. At least for two years we received no telephone bills. Even the most essential household goods such as soap powder and toilet rolls were not always available in the shops when we first arrived in Ghana, and thus we would sometimes drive to Togo, a journey of two hours each way, to go shopping. Once across the border there would be dozens of money changers ready to convert the Ghanaian currency into the Francs used in Togo. The first few times I completed this exchange I had the feeling when we were shopping that I did not have as many Francs as I thought I had. On a later trip, having made the exchange I went with my family to a café, and on paying the bill it was clear that I was a few thousand Francs short. I wanted to find out what was happening, so I went back with my wife to the frontier to change some more money. We insisted that the money changer sat in our car, and first I counted the Francs we were supposed to get, and then I passed them on to my wife to recheck. We then went to do our shopping, and much to our shock we found that we were again a couple of thousand Francs short. Despite further attempts at trying to find out how the money changers did this, and each time losing money, I never did manage to uncover their trick. Things are just not always as they seem to be.


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Bend Down Boutiques Most of the population of the poorer countries find it hard enough to find tomorrow’s food, let alone to buy clothes to protect them and their families from the cold or the heat. If it were not for secondhand clothes exported from the richer to the poorer countries, much of the poor would be even more raggedly dressed than they currently are. The scale of this trade is immense. Seventy percent of the containers leaving the U.S. for Southern and Western Africa contain second- hand clothes. In every African market and in several Asian markets, too, there are huge areas devoted to ‘Bend Down Boutiques’ where the customers bend down to sort through piles of clothes stacked on the ground. Many streets are clogged with mountains of second-hand clothes. Unfortunately, the elite do not like the idea that they are importing the rejects of the developed West, and so they ban the import of second-hand goods, and again it’s the poor who suffer. I have argued that the richer countries only borrow clothes from the poorer countries. The clothes are made in sweat shops in developing countries, bought by consumers in the rich countries, worn a few times, and then returned to where they originally came from.

The Journey, Not the Destination I ran out of money in Niamey, the capital of Niger, and almost ran out of life too. I spent a couple of weeks in the lorry park, sleeping on sacks of onions in a lean-to next to an open drain, and spitting out my intestines. I was kept alive through the kindness of two poor vendors, one of who gave me sweet milky tea in the morning and the other who provided me with cooked offal in the afternoon. Despite my gradual recovery, the truck drivers’ cooperative became increasingly concerned with the hassles that they would face if I were to die on them. I was thus bundled onto a truck loaded with cola nuts for Katsina in Northern Nigeria. For the first couple of days we drove across a region severely affected by river blindness. Everywhere we stopped we were surrounded by the blind begging for alms, and camping at night, we would be kept awake by the wailing of the blind. Pairs of destitute adults would be led around the village by young children who, I guessed, would in turn be blinded by the black river fly. I found it difficult to imagine how most normal village activities such as hoeing and harvesting, carrying water and cooking, could all be carried out by the sightless. Even now after more than thirty years of an expensive international campaign against river blindness, with aerial spraying of the river banks where the black fly breeds, and a drug which, though supplied free, has to be taken regularly, the scourge of the black river fly has yet to be eliminated. Further along the red dirt road we got stopped by a violent thunderstorm, and the thirty or so passengers and I crawled under the tarpaulin to spend the night suffocating in the heat, cramped on the hard sacks of cola nuts, and devoured by swarms of mosquitoes,

THE JOURNEY, NOT THE DESTINATION

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which must have been waiting in the bush for this particular moment. How many of us, each covered with dozens of bites, caught malaria from our shared night under the tarpaulin I do not know. We can only be filled with shame by the inability of the governments in the richer world, and the drug companies that make tens of billions of dollars profit each year, to prevent the three million deaths that take place from malaria every year mainly of children in Africa. What a crisis there would be if eight or nine thousand British or American children were dying every day from malaria, but since the children who die are African, we hardly notice. A few hundred meters before the Nigerian frontier post we passengers were told to get off the truck, and were led along a forest path to wait on the road on the other side of the border to be picked up by the truck when the frontier formalities were completed. The truck driver did not want to have to pay a bribe to the immigration officials for his unauthorized passengers. My very first steps on Nigerian soil provided me a lesson on the importance of avoiding police and immigration officials, if I wanted to keep my money. Better to remain invisible and unseen. This was also the idea of our truck driver, who wanted to complete his journey to Katsina before dawn, when the road barriers went up and the police came out in force. An hour or so later we had to stop for another truck that had parked in the middle of the road, and despite a lot of hooting and shouting no driver appeared, and so we edged carefully past it on the soft shoulder, which was softer than expected, and ever so slowly our truck tipped over, spewing us passengers out amongst sacks of cola nuts and into the bush. Fortunately no one was hurt. I assumed that I and the truck would be parting company here, but much to my surprise within three hours the truck was righted, loaded, repaired, and ready to roll. I realised that the skill of African mechanics and what they can achieve with almost no tools is often extraordinary. We arrived at Katsina just as the sun was rising. The herds of camels resting outside the city walls were beginning to stir, and some of their minders, white dhotis contrasting with their black skins, were congregating in small groups discussing the day’s gos-

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sip, whilst others were fetching water and lighting fires. The city gates had just opened, and farmers were leaving for the fields leading their buffalo, wooden ploughs slung over their shoulders. Not a woman could be seen, as this was the heartland of Islamic Sharia law in Nigeria. A woman was only allowed out of the inner courtyard of her home once a year, suitably veiled, and accompanied by a brother or other close male relative, to visit her parents.

Can Anybody See Me? I did not visit Nigeria for thirty years. It was during the years I spent in Ghana that I was also given responsibility for developing a major higher education reform programme in Nigeria. I had to travel between the two countries frequently. Though it was only an hour’s flight, or 360 kilometres by road across Togo and Benin, travelling to and within Nigeria has always been a special challenge. Thanks to flight cancellations, overbooking, traffic jams, torrential storms, and military coups, this journey was always an experience of the unexpected, one that I have since missed in the more ordered societies where I now live. After my first flight to Lagos, on leaving the terminal building I was surrounded by a group of Taxi drivers, the most insistent of whom offered to smash my face and my glasses if I did not take his car. The driver of my choice was knocked to the ground by this active salesman, and I had to beat a hasty retreat in the nearest available car for the hair- raising speedway drive to downtown Lagos, to one of the most memorable hotels in the world, the Eko Holiday Inn, later to become the Eko Meridian, famous for the view of beach side executions that it provided. It was so popular that it was always over booked, despite the fact that everything movable such as the air conditioners, and many non-movable items such as washbasin drainage pipes, had disappeared from the rooms. Since the reception had no seats to discourage the swarms of prostitutes who accosted male and female guests in the elevators, and even went doorto-door offering their services, the wait for a room was particularly tiring. One time, fed up with standing and waiting for a booked room which obviously did not exist, I asked to look at the guest list,


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to see if there was anyone I knew whose room I could share. There was one, a female World Bank colleague, who was somewhat surprised by my midnight request to sleep in her room. Another colleague, tired after a long international flight, checked into the hotel, and immediately took a shower to freshen up for a meeting. Much to his horror, coming out of the shower, all his clothes, suitcases, money, passports and other documents had been stolen from his room, and all that remained was the small hand towel the hotel had provided. The phone was not working, and so he had to go down to the lobby to report the theft, wrapped in nothing but the hand towel, only to be verbally attacked by the hotel staff for not taking care of his property! Another colleague naively put his money and travellers cheques in the hotel safe deposit box, only to be crushed the next day by the empty safe. This is all part of the Nigerian experience. Arriving another time at Lagos airport after a non-stop flight from Ghana, my suitcase had also evaporated. By the time I had fully learned a lesson of non-attachment, it was too late to travel to town as not even the taxis would risk the drunken policemen and armed robbers on the highway. I had to spend the night trying to sleep on the airport floor, only to be moved on every half an hour by the truncheon of a power-hungry policeman. Early the next morning I went to the domestic airport to book a flight to the North. This was supposed to take off at 8 a.m., but was delayed until the evening. Again I spent a day in an overcrowded airport lounge, followed by a night in a local flop house, as all the better hotels were full by the time that I arrived. By then I was beginning to smell strongly, especially as I had no luggage, no soap or toothbrush, and no change of clothes. I decided I had to buy a new outfit, and thus on my way to an important breakfast meeting with the vicechancellor of the local university I bought myself new underwear, a salmon pink safari suit, and some local perfume, and changed there and then in the market. This safari suit became my trademark throughout my remaining Nigerian journeys. Nigeria often occupies a well deserved position as the most corrupt nation in the world. The cities hum with tremendous energy,

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much of it directed towards developing some small or large scam to make money. Small scale, such as the car repair scam where, stuck in a traffic jam, children crawl under your car, disconnect the carburettor or some other part, and when the car fails to start, they arrange for a mechanic to appear out of the blue on a motorcycle, who offers to fix it for a relatively high price, as often as not changing your original part for a Nigerian made alternative. Large scale, such as the attempt to steal U.S. $2.5 million from a university reform project I was responsible for during its first couple of weeks. In stopping this corruption I was subjected to four hours of insults during a public meeting launching the program, followed by orchestrated riots in each of the universities I would visit. All in the cause of duty! Working in Nigeria was a tremendous learning experience. I was constantly confronted with the unexpected during quite normal activities, such as checking into a hotel or taking a plane. There were some of the most brilliant minds in Nigeria mixed in with some of the most unscrupulous, and every contract or expenditure provided opportunities for thievery that had to be overcome. If only a small part of the energy spent on corruption and scams could be devoted to production and development, Nigeria would be a rich country by now. To work successfully as an outside donor professional in Nigeria, it was necessary to be detached at times, and think like a crook at other times. Once I tried to return to Ghana during a military coup in Nigeria. It was rapidly obvious that almost all flights had been cancelled. In fact there was only one leaving Lagos that night, a KLM flight to Europe with a stopover in Togo. I tried to buy a ticket, but was informed that they had no passenger traffic rights between Lagos and Togo. After further pleading, KLM agreed that they would take me to Togo for free if I could get to the boarding gate within ten minutes, but they could not give me a boarding pass. Despite the fact that the airport was bristling with hundreds of highly armed soldiers who had been specially mobilized to prevent non-authorised people leaving the country, I walked through the airport as if I owned it, dragging my suitcase behind, and not stopping at any of the passport or security checks I reached the departure gate ahead of time, and was taken free of charge to Togo.


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Though Nigeria is one of the biggest petrol producers in the world, it is also the country with the most frequent shortages of fuel, and often all local flights were grounded because no aviation fuel was available. One time I was introducing a colleague of mine to the intricacies of working in Nigeria, and had taken him to see the head of the National Universities Commission, who was working out of a blue velvet hotel suite in Abuja, the new federal capital. On arriving at the airport for our return flight to Lagos, all flights except for one had been cancelled. Seven to eight hundred passengers were all trying to get on that flight. I managed to carryout a black market transaction in the toilets, and got two tickets and boarding passes at double the normal price, one in the name of Ms. Jasmin Suleiman, and the other in the name of Ms. Fatima Abdulkadir. As the plane taxied to its parking space, I told my friend to run, and when he did not understand what I was telling him to do I pushed him ahead of me and onto the plane. “Strap yourself anywhere,” I told him, “and don’t move.” Passengers without seats (but with boarding passes) were still being pushed out of the back of the plane on to the tarmac as it moved towards the runway for take off. Twenty minutes into the flight all the lights went out in the cabin and one of the two engines coughed into silence. A faint voice crackled across the intercom, announcing that the plane would make an emergency landing at the nearest airport. A few minutes into the descent my colleague asked me in a really worried tone of voice, “but what about the insurance?” as of course neither of us was on the flight. When all flights were cancelled there was no alternative but to travel from Lagos to Accra over land. This should be an easy journey, as it was merely 360 kilometres along a relatively good coastal road. The only problem was that there were three international frontiers to cross, and over 30 police barriers or corruption points, where bribes had to be paid in order to continue along the next stretch of road. One time I and three disappointed airline passengers, fed up after days of cancellations, joined together and chartered a shared taxi to take us from Lagos to Accra. My place was in the back seat, squeezed between two very large Ghanaian women. There was a tremendous queue at the frontier between Nigeria and Benin, as al-

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most all the cars in Benin travelled across the border to Nigeria to purchase its highly subsidized and almost free petrol. I succeeded in getting our taxi ahead of the queue, and once it was safely across the frontier had my passport stamped with a Nigerian exit visa, moved to the Benin entry post, and in the middle of the impatient crowd there, pushed forward holding my passport in my hand, trying to get someone to take it. Someone did, but not an immigration officer. There I was in no man’s land, with no passport, and three frontiers still to cross before reaching home! I had to pay dearly to get into Benin, but thereafter walked across the Benin/Togo and Togo/Ghana frontiers as if I owned them, not stopping at any immigration barrier, and not even being challenged. My fellow taxi passengers bought several baskets of freshwater crabs by the side of the road in Benin. These were evidently a delicacy, and would make perfect gifts for family members in Ghana. In Togo our Nigerian driver became so annoyed with the frequency with which police stopped him for bribes that he insulted one of them. He was immediately arrested and carried away in chains, and despite all our efforts we could not secure his release. In addition to the luggage we had to carry the baskets of crabs across the frontier, and hire another taxi on the Ghanaian side. By then it was getting dark. Unfortunately, with all this coming and going, one or more of the baskets had opened, and throughout the two-hour trip to Accra we were all nervously waiting for the next sharp bite from a scurrying crab.

Can We Land Somewhere In Nepal, one in ten of the planes used for internal flights to mountain air strips crashed every year. The pilots claimed that in Nepal the clouds have rocks in them, and thus they only liked flying in fine weather when they could see where they were going. There were often unpredictable high winds in the mountains that could blow the planes off their planned course. The pilots were generally superb, the ground staff largely corrupt, and the planes not always in the best of condition. Usually they leaked so much in rain storms that we had to put our umbrellas up.


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In order to get to the most remote airfields in our project area, airfields that were not on the route of any commercial flight, we depended on chartering the U.N. six-seater aeroplane. The only problem in arranging this charter was the pilot, who would go into long drunken binges in his Kathmandu home. It would take my wife several days to sober him up sufficiently for him to fly. She would go to his house, talk him through his problems, throw away his bottles, and arrange for his cook to give him plenty of coffee and regular meals. When he was sober he was a superb pilot and could fly anywhere in Nepal, chain smoking and drinking coffee, deafened by the opera music playing loudly through his earphones. There was a field where small planes could land in the north of the region where I was working. The pilot would fly directly at the mountain, and what seemed to be a few meters off he would dive vertically down towards the river below, and again a few meters off the ground he would flatten out and land as long as there were no cows in his way. It was crucial that the commercial pilots were completely in control of their planes and what they were carrying. This was not always the case, as ground staff would take bribes from traders to add additional loads as the cost of air freight was far less than that of employing porters to carry the same load. My wife once persuaded a pilot to weigh all the goods that were being put onto a small plane that she was travelling in to meet me. It turned out there was double the permissible load. There is one intrepid Nepali traveller who has been the sole survivor of three plane crashes, all from his home in Eastern Nepal to the capital Kathmandu. Each time the ground-staff were bribed to overload the plane with oranges, and each time it failed to climb fast enough to get over the mountain in front of the air strip, crashing into it. It is surprising that he continued to take the plane, and even more surprising that other passengers were ready to fly with him! Whenever we had to go to Kathmandu from my base in the Far West of Nepal we would always try to go by plane. The nearest airstrip was in the valley below our village, a two hour dance down, and three hours slog up. There was no way to know whether a scheduled flight would arrive or not, and thus we had to go down to the valley early in the morning of the day for which we had con-

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firmed flight tickets, and if the plane did not come, climb back up again in the evening. Sometimes we would have to do this up and down trip every day for a week until the weather cleared and a plane could finally land on our field. The weather might be perfect when we set off down the mountain, but arriving at the air field there would be small clouds which gradually built up. If only the plane could have come on time! Over the years I learnt not to have expectations and to enjoy the journey, and the cups of hot sweet tea I had on the trail. It was almost secondary whether I reached Kathmandu or not. If the weather did not clear, then the overland trip was long and arduous. First I would walk for three days to the nearest road, then take a truck along this precipitous dirt mountain track to the border with India, cross the frontier, and join a shared jeep for the twenty kilometre journey to the nearest railway station. Though the train had first and second class carriages, the ticket officer refused to sell me any but a third class ticket. He claimed that if there was anyone in the higher class seats this would encourage the dacoits to attack the train as it passed through the forest. So I always had to spend the night crammed amongst the thousands of Indians who are always on the move. An Indian train was always a happening, with people climbing in and out of the windows and onto the roof, tea brewed on the floor, and food sellers jumping on to the outside of the moving train, hanging on with one hand and balancing half a dozen trays of food with the other, and jumping off when the food was sold. And always there were the crowds. After a change of trains, I took a bumpy ride along a sandy track towards Nepal in another shared jeep, followed by a walk across the frontier and a twelve hour minibus ride to Kathmandu. Five days if I was lucky. Just because a plane takes off does not mean that it will ever arrive at its destination. Sometimes bad weather, sometimes incompetence, and at other times mechanical faults mean that the plane lands somewhere quite different from its schedule. Two of my daughters were once coming to visit me in the Far West of Nepal. My wife had put them in the plane in Kathmandu, and I was in the valley


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waiting to greet them. No plane came! A mechanical fault had forced them to land in a town on the border with India. It was a real frontier town, with only truck drivers, mechanics, and smugglers. Neither my wife, nor I, nor the airline company, nor even my daughters had any idea where the plane had landed. The girls had to barricade themselves in a flop house room with a crate of empty beer bottles which they flung at anyone trying to get into their room. The next day they spent sitting on the air strip translating the aeroplane’s maintenance manual from French to English so the flight engineer could repair the plane. After two days the plane succeeded to take off and return to Kathmandu. Another time my wife and I were flying to Kathmandu and we got caught in a violent thunder storm. We were being thrown dangerously near the mountains, and were holding on so tightly that we could not even put up our umbrellas. We knew everything was not going according to plan, as the pilot was deadly pale and sweating profusely. Finally he turned the plane away from the mountains towards India, and just before dark we landed in an airport in India near the birthplace of the Lord Buddha. Instant enlightenment as the plane taxied to a halt and the engine was switched off.

Driving There The logistics of importing and distributing hundreds of thousands of tons of food in the countries facing endemic starvation is daunting, especially since most of these countries are landlocked and have undeveloped or non-existent internal road networks, and inadequate and poorly distributed fuel supplies. It is not just grain, but cooking oil and canned meat or fish which are necessary for any life sustaining diet, all of which have to be brought into countries facing famine and distributed into the hands of millions of those who are most in need. Everything that needs to be imported by Ethiopia, a country with more than 60 million people, comes through one port, Djibouti, and along one road, and one old railway line, to Addis Ababa, the capital, where all locally produced goods and imports have to pass on the way to other towns and regions. This road is in such bad condition in parts that a truck can take a week to cover the six hundred kilometres from Djibouti to Addis Ababa. When there is no famine and no war, all Ethiopia’s 60 million peoples’ needs can be met with just 300 truck-loads of imports a day, about what is used by a small town in Europe or U.S.A. with a population of around 300,000. Whenever there is a famine in Ethiopia three times this number of trucks have to ply the road, and when there is a famine and a war, as was the case in 1999, more than a thousand loads are transported daily, requiring around ten thousand trucks. Since almost all these trucks were owned by Ethiopians, huge camps had been set up in the desert outside Djibouti city, each with parking and sleeping facilities for several hundred trucks and their drivers, where the truckers waited until they were called to the port for a load. Each of these

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camps would have Ethiopian restaurants and bars, Ethiopian mechanics, Ethiopian music, and even Ethiopian prostitutes. Chad is another landlocked country. It only has a population of sixteen million people, and all its goods (except for some petroleum products) are imported, and its cotton exported along a thousand kilometre road from the port of Douala in Cameroon to the capital, N’djamena. This must be one of the worst truck roads in the world. For most of its length it is an unmaintained red mud road. In the hot dry summer months when temperatures can reach 45 or even 50 degrees, each truck and four wheel drive creates a huge cloud of red dust, so much so that visibility reduces to a few meters, and head on collisions are not uncommon. The only way I could tell whether there might be a truck coming in the opposite direction when driving on that road was from the cloud of dust that rose into the sky in the distance. At other times I just have to hold my breath as I drove through particularly thick clouds of dust. Every tree, bush and village within a hundred meters of the road was coloured red from the thick coating that covers everything. It is, however, in the rainy season that the truckers face their greatest challenge. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of holes in the road that are deep enough to swallow up a jeep, and sometimes even a ten-wheel truck. Whenever I would come to a patch of dirty water on the road, I would have to decide whether it was just a puddle or a deep pond. Once I had to be dragged out of a hole in the road by all the men in a nearby village, and a horse! The skilled driver can take two weeks to cover the thousand kilometres of mud and pot holes, and more than 20% of the trucks on this route break down during each trip in the rainy season, and have to wait weeks beside the road before the required spare parts can be made or bought and fixed.

Do We Need Roads? During my first trip around Africa in the early 1960’s, the newly independent governments made efforts to preserve the few roads that they had. Whenever it rained, ‘Barrieres de Pluie’ (rain barri-

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ers) were immediately put across the roads to stop all vehicles wherever they were until the road had completely dried out, to protect their surface. The roadside villages had no incentive to lift the barriers prematurely, as they could make money selling food and drink and sexual services to the captive truck drivers and their passengers. When I was travelling on top of the truck load of kola nuts on a dirt road across the country Niger, whenever it rained, which was often, we would be stopped for three or four days in small villages, and be fed a sandy millet gruel and beer by the topless beauties of the village, sleep under the truck, and be devoured by mosquitoes. To be woken in the morning by the warmth of the sun, with no mosquitoes, and see the road steaming all around was as close to heaven as I have ever been, sometimes turned into hell by a rain shower just before we were ready to depart. The road from Douala to N’djamena is only a small part of the challenge of distributing goods to where they are needed in Chad, as it is virtually impossible to make durable roads in a country that has almost no clay that can be used in road building. I presented a technical paper to the World Bank in the mid 1990’s entitled, ‘Does Chad Need Roads?’ Since the country was largely flat, as long as speed was not important, tractors and lightweight trucks could easily drive on the packed sand and mud existing in most places without the need for earthen or tarmacked roads. The traffic density on existing trunk and rural roads was far less than could justify the high costs of road construction. The only real beneficiaries were civil servants, who could speed from one place to another in their aidsupplied four wheel drive vehicles. My study showed, on the basis of economic analyses, that Chad did not in fact need roads, but a low cost transportation system based on small trucks and tractors with trailers, and narrow bridges over gullies and rainy season rivers. Unfortunately, the road construction consortia and vehicle sales agents had a great deal more influence than I, and vast sums of money continue to be spent on under-utilised and non-durable roads and inappropriate new and second hand ten wheel trucks. Much of the technology that is sold to the poorer countries is inappropriate. The vehicles and the roads that they require are no exception. Vast amounts of foreign assistance is spent on building all

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weather tarmacked roads in poor countries such as Ethiopia, so that the cars, buses, and trucks used in Europe and America can be sold in these countries. In the richer countries, roads are designed to enable people and goods to be transported rapidly from one place to another. Maximising the speed and minimising the time spent on journeys is important. The passenger car, the bus, and the articulated truck require relatively smooth, wide, and very expensive roads to be used effectively. Road transportation consumes a huge proportion of the GDP in these countries. It has been estimated that more than a quarter of the GDP of the U.S.A. is devoted to the direct and the opportunity costs of road transportation and all of the infrastructure that this requires. Though the transportation needs of the poorer countries are totally different from those in Europe and U.S.A., with speed being unimportant and transport densities much lower, identical strategies are adopted as in the rich, with the same vehicles and the same road designs. In preparing transportation priorities for the poorer parts of the world it is necessary to look at what has to be moved, where, by whom, and with what frequency. Studies carried out in Ethiopia and Ghana have shown that seventy percent or more of these needs are around the village, or urban slum, rather than between villages and towns, or over long distances. Taking produce from the fields to the village, and on to a nearby market town, or carrying water and firewood to where the people live are the main transport activities of most people. A tractor with a trailer is far more effective than a truck, as it does not need a road, only rudimentary bridges over the deeper rivers and ravines. A motorcycle, sometimes with a trailer, is far more effective than a car, as again no expensive road with a sealed surface is needed, and usually a footpath is sufficient. Bullock and horse drawn carts have been used for centuries in carrying agricultural produce across the countryside, and could be made much more efficient merely by using ball bearings and inflatable tyres. Similar improvements to handcarts, and wheelbarrows used by water sellers and other urban traders in the slums, would likewise increase their efficiency. Bicycles, sometimes with trailers or sidecars to carry produce and sick people to a health centre or hospital, are extremely

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efficient. A bicycle ambulance is manufactured and widely used in Northern Ghana. This was always at the health centres, ready to take sick patients to hospital, unlike the motorized ambulance. These ambulances, which of course require roads, are usually supplied by well meaning donor agencies, and are used for everything but transporting patients to hospital, such as taking the doctor’s children to school, or collecting produce from farms, or transporting officials on supervision visits to health centres. A road designed for cars or trucks is inordinately expensive to construct in the first instance, and is also costly to maintain. The initial building of a road in a poorer country is usually financed with foreign loans or grants. Since corruption and kickbacks are common, specifications are frequently not adhered to, and thus annual maintenance costs can be even greater than those for similar roads in rich countries. Since maintenance is usually the responsibility of local government or local communities, each of which have limited resources and multiple demands on these, it often does not take place, and thus it is not unusual for a road to have to be completely rebuilt after ten or fifteen years or, in extreme cases, every year. There is nothing worse than driving on a road that was once tarmacked but no longer, as the broken surface and jagged edges can destroy all but the strongest vehicles. It is often better, where maintenance is likely to be poor, to build an earthen road, as it can at least be scraped flat with a bulldozer from time to time. In the mid nineteen eighties Accra, the capital of Ghana, was known as the city with half a million potholes. The highways were so broken up that cars and taxis had to be fitted with a double set of leaf springs to enable them to ply these roads, and even so, axels would break and wheels fall off with considerable frequency. A taxi trip was always an adventure, as it sometimes ended up in a pothole in an unknown part of the city. Many of the mountain roads in Nepal are washed away every year by the monsoon rain. Driving along one of these roads shortly after the end of the rainy season can be a horrendous experience, as parts of the road are still moving down the mountain side, and the surface is not horizontal, but slopes towards sheer drops into the val-

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leys below. Small sections of these roads were so dangerous that I would have to order all my passengers to get down from my land cruiser and walk across. I would then organise the load in the vehicle away from the dangerous side, will myself into a state of complete concentration, and hold my breath as I drove slowly and steadily across, each rolling stone sending tremors in my heart. Once across I would rearrange the load and pick up my passengers, and continue on to the next landslide. At least there was a road of sorts. On another occasion when I was on the trail returning from a training programme in the Nepali mountains it rained more heavily than I had ever seen anywhere in my life before, around thirty centimetres in a twenty four hour period. All the trails were moving with new springs, streams, and mud flows. I had planned to spend the night in a village on the trail not far from my home base, but the trail had moved so much and I did not notice that it no longer passed the village, and I found myself on a slowly moving landslide just as it was getting dark, not knowing where I was, only that there was a river roaring far below. I spent what seemed like an eternity, but was probably not more than a hour, clinging to tree roots, accidentally letting my torch clatter down the mountain side, half crawling across this moving pitch dark world, finally coming off the landslide to solid ground, so covered in mud that I frightened the inhabitants of a nearby hamlet, where I had to stay the night.

Motorcycle Madness The traffic jams in Lagos are legendary. Returning home from the office, the Nigerian will do all his or her shopping on the way….clothes, vegetables, pirated VCRs, meat, electronic goods, car spare parts, and groceries all filter by the car window. We visitors were all warned not to leave our hands out of a car window if we were wearing a watch or a ring. Even a President of Nigeria was assassinated when his motorcade was caught in a traffic jam. The assassin calmly walked to the window of the President’s car, emptied his automatic point blank in the head of the leader, and escaped through the traffic on a motorcycle.

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When I was on the way to the airport in an official car, we got stuck in an unmoving sea of belching black smoke. Quite obviously at the rate we were going I would miss that evening’s plane, and probably that of the next day too. I got out of the car with my luggage, waved down the first motorcycle that I saw, and asked him how much he would charge to take me to the airport. “A hundred Naira,” he said; I agreed, and was just about to mount, when he asked whether I meant the local or the international airports (which were in adjacent buildings). On informing him that it was the international airport he increased the price to one hundred and fifty Naira, as obviously my need was that much greater. The next half an hour we spent zigzagging between overloaded trucks, overcrowded buses bursting at the seams, and over anxious car drivers, to arrive at the airport just in time for my flight to Accra, which for the first time ever, left on schedule. The traffic jams in Lagos were nothing compared with those in Bangkok. Friends would redesign their cars to enable their children to face three or more hours travelling to school and the same amount of time returning home at night. The children would eat breakfast and dinner in the car, would have special tables so that they could do their homework during the journey, and would have a portable chamber pot to use whenever the need arose. Often the only way to be sure of making an appointment on time was to go by motorcycle taxi. At each intersection a group of these motorcycle taxi drivers would congregate, all wearing the same coloured jacket which was specific to that group. Ministers and diplomats, businessmen and fashion models, surgeons and architects, would all be forced to leave their BMW’s and Mercedes, wear the greasy spare helmet carried by the drivers, and jump on the nearest motorcycle taxi for a hazardous dash across town. What I always found most terrifying were the cross roads, where hundreds of motorcycles would be revving their engines, ready to take off like a swarm of hungry locusts as soon as the lights changed. This roaring race for pole position, with my taxi zigzagging amongst other motorcycles, was awful, and I was never sure that we would not be knocked to the ground and crushed by the following swarm. We would always need to wash the sweat and

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grime off our skin and hair before entering the freezing, airconditioned room for our meeting. These taxis do not just work in the cities, but can be found waiting at crossroads wherever buses stop. They can ply country lanes or narrow streets in urban slums where no four-wheel vehicle can pass, and can depart with only one or two passengers and take them directly to their destination, unlike other public vehicles. They have grown naturally out of a real need. They pass no special tests, receive no special assistance, and have no special licenses, but are subject to the discipline of their clan. We tend to think that a motorcycle should carry one or a maximum of two people, but it is so versatile that it is often used to carry whole families…three on the seat, one on the petrol tank, and one strapped on someone’s back or front. Bangkok, in common with most other cities, is not designed around the needs of its people, but around the needs of the private automobile. Every year 300,000 more cars are added to Bangkok’s streets. This means that 1,000 kilometres of additional roads are needed just to maintain the status quo, not including a further 1,000 kilometres of parking space. Roads have been widened and pavements narrowed, roads have been built on top of roads, and again on top of these, so that now hundreds of thousands of people live in perpetual darkness, and still the traffic grinds to halt whenever it rains. I have been arguing for many years that everyone would be better off if the private car could be totally banned from the Bangkok city streets. Buses, taxis, motorcycles, motorcycle taxis, and even bicycles would flow smoothly and rapidly from one point to another, pollution levels would be dramatically reduced and health improved, and everyone would waste much less time travelling from one place to another than is currently the case. Trucks would complete deliveries late at night, which would also be the only time people would be allowed to leave or arrive in the city in private cars. Since the car manufacturers, the petrol companies, and those who like to show off their cars will loose, this proposal, like many ideas designed to maximise the common good, will never happen until the day arrives when nothing can move in the city any more. This day is probably not far off.

Walking the Precipice The far West of Nepal, high in the Himalayas, where I lived for five years in the 1980’s, was a pre-wheel society. Everywhere was either up or down, and it always seemed that there were far more ups than downs. Our village stretched along a ridge on the side of a mountain, and involved a climb of several hundred meters from the untouchables at the bottom to the high caste Brahmins at the top. Almost everything was carried on the backs of men and women, though on the broader trails mules were sometimes used, and in the higher mountains sheep, each loaded with up to 10 kilograms of salt, sugar, or grain, relieved men. Every day hundreds of porters would pass our mud, cow dung, and slate house, coming and going from distant mountain villages loaded with everything that they might need in a year, especially salt, which was essential for both animals and humans, and could not be found in the hills. I really felt that I was living in another age, with the colourful procession of men, women, and animals passing in front of my eyes as I sat in the street drinking tea every morning. Our house had no running water, no electricity, and no glass in the windows, which added to this feeling of time travel. Our toilet was thirty or so meters from the house, and was of my own design, and had no roof. The view of the stars from this toilet was spectacular on clear dry nights. The special two pit design was known throughout the hills as a ‘Bennett type latrine.’ In the day time, in every direction the hills and mountains stretched as far as we could see, huge eagles soared, and to go anywhere we would either have to go up or down very steep slopes.

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The climb up from the valley below our village was particularly hard, and many of the porters would stop in a shop on the hill for an injection to help them with this climb. Even though the injection was only water, they would be filled with new energy. Many of the trails that we had to travel on to visit the hundreds of project sites were steep, difficult, and sometimes dangerous, and were quite impassable for any wheeled vehicle. I remember one time arriving in a classroom in the mountains where the children were reading ‘Suchada took a bus to the zoo.’ I asked the children what a bus was, and none had the faintest idea, and only after a lot of discussion did we arrive at the definition that ‘a bus is a kind of porter.’ I failed completely in getting the children to understand the concept of a zoo. It was clear that a national primary school curricula, designed to meet the needs of the better off children in the Kathmandu valley, was entirely inappropriate both for those living in the mountains and for children living in the floodplains on the border with India. We decided that we would have to design a new type of primary school curricula which would encourage the children to take action rather than merely to regurgitate words. There was no point in a child being able to repeat that he should wash his hands and face before and after meals, when his face was always dirty and his hands filthy. A class on hygiene would always end with all the children making their own soap, and then going to a nearby spring to take a bath and wash their hair. The primary school curricula was designed around twenty or so themes, each leading to a simple relevant development action, and at the same time teaching speaking, reading, writing, and calculating skills. These were supplemented by a series of readers with a development or moral message, written by local intellectuals. One time I was trekking in the mountains on a path that followed the gorge of the cascading Seti River. The path gradually climbed up some cliffs and narrowed to around 30 centimetres, and the surface deteriorated to loose stones and slate fragments. I could not turn back as the path was too narrow, the river was raging a sheer fall of fifty meters down, and I was convinced that with my rucksack bumping the cliff face from time to time, there was no way that I could survive. I realised that I must not look down, but keep my

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eyes firmly on the track ahead, and breathe slowly to give me as much strength as possible in my knees. After what seemed to be the longest walk in my life, the track gradually descended and turned away from the river to cross a stream cascading down a mountain slope. I collapsed on the bank of the stream unable to move, but vaguely aware that the path climbed again on the cliffs rising from the other bank of the stream. Out of nowhere a pink robed Sadhu suddenly appeared, carrying nothing but his stave and a water gourd. Sensing my fear, he pointed out to my colleague and I that there is always more than one route to every destination. If one way seems impossible we must follow another. As quietly as he had appeared he disappeared. I knew that my chances of surviving a further period of cliff balancing was slim, so we had to climb away from the river valley on an unknown path following the stream, and go over the mountain instead of around its edge. It turned out to be a full day hard trekking to get to our destination, instead of perhaps half an hour along the cliff, but at least I got there alive. There were very hardly any suspension bridges across the Seti river and its tributaries, and the normal way we crossed was hand over hand, balanced on a sling beneath a wooden triangle, along a grass rope slung between two poles, one on each side of the torrent. There was a thinner rope which enabled the sling to be pulled across the river loaded with a sheep or a porter’s basket attached. It seemed easy, and porters would zoom across the river with the greatest of ease. I was able to manage this trapeze, not with any skill or style, but at least I got to the other side. My wife, however, found it virtually impossible, and until a teacher came up with a solution, we were making several-day detours to the nearest suspension bridge. We tied both her hands together over the rope, sat her in the trapeze, and then also tied her feet together over the rope. As long as nothing broke there was no way she could fall in the river. We then pulled her over the torrent like a sack of merchandise. Not a very dignified crossing, but not one where her panic could influence the outcome. I only told her after we had left Nepal that the grass ropes were not very strong and would often break, throwing travellers to their death in the river below.


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By far the most dangerous wild animals in the mountains were the bears. Early one morning I arrived in a village to a scene of wailing and confusion, as a woman had just had half her face ripped off by a bear whilst collecting water from a nearby stream. After examining her I realised that neither I nor rudimentary modern medicine could do much to help her. The bear is not an inherently aggressive animal, but when surprised or disturbed it will strike out at random. Strangely, each culture has a different way of dealing with a bear that is met on the trail. In Thailand you have to run up hill because bears are too heavy to run uphill rapidly; in Nepal you run downhill, as the bear’s eyelashes are very long and block his view when he trundles down; in Ghana you climb the nearest tree, as bears are not good at climbing trees; and in Canada you have to pretend to be dead as bears do not touch dead meat. Luckily I never met a wild bear and thus never had to decide whether I should run up or down the hill, climb a tree, or pretend to be dead!

It’s a Hard Life The people who we were helping with our project in Nepal had a very hard life. In winter the hills were covered in snow, and in summer there was a dust haze and temperatures sometimes as high as 40 degrees. Land holdings were miniscule, averaging half a hectare per family, and the terraces stretched to the top of the hills, frequently to be washed away by the deluge of the monsoon. The Minister of Environment, who was a feudal lord, a politician, and a friend of mine, often trekked with me. One time he pointed at a cascading stream and said, “Our water goes to India, it takes our soil with it, and the people follow.” Almost one third of the men had left the hills for the good life in India. Usually all the men from one valley would monopolize all the night watchmen positions in one particular Indian city. They would thus maintain their identity and their linkages with home, and not be absorbed by the immensity of the Indian city. Though any one man might only travel home every decade, colleagues would carry news and money in between these visits.

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The Nepalese men did not want to leave their homes and families to live in the hot Indian mega-cities, but life was so precarious in the mountains, like living on a precipice, with never enough food from one day to the next, that one less mouth to feed could really make a difference. The meagre remittances they managed to send home helped finance all necessary annual purchases. We could never reverse the migration trend, but we did try to help those who remained in their villages find ways to increase their production and productivity. In the adult literacy programmes we did not tell anyone what they should do, but encouraged discussions in the classes so that the participants would themselves find solutions to some of the problems they faced, and together take action to solve these problems. The literacy programme was designed around twenty four development themes, and participants were expected as part of their class to carry out practical activities on each of these. Construction of simple pit latrines and preparation and use of the human waste as a fertilizer, development of composting techniques, planting of fruit trees, developing kitchen gardens, protecting water sources, and planting fuel and fodder trees were some of the themes covered. I had hoped to enhance our diet by growing vegetables in a small enclosure around our house, initially surrounded by a thorn fence, and later by barbed wire. I had also hoped that this plot would provide a demonstration to the villagers of the possibility of developing their own kitchen gardens. Unfortunately the cows always managed to eat the vegetables before we did. They seemed to be impervious to the scratching and tearing of their skin as they pushed through our fence. We could not drive them away with too much force, as the cow was such a holy and revered animal that if we hurt one the project would be finished and we would have to leave the village. One young man in a neighbouring village, seeing a cow about to eat his ripening wheat, threw stones at her to drive her away. Much to his horror one of the stones hit the cow on its head and she dropped down dead. Within minutes the man had to bid farewell to his parents, his wife, and his three young children forever, and flee from his village and his region, never to return. If he had stayed and was lucky enough to be arrested by a policeman, he would have


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been jailed for life; if not he could easily have been killed by his neighbours and friends. The mountain where we lived was a cruel place, as each caste struggled to maintain its supremacy over the castes below. It was a feudal system, as much of the land belonged to local land lords, many of whom lived in our village, and was cultivated by other peasants. Some of the lords owned great swathes of land, which enabled them to send their children to private schools in India and to live outside the mountains, consuming conspicuously, whilst their people suffered from hunger. When we started our project, political power in the region was totally dominated by these landowners and the higher castes. It was not so much that the lower castes were consciously excluded, they were just not seen, and hardly existed, though they were in the majority. The women who worked from early in the morning till late at night were also totally invisible. The formal school was not much better, as upper caste children would torment the lower castes that were foolish enough to go to school. This exploitation was probably part of the reason why the Maoist uprising started in the Far West of Nepal a decade ago. There were itinerant groups of dancing girls who would pass through our village a few times a year. Each group would consist of four or five young girls, some who seemed no older than fourteen or fifteen, and women, all heavily made up and dressed in bright coloured saris. They obviously did more than dance for their customers. In the day time the high caste Brahmins would stone these dancing girls, who were quite obviously untouchables, and in the night they would sleep with them. I was interested to know how they managed to make love without touching and being polluted by an untouchable. Up until quite recently there were temple prostitutes in some of the temples in the region. One of the only ways a peasant could pay a debt to a Brahmin priest was to give one of his daughters to the temple, who, after being used by the priest, was then rented out to other men to increase the temple’s income. Whilst living in Ghana we came across a similar custom amongst one group of Ewe traditional priests. Even for the glory of god girls are forced to prostitute themselves.

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Wherever I have worked, I have always been astonished by the depth to which people believe in the most irrational customs and practices. In the mountains of Nepal the life of a cow is more valuable than that of a person. It is also believed that if an untouchable drinks milk, the cow providing the milk will die. In Ghana, Ethiopia, and Uganda, a woman cannot really be considered a woman if she has not had a clitorectomy. In parts of Ghana if a mother gives birth to twins both will be killed, as there is no way to tell which is a human and which a devil. In Ethiopia a Hammer woman will leave her child in the forest to die if its bottom teeth grow before its top teeth. My work has always been involved in helping everyone develop a pride in who they are, be they women, or young girls, or lower castes, or exploited ethnic groups. We have to help them become conscious, through new types of education, of their relationship with their exploiters and their inherent subservience, as this is nearly as important as their objective reality. In our Nepali project area almost no girls had been to school apart from those who had lived for some time away from the mountains. We developed a non-formal education course for young out of school girls, the Cheli Beti (small girl) programme. Classes were held at a time and place convenient to the girls, when they were not too busy with their daily chores; normally early in the morning, and always in the middle of the village. They had their own Cheli Beti song which they would sing on the way to their class, and a blue Cheli Beti bag which they made themselves. Each class involved a discussion around a photo of a village girl, Kamala. The girls would discuss what Kamala was doing, read key words, and later key sentences about Kamala, and then copy what she had been doing: washing her hair, planting a tree, and burying her faeces. The girls would identify more and more with Kamala, until the final class when they discovered that she was an untouchable! Classes were led by a literate village woman facilitator who had received thirty days of intensive training. Facilitator training was always residential, in a local resource centre school, and participants were given two meals and two snacks a day, which was incentive


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enough for them to join any training. The logistics of portering in hundreds of kilos of rice, wheat, and lentils to training sites many days walk from a road; buying firewood, spices, vegetables, milk and sugar; hiring cooks and providing utensils, was hard enough. In addition, facilitators had to be selected and invited in a region where there were no phones and infrequent mail, training materials prepared and carried to the site, and trainers trained. Training activities would start at around 7.30 a.m. each day, seven days a week, and end at around 10 p.m. I will always remember arriving one dark and freezing Saturday evening at a training centre eight days walk from our Headquarters in the high Himalayas near the Tibetan border and found facilitator training in full swing. Though there was a hospital and several health centres in our project area, no doctors or nurses and few health assistants had been seen there for several years. These health personnel were all on the payroll of the Ministry of Health, but as they were never inspected, they felt it easier to draw their salaries and work elsewhere in some town where private practice was possible. Most diseases thus had to be treated with the assistance of shamans and local herbs by the people themselves. As an example, for diarrhoea, a piece of hashish was put in a banana and baked in the fire, and then eaten hot. Serious illnesses were treated by shamans, or by Brahmin priests. Both would try to drive away the evil spirit that was causing the disease. One time we were sleeping near a house where a shaman was in action. The patient, a woman, had severe stomach pains, and might have had appendicitis. The shaman, clad only in a loin cloth, face and chest partly painted with white chalk, rattled his chains of shells, lit a smoky fire, broke eggs, drummed and danced round and round the woman the whole night, covering her with dust, chanting, and trying to get her into a trance. Early in the morning he leapt out of the hut, shrieking, and shooting a miniature bow and arrow in the air, chasing away the evil spirit that had caused the illness. When we went into the hut before we left, we were surprised to find his patient sleeping peacefully and apparently cured. If anyone had an illness that could not be cured by the shaman, and had money, he might be carried in a basket for several days to the road, and then by truck on to a hospital that had doctors.

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The separation between basic education and basic health services has always seemed strange. Since the overall objective of any education programme must be the improvement of the life of the learner, it is obvious this can only be done if his health is also improved. Whenever we have tried to help villagers identify the most serious problems they are facing, dealing with sickness often comes out as their highest priority. Sometimes it is only possible to motivate adults or children to attend functional literacy classes, or even school, if the teacher has some common drugs, and with these is able to help treat a few endemic diseases. In my work with the hill tribes in Thailand and in Nepal, we trained teachers both as teachers and as health workers, so that they could also help lead their learners into taking action to improve their health. The key messages of our programme included improving sanitation and hygiene, eliminating intestinal parasites, teaching participants to prepare an oral rehydration drink from local ingredients, dealing with scabies, improving nutrition through the planting of vegetables and fruit trees, and the spacing of children. Our facilitators were instrumental in reducing the ravages of a measles epidemic, which enhanced their status. As some teachers were trained in health care we also provided them with a medicine chest containing a few standard medicines to help deal with some curable but debilitating diseases, such as intestinal worms, scabies, and malaria. We would often meet the postman on the trail. He was easily identified, as on one shoulder he would have a spear with a bell on the end, and on the other a canvas shoulder bag with the mail. We would hear his bell some distance away, and like the mad hatter he was always in a hurry, walking very rapidly or even jogging, and thus would pass us on the trail. At a prearranged time of day he would meet the postman from the next valley, exchange post bags, and both would run back, bells tingling, from where they had come, to meet another postman on the ridge of another mountain. The whole life of the postman was spent running from one ridge to another, with a short stop in a village post office in the middle for the mail to be sorted. In this way a letter from our village to Kathmandu would take around twenty eight days. In Kathmandu the mail did not always reach its destination, as in the winter it was sometimes used to warm up freezing postal clerks on the fires they lit in a back


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room of the central post office. Our own helper in Kathmandu managed to cook all the meals for his family on the thousands of pages of un-asked for and unreadable reports that were sent to me by air courier from my U.N. employers. There was a bank in the village, a branch of the state bank. It sometimes ran out of Nepali currency and only had Indian rupees. In the mountains the Indian rupee was more common than the Nepali, as all those working in India would send small amounts home whenever a countryman was returning. It was not uncommon that the returnees would be attacked on their way before reaching the hills if they were not travelling in a group with friends. The shortage of Nepali rupees meant that I sometimes had to bring a bundle of Nepali currency from Kathmandu, wrapped up in newspaper in my rucksack to pay the staff and all the different project activities. Little did my fellow travellers know that I was carrying quite a small fortune.

Gift of the Gods There was a saying in the mountains that the gods had given them a life full of hardship and suffering, and the only gift they provided them was that of the marihuana plant. It grows by itself like the weed that it is, and never has to be tended or cared for. In the spring before the millet or wheat crops are planted all the fields, especially those in the valleys, are covered by forests of marihuana plants, growing up to three or four meters high. Some days I would walk for hours along a valley surrounded the whole time by these immense weeds, and getting high just from the smell in the air. The marihuana weed was extremely useful, as the people got their clothes and shelter, their light, their food, their oil and their medicines all from this one plant. The stems would be soaked in a stream, pounded with stones, and soaked again. After another pounding they would be split open and the fibres inside peeled out, washed, squeezed, dried, and woven on a narrow loom into strips, which could then be sewn into clothes and tents. I still have a jacket and a blanket made from the fibre of the marihuana plant. Torches were made from the dried residue of the stems and could lighten the

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darkest trail for an hour or more. A measure of seeds would be traded for the same measure of grain in the flood plains near India. These seeds would be crushed to extract oil, which was used for massage, and the residue made into a delicious pickle. Finally the drug hashish would be made by rubbing the top of the female plants between the palms of the hand, scraping the resin off with a knife and rolling it into sticks. The hashish would be used to treat diarrhoea, or blended with yoghurt to make a mildly intoxicating drink, Bhang, given to help guests relax, and a stronger version drunk during the annual Shiva festival, or smoked with visiting Sadhus. In an attempt to develop lightweight corrugated sheets for roofing schools, I had asked a chemist friend of mine to try to develop ways of stiffening the hemp cloth into brittle sheets to be used as a lightweight roof for school buildings, all of which unfortunately proved too technically difficult and expensive. Ignorant people who talk about eliminating the marihuana plant have no idea how this simple weed plays such an important role in the life of poor villagers in many parts of the world. There was some embarrassment in the U.S. embassy in Kathmandu when they were unable to control the spread of the marihuana weed in their compound and in the garden of the ambassador. This was particularly embarrassing given their active anti-drug rhetoric, and their tying of aid to the closing down of Government hashish shops. The first time that we visited Kathmandu, these Government shops were still operating. They were rather like the wine stores in the U.S.A., with a range of different types and brands of hashish depending where it came from. My wife and I bought one hashish cookie from this shop to share, which we ate on our way back to our hotel. We sat down in the dining room and ordered our evening meal, and as we were waiting, the walls of the room started to zoom in and out as the room rocked. We felt in no fit state to face any food, and only wanted to get back to our room as quickly as possible, but we could not keep our balance when we stood up. We ended up crawling out of the dining room on our hands and knees, down the corridor to our room, pretending to ourselves that this was entirely normal. It was two days before we were able to leave our room without being accosted by ghosts and demons, and we vowed that never again would we eat a hashish cookie!


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Despite U.S. pressure, marihuana and its products are as readily available in Nepal as ever. Bhang is still given to visitors, and huge quantities of hashish are still smoked by Sadhus, especially during the Shiva festival. My friend, the Minister of the Environment, had his joint rolling peon, whose only task was to prepare a continuous supply of hashish cigarettes for him at meetings, even in cabinet meetings.

Dealing with Corruption If there has been one extraneous issue that I have had to deal with throughout my professional life it has been corruption, whether large scale or small scale, whether perpetuated by petty officials or leading politicians, and whether short term or long term. The word corruption in its origins refers to putrefaction, sleaze, and vice. There can be very corrupt societies with excessive use of drugs and alcohol, and exploitation of women and children, but little bribery. Nowadays when we talk about corruption we normally refer to the misuse of someone’s position for private gain through dishonesty, bribery, or theft. Corruption can involve the transfer of massive sums of money in order for a firm to be awarded a large contract, or millions of small kickbacks for services such as providing driving licences, or identity cards, or medical treatment. Corruption, however, does not have to involve money changing hands. For example nepotism, patronage, the theft of state property, the promise of future employment for favours granted, and the acceptance of sexual favours for some other end, are all forms of corruption that I have had to confront in my working life. I have never worked in or visited a country that is corruption free. There is not necessarily more corruption in poor countries than in rich. In total the amounts of corruption in some of the richer countries can in absolute terms be more than the amounts in the more corrupt poorer countries, but of course as a proportion of national income it will be less. Politicians, government officials, business executives, aid officials, officials of multinational agencies, and even priests and monks can be, and often are, corrupt. In Cameroon

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and Nigeria corruption is the largest industry, and distorts and destroys all growth prospects. I have often helped academic colleagues estimate the total corruption in particular economies. Thirty years ago in Thailand it was estimated that the two military leaders, Field Marshal Thanom and General Praphas, were involved in about U.S. $1 billion of corruption a year. This did not mean that they had this amount available to put in a local or foreign bank, as they also had to use a lot of money to keep their cronies and clique happy. More recently I estimated that corruption in Cameroon in all its forms totalled around 20% of national income, and argued with the World Bank that merely halving corruption would release more funds than provided by all foreign aid donors and lenders in a year.

Bribery in Contracting One of the most common forms of corruption is the bribery that is demanded by politicians and Government officials in order to award a contract to a particular company. Normally the rate of bribe required for each type of contract in each country is known and is almost always demanded in advance. The first time I came across this was in Nigeria in 1960, where the Minister of Finance was known as ‘Festering Sam…Mr 10%.’ In Nepal in the 1980’s road contractors had to pay 20% of the contract price in advance. In order to finance the required bribe, contractors and suppliers either have to inflate their prices through price fixing, or obtain payment for sub-standard goods or works. For any country to develop, it is necessary for the roads, bridges, schools, and power plants that are constructed to last many years before having to be replaced. Poor quality work carried out under a corrupt contract can thus have a most serious impact on development. I have travelled on a road in Chad costing U.S. $25 million, which after only five years was totally unusable, and all vehicles had to drive on the desert beside this road. Even worse, I have seen a newly constructed primary school in Ethiopia fall down and kill a

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number of children, as not enough cement had been put in the concrete used for the beams. A few years ago, again in Ethiopia, I looked at the delivery of imported furniture for newly built schools. The first chair that I sat on disintegrated into hundreds of fragments, and the desks were so weak that they were dangerous for students. Contrary to the contract provisions, this furniture had been accepted by an official without any inspection or tests, obviously after payment of the right incentive! Again in Nigeria in the late 1980’s the bribe demanded was sometimes 100%. In these cases the total contract price was shared between the politicians and officials and the contractor, and no work was done. Each time there was a change in political regime, all the contracts awarded by the previous regime were cancelled and new contracts negotiated, and still no buildings were completed. University campuses are covered with the skeletons of unfinished buildings. It is not just in Africa where huge sums of money are spent with no results, but also in Thailand, where U.S. $500 million has been spent on a waste water plant at Klong Dan, just outside Bangkok, which has never become operational. In Thailand there is a National Counter Corruption Commission, which has been looking into this case for the last two or three years without any conclusions to date. This commission has around 8,000 outstanding cases that they are currently investigating, and they only reach conclusion on about three cases a day! More recently all nine members of the commission have received suspended jail terms for giving themselves illegal salary increases. In every port that I have ever visited in Africa there have been ‘fixers’ who, for a fee, can arrange to have imported goods cleared through customs at a fraction of the normal import duties. Part of the fee paid obviously goes directly to the customs inspectors. This became so common that in Nigeria, Government has had to contract a private Swiss company (Société Général de Surveillance) to collect import duties on its behalf, obviously charging a fee for so doing.


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When we were living in Ghana my wife and I decided to drive across the Sahara Desert to England, which involved several thousand kilometres of roadless sand combined with strong wind and unexpected rain at times. Arriving in England our first task was to arrange for our truck to be shipped back to Ghana so we would have our vehicle on our return. Little did we expect that we would face Kafkaesque problems in trying to clear it through the Ghanaian customs, which failed to understand how the same vehicle could be imported twice, and thus assumed that there must be something underhanded going on. After failing to extricate our vehicle from the port over more than two months, we eventually had to rely on a fixer and pay irregular ‘fees.’ In five days we had our vehicle! In the Ivory Coast I had a colleague who paid the equivalent of $300 to the local tax officer to have all his details totally eliminated from the central tax authority’s computer system. During the seven years he lived in that country he never had to pay any taxes.

Bribery in Employment A competent public service, selected on the basis of merit, and responding to professional incentives, can be useful for development. This is unfortunately not the case in most of the countries where I have worked. In order to get a job as a teacher in Ghana it used to be necessary to pay the district education officer around U.S. $150 and a goat. In Kenya a woman, if she wanted to get a secretarial job for which she was qualified, frequently had to sleep with the boss in both public and private enterprises, as was the case in Namibia when a woman applied for a scholarship to study overseas. To get a job in a border immigration or customs office is obviously very lucrative. I did a small survey of a Ghanaian border post one independence day as President Rawlings was making his annual diatribe against corruption. Anyone who wanted to have their passports stamped on leaving or arriving in Ghana had to slip notes equivalent to fifty U.S. cents in their passport. Any trader who did not want to spend all day having everything they possessed examined and re-examined would need to pay the equivalent of five U.S.

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dollars. Others were threatened and frightened by being accused of carrying too much money, or prohibited goods, and were shaken down for even more. It took an hour and forty minutes for these denizens of justice to make the huge sum of a thousand dollars, somewhat more than the monthly salary of the dozen policemen and immigration officials on duty that day. In Cameroon when a civil servant sought a promotion, he had either to hang around various government offices for six or eight months waiting his turn in ever-lengthening queues, or pay at least three central government officers each around a year of the extra benefits he would get from his promotion. In Togo a customs officer had to pay seven years’ salary for a post on the frontier with Ghana, and since he could never be certain that someone else would not come along and pay more and replace him, he had to make his investment back quickly. In India it could cost thirty-two years salary, paid in advance, for an engineer to get a district engineers post. We took some small steps to ensure more transparency in the hiring of educational personnel. In Ghana we identified around 6,000 staff that had been hired to work in primary and secondary schools without authorisation, and they all had their contracts terminated. In Cameroon some authority was given to School Management Committees to recommend rewarding and punishing teachers. In Chad funds were given to Parents Associations to hire, pay, and fire, if necessary, their own teachers.

Is Every Policeman a Thief? Good communications, both within and between countries, are important for all types of development. In my travels around Africa the police, the customs, the army, the frontier police, and anyone else with a gun and a uniform, would set up a barrier across a main road, largely to collect a ‘tax’ on all road users. Those who do not stop to pay their toll risk getting shot. Every road in West and Central Africa is covered with police barriers, whose only function is to extract what they can from the driv-


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ers and passengers of the vehicles that pass. Togo is a small country, and is only about thirty five kilometres wide, but has six police barriers on the coastal road, one every six kilometres. Each has several heavily armed policemen, who do not hesitate to shoot if a vehicle does not stop in time, or rapidly pay the obligatory U.S. $2 to U.S. $5 fee. Once I was driving with my wife and two daughters in Accra, Ghana. There was the usual power cut, and all was pitch dark. We passed someone waving a flashlight, and decided to stop when a second person tried to wave us down. Within a few seconds we had a drunken policeman push his gun through our car window on to the head of one of my daughters. Only after a few minutes of very tense negotiations over the appropriate size of the fine I should pay for not stopping at a police barrier was the gun finally removed. Police barriers on the most profitable routes were very substantial installations, with heavy gates, nailed planks, permanent buildings, an officer and half a dozen policemen. Much more dangerous were the temporary barriers put up by a policeman who wanted to buy gifts for his children or spoil a girl friend. There would merely be a stop sign and some planks of wood with hundreds of nails sticking out. These were pulled off the road with a rope when the fine had been paid, but at night could not easily be seen. Far too often motorists and truck drivers were shot for failing to stop on time. The privatisation of the road barriers went one step further when one retired gogo dancer and bar owner dressed up as a policeman and set up her own private police barrier about twenty miles outside Accra. She was only as it were defrocked when she tried to shake down a superintendent of police in civilian clothes. Another time I was driving from Burkina Faso to Mali along a dirt track. I completed the departure formalities at the border immigration and customs posts for myself and my vehicle, passed a group of gendarmes playing cards behind a mud building, and drove on along the thirty or forty kilometres of no-mans-land before reaching the first Malian settlement, only to be shocked by a car following us at high speed, and loaded with men who appeared to be trying to shoot out our tyres. Stopping, I was surrounded by a group of irate

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gendarmes who accused me of refusing to fulfil the formalities at their post. We were escorted back to the Burkina Faso frontier, and only after several hours of tense negotiation, and the payment of a substantial fee, were we allowed to proceed. Economists working for the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund are strong advocates of free trade between countries, trade with the fewest duties and taxes. They often impose conditionalities on governments to get them to reduce import duties, export taxes, and subsidies. Their models strangely ignored the more serious problem of the extremely high costs of in-country trade due to the plethora of police corruption points.

Greasing Government Procedures Like most of my colleagues who are concerned with development and reducing poverty, I have always felt irritated with unnecessary delays. Since very little can be done in most countries without getting approval from one or another government agency, speeding up procedures is very important. In Ghana, in order to approve a payment to a school building contractor, between eighteen and twentyseven approval signatures are required, several of which require an under the table payment. In Ethiopia it would take about three months for a simple standard school building contract to be approved if the contactor was not ready to grease officials’ palms. On the basis of pressure from us in the World Bank office in Cameroon, the Government controlled newspaper ran daily articles for a month on all the different types of corruption that the people were facing in their lives, partly to shame officials into taking action to reduce some of the corruption, and partly to get the people themselves to start objecting to continuous demands for bribes. The extent, and the creativity that Cameroonian civil servants had in finding ways to make money from their positions, was astounding. Payment was necessary if you wanted to be injected with an antibiotic instead of water in a hospital, to obtain a local airline ticket, to process a resident’s visa, to have illegal logs made legal, and of course all the payments needed in school. It seemed that every civil


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servant had invented some way to supplement his salary, which had been falling for several years. When I was working in Nepal, a high ranking official in the next office suddenly died from a brain haemorrhage. At the time of his death he had 800 files in his office still waiting to be dealt with, some dating back two or more years. On investigation it became clear that the only files that he ever considered were those with a bank note attached.

Payment for Free Services Identity cards are essential in many countries, and are supposed to be provided free by local administrative officials. However, as the cards are so necessary, those responsible for issuing them often demand some ‘fee.’ Since the poor sometimes cannot pay, they are substantially denied nationality. Many thousands of hill tribesmen and women in Northern Thailand have been threatened with expulsion as they have no ID cards. In Ethiopia colleagues of mine with Eritrean- sounding names had to pay huge sums of money when they went to the local administrative office to renew their ID cards. In Thailand until recently you only needed to pay a small bribe of around U.S. $4 to obtain a driving license without having to pass any test. The damage unqualified drivers cause to life and property in that country is well known. In Ghana there were no private hospitals. When a World Bank security guard needed a hernia operation he went to the local public hospital and contacted the surgeon there. Before this doctor would operate he demanded a fee roughly equivalent to his monthly salary. This had to be paid in an unmarked brown envelope in advance, which the surgeon kept whether the patient survived or died. In this case there was no operation, as the day before he was to be admitted the guard went for his final check up and fortunately met a nurse who came from his tribe, who told him in no uncertain terms that the vast majority of this surgeon’s patients died. Our guard came to us on bended knees, weeping and asking us not to force him to go ahead with the operation. I checked at the Ministry of Health, and

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was surprised to find that they were aware that this surgeon had a 94% mortality rate with his operations. The Chief Medical Officer told me that they did not know what to do with this doctor! In another case we were helping treat an old man who had TB. All TB drugs were free in an effort to stop the spread of this increasingly infectious disease. It was extremely important that this man got an injection every day for three months. Often, however, a nurse at the local hospital refused to give him his shot without a payment that he did not have. Either my wife or I had to go to the hospital and waste our time and that of the medical officer in charge with a complaint over the behaviour of his staff.

Theft of State Property Who amongst us has not taken paper and pens from our office, made photocopies of private documents, and made calls to our family and friends on the office phone? In many of the poorer countries Governments do not pay their utility bills or repair donated equipment, so the real cost of this petty pilfering is unclear. There are many more blatant cases of theft of state property. In Ghana, doctors would use drugs and medical supplies from public hospitals in their private practices. In Cameroon, Ministers refused to return official vehicles when they were removed from office. In Ethiopia, famine relief supplies ended up in private markets. Everywhere building materials disappeared from Public Works Department stores. In Ghana I was involved in designing programs for roofing thousands of schools whose walls had been built by local communities. Initially almost none of the roofing sheets supplied ever reached a school, but were used to roof the houses of influential people in the neighbourhood. Eventually we decided that all our roofing sheets should be coloured blue on both sides, which made it easy to see illegal use from the air. It was announced on the radio that these blue sheets could only be used for schools, and that any inappropriate use would be punished. Only then did the schools begin to be roofed. These roofing sheets became known as ‘Bennett blues!’


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Money Politics In most of the countries where I have lived elections have rarely been free, though they are sometimes fair when the electorate sell their votes to several candidates and vote for the one that they like the best. Politicians spend vast sums of money in getting elected, and in addition to legal publicity campaigns, employ local big shots and agents to distribute money and other freebies to the electorate. Of those countries that I am familiar with, it is in Thailand where buying votes is almost a way of life. Despite its professed Buddhism, its people frequently go to extremes. It has been estimated that in the 1995 general elections more money was spent than in the 1996 U.S. Presidential elections! Quite obviously, the politicians and other financiers of their election campaign expected rapid financial returns. To change this the 1997 Thai constitution has limited election expenditures, and established an election commission to monitor these, amongst other things. In Ghana, Ministries and other Government agencies were ordered to only award contracts to businessmen who were party loyalists. In many cases we had to refuse World Bank financing of contracts where party considerations predominated.

Poisoned Chalices Development planners and colleagues in the World Bank have believed that countries should search for oil and other minerals that could be exploited to generate funds that could then be invested elsewhere in the economy. I have been arguing that these mineral resources are often poisoned chalices, only benefiting foreigners and a small local elite, destroying peace and social harmony, and often having a negative impact on development. I had argued particularly forcibly against my colleagues in the World Bank, who were trying to give a loan to Chad to help finance a pipeline to export its oil through Cameroon. The lessons learned from Chad’s oil producing neighbours of Nigeria and Congo Brazzaville seemed strong enough. For many years these two countries vied with each other as to which could be the most violent and destructive to its people. But

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still my colleagues believed that Chad would be different. It wasn’t, as the first use the Government made of its new oil revenues was to buy military hardware to enable it to better control its people. Nigeria is the fifth largest petroleum producer in the world, and has been exporting huge quantities of oil over the past forty years. Thanks to these oil resources it has had an awful civil war in Biafra, in the Eastern region where the oil is, with over a million dead. There is also terrible environmental degradation in the oil producing areas, increasing tribal conflicts and worsening human rights. It has also had widening income disparities and growing poverty, with corruption becoming a way of life. Despite huge revenues from the sale of its oil and gas, it still had foreign debts in excess of U.S. $35 Billion. Economists have known for a long time that economic growth in oil rich states has been below, and often far below, worldwide averages of countries with similar levels of wealth, but have kept quite about this, as it went against widely held theories. They also did not know why this was happening. Only recently has research made it clear that the more mineral resources a country tends to have, the more corrupt it is likely to be, thus the fewer resources that will be available for its development, and the slower will be its economic growth. I would add that the more mineral resources poor countries with weak Governments have, the more likely it is that conflicts over the ownership of these resources will develop. Unfortunately, this research had not been completed at the time I was trying to stop the Chad/Cameroon pipeline.

Corruption and Failed States The corruption emanating from a country’s mineral extraction industries is often the first step towards the disappearance of a functioning state. There are a number of countries, largely in Africa, where corruption has become so embedded in every activity that governments hardly govern any more, and can no longer carry out most of the functions expected of them. Neither politicians nor civil servants look at the services that they should provide the general


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public, only at the resources that they can extract from the population for their private benefit. These countries are known as ‘failed states.’ Sierra Leone, Liberia, Cote D’Ivoire, and the Central African Republic are all failed states where I have worked at some time; whilst Congo Kinshasa, Congo Brazzaville, and Angola are amongst other failed states. All have massive mineral resources (oil, diamonds, and gold) combined with abject poverty, and all have had civil wars and famines existing side by side with extreme corruption and opulence of their political leaders. It often seems that foreigners and foreign Governments have encouraged the withering away of the state for either commercial or geopolitical reasons. The Central African Republic is the only country where I have been taken to the airport in a French military tank. More seriously, it is an extremely poor country in the heart of Africa which has the misfortune of having substantial deposits of diamonds, and therefore has remained very poor. In addition, it is a country where the French became directly involved in its destruction. In 1966 JeanBedel Bokassa overthrew the first President of the Central African Republic, accusing him of corruption. In 1972 a diplomat friend of mine was invited, with his wife, by the President to a state dinner. At the end of the meal each of the wives of the diplomats invited was presented with a gift- wrapped box containing a beautiful diamond. A few years later Bokassa gave the President of France, Valery Giscard D’Estaing, two large diamonds, supposedly to get French support for his coronation as Emperor of his newly named Central African Empire. Despite the fact that by 1977 Bokassa was already beginning to run the country as his personal kleptocracy, the French Government agreed to orchestrate his coronation as Emperor, to partly pay for the ceremony using French foreign aid, and pay for the rest of the festivities by mortgaging future sales of diamonds to France and bankrupting the country in so doing. The Emperor’s throne, his regal robes, fifty sedans for visiting rulers from neighbouring countries, and even French prostitutes were all imported from France for the great day. The ceremony went off in great pomp, even though everyone was perspiring in their heavy robes in the tropical heat. After the festivities wound down, the fraternal leaders enjoyed the skills of

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the French prostitutes, who were employed during the coronation as French technical assistance personnel! The French have tended to turn a blind eye to the corruption of the leaders in their ex-colonies. What was and is still considered important is to maintain France’s linguistic and economic dominance in Africa. In 1979 the Emperor Bokassa went too far even for the French authorities. He insisted, in order to replenish his personal bank accounts, that all school children would have to buy their uniforms from a factory that his wife owned. When many children and their parents refused because of their high price and poor quality, Bokassa stormed into a secondary school, arrested several hundred children, and lead his troops to slash to death many of these. This was too much for the French, who rapidly arranged a coup to overthrow the Emperor that they had installed. One leader followed another, each as corrupt as their predecessors. When I was last in the Central African Republic in 1996, neither teachers nor one faction of the military had been paid for five months, as the President at that time was busy building a palace for his retirement in far away Togo. The army mutinied, supported by most of the urban population, but within twenty four hours the French soldiers had moved in to take control of the capital and reinstall their puppet. Though statistics are few and far between, it seems that in the forty years since independence the people in this country are as poor as they had ever been. Despite the cruelties of many of the kleptocrats, few embargoes are ever organised by the so-called developed countries to ostracise the biggest thieving politicians in these failed states. When I was in Sierra Leone in 1991 the mining and sale of diamonds was controlled by a few immigrant Lebanese families who used part of the proceeds to buy fancy vehicles for the politicians, and to set up quality schools for their children, and even to pay off some of the national debt to the IMF. The remaining proceeds would be sent to their overseas bank accounts in Lebanon and elsewhere. During the decade that they had been controlling the diamond trade the economy had been in a tail spin, terrible poverty was endemic and the vast majority of the population, including the mid-


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dle class, were significantly worse off than at the time of my first visit there in 1960. It was estimated that the Lebanese were sending around U.S. $200 million of diamonds out of the country a year, and flouted their wealth and their fancy cars on Freetown’s beach road every evening. The common soldiers, who were only paid intermittently, wanted a share in the wealth of these foreigners. They thus staged the first of many coups and rebellions to gain control of the diamond areas. As each faction stole the diamonds, other factions staged counter coups to get their hands on this illicit trade and use the revenues to purchase weapons to slaughter and maim all those who got in their way. As it was, tens of thousands of people were killed, thousands maimed, and around half the population of the country had to flee their homes. Another poisoned chalice! Some semblance of order has been restored, thanks to the presence of 18,000 U.N. peacekeepers, the largest group anywhere in the world, and costing more than the country had ever been earning from diamonds. Thanks to these jewels, and the greed that they provoked, virtually everyone in Sierra Leone is worse off than they were in the 1960’s and 1970’s. From being a country with one of the best education systems in Africa, a well functioning health service, and positive social indicators, it is now the country at the very bottom of the U.N.’s Human Development Indicators, and has one of the lowest life expectancies anywhere in the world; 49 years for women and 43 years for men. How much better off everyone would have been if diamonds had never been mined.

Coups and Curfews: It’s a Risky Business Traditional African monarchs and chiefs are often more influential than modern politicians. Tribal jealousies and underlying conflicts are far more important than any ideological differences. In Uganda there was a major division between the Nilotic people of the North of the country and the Bantus in the South and West. By far the most important and influential of the Bantu traditional rulers was the Kabaka of Buganda, whose kingdom covered the whole of the fertile centre of the country including the capital, Kampala. About a quarter of the population of Uganda were Baganda. The Kabaka had his own Government and ministries, as well his own tax revenues. The Prime Minister of Uganda, Milton Obote, was a Nilotic who spent the first few years as head of government skilfully balancing the various tribal and religious divisions in the country. In 1966 he decided to consolidate his power by removing the Kabaka, and employed Idi Amin’s faction of the army to storm the Kabaka’s palace, overthrow his Government, and drive him from the country. After a few days of fighting the Kabaka fled into exile in England and his people rose up against the Government, with night time attacks against policemen and soldiers. The Prime Minister promulgated a 7 p.m. to 6 a.m. curfew throughout Buganda, including in the capital. For six months we had to be home by 7 p.m. if we were not to risk being shot, and even those of our friends who reached home five minutes late suffered terrifying experiences. Anybody that we invited for dinner had to stay the night. Every night for six months we would hear sounds of shooting in the fields below our house, and sometimes would pass dead bodies as we took our children to their kindergarten. This was the first of the half

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dozen or more violent coups or revolutions that we have had to live through during my career.

A Ride in a Tank During the French colonialisation of the Central African Republic, the exploitation of ordinary people was even worse than has been the case since independence. At that time the country was divided into fourteen zones, and each rented out to a private company which was free to exploit its fiefdom as it saw fit, killing and maiming the people if they were not producing the required cash crops or diamonds. With independence the foreign exploiters were replaced by equally ruthless indigenous leaders, most of whom were well trained in violence, having been in the French army. Like all countries in central Africa, links with the wider world were tenuous at the best of times. The capital, Bangui, was beautifully situated on a bend in the Ubangui River, with ex-Belgium Congo on the other bank. All the necessities and the symbols of development were brought on barges from Brazzaville on a ten day journey along the Congo River, and then up the Ubangui to Bangui. Some of these goods were then transferred on to trucks for a further twelve days to Southern Sudan. I longed to take this barge trip, and made all the necessary arrangements, only to be thwarted by the frequent army mutinies and continuous political turbulence in both the Central African Republic and Congo Brazzaville. I was responsible for World Bank educational projects in this poor country in the heart of Africa, and was impressed by the primary school teachers who continued to teach despite only being paid intermittently, having to carry out all instruction in French, and forced to teach with almost no text books. I found it really weird that French, a completely foreign language, was used in the lower grades of primary school, even though it was only spoken by a miniscule proportion of the population. It was also dangerous, as it created a huge gulf between a small foreign oriented elite and the rest of the people. I thus provided support to a few local educators who wanted to develop curriculum materials in Sango, a local lingua

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franca that was understood by about 60% of the population of the country. It was not to be, as the first of a series of military mutinies started whilst we were discussing the new curricula. The main targets of these mutinies were the symbols of foreign privilege; the compound of the French Embassy, a foreign-owned bank, and the mansions of foreign aid workers, including that of the World Bank representative. Throughout the first night there was the sound of machine guns and mortars. The next morning, as there was only sporadic shooting, I walked to the centre of town where bands of mutineers were enjoying the freedom of the streets, followed by hordes of urchins shouting ‘tirez, tirez’ (shoot, shoot) at the soldiers, who shot in the air from time to time to satisfy their followers. This freedom was short lived, as by the end of the day the French army had moved in and occupied all the main road intersections, and other strategic points, killing any mutineers who came too near. It made me feel really strange to see white soldiers occupying the capital city of a supposedly independent black African nation. One of the excuses for the French invasion of this sovereign nation was to help protect and eventually evacuate foreigners (white?). A special Air France plane was laid on, and we were picked up from various assembly points by French army tanks and taken on a noisy and hot ride to the airport. All the French citizens, and those who had Air France tickets, were bundled on board the waiting aircraft; but I, who was not French and had a non-transferable Cameroonian Airlines ticket, was refused a seat, as there was no way that Air France could be sure that they would ever be paid for my flight. I pleaded several times with the captain, but to no avail. By the time the plane took off without me the tanks had been called to more active duty, and the only way to return to my hotel was on the back of a moped which zigzagged through the mutineers’ road blocks and had me safely there in record time. Since there was no electricity in town, the hotel, which was designed to be air conditioned, was like an inferno. I just had to sleep with my windows open, only to be devoured by swarms of hungry central African mosquitoes from the bend in the river, and unfortunately caught malaria for the first time in my life. I was thus not at my best waiting for seven days for


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Bangui airport to be finally reopened and I was able to fly back to Cameroon. It is hardly surprising that I have made efforts to avoid Air France ever since, as long as there was some other airline available.

Ambushed The terrible stress that my friends and I were under during all the events that eventually led to the overthrow of the Thai military dictators in October 1973 was so great that as soon as it seemed that thanks to the Thai King’s intervention things had quieted down, I decided to take a day off with my family. We joined a boat load of pilgrims on a trip along rivers and canals, between rice fields ready for harvest, to a famous temple where the Abbot had built a garden of hell, showing the terrible punishments that would befall us for each of the sins that we might commit. There was the tree of adultery where naked men and women climbed after each other, increasingly gouged by the thorns of the tree; the greedy man forever trying to fill his immense stomach with a tiny mouth; men who had the body of a goat; and women the head of pig. There were dozens of realistic life-sized models contorted and in pain. It was difficult to imagine that there were so many sins we could commit. The Abbot not only had his garden of hell, but was also ready to sell very powerful amulets that prevented the wearer from being disfigured or disabled in an accident. We readily paid the price. Returning to Bangkok by boat through villages on the banks of the canals, singing groups of villagers husking the harvested rice, some children returning from school by sampan whilst others dived and splashed in the water, and rice barges crawling along the mighty Chao Phraya River, we felt good. It was only the smoke that was rising from the centre of Bangkok that looked out of place. Our boat let us and other passengers down at the quay where we had boarded twelve hours earlier, near the campus of the biggest university. Slowly I realised that the figures I had thought were jumping off a bridge in to the river were in fact being shot off, and the smoke that we had seen was of buildings that had caught fire as the military advanced on the university. Driving slowly out from the quay we

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found ourselves in the middle of a pitched battle, with soldiers and students hiding behind walls and sheltering beside lampposts as they shot at each other. I pushed my wife and children to the floor of our car, and decided to run the gauntlet. “Never mind,” my youngest daughter said, “We have our Buddhas (amulets) to protect us.” It took us about ten minutes to get out of the battle zone to an area where other moving vehicles could be found. Perhaps it was our amulets that had saved us. After the military President and Prime Minister had left the country, I did everything I could to encourage new graduates to go into the countryside to help peasants climb out of their poverty through education, adult literacy, and community development, and used our own resources to give these young idealists enough to live on. Whenever I had free time I tried to visit these young men and women to encourage them and discuss with them problems they were facing, and possible solutions. One weekend we were on our way to visit a group of three activists in a poor and exploited village in a relatively remote area four or five hours south of Bangkok, and were travelling along a dirt trail through thick scrub. Suddenly soldiers with blackened faces leapt out in front of us, screaming and shooting their machine guns. Both my wife’s and my heart almost stopped with shock, and it took us several minutes to realise that we had arrived in the middle of a military exercise.

Zapatist Revolution One of my favourite films is ‘Viva Zapata,’ with Marlon Brando playing the lead role of Emiliano Zapata, the Mexican peasant leader and revolutionary land reform advocate of the early 1900’s. I had always been particularly impressed by the way he refused to be bought by liberal bourgeois reformers. When he was being hounded by the reformist’s troops he hid for some time in the mountains around San Cristobel de las Casas, in Chiapas State in Southern Mexico. When I was working in Ghana I decided for some unknown reason that my wife and I should celebrate the 1993/94 New Year in San Cristobel de las Casas. It was a very long trip, a flight from Ghana to Europe, then on to the U.S.A., and on again to the


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Yucatan in Mexico, and finally a two-day rental car trip into the hills. On the way the poverty and sadness of the indigenous Indians marked me. Their plots were as small as those I knew well in the mountains of Nepal, and their huts were poorer and darker than those we had left behind in Ghana. Even in the markets there were crowds of small sad men and women, whereas those in Africa and Asia were full of exuberance and noise. We arrived in San Cristobel de las Casas on the afternoon of December 31 1993, found a small local hotel on the main town square, and spent the afternoon and evening strolling around and joining in the festivities in the streets. A few hours after going to bed my wife woke me to the sound of what she thought was gunfire. I told her to go back to sleep, as it was just firecrackers that people were letting off to celebrate the New Year. Getting up the next morning we thought it strange that someone had dropped by accident lots of desks, chairs, and other furniture, blocking the road beside the hotel. We got dressed, went downstairs, and against the strangest protests of the hotel manager went into the street, only to be surrounded by a group of heavily armed men and women, many in balaclava ski masks, and others with colourful bandanas covering their faces. All over the central plaza there were hundreds of small masked, indigenous people, some with modern guns, others with what looked like home made hunting rifles, whilst yet others just with cutlasses. The town had been captured during the night by a new group of Zapatist revolutionaries, whilst the police and the army had been celebrating the New Year. This Zapatist revolution was symbolically launched the same day the North American Free Trade Area came into force. At first we were forced back into our hotel, but after an hour or so the atmosphere became more relaxed and we were allowed to wander around town. All the government offices had been looted and their records destroyed, the hospital’s drug supplies were appropriated, the barracks captured and I presume their weapons taken, and all the roads in and out of town blocked. The occupying force was disciplined and distant, did not threaten or try to rob shopkeepers, and did not stop me taking photos of them and their activities. There was a small core leadership group operating from a minibus. That afternoon, their leader, Sub-Comandante Marcos, who later

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became famous throughout the world, gave a long speech from the balcony of the town hall to the assembled people of San Cristobel de las Casas. On the evening of the second day Marcos called a meeting of the thirty or forty tourists who had been trapped in the town, and told us that since he was expecting the Mexican Army to attack at any time and as this was not our conflict, we should plan to leave town at dawn the next morning. At 5 a.m. the next day, when it was still dark and there was a thick mist blanketing the town, we all assembled on the main square, nervously ready for our flight. We had perhaps a dozen vehicles in all, and were not more than thirty people. None of us had any idea as to what would happen to us, whether we were moving into a trap or were the bait, or were going to be taken into the forest as hostages. My wife prepared a small bag with a change in underclothes which she hoped to bring with her if she were taken hostage. Some of us were tough, macho world travellers in 4 wheel drive trucks, whilst others frightened couples were in saloon cars and everything you could imagine in between. Just outside the town we came across the first barriers, which were huge rocks that had been rolled onto the road. With our combined efforts we rolled them back off. Next there was a burnt out bus straddling the highway which we were able to manoeuvre around. When we came to five huge pine trees that had been cut down across the road we thought that we would have to leave our vehicles behind and walk. One by one we struggled to drag the trees slowly to the side of the road. We tied ropes to the trunks and fixed these to the trucks. The trucks went into low gear and pulled, and we all pushed, and finally the road was clear. Seventy kilometres further on we passed the first Mexican army troops, dug in and camouflaged, shocked by our small convoy coming out of the forest, and far too frightened to advance on the Zapatists. Over the years since then, despite the fact that Sub-Commandante Marcos has managed to mobilise millions of Indians throughout Mexico and make good use of foreign media, the lot of the indigenous population has only improved marginally. In Mexico, as elsewhere, the rich, be they landowners or business tycoons, are so


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powerful that they can easily resist legitimate pressure for change from the poorest underdogs in society.

What Price an African Life A few months later I was on my way back to Bangui to continue with my work on changing the language used in primary schools from French to Sango when another mutiny broke out, and the plane that I was on was diverted to N’djamena, the capital of Chad. Another opportunity lost. After almost twenty years working and living in Africa, I have learnt that it is the impossible goals and expectations that we development advisers have set which are a large part of the cause of the proliferation of mutinies, tribal conflicts, coups, and civil wars. The more we have tried to create a class of black French, black English, or black Portuguese, the greater the instability. The more one class or ethnic group dominates whatever resources there are in a country, the more there is likely to be violent political upheavals, as this is the only way another group can control or share in the bounty. It has taken several hundred years to move from the feudal or serf-based economy that existed in Europe to the current system, where poverty is now less deep, and where there is at least some possibility for a few of the poor to break out of this poverty through some Government assistance and their own hard work. When I was walking around Africa in 1960 the use of money was not widespread, and in some regions clothing was still uncommon. We development advisors have unrealistically assumed that it is psychologically possible for people anywhere in the world to be able to leap several centuries forward in thirty or forty years and have the same motivations and expectations as we do. We jet into the capital cities of the third world, stay in the same luxurious hotels wherever we go, and plan the future of people we cannot know with Western educated and oriented leaders who are just as out of touch of their people as we are. In medieval Europe there were long decades of pointless war, with villages and towns pillaged, fields burnt, women raped, and

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many other horrors committed, all in the name of one lord or another, or one faith or another. Between 1348 and 1351 up to half the population of Europe died of the plague. It was not just in Europe where there was the sacking of cities and churches. At the same time in South East Asia the Burmese and Thais were always at war with each other, usually over the ownership of white elephants. Tens of thousands of people would be slaughtered in these wars, and many more would die of cholera and typhus. What is happening in Africa today is merely a repeat of our own past, wherever we come from; it is only the scale of everything which is so much larger, thanks to the destructive weapons we sell to psychopaths in that unfortunate continent and the virulence of the new diseases. In the last decade of the 20th century around 10 million Africans died in various conflicts. A million killed in Rwanda, four million in Congo, three million in Angola, hundreds of thousand in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Ethiopia, and Mozambique. Disease and pestilence have kept well ahead with 3 million Africans dying of HIV AIDS a year, a similar number killed by malaria, millions of children stunted for life due to malnutrition, and several hundreds of thousands dying of starvation each year. Each of the dead have mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, friends and lovers who suffer as much as you and I would if one of our own children were to die unnecessarily. This suffering is multiplied millions of times over, and somehow is only acceptable to the rest of the world because the dead are African. Most of us have a hidden assumption that an African life is worth much less than that of an American or European. Meanwhile the African leaders have their private jets, their Swiss bank accounts, their palaces in Africa, and their castles in France. It can be no surprise that those who hold power cling on to it, and those who don’t are always looking for ways to grab it. I have already discussed the poisoned chalice of petroleum. Competition between British and French petrol companies over Nigerian oil led to the Biafran civil war in the 1960’s, with a million killed. In Congo Brazzaville there has been a continuing conflict between two gang leaders (a priest and a general) over who should control its petrol, to such an extent that the capital city has been flattened several times. In Angola it was both petrol and diamonds that


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paid for the simple weapons that were used to murder three million people or more during the twenty year civil war. It is almost universally argued by development experts that countries that want to advance rapidly should open their economies as widely as possible to imports. Most of such imports are for luxury consumption or for tools of oppression, and tend to benefit the same class or group that benefit from the exploitation of the mineral resources. I would argue that the people of Sub-Saharan Africa would benefit if there were a complete trade embargo, with a blockade of all imports apart from gifts of food and drugs, and all exports. If this could be done there would be much less for different ethnic groups to fight over, and fewer weapons available for these fights. Africans could then find ways out of their own problems, in their own time. Lebanese immigrants arrived in West Africa in the first decades of the twentieth century, initially dropped there by unscrupulous shippers when they had paid to be taken to Brazil or the U.S.A. They rapidly occupied the same positions in retail and wholesale trade as the Indians in East Africa, and through extensive family networks had their feet in several coastal countries, ready to move whenever insecurity became too great where they were. At times they wielded extensive political power, having bought the leadership in several West African states. Much to the embarrassment of the IMF, the leading Lebanese businessman in Sierra Leone wrote a personal cheque to the IMF for U.S. $26 million to settle the country’s outstanding debt to the IMF, thus allowing World Bank and other donor supported projects to start again, no doubt to be controlled by the same Lebanese. Chad is another of these peculiar French colonial creations in the centre of Africa. It is entirely landlocked, and most of its imports are brought in by truck from Cameroon, a thousand kilometre trip along one of the worst roads in the world. Three quarters or more of Chad’s extensive land area is desert, and the remaining part is savannah and even some tropical forests. Eighty percent or more of the population are animists and Christians living in the South, and 20% are black Moslems living in the North. In the 1970’s and

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1980’s it had one of those particularly savage civil wars that all my Chadian friends prefer to forget. Sometimes there were as many as a dozen different armies or gangs of callous killers involved, and at times the capital was occupied by two or three armies. The changing front lines led to the death of many thousands of civilians. Some factions were supported by the Libyans, some by Sudanese, some by the French, and one even by the Egyptians. In the end a French supported group of northern Moslems gained the upper hand and formed a government that has remained in power for more than a decade. Just to remind people who is really in charge now, French Mirage jets continue to break the silence of the dawn, taking off from N’djamena’s airport and screeching across the desert, and patrolling foreign legionnaires in their mini shorts and sunburnt legs continue to travel all around the country. What was most interesting during this time when the warlords fought for control of the capital and there was no central government of any kind was that in much of the South of the country dirt poor parent and community groups created their own primary schools with absolutely no outside support. They constructed mud and wattle classrooms, and employed barely literate villagers as teachers, paying them a tenth or less what a civil servant teacher would earn, usually not in cash but in sacks of maize and millet, and organised their academic year around the agricultural cycle. The quality of many of these schools was poor, but at least the children were becoming literate. For more than a decade these community schools provided the only education anyone was getting. In several of the failed states the only schools and health centres were established and run by the people themselves. When I was working in Chad most of the petrol it needed for generating electricity and for fuelling its vehicles came from Nigeria, and thus whenever supplies broke down in Nigeria there was no electric power, and thus no air-conditioning. Since summer temperatures could reach fifty degrees centigrade my clothes would be soaked in sweat when I ran seminars and carried out training. Apart from cotton and stolen vehicles Chad had almost no exports, and was almost entirely dependent on foreign aid, even to pay its civil


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servants. It did, however, have substantial petroleum reserves in the southern half of the country, a thousand kilometres from the coast. Petrol is a poisoned chalice in more ways than we in the rich world can imagine. One time when we were living in Yaounde, a petrol tanker backed by accident into a wall and started to leak. The people living near where this happened considered the leaking fuel to be a gift from heaven to supplement their meagre incomes, and rushed with buckets, cans, cooking pots, and anything else that could hold petrol. It was impossible for the few policemen present to control the crowds of treasure hunters even if they had wanted to, and one, relaxing, pulled out a cigarette, struck a match, and a huge explosion and fireball engulfed the children, women, and men with their buckets of petrol. 960 were killed, and many more burned and disfigured. What started in joy ended in misery. Frequently in the oil rich Niger delta youths, resentful that the oil extracted from their land is piped away to some distant destination with no benefit for themselves or their people, chop holes in a pipeline, and like their Cameroonian brothers fill buckets and pans, and from time to time blow themselves and hundreds of family members up, un-noticed by the outside world. What price an African life? Whilst we were living in Africa it was neither malaria nor HIV AIDS that we were most worried about, but road accidents. Several of our friends were lucky to escape with their lives, and some acquaintances were less lucky. The highest rates of road fatalities per kilometre driven are in Africa. The elite drive at very high speeds in poorly maintained cars on roads used by villagers to dry their crops on, and by donkeys and cattle to sleep on. Far too often children and other village folk would be hit by speeding cars, which would not stop for fear of the anger of the local people. In Uganda some Government Ministries were in Entebbe and others in Kampala, 22 miles away. I made this trip frequently, and sometimes came across small groups of villagers grouped around someone who had been killed or injured by a speeding car. I always stopped and picked up the injured person and took him or her to the local hospital, where I was usually attacked by the nurses for interfering before they asked for the obligatory bribe.

The Joy of Life The life of the poor in the rural areas in Africa and Asia is far harder than any of us can possibly imagine. There is frequently not enough to eat in the lean months before the harvest. Too often crops and livestock are destroyed by floods, droughts, or pests. There are frequent epidemics of TB, measles, and malaria. A third of the children born might die before their parents. Everything involves work, carrying water, carrying firewood, carrying fodder; and more work planting, weeding, harvesting, and threshing. It is the festivals that the people look forward to more than anything else. Festivals are the time when the people can dress up, eat, drink, dance, and flirt, and in some tribes provide the only opportunity for this. It is a time of joy, and a time for renewal. In the hills behind the village in Nepal where we lived there was a steep climb of seven or eight hours up to a plateau at 3,600 meters above sea level. Whenever we were going to the North and East of our Headquarters we would have to climb up and cross this plateau, and would stop one night at the top, usually near the Koptad Baba, a famous hermit. He came from Kashmir, and had been a medical doctor in India but had renounced all worldly goods and been living in a small hut on the plateau for the past thirty years or more. In the winter the plateau was covered in deep snow and was often impassable, but still some courageous herders would come up from their villages below with offerings for the Baba. Without these his survival through the long winter would have been more than miraculous. In the summer the plateau was so high that the lakes and ponds would freeze over at night, and I would be out of breath and quite weak crossing its heights. The Baba was so famous as a sage and an astrologer that it was said that even the Prime Minister would

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visit him by helicopter before making crucial decisions. He lived in a one room hut, grew medicinal herbs to treat the herders who fell sick, and befriended snow leopards, tigers, and other animals, especially during the cold winter months. It was clear that he had some extraordinary powers, as he would prepare for my visit an hour or so before I reached his hut. We had many discussions about schooling, and the importance of basing all education on sound moral as well as pedagogic foundations. He was concerned over the lack of attention and resources that the Government gave to primary education, as this was the foundation on which the future development of the country depended. No sane man would construct a multi-storied house on weak foundations in the sand, as no matter the quality of the building materials used on the higher floors the likelihood was that it would collapse. In Nepal per student expenditures in primary education were far lower than those in secondary and higher education. Just after the harvest in October there would be a huge gathering of all the clans from the villages surrounding the plateau which lasted for two nights and three days. Food, drink, and trinket sellers would arrive first and set up their tents, and then thousands of villagers colourfully dressed in their finest outfits and covered in beads, gold, and silver would start to arrive. Each group would come from a different direction and make the long climb up from their village, singing as they came. The men with their colourful caps, wrapped in white shawls over a jacket and Jodhpur trousers, leading their women and children, whose outfits and adornments differed depending on the direction from where they came. All were wearing multicoloured skirts, thick strings of colourful beads, new white plimsolls, shawls, mainly white but sometimes not, and flowers in their hair. They were also wearing all the gold that they possessed, discs the size of saucers pinned to their hair, nose rings as big as the discs, nose jewellery, and hanging ear discs; whilst others were covered with heavy silver necklaces, spiky bracelets, and anklets; and yet others were worn down by the weight of all the beads they had around their necks. No women from any two villages wore the same outfit or adornments. This festival was the only time during the year that women were allowed out in public in all their fin-

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ery, showing off their gold and jewellery, and was the only time that the girls could meet with young men from neighbouring villages. Throughout the year the diet of those living around the plateau was the same day in and day out: millet chapattis, a soup of pulses and salt, and sometimes milk, yoghurt, or ghee. The three days of this festival was the only time in the year when there was meat to eat. There was also plenty of alcohol being sold for the men, and less openly for the older women. Men and women would form separate circles and move round and round in a shuffling, stamping sort of dance. One woman would sing out something that had happened during the past year, all the women would repeat after her; and then a man would lead the reply, to be repeated by the other men, and all the time the two circles would rotate. This repartee would go on for hours, round and round, singing backwards and forwards, getting slightly more daring as the night went on. Anyone could leave the circles, to return later, though the young girls were carefully watched. As dawn broke those who had special requests of the gods, or special thanks to offer them, would take a bath in an ice-covered lake, men and women in ponds distant from each other. More meat and alcohol to warm up, and then constant movement over the a large open expanse of the plateau as each of the groups would rotate around, meeting those who they had not seen for a year, stopping here and there to exchange news and gossip, but never showing emotion, and always remaining in their groups. It was as if the whole plateau were alive in a blaze of moving colours. The second night was much as the first, with the stamping shuffling circles and the repartee. The morning of the third day was spent on a silent trot back down to their separate villages, first to sleep off the three days of excess, and then to return to the grind and hardship of their daily lives, locking their jewellery, shoes and finery away in trunks, to remain unopened for another year.

Festivals I doubt whether I have ever been on a prolonged journey in any country without coming across some kind of festival. They are always so important in the lives of those with neither radio nor televi-

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sion that I have tried to build in some aspects of these festivals into non-formal education programmes, and readers. The most important festivals are seasonal, during planting, rainmaking, harvesting, worshipping ancestors, New Year, or paying homage to a chief. Usually one or more of these festivals allow sexual behaviours that are not allowed the rest of the year: getting drunk or high, flirting, and even making love to someone who is not their spouse. Many are the times that I have stumbled upon the most incredible festivals with no idea as to exactly what they were for. Nubile, semi-naked teenage girls in the most complex dances in southern Ghana, dangerous stick dances in the central region of Ethiopia, and shamans dressed in hideous outfits in a terrifying animistic festival on a mountain slope in Nepal. The New Year or Songkran celebration in Thailand falls towards the end of the hot season, and is by far the biggest festival of the year, with all those who had migrated to the cities returning to their village or town of origin. Traditionally it involves ritually washing the hands and heads of parents and older relatives, to clean away all their hardships and suffering of the past year, and wish them a better year to come. After the ritual washing the elders would be given a gift such as a new cloth. This tradition has gradually been transformed into an exuberant water festival, where everyone has great fun throwing and spraying water at everyone else. In the evenings there is a lot of eating, drinking, and flirting, as relatives and friends celebrate a coming together of those who they have not met for a year or more, as is done in almost all new year celebrations the world over. In rural Thailand it always used to be the village monks who would determine when the planting season should start. In some communities in the North East there would be great excitement as the time to plant the rice crop approached, as the monks had built large rockets. On the auspicious day they would fire them. If the rocket flew high the crop would be good, and if it veered off, exploded, or crashed, the omen would be poor. Crowds of men, women, and children would surround the launch site in anticipation, and if the rocket climbed high in the sky, there would be a great cheer and a huge celebration would start with copious supplies of

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alcohol, and if the rocket exploded taking off, or crashed nearby, everyone would slouch off home.

Rites of Passage Rites of passage are celebrated with great enthusiasm and colour, and provide opportunities for there to be a redistribution of surplus crops and income to the whole community. They also help to bring and keep extended families together. Accepting the existence of a newly born child, the passing of a young man or woman into adulthood, a wedding, and a funeral are all celebrated with varying degrees of enthusiasm in different cultures. The jumping of the bull is the most important festival for the Hammer in the South of Ethiopia. Until a young man has jumped across a group of ten or so bulls, lined side to side, three times running without falling, no one would consider marrying him. Large quantities of millet beer are prepared several days in advance, and early on the day of the bull jumping, sufficient food for everyone is put in huge black clay pots on slow burning fires. Early in the afternoon the young men start adorning each other, stripes of white from their ears to their eyes and chin, strings of coloured beads, and feathers in their short hair. The women cover themselves with a paste of ochre mud and oil, hair, face, and bodies, and wear nothing more than a leather apron. The sisters and younger female relatives of the bull jumper are very sad to loose their brother to his new bride once he has cleared the bulls, and to show their love for him they offer themselves to be whipped by him with a bunch of thin branches. They taunt their brother until he gets really angry and beats them until there are bleeding welts on their backs, and still one or two of the women continue to taunt his weakness, and as if in a trance don’t know how badly beaten they are, and have to be dragged away by the older women to stop them being permanently maimed. Higher up the hill above the village the dancing begins. Groups of men circle around to the pounding of drums and, keeping their bodies straight, leap high in the air together. Leaping, their group moves nearer and nearer to the group of the women, who are also circling, stamping, and shaking their anklets together. As the

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men approach the women, a man breaks off and performs an erotic dance in front of the woman of his choice and then returns to his circle, repeated by each man in turn. The bulls are brought out and lined up as darkness approaches, eerie in the light of the cooking fires. Suddenly the hero was standing on the back of one of the bulls, and leaping three cows at a time reaches the end, jumps round and repeats it twice, to the ululation of the circling women. As the night wears on the dancing circles got smaller and smaller as couples paired off and disappeared into the bush. The funeral is by far the most important festival for the Ashanti in Ghana, and for most people throughout Africa. Usually a dead person will be buried with finer clothes and jewellery than they ever possessed in their lives, and their families will get seriously in debt providing a proper send off for a sibling, spouse or parent. In the past when an important Ashanti chief died, he would be buried with a hundred or more ‘servants;’ people who were picked up at random and had their necks broken before they were buried in the grave of the chief. In the past when an important chief died everyone would hide in the bush until the funeral was over. When a new post office was being built in the capital of the Ashanti region a royal grave was accidentally uncovered, and more than two hundred skeletons were found next to the remains of the chief. The funeral is so important in Ghana that there are make-up artists and even special plastic surgeons that would do what they could to beautify a corpse before it was ready for its final public appearance. Arriving at a funeral, the first thing to do is to bid farewell to the corpse, which is dressed in expensive clothes and jewellery, laid out in state in an elaborate coffin, sometimes in the shape of an aeroplane or a Mercedes Benz, or something else the dead person would have liked to possess in his life but never did. Passing in front of the corpse to bid farewell a photographer takes a souvenir picture of each guest with the dead body, to be distributed after the burial. I have enough pictures of me with various corpses to fill an album, and I have only been to a few funeral celebrations! A small funeral will have several hundred, and the larger several thousand,

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or even tens of thousands of guests. The funeral is a time for passing on gossip and developing new relationships. It is also a time for heavy drinking. The biggest and most elaborate funeral I have ever attended in my life was that of the mother of the Ghanaian Minister of Health, who also happened to be one of the most important traditional chiefs in the country. On the auspicious day the chief was sitting under a huge multicoloured parasol, bedecked in royal attire, with such a heavy solid gold ring with his clan symbol attached, that he needed to have an official hand waver to help him lift his hand to greet all those who arrived at the funeral. He also had his official interpreter, who was always present whenever the chief was in public. An important chief never talks to anyone directly, but always through his interpreter. The interpreter would always say, “The chief says ……” Thus if the chief says anything wrong it is always the interpreter who is to blame! This must be a very useful way out of some sticky situations. Soon after the paramount chief was ready to receive his guests the processions of other Ashanti chiefs started to arrive, each preceded by drummers, and town criers who would extol the greatness of their particular master. Each chief would be wearing his most elaborate robes and gold jewellery, and was carried high on a palanquin, shaded with a multi-coloured parasol, and followed by his interpreters, wives, and dozens of other subjects. Arriving at the parade ground in front of the paramount chief, each group would make several increasingly noisy rounds of the field before dancing in front of their host as he encouraged them with the assistance of his arm waver. They then retreated to the edge of the ground to continue to drum, dance, and shout praises of their chief, freeing the area in front of the bereaved chief to the next group. As the morning wore on, more and more chiefs arrived, closer and closer to each other, and the parade ground became a kaleidoscope of whirling colours, and a cacophony of drumming and trumpeting, which rose to a crescendo when Ashanti members of the party politburo and Ministers came to pay their respects to the mourning chief and to campaign for the support of the Ashanti people. Still the flow of chiefs and their followers rolled on, as did the flow of spirits, adding to the chaos and the noise. Several hundred

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chiefs and their followers had paid their respects to the paramount chief, and ten, twenty, or more thousand followers were on the parade ground drinking heavily, drumming and dancing. Only when night began to fall did the revellers take off for home, with considerably less enthusiasm than when they arrived. Towards midnight the body of the dead woman was taken from the chief’s palace to a secret burial ground and quietly buried. When I was first in Ghana the revellers would accompany the coffin to its final resting point, but nowadays the only way to prevent grave robbers digging up new graves to steal jewellery and expensive cloths was to keep the burial grounds secret, or to bury the dead in the compounds of their houses. So much for progress! Many old customs have to be adapted to take account of the breakdown in values, changing economic realities, and the population explosion. As Chinese and Christian graveyards consume an increasing proportion of available land, as Africans live more and more in an urban environment and have no space to bury their dead under their houses, or even their husband’s head under their bed; and as Hindu cremations have to be carried out in increasingly deforested areas with not enough wood to burn all the bodies, old customs need to be adapted.

Coming Home The cities and towns in Africa and Asia have been growing rapidly over the past few decades, largely financed through the transfer of resources from the countryside to the towns. It is only during the annual village festival that funds flow in the opposite direction. Most of those now living in the burgeoning towns still have roots in their village of origin, and have close relatives still living there. In the towns there are always support groups for those who have migrated from the same village, and more important there is always at least one festival a year when most will return to their natal village, drawn by special dances, food, and drink. Sometimes these are national religious festivals when everyone throughout the country is on the move, and sometimes these are special seasonal village or temple celebrations. Wives, girlfriends, parents, and other relatives who

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have been left behind in the villages look forward to these festivals, as those from the towns will always come with gifts, whether they can afford these or not. Those from the towns can also be persuaded to part with some money for local development activities. Those who live outside the village often feel superior to those that they left behind; but they also miss the special dances, food and drink in their home town. Minibuses, pickups, trucks, or cars leave the city early in the morning for the distant village. Already there is drumming and singing, sharing of some local delicacies, and drinking. Arriving in the village, a field in front of the chief’s palace has usually been prepared, with some chairs under an awning for big shots such as the entourage of the village chief, the local political elite, and including my wife and I. Pots of frothing palm wine and other drinks are brought in and passed around to quench the thirst of locals and visitors alike, as the beating of the huge village drum encourages everyone to come to the arena in anticipation of the forthcoming festivities. After the chief has greeted the visitors, a group of unmarried young woman leap into the arena, usually dressed in colourful matching clothes, but at other times naked from the waist up, and perform sophisticated synchronised dances to the beat of three or four frenetic drummers. Every so often there is a break in the dancing, and the chairman of the village development committee announces the various projects that they would like to undertake in the coming year: a meeting room here, a new classroom block there, and improved drains everywhere, and contributions are solicited. Clever strategies are used to get money from the visitors, including competitions between those born on the different days of the week, and dancing contests. Meat and drinks flow in profusion. After a while the visitors, men, women, and children are dancing too, and whenever the chief is particularly impressed he holds up two fingers and points at the skilful dancer. As night falls the drumming gradually stops and everyone passes from house to house around the village greeting each other, gossiping, eating and drinking spirits, finally sleeping wherever they ended up. The next morning, after all promised contributions have

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been extracted, everyone piles back into the vehicles, and drum, drink, and sing all the way back to the city. These festivals have always been useful in my work, as not only have they helped me become aware of some key problems as perceived by the villagers themselves, but have also enabled us to use the festival as an opportunity to launch a literacy class in the village, with the support and encouragement of those living in the city.

Bring in the World There are many so called development experts who spend half or more of their professional lives preparing for, attending, and reporting on conferences. Participants not only stay in luxury hotels and are provided with rich food, but also receive per-diems which substantially increase their incomes. During these conferences participants feel important, as they are discussing core problems, and make recommendations as to how these might be resolved. Usually the only recommendation that is sure to be followed up is to have another meeting in yet another exotic location. Early in my career I decided that I was not going to join the conference circuit, especially as I was aware that it was not me or any other expert who could solve the problems of the poor, but only the poor themselves, and the longer I spent in the developing world, the more I realised that problems have to be solved through action, and not just through words. After I had been living in the Far West of Nepal for a couple of years, UNESCO’s International Institute of Education Planning asked me if I could help organise an international conference on Education for Rural Development. I agreed as long as I was able to organise the meeting around our project. It was clear to me that the conference should be held in the project area and not in a Kathmandu hotel, so the participants could at least see what was happening or not happening on Education for Rural Development in a real life situation. We held a series of meetings with the villagers in our mountain Headquarters, and convinced them of the honour it would be for their village to be able to welcome people from all over the

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world. We also had to decide where forty or so guests could sleep, where they could meet, and what they could eat. The villagers agreed to clean and whitewash a building which had once belonged to a governor of the province but had been unused for many years; to build a large water tank so that participants could wash; to dig two pit latrines; to provide all the woollen carpets and quilts that they possessed for the outsiders to sleep on; and to get from local government offices enough chairs for all the participants. The conference meetings would be held under a big shade tree. We agreed that we would be responsible for flying participants to the airfield in the valley below the village and for preparing all the meals, though the villagers would supply the wood for the cooking fires. I hired two cooks from a trekking company in Kathmandu and flew them, all their utensils and food stuffs to our base a couple of days before the conference, and the villagers carried everything up the mountain. The day the participants arrived on two charter flights was very hot, and though their luggage was carried by porters, the participants had to walk up the mountain. It was a day of great festivity for the local people; along the whole length of the climb the visitors were garlanded, given hot sweet tea and water, and were accompanied by drummers and singers. Thousands of people from all the villages in the area lined the trail to encourage just a bit more effort. Everyone managed to arrive, with the fittest reaching the conference site in three hours, and the slowest taking eight hours. Africans, South and South East Asians, North and South Americans, and Europeans came to this memorable conference. Everyone slept more soundly on their carpet than they expected. Only a few participants were ready to trek any further to visit other project activities over the next days, but many were happy to walk around the village. There was one incident that almost destroyed the good rapport between participants and villagers. One of the African participants washed at the water tank naked, without wearing a sarong. Apologies all around, and the damage was repaired. Though the kitchen was an inferno, and must have been about 50 degrees centigrade inside, the two cooks produced wonderful meals. Departure was on the fourth day. All the participants were up early, and did not need any encouragement to go down the mountain

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to the airfield. I was worried, as visibility was poor due to the dust that had blown up from the plains of central India. Our charter planes never arrived. Whatever could we do? It would be virtually impossible for many of the participants to climb the mountain again. Then miraculously out of the sky a plane appeared, a cargo plane loaded with famine relief grain, which had followed the valleys instead of flying high over the mountains. After some negotiation the pilot agreed to take a cargo of international conferees to an airport where hopefully they could meet their charters to take them to Kathmandu. This was one conference that the participants never forgot, though whether it had an impact on their actions was another question; and as for the villagers, for many years there were ballads sung at festivals about the time the world arrived in their village; accompanied by black, yellow, brown, and white people.

Singing in the Dark Adult literacy classes almost always take place at night after learners return from the fields, or their work, or have finished their daily chores. Lighting is usually from kerosene lanterns. It was always very moving for me to visit an adult class after a difficult trek along rocky paths in the dark, to arrive at the site where the class was taking place. Twenty or thirty men and women, crushed in a small room, lighted by three or four lanterns, really enjoying themselves, and so ready to show off their new found skills. There is such a pride when someone can first write their name, gripping the biro in their fist. They insist that I stay the night with them so that they can show me their development achievements the next morning …..trees planted, latrines constructed, improved cooking stoves built, simple things that have a big impact on their lives. The learners in literacy classes in the towns form a less homogenous group than those in the countryside. They have many different jobs, their homes are more widely dispersed, and they come from different ethnic groups. However, even in these urban areas, since the literacy classes are usually run in schools where there is no electricity, kerosene lanterns have again to be used. It is also a memorable experience to walk through the darkened city streets to arrive at a

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class where older men and women are struggling with this entirely different form of communication. The big difference between urban and rural classes is that in town it is very hard to get learners involved in any practical activities. It is always difficult to maintain the active involvement of adults tired out from their hard days work, and this can be done only if there are frequent changes in the learning activities: discussion, interpretation of a picture, singing, reading key words and sentences, singing, calculating, planning action, and singing again. Singing is very important as everyone joins in and wakes up when a familiar song, especially designed for literacy participants, is sung. Whenever I needed to impress my sponsors, I would always take them to visit adult literacy classes that were being taught at night illuminated with kerosene lanterns. There are few activities more impressive than a group of ordinary men or women struggling to write something, or singing in the half light, and discussing what benefits they hope to gain from becoming literate. I have been a new literate in three or four different languages and scripts including Thai, Nepali, and Amharic, and I am well aware that there are normally no newspapers, magazines, or books that are specifically designed for newly literate adults such as I. The new literate needs a large typeface, a simple grammatical structure, a small vocabulary, and an interesting and relevant content. In most countries there are readers written for primary school children from middle class families, but poorer adults are not likely to be interested in stories about the adventures of children and their pets. More often than not there is nothing appropriate for the new literate to read. In Ghana where we ran literacy classes in sixteen national languages, we found that apart from the bible and the prayer book there was nothing available for anyone to read in the languages being taught. There is obviously little point in teaching people to read if there is nothing for them to read, as a skill not used is easily forgotten. According to research that we carried out on the retention of literacy skills in both Thailand and Nepal, it seemed that if newly

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acquired literacy skills were never used, they tended to be lost in about three years. We once had a young adult attending his third literacy class. Thus whenever we prepared learning materials for literacy classes in any language, we also had to develop, print, and find a way to distribute reading materials in the same language. In every language taught in the literacy programme we would develop a bi-monthly village newspaper, mainly reporting on the achievements of different learners and classes, and at least fifty different short readers with stories on topics that would interest the new learners, written and illustrated by people living in the area where the particular language is spoken. In much of Africa and Asia, outside the church or the temple, there is nowhere that the people can meet to gossip, laugh together, listen to the radio, and to discuss what needs to change in their lives and their community. We have always encouraged literacy learners to find or build a multi-purpose Village Reading Centre. Once this is done the centre would be stocked with readers, village newspapers, school books, anything else of interest from other agencies that we could find in the particular language, along with a radio and battery cells, or more recently a solar and clockwork radio. The centre would be managed by a small group of learners, and would be open to all adult literacy participants and graduates, as well school children. It has been extremely difficult to maintain interest in these centres and their activities beyond three or four years, as few governments have budgeted for a continuous supply of new reading materials in the different languages, and arranged for these to be distributed all over the country to the different centres. In Ghana and Cameroon, beer, matches, and cigarettes reach the remotest corner of the country through private initiatives. We thus gave subsidies to the beer and cigarette distributors for each set of reading materials they managed to deliver to reading centres. Family planning and health workers have also tried to use the cigarette distribution network to make condoms available at subsidised prices nationwide. These were rarely successful, as in small towns and villages there would be immediate gossip on who was buying condoms, how many and how frequently. Any purchaser would almost be advertising his sexual habits. It was not until a brilliant Thai so-

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cial marketer, Meechai Viravaidya, developed an innovative strategy to overcome this problem, so that it became possible for men and women to purchase condoms with no stigma attached. His organisation promoted the multiple uses of condoms. They were advertised to be used to store grain, protecting it from the damp and from insects; to keep cooking oil in; and even to store small quantities of water. He produced condoms in many different colours so that they could be used as balloons by children, and made into water bombs during the New Year’s celebration. Finally it was shown how they could also help prevent the spread of sexually transmitted diseases and be used in the spacing of children. Everyone was buying the subsidised condoms, and no one could say what they were being bought for!

Consuming Champagne I was in charge of the World Bank office in Cameroon when one of the Managing Directors and a couple of Vice Presidents decided to make an official visit to that country. I organised what I thought was a balanced programme of visits to the harbour, a school, a health centre, a banana research institute, and an industrial holding company. What I had not foreseen was the huge numbers of sycophants who would join the various visits. By the second day we had a motorcade of over eighty vehicles, and it was taking around an hour just to load or unload everyone at each stop. Even worse, during each official visit our group was treated to dozens of bottles of champagne, which was fully appreciated by the accompanying hoards, but the cost of which was usually higher than the annual operational budget of the institution we were visiting. I estimated that during the two and half days of visits over forty cases of champagne were consumed. As the morning wore on not only were we getting more and more behind schedule, but our police escort was also becoming increasingly aggressive, forcing everyone who was not a part of our motorcade off the roads. I finally had to make an emergency request for an army helicopter to get our guests ahead of the motorcade, and carry out the planned visits on time. On the third and final morning I broke all protocol, escaped our police escort, and took the guests to a nearby slum and visited an understaffed and

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overcrowded primary school and a dilapidated health centre there. Apart from the champagne this was all the Managing Director and his team ever remembered. In the 1970’s Nigeria banned the import of champagne and sparkling wines because of the drain this was creating in the country’s foreign exchange reserves. For some years I was puzzled by this, and by the fact that Cameroon, not a rich country, had the highest per capita consumption of champagne in the world. Everything became clear when I learnt that the wives and girl friends of the elite had the habit of taking baths in champagne. Due to its astringent properties it was claimed to tighten their vaginas, making them more exciting in bed. Meanwhile teachers and other civil servants had their salaries halved, levels of malnutrition worsened, the number of poor increased, and the World Bank and the French continued to pour money into the country, feeding the excesses of the rich.

Let’s Have a Party To be poor is to be insecure; never to know whether there will be food tomorrow, and whether there will be too little rain, or too much rain, and whether the crops will flourish or be destroyed. Poor villagers are also proud of their homes, their animals, their children, and above all else their primary school, as they feel that this is the first door that their children will have to go through in their journey to a future with greater security than they have managed. They do not understand what happens in the school, but they can see whether there is a good school building or not, and in many respects the school building epitomises the school for them. Wherever there is a homogenous community it is relatively easy with the right motivation to get extraordinary public participation in the construction of primary school classrooms. Though motivation can differ from situation to situation, one aspect is very clear: the community must believe that they are constructing their school, and not one for some distant government or bureaucracy. In the mountains it was also clear that the construction of any new school building could not use modern building materials, as it

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would be prohibitively expensive, and sometimes impossible to porter cement, sand, iron rods, and roofing sheets to remote sites far from any road. Villagers had been building their own houses to live in for thousands of years, but the local construction technology and house building designs were inappropriate for classrooms. The rooms were too narrow and the windows too small, and it would be damp inside if it were not for the cooking fires, and the heavy slate roofs necessitated using a lot of wood, which was increasingly scarce thanks to widespread deforestation. As most of the people could not read, we prepared a pictorial manual for non-literates explaining where the school should be built, what it should consist of, and how it should be built and maintained. We developed a simple technique for cutting the roofing slates a lot thinner than usual, and gave each community a cross saw and a few other hand tools, as well as training in their use so that much less wood would be used than in their houses. Finally we gave each community a heavy plastic sheet to make the foundations damp proof. A set of standard designs for different sizes of schools were drafted, each with a fixed level of subsidy from the project of between one and two thousand dollars for four and eight roomed schools respectively. Building supervisors were trained who would walk from site to site, advising the villagers, and certifying when one of the payments was due. It was unrealistic to expect that the grants for school building allocated by our project could be accounted for, given the fact that almost all the villagers were illiterate. It was therefore decided that we would pay the subsidy on the basis of results. Three stage payments were made, each on the basis of reports on the quality and level of construction reported on by the building supervisor. Many school committees decided not to take any of the two interim payments, but to complete the whole school through voluntary labour, and to collect all the money when the building was completed and have a huge party, killing a number of goats and buying several jerrycans of alcohol to be shared by all those who had helped in the construction.

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At one of these parties, three four meter-long horns were blown to call everyone from the surrounding hills to come to the new school, a two story eight classroom building with an endless view of wave after wave of hills leading to snowy mountains in the distance. Six large goats were slaughtered and put in great black pots to boil, and many jerrycans full of raw alcohol were stored in the school. As darkness fell the horns were blown increasingly frenetically, as what looked like bushes, covered in cloth and held high on long poles, danced around the school. I guessed that these were animist spirits who were being asked to protect the new school building. Men, women, and children then silently gorged themselves on the meat, and drank more than I could possibly manage. This party would be difficult to account for, but was a legitimate use of the funds allocated to the construction of the school. During my time in the Far West of Nepal our project assisted in the construction of 120 schools, of which 117 were well built and durable. Whenever I visited any of the villages that had benefited from a construction grant, I was always taken with pride to see their school. Later, the World Bank in a major education project tried to follow this system of payment by results, but also insisted on payment certificates and proper accounting on the use of the funds allocated. The net impact was that a single classroom cost more than a complete school under our project. The main beneficiaries of this cost increase were no longer the poor, but urban based accountants and engineers.

Share a Meal and Find a Friend In all the places where I have lived and worked I must have seemed an oddity to many of my clients. To start with I am a pink, and those I have been working with have been black, or brown, or yellow, and every colour in between. I have only been able to speak a few of the myriad languages that my clients use on a daily basis, and these rarely with fluency. I have never been poor or insecure for any length of time, and have always had the wealth and concern of a first world family and Government behind me. I have usually been comfortably dressed unlike many of my clients, the majority of whom find their clothes in the bend down boutiques that are a central part of markets throughout the third world. If it were not for the food and drink that I have enjoyed with people wherever I have worked I would have had little basis for communication.

Staple Foods Everyone is so attached to their particular starchy food: be it rice, or wheat, or corn flour, or plantains, or teff, or false bananas; that in most languages the word for the staple is the same as the word for food. No matter how much a person might eat, he or she will always feel hungry if they do not have their normal staple. This need for the basic starch is independent of class. Wealthy colleagues of mine will ensure that they have copious quantities of their favoured staple in their suitcases wherever they travel, even when they attend international conferences in luxury hotels. I usually have no difficulty with the starches, though several have not been too easy to swallow. Millet is one of my least favourite. Sometimes it is served as a ball of dough with a dose of sand from

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the surrounding African Sahel; at other times as heavy chapattis, washed down with salty lentil soup in the mountains of Nepal; and yet other times as a black and heavy Ethiopian unleavened bread, njera, eaten by people who cannot afford the lighter teff njera. Teff is a fine grass seed used as the staple by more than half of Ethiopians, and is only eaten in Ethiopia. Kenke, lumps of fermented maize dough, is eaten by the coastal people in Ghana and Ivory Coast, is difficult to enjoy in its heavier forms even when eaten with dried or smoked fish and a pepper sauce and washed down with beer. Perhaps the most common staple consumed by the poorest people in Africa is cassava. It produces more calories per acre than any other food crop, and needs less work in its cultivation, as it almost grows by itself. It sucks out tremendous amounts of nutrients from the soil, and will destroy the most fertile land in less than five years. Most cassava in its unprocessed form is poisonous, and people who do not have enough fuel or time to complete its preparation properly can kill themselves inadvertently. Since heat destroys the poisons, the cassava tubers are peeled and boiled, their hot juices squeezed out with a kind of clothes wringer, and then either boiled again, or dried and ground into flour, which is baked on a very hot skillet. It is then ready to eat with a pepper sauce, or even just with boiling water. It is pretty tasteless, and only becomes enjoyable if beaten in a huge wooden mortar with boiled plantains or yams to make fufu. The thumping from the pounding of fufu, or husking of grain in a heavy wooden mortars is one of the perennial sounds of the African and Asian village. Sweetened white wheat bread is making important inroads as a cheap convenience food the world over, and white rice a starch of choice of richer families everywhere. Both of these are of little more nutritional value than the cassava, since they only provide carbohydrates. Frequently wheat and rice consumed in the poorer countries is provided as food aid, or imported at subsidized prices from surpluses in the U.S. and Europe, and it can thus difficult for indigenous food crop farmers to earn a liveable income from the production of their traditional staples.

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There are many staple foods eaten by millions of people that most of us have not even heard of. One of these is the false banana, a highly productive starch crop which was once extremely widespread in East Africa, and is still used as the staple food by millions of Ethiopians living in the western highlands of that country. The false banana looks like an ordinary banana tree except that it never produces any bananas. It is the roots that are eaten. A single root can weigh as much as fifty kilograms, and once dug up, is fermented for about a year, ground into flour, and used to make thick slabs of cheesy flavoured heavy bread, which is eaten with a hot chilli sauce.

If it Moves Eat it I have not had too much difficulty pretending to enjoy these starches with clients or colleagues. It is what I have had to eat and drink with them which has sometimes been nearly impossible. Most of the poor in Africa and South Asia do not have access to clean water, and thus intestinal parasites are endemic. These parasites further worsen their already very poor levels of nutrition. Round worm is one of the more benign, whilst Bilharzia is much more serious, and is endemic around the shores of Lake Victoria in Uganda, and in many of the slow flowing rivers or stagnant lakes and ponds elsewhere in Africa. The parasite passes from cattle to snails, and onto humans, and attacks the kidney and liver of the affected person, leading eventually to death. Over a hundred million people, mainly in Africa, are affected. Guinea worm and black water fever are a couple of the other risks that the intrepid traveller has to face along with millions of ordinary people when he is thirsty and drinks from streams, springs, or unprotected water sources. It is thus not surprising that water is rarely given to guests to drink with their food. Far more common is a local beer which is served with all meals from breakfast to dinner. The Tibetan will start his day with a shot of strong alcohol, and thereafter will only drink Tsampa, a barley and butter beer; the Ethiopian will get much of his nutrition from Tolla, a thick weak barley beer drunk from morning to night; and the Ghanaian farmer will only be happy after he has tasted his first palm wine of the day.


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Even in England a couple of hundred years ago everyone drank beer with breakfast, as drinking water was far too dangerous. I used to think that all these beers were healthier than water, until I watched one being made in a village in Mali. Millet was boiled in big pots, and when it had cooled down, the women of the village would spend hours chewing the softened millet and spitting into the beer pot. Evidently human spit helped speed up the rate of fermentation. It certainly reduced my eagerness to sit down with my hosts and drink beer that evening with the food they had specially cooked for me. In my travels I have been relatively lucky, as apart from frequent doses of amoeba, giardia and round worm, and one case of flat worm, I have avoided most of the more pernicious parasites. What is one man’s food is another man’s pet. The Ewe in eastern Ghana like eating cats, and Cat and Goat stew is one of their special delicacies offered to their honoured guests. One of my colleague’s Siamese cat ended up in a stew pot in Accra. Dog meat is a special treat amongst certain communities in Thailand, Korea, Vietnam, China, and much of Africa. Recently we were visiting a remote forest temple in the Northeast of Thailand in which an activist colleague was abbot, and early in the morning we could hear traders in the valley below encouraging the villagers by loudspeaker to exchange their dogs for brightly coloured plastic buckets. Dog meat sells for a higher price than beef in the markets around Bangkok. It seems that Koreans also like eating dogs, as when they were building a hydroelectric dam in Kulekhani in central Nepal all the dogs for several miles around disappeared. Thirty years ago when we were first living in Bangkok things were never as we thought that they were. As we were often tired from the heat and the high humidity, we did not find it odd that our maid would keep on falling asleep in the strangest places during the day. We rarely went out at night, as we had small children in a new environment. One night, however, we went out to dinner with some friends, and returned later than usual only to find no maid around and our children alone in the house. In the confrontation the next day it became clear that the maid had been working as a prostitute in a local bar at night, and for us in the day, which explained why she

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was always dozing off. Around the same time we noticed that our children always went to our garage in the evenings when our Government paid driver went off duty, until we understood that they were assisting him in his daily sex change from man to woman, helping him fix his falsies, straighten his wig, zip up his mini skirt, and get him ready for a singing engagement in a downtown bar. We had a beautiful brown cocker spaniel which my wife would take with her wherever she went, including to the local market. After some months, she noticed that she was being followed by a rich Thai/Chinese man in a new Mercedes Benz car. Though she spoke no Chinese, and only a little Thai, and he no English, it was clear that he was offering her U.S. $500, and by the end of the week had upped his offer to U.S. $2,500. From what had happened during the preceding months she could be forgiven in thinking that he was offering large sums of money to sleep with her, and he got more and more impatient with her refusals. It was not until one of the market women told my wife that the man only wanted her dog, which would evidently make a superb stew, that she realised that she was not the attraction this time. I do not know why this is, but there seems to be a great desire in eating things that are strange or forbidden. Perhaps this originates from the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden. I can understand that the Pygmies living in the jungle will have to eat bush meat to survive, but why rich people have to eat the body parts of endangered species is harder to fathom. There is a thriving wild animal black market in Thailand, as the Chinese will pay huge sums to eat the strangest parts of wild animals including bears’ paws, tigers’ tails, and rhinos’ horns. In Yaounde the demand for bush meat was frequent because this meat was cheaper than chicken, pork, and beef. Though the corrupt owners of the logging companies are making a small fortune from their rape of the jungle, they pay their workers next to nothing. These workers thus supplement their meagre incomes by killing all the wild animals they come across during their daily flattening of the forest, and transporting their corpses to the city on the timber trucks. Around the central railway station we could always find the bodies


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of monkeys, crocodiles, and even chimpanzees for sale to individuals and speciality restaurants, along with elephant trunks and livers, as well as bush buck and deer. Many of the creatures that I have had to eat in Africa have been giant versions of the animals that the gourmet enjoys in classy Western restaurants. There is the giant snail, considerably bigger than my two fists together, which smells awful, has to be chewed for ages, and only has a palatable taste when cooked with other meat. There is the meter-long black slug or giant millipede that is the national dish in the Central African Republic. The markets are full of white enamel bowls full of these horrors slithering here and there. Luckily when cooked they don’t have much taste, and also require a lot of chewing. I suppose they look no more horrific than jellied eels, which used to be so popular in England. Throughout West Africa one of the delicacies that people will travel for miles to enjoy is the bush rat, otherwise known as an agouti, or grass cutter. It is considerably bigger than a rabbit, has a very strong taste like most bush meat, and is eaten roasted, smoked, or stewed. Too often the name given to a food determines whether we will like it or not. We can eat an eel but not a giant slug, can find an agouti delicious but not a bush rat. I have never had any problem eating deep fried grasshoppers in both Uganda and Thailand, but once I know that a sauce has been made from creatures that look to me like cockroaches, or that the roasted entrée was once a dung beetle, I begin to gag. I have to close my mind whilst I pretend to enjoy such a meal with villagers or colleagues. It is always difficult to decide whether to eat these delicacies quickly or slowly. If I gulp them down with my mind turned off I risk being given a second helping; but if I eat too slowly not only do I have to put up with the disgusting taste longer, but also risk insulting my hosts. After a few years living in the far West of Nepal, I became so well known that villagers would automatically slaughter a goat when they saw me walking a couple of mountain tops away. The goat would be shaven and the body, including the skin, internal and external organs, and the head would be boiled for five or six hours, and be ready to be eaten around midnight. I had to somehow manage to

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stay awake until then, and to participate in active discussions on local politics and project activities when all I wanted to do was to sleep after twelve or more hours of trekking. A good helping of skin, eyeballs, and testicles, served in the pitch dark, and eaten with loud sucking sounds, day after day, was more than I could manage, even in the cause of duty. I thus underwent a religious transformation and became a vegetarian overnight, a discipline I have kept up ever since. This has enabled me to reject, with some honour, many of the delicacies that I previously had to enjoy. Most people in the poor countries have no understanding of what vegetarianism is, but can understand when I claim I cannot eat meat because of my religion. My vegetarianism does not necessarily let me off scot-free, as there are some meat-free dishes such as okra soup which are as unpalatable as the longest slug. Once I start sipping this soup I cannot stop as it has the consistency of mucus!

Feeding the Hungry I can hardly complain about the odd and unpalatable dishes that I have had to eat, as at least I have always had something to eat. Whenever I visit any of the big cities in the majority world and see the thousands living in the streets, and the hundreds of thousands eking out an existence in the fetid slums surrounding the city centres, I have no idea as to how the people manage to survive, and even less idea as to how they reproduce. Wherever my wife and I go we try to find some way to help a few children and bring a moment of happiness to their lives. In Ghana we had constructed a simple palm leaf shelter in a fishing village by the ocean thirty kilometres from Accra, where we often went on a Sunday. At Christmas we would organise a party for all the fifty or sixty children in the village where our hut was situated, and provide each child with stew, cake, ice cream, sweets, a specially printed T shirt, and a small gift. The party would rapidly become unmanageable, as several hundred children would turn up instead of the expected sixty, along with their mothers, who would scream at their children to grab as much food and as many gifts as possible, not thinking of the needs of other smaller or weaker chil-


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dren, or the impact such a stampede would have on whether a party would ever be organised again. Food aid, like our party treats, is also often grabbed by the strong and powerful, who either use it to reward their political supporters and sell what they and their sycophants cannot consume. Sardines donated by Japan, and cooking oil given by the U.S.A., are being sold in almost every African and Nepali market I have visited, or smuggled into neighbouring countries. On the frontier between Benin and Nigeria there is a thriving trade, with children carrying sacks of donated wheat across the border into Nigeria and returning with bottles of subsidised petrol strapped to their backs. Whilst we were living in Addis Ababa we would go every Sunday to a village in the mountains behind the city with sacks of bread and fruit. The people there were extremely poor and malnourished, and despite its proximity to Addis Ababa, very few children went to school. Almost the only income the villagers had was from selling Eucalyptus leaves and cow dung pancakes in Addis Ababa, both of which were used for cooking the tastiest njeras. The women of the village would cut the Eucalyptus leaves from the forest early in the morning and struggle down the mountainside with up to a hundred kilograms of branches on their backs, some as wide as two meters. As we climbed up the mountain in our car we would meet hundreds of women, some who seemed to be so old they could hardly walk, and others so young that they had not yet reached puberty, bent double with their immense loads. It seemed that the forest was moving down the mountain to the city. Once the women had sold their load they had to climb back up the mountain to return home. The whole trip, from cutting the branches, carrying them down the mountain and selling them in Addis, and returning home would take at least six hours. Though a woman could sell a load of leaves for as much as U.S. $1, after they had paid the necessary bribes to the forestry guards and any police they met on the way, they would earn around U.S. $0.25 a load, with which they had to feed and clothe themselves and their children. Every Sunday we would feed around thirty children from one village with bread and fruit. After the children had eaten we would

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take them for a ride along mountain tracks in our land cruiser, usually having as many as thirty children inside and on the roof of our vehicle. Twice a year we would buy each child a full set of warm clothes, which some of the children themselves would distribute to their peers under our supervision. We were never swamped by hundreds of people from other villages, as we made the children from our village responsible for deciding who would get what. In other words we empowered them. One of the big problems of food aid is that responsibility for the distribution of the supplies is left to government officials, who not only don’t know what it is like to miss a few meals but also skim some of the food off for themselves. For any effective distribution of food, the beneficiaries must be involved in positions of responsibility in determining who should get what food supplies and when. A few years ago my wife and I were in Pondicherry on the Southeast coast of India, and coming across a band of a dozen or more hungry street children, we decided to give them all a good meal. This was easier said than done. We went from restaurant to restaurant and were refused entry in some, and driven out by irate owners with sticks from another. Evidently some of the children were untouchables. Finally we found a food shop that was willing to sell us the number of meals needed, each wrapped in newspaper and to be eaten in the street. We bought his entire stock, and gave a packet of rice, lentils, and curry to each of the children. Unfortunately, as we were doing this, dozens of beggars and cripples seemed to come out of every crevice and alley and surround us. Soon we were being mobbed by faceless lepers, starving women, and legless cripples demanding food, to such an extent that we had to jump on the first cycle rickshaw that passed in order to escape with what seemed at that time to be our lives. Distribution of food is always much harder in the cities than in villages, as there are so many competing communities in the towns, each with legitimate and illegitimate demands, that when food is available, it is difficult to know who to empower to be involved in its distribution. There are millions of hungry children, women, and men in most of the countries where I have worked, often side by side with thou-


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sands of tons of surplus food from Europe and the U.S.A. This food aid sometimes replaces locally grown crops and impoverishes local farmers, sometimes rots in warehouses, and at other times meets a real and pressing need. People are hungry because they have no money or other valuables that they can use to buy available food, or because the food aid from foreign donors is not what they are used to eating. I have seen a poor Ethiopian farmer selling his house for firewood in order to get money to buy some food for his family, and this in the country with the most developed food aid distribution system anywhere in the world. In a good year two or three million Ethiopians do not grow enough food to feed themselves; and in a bad year eight to ten million people need food handouts, most of these living in areas far from any road. Traditional practices often do not help, and are extremely difficult to change even when necessary in life and death situations. An Ethiopian Coptic Christian is not allowed to work in the fields for at least twelve days a month (four Sundays and eight important saints’ days). Twice a week, and for long periods before Easter and Christmas, they cannot eat anything of animal origin, even if they are suffering from malnutrition. Over 60% of Ethiopian children are stunted, and will never develop to their full physical potential or intellectual capacity. This is partly caused by absolute shortages of food, but also by traditional child rearing practices. Women face a wider range of dietary prohibitions than men, and also have frequent pregnancies with little spacing between. It is thus not surprising that their children are often born underweight. Since there are many taboos on what a child can and cannot eat, and no understanding of the need to mix grains and pulses to provide complete protein, the children become increasingly stunted as they grow older. Far more serious are the 8% of Ethiopian children who become physically wasted, so much so that if they do survive into adulthood will be physically incapacitated and mentally retarded. This childhood malnutrition has complex causes as have most of the development problems that I have faced in my career, and is always extraordinarily urgent, as a child who is malnourished during

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the first three years of her life will be affected for the rest of her existence. There is no magic bullet. Distributing food for infants and children does not help as much as might be expected, as it merely means that the family’s meagre food supplies are used to feed other family members. In order to reduce malnutrition, just to start with, traditional food taboos have to be loosened, new ways of combining foods learnt, intestinal parasites eliminated, pregnancies spaced, food crop productivity increased, land holding patterns changed, and transport links improved. Several years ago it was hoped that integrated rural development projects would help improve child nutrition. Under these projects there was a central coordination committee to bring together all the Ministries that would need to be involved if problems such as malnutrition were to be resolved, but these only seemed to multiply the bureaucracy involved and the proportion of foreign assistance that was needed to feed this bureaucracy. In well designed development projects around half of the foreign assistance is spent on bureaucratic support, and in some of the most flagrantly wasteful projects over ninety percent is devoted to foreign experts and a national administration especially designed to serve the donors and lenders. Increasingly it has become clear to me that meaningful rural development and poverty reduction can only take place if grassroots community organisations are empowered, and assistance given directly to these organisations rather than to any intermediary Ministry or government department. Even more havoc is caused to the way of life of the herdsmen and their families when there is a serious drought, as it is not only harvests that shrivel up, but also the pastures on which their cattle, horses, camels, and goats feed. Amongst several tribes of East African herdsmen the staple food is a mixture of blood and milk. An arrow is shot at close range into the neck of a cow, and it is bled into a calabash of warm fresh milk. Camel milk needs no blood to fortify it, as it is so rich that it is a meal in itself if you can keep it in your stomach. In a normal year, herdsmen barter milk and meat against the grain grown by sedentary farmers. Since no one provides food aid for the starving animals, they perish in their millions whenever there is a serious drought; the horses first, and the camels


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last; taking with their parched bones a whole way of life. A herdsman who has spent his entire existence wandering with his animals from pasture to pasture cannot change his profession and become a farmer when his animals die in a drought, as he has no land and no farming skills. If he is lucky he might get a job as an agricultural labourer, but it is more likely that he will end up semi-employed in the slums of some overgrown city.

Television: Junk Food for the Mind There are few countries in the world where those who have a TV do not watch at least three or four hours a day, their minds numbed by the continuous flashing, zooming, panning and other technical events and crass programme content. No longer do families enjoy meals together, discussing their day’s activities, but instead shovel food into their mouths whilst they vacantly stare at the flickering screen. Wisdom no longer comes from the stories of the parents and grandparents but from popular TV programming, which is usually little better than the lowest common denominator. A generation ago there was a sense of community everywhere, as people would drop into their neighbour’s house at any time of day or night and stroll in front of their houses in the evening, passing the time of day. Now they spend their free time slouched in front of their TV’s, craving the goods advertised that they don’t really need and cannot afford. When television first came to many of the poorer countries for some time it enhanced a sense of community, as TV sets were put in village reading or community centres so that everyone could watch together, discussing what they had seen. I have joined discussions of adult viewing groups in both Kerala and Egypt, and initially felt that TV could play a motivational role in functional literacy programmes. But gradually these sets broke down and were neither repaired nor replaced, and at the same time the price of TV sets in the market fell dramatically so that owning a TV became more possible, and individual households watched TV in the privacy of their own homes, which contributed to the rapid reduction in the sense of community which has been occurring in both urban and rural areas all over the world. Now in most places people spend more time watching TV than any other waking activity except for full time em-

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ployment. For example, a child in a well managed school system might spend as much as seven hours a day in school, for as many as 180 days or around 1260 hours a year. Most will spend considerably less. The same child might watch TV for four hours a day, or 1460 hours a year, considerably more time than he spends in school. When I was living in the mountains, even though there were very wide income differentials between castes or occupational groups, robbery was almost unheard of. There was no electricity supply, and no television. One local shopkeeper decided to porter in a generator, a television, and a VCR with a few videocassette tapes. He set up his own video theatre in the garden behind his house, and thirty or more villagers would pay nightly to have the thrill of watching their first ever TV. The first film shown was Topkapi, where a criminal gang carried out a daring robbery by removing a few roofing tiles and climbing through the roof of a building. The next night some village youths robbed the shopkeeper who had been showing the films by removing some of the slates from his roof and sneaking into his house. The TV critic, Marshall McLuen, pointed out more than thirty years ago that the ‘media is the message,’ and that the impact of TV is largely independent of its programme content. It does not matter what people watch, it is the watching per se which is damaging to the individual and society. TV by its nature is designed to be addictive through its technical events; the panning and zooming, the scanning, the flash ins and outs, and flashbacks. In most TV programmes there is a technical event every four or five seconds and the viewer is mesmerised. Television is a like drug, people switch it on easily but find it very difficult to switch it off. The technical events hold the audience no matter how crass the programming. Game shows, soaps, MTV, CNN, Dallas and Dynasty, or local copies of these, are standard fare the world over, but even if these were to be replaced with educational, or culturally sensitive programming, the addiction to TV would be equally strong. More recent studies have linked childhood viewing habits with brain damage, early puberty, obesity, aggressiveness, back pain, an increased propensity to smoke, and high cholesterol in later life.

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Harmful chemicals form in the brains of children who have just watched two or more hours of TV, and it seems that the brains of children who watch more than four hours of TV a day become permanently rewired. A recent study in the U.S.A. showed that each extra hour of TV watched per day by children under three increased their chance of suffering from attention deficit syndrome by 10%. I was the TV critic for the local English language newspaper when TV first came to Uganda in the mid 1960’s. I will always remember one time when the TV station put on the tapes of a film in the wrong order, with the climax shown before the introduction, and no one noticed this or complained to the TV station, as the story being told was far less important than the media being used. Much more recently, when I was in Namibia, broadcasting technicians accidentally transmitted a porno tape that they had been watching instead of a soap, and it was several minutes before anyone noticed or complained! TV is a non-participatory media, which at the same time captures the audience so that they do little more than munch some sweet snack whilst they stare at the screen. There is also some evidence that suggests that the greater the amount of TV that is watched by a population the more passive they become, and the lesser their participation in elections and other political activities. One of the functions of Government is to protect its citizens from behaviours that are self- destructive. Motorcyclists have to wear helmets, and car drivers seat belts, certain dangerous medical drugs cannot be sold in pharmacies, there is a high tax on alcohol, and dire warnings on cigarette packets. Watching too much television is equally dangerous, as in addition to atrophying parts of the brain, it can distort ideas of what is right and what is wrong. People need to be protected from watching too much television, just as they need to be protected from dangerous drugs. I had suggested in one of my books that there should be no TV transmissions from 6-8 p.m. every day so that families would have a chance to talk to each other when the adults returned home from work and children from school. This would also give parents and grandparents the opportunity to pass on traditional wisdom and moral values to their children.

Rural Development Malnourished infants can never develop to their full physical or intellectual potential, hungry children are listless and prone to frequent illness, and starving adults lack the energy they need to improve their lives and those of their families. The heart of any rural development strategy thus has to be to ensure that infants, children, women, and men living in rural areas have an adequate caloric intake along with some protein and other needed nutrients to last them throughout the year. In order for this to happen there needs to be adequate production of staple foods, fair land distribution, good storage facilities, sufficient fuel and clean water for cooking, and rapid treatment of intestinal worms and other parasites. There are far too few places in the developing world that even partially meet these criteria for food security. To begin with there are extreme inequalities in land distribution, and more often than not farmers are cultivating someone else’s fields. In the Kathmandu valley peasants are giving as much as 70% of their produce to the landowners. Traditional storage facilities are often poor, in parts of Ghana over a quarter of stored food is eaten by rats or destroyed by insects. Throughout the mountains of Nepal trees have been cut down for fuel leading to soil erosion, and cow dung has to be burnt in cooking stoves instead of being used to fertilise the fields. The south facing walls of village huts seem to be covered with brown pancakes: dung cakes drying in the sun before they are used as a fuel for cooking. Children, especially girls, spend their lives collecting firewood and water instead of going to school. Water sources in the dry season can be several hours walk away. Even with cow dung there is not always enough fuel to enable food to be well cooked.

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Solving all these problems is crucial, but perhaps the most important of all is land reform, so that land belongs to the tiller. Unless the farmer owns the land that he farms he will have little incentive to improve its fertility, nor to risk getting credit to finance improvements. Land and credit by themselves are not sufficient since new knowledge, attitudes, and above all new practices are also needed. The adult functional literacy programmes that I have been involved in designing are one tool for helping peasants find appropriate practices for improving farming methods and family nutrition. These functional literacy programmes have always concentrated on helping farmers develop new ways of composting fertilizer and intercropping, and vegetable and fruit production, amongst other activities. Well-designed and supervised agricultural extension programmes can play an important role in helping farmers decide on the most appropriate time to plant, to weed, to harvest key food crops, and help arrange loans for purchased agricultural inputs when needed. But still most farmers in Ethiopia and Nepal cannot produce enough to feed their families, who suffer pre-harvest hunger in good years and starvation in bad.

Rural Poverty Although not realised by the urban bourgeoisie, the large majority of the children in all the countries where I have worked still live in rural areas; in excess of eighty percent in Nepal, Ethiopia, and Chad, and more than half in Thailand. Though there are certainly many people in the towns living in deep poverty, most of the abject poor are found in the countryside, and despite all the pious intentions of foreign development partners the poor, and especially the rural poor, normally remain poor. The idea that funds will trickle down to the poor from the wealth of the urban middle classes has been proved false everywhere, and in fact money tends to flow in the opposite direction, from the countryside to the city. In Ghana most rural areas were poorer in 1985 than during my first visit there in 1960. This was not surprising, as the main source of Government revenues were the cocoa export taxes drawn from the rural areas, and their main expenditures the salaries and benefits paid to an inflated civil service recruited largely from the urban middle class.

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Much of the initial development in Thailand was financed by Chinese Thai landowners, who used their profits from agriculture and landholdings to finance industrial investments in the towns. Some of the most pernicious cultural customs have almost disappeared in the towns, but still continue unabated in the rural areas. In Ghana, Sierra Leone, and Senegal, rural female circumcision is widespread, leading to frequent septicaemia, and almost no sexual pleasure later in their lives. In Ethiopia and Nepal girls as young as six or seven are married, and premature sexual relations result in ruptured fistula and other life- threatening conditions. In Thailand rural teenage girls, hoping for a better life, are tricked into prostitution in the towns. Even without the millstones of hunger and life-threatening cultural practices around their necks, everything is loaded against the rural child. Despite the importance of relevant education in reducing rural poverty, rural children attend schools much more poorly endowed than urban, and have far lower levels of progression up the school system than their urban brothers and sisters. In rural areas there are much higher infant mortality rates, and a lower life expectancy than in urban areas. This is mainly due to a lack of clean water, and at least partly due to the fact that health centres are frequently closed as the health assistants and nurses are absent more often than not, and even when they are present do not take their work seriously. Though there was a hospital in the village where I lived in Nepal, during the whole of my stay the assigned doctor was only present for two months, and other health personnel not much longer. Sick people were first treated by local shamans, and only as a last resort were carried in a basket for at least three days to the nearest town with a functioning hospital, where doctors, nurses, and drugs might be found. Few Governments pay enough attention to the needs of their rural people, and many have practices and even regulations that result in significantly more resources going to the towns than to rural areas. In Cameroon and other francophone countries, if a married couple are both civil servants, they have the right to be employed in the

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same town, even if there is no post for both. Many newly qualified young women who are unwilling to work in the countryside enter into marriages of convenience, marrying a man who has a post in a town but never intending to live with him. As a result of this I have seen three teachers per class in Yaounde, and at the same time there are three classes per teacher in more remote rural areas in the North of the country. In Ghana the Government set up more than a hundred experimental and pilot primary schools in middle class areas of Accra and other large towns catering to the children of the bourgeoisie. These schools had more qualified teachers and far better facilities, as well as triple the per student expenditure of any rural school. Until quite recently the village, the clan, and the ethnic group to which a family belonged to was far more important than their nation. When I was travelling around Africa in the 1960’s I was aware that people talked with pride about their village and tribe, but they had little or no idea as to what was Ghana, or Upper Volta, or Mali. Even in Thailand in the early 1970’s there were many villagers in the North and North East whose only contact with Government was through the periodic visits of tax collectors, and who found it very difficult even to understand what was being said by these central Thais since their dialect was so different. They would sometimes be ready to move their village to a more remote area to avoid contact with civil servants from Bangkok. In Nepal in the 1980’s most villagers in the mountains saw Kathmandu valley as a separate country that sought soldiers, food, and other tribute from them. The village community provided most of the people in the countries where I have lived with a certain security through unchanging social and cultural relationships and support mechanisms. At the physical level, though the land was often not owned by the tiller the landowner was also of the village, and in times of food shortage would distribute surpluses to his fellow villagers. More and more these support mechanisms are breaking down as a market develops and food surpluses can be changed into money. At the spiritual level the priest, the monk, the imam, or the witch doctor helped the villagers through life’s joys and crisis. This security is rapidly being lost as greed has become the overarching value, and land ownership

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has been taken over by absentee landlords who do not know their tenants. The rural areas are too often seen as a source of cheap food for the towns, a market for the mass-produced products of new urban industries, and a pool from which unskilled and seasonal cheap labour can be drawn. Governments rarely put the needs of the rural areas first, or invest to make them attractive places to live with a range of non-farm employment opportunities, functioning quality schools and health facilities, clean running water and electricity.

African Socialism The 1960’s was a period of great hope for Africa. Most countries had only recently become independent, the new leaders were sure that, freed from the shackles of colonialism their countries would rapidly develop and provide prosperity for all. In several countries on the continent there were political leaders who believed that the future of their countries depended on rural-based development and socialism. At that time most of the newly independent African countries had very few university graduates, and Uganda was no exception. I used to be invited from time to time to attend meetings of the Cabinet of Ministers to brief the Prime Minister, Milton Obote, and his ministers on the implementation of the first five-year plan and the preparation of the second plan, even though I had only recently graduated from university myself. At one of these meetings my Minister and I were ordered by the Prime Minister to prepare an overarching political strategy for the country, ‘The Uganda Path to Socialism,’ and as a part of this assignment I was sent to Kenya and Tanzania to study what their Governments were doing in promoting socialism. Not much was taking place in Kenya, but Tanzania had prepared a detailed political strategy of African Socialism, and in schooling had gone even further along lines that I had been pursuing in my own writing, with the promulgation of its policy of ‘Education for Self Reliance.’ The President of Tanzania, Julius Nyerere, was known as the teacher by his people. In 1962 he had temporarily given up his

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Presidency to spend almost a year walking around his country to gain an understanding of what the major problems were, and the hopes of his people. He believed strongly that those who benefited from schooling had a duty to serve their communities, which had made sacrifices to enable them to progress up the school system. As a part of his ‘Education for Self Reliance’ strategy, he wrote: “Those who receive this privilege (of education) therefore have a duty to repay the sacrifice that others have made. They are like the man who has been given all the food in a starving village in order that he would have the strength to bring supplies back from a distant place. If he takes the food and does not bring help to his brothers, he is a traitor. Similarly, if any of the young men and women who are given an education by the people of this republic adopt attitudes of superiority, or fail to use their knowledge to help the development of this country, then they are betraying our union.” Julius Nyerere was one of the few politicians that I have met who practiced what he preached. At the time of my visit there was great controversy over Nyerere’s refusal to let his son be admitted to a Government Secondary School, as his grades were not up to the minimum level required. I was also impressed by the adult literacy campaign that had recently been launched, and which was reaching remote villages all over the country. Many development specialists argued that Tanzania’s strategy of African Socialism was unrealistic, and did not take account of the inherent desire of people to consume ever more wherever they might be. Nevertheless it is intellectually more robust for governments to concentrate on reducing the poverty of their poorest citizens than on encouraging the wealthy in the towns to become wealthier, in the hope that some of this wealth might eventually trickle down to the poor. In order for priority to be given to rural development, Tanzania restricted migration from the countryside to the towns so that a smaller proportion of available resources would have to be spent on expanding urban infrastructures. This unfortunately had the perverse impact of creating a huge dualistic divide between the urban and the rural areas.

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Barriers and Bridges Until recently villages were usually self-contained economic and cultural units. They would have weavers and tailors, cobblers and iron-smiths, masons and carpenters, and herdsmen, none of whom owned their own land but who would be living in a symbiotic relationship with cultivators, bartering their goods for the staples they would need. More recently the new urban industries have replaced several of the products produced by these craftsmen, inadvertently forcing them into destitution, since they had never grown their own crops or had much need to own their own land. When I first worked in Nepal in the early 1970’s, most of its tens of thousands of villages had at least one weaver who produced all the cloth the villagers would need in exchange for food. All this had changed very rapidly by 1980 when the first power looms were brought into Kathmandu, along with the technicians to operate them, and much of the cotton fibre that was to be woven. A few hundred Nepalese were employed in these textile factories, most in menial tasks, and many thousands of village weavers lost their livelihood. As they had always been landless, they and their families joined the growing number of migrant workers living in slums around Kathmandu and other towns. This pattern has been replicated in industry after industry and in country after country. More and more destitute people swell the ranks of migrant workers, living in shantytowns on the edge of cities, and never certain where tomorrow’s meal will come from. The magnitude of the flood of humanity moving in and out of the countryside can be seen from Thailand where, at the time of the 1997 economic crash, out of a nationwide population of around 60 million, five million migrant workers lost their jobs and had to leave the cities and return to their villages. Development specialists increasingly forget that people are not only the main means of development, but the main end also. It is far more important that people live in relative harmony with their surroundings and their peers than any increase in national income. If the free flow of textiles from towns to villages puts thousands of people out of work, then barriers should be created around the vil-

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lages to stop textiles being brought in until the local weavers’ productivity can be improved. Bridges are also necessary over these barriers to allow new technologies into the villages that can be learnt and applied by the weavers. Since the international trading system is so loaded towards meeting the needs of the more powerful companies from the richer countries, the poorer nations need to create tax barriers to protect their infant industries from the unequal competition from multinationals, if these industries are to be given a chance to grow and eventually to compete in the global economy. It is equally clear that rural crafts, if they are to survive, need similar barriers to protect themselves from the new urban industries, but also need bridges which allow some commerce and people to pass between the towns and the villages, as investment in rural services and industries make rural artisans more efficient, and life in the countryside more attractive.

Community Empowerment Before roads and other communication links were constructed, traditional religions and cultures dominated life in the countryside, and the village community was largely responsible for its own prosperity. There are of course many conflicting interests in every village: priests and laymen, landowners and tenants, men, women and youths, whose rights and responsibilities were determined by custom and who tended to live together in relative harmony. This is, of course, not to deny the injustice faced by casual workers, untouchable castes, and women, for as long as records have been kept. Increasingly Government is playing a role, not always benign, to tax, and to claim land as well as natural and mineral resources; and to mobilize labour to build roads, schools and clinics. I have seen hill tribe villagers in northern Thailand evaporate when police or soldiers passed through. The construction of a road, or the opening of other links to the outside world, can rapidly destroy any traditional harmony that once existed. Not only do the differing village interest groups manage to deal with officials in disparate ways, but also their relationships differ with the flood of businessmen, carpetbaggers, and salesmen who strive to create needs that did not previously ex-

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ist. Not all the influences are pernicious: health centre staff can help reduce suffering from disease, and a teacher can give children literacy skills that they can use later in better understanding the outside world. However, overall, as community unity disintegrates injustice and inequality increase, and control moves away from the village to government and commercial interests. In order to re-empower communities it is necessary that they learn again to be proud of who they are and what they can do. I have arrived in forest villages in the late afternoon in Ghana, and have been immediately dragged by villagers to see the school that they had together constructed. The teaching and learning activities were not their responsibility, but the school building and compound was theirs, and they were proud of this. Action-oriented literacy programmes can also help ordinary villagers become proud as they find by themselves solutions to their problems. In one mountain village the literacy participants found a new spring, which they dug out and protected, and then organised a big festival to enjoy the first drink of their water. It was so much more delicious to them than government piped water. A Brazilian friend of mine, Paulo Freire, was probably one of the most important revolutionary educators of the second half of the twentieth century. His ‘Pedagogy of the Oppressed’ was so effective in practice that he was banished from his own country and from much of South America also. When I knew him he was working for the World Council of Churches on educational strategies in several of the ex- Portuguese African colonies, and living with his daughter in Geneva. He understood that most school children in these countries suffered from narration sickness, and were the object and not the subject of their learning, and were merely banking knowledge, not using it. Teaching and learning activities had to be changed dramatically and be designed around, and centred on, the children or adults, and what they already knew. Most of his work was on the education of adults, as a mind opening and revolutionary activity. He argued that the oppressed/oppressor relationship was so strong that the oppressed could only be liberated if situations could be created that would

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make them really angry over the contradictions in their existence. Even the oppressor could be liberated, if the culture of silence that determines most relationships could be broken. He felt that the action oriented literacy programmes that I was involved in would not result in any permanent liberation or empowerment. I in turn argued that building up pent up anger was dangerous, and could lead to violence and destruction, and that we should be aiming at creating this empowerment through other strong emotions such as love, cooperation, and pride. Unfortunately, one of the countries where his pedagogy was most fully implemented, Guinea Bissau, descended into a decade of awful violence. This might not have been caused by his ideas, but merely by the general instability of the ex-Portuguese colonies. Another way of empowering village communities is through political action around a uniting issue, such as over land, water, or dams. In Thailand there has been a tradition for villagers to march on Bangkok whenever injustices become so unbearable that they have to be confronted. The most recent of these political action groups is ‘The Assembly of the Poor’ which has, for the past decade, mobilised tens of thousands of villagers to protest over a lack of consultation before dams are constructed, which uproot them from their past and destroy their current livelihood. Initially The Assembly of the Poor was led by outsiders, but later developed an indigenous leadership. Those who have marched together, camped in front of Government house together, and become aware together of the callous disregard of their problems by urban-based politicians, become an empowering influence when they return to their villages. Whether through action oriented literacy, Freirian concienticization, or political action, power must be brought back to where it should belong: with the people themselves. Only then will a ‘Barriers and Bridges’ strategy of development become remotely feasible.

Politics and Rural Development Most political systems are inevitably biased towards meeting the needs of those who live in the capital city and other major towns.

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Protests by and complaints from those who live in the city are reported in the media, and are in the full view of politicians, and seem much more pressing than similar complaints by workers or peasants several hundred kilometres away. The sale of basic food staples consumed by urban workers is often subsidized, along with electricity, water, and higher education, all of which benefit city dwellers far more than rural people. Schools and clinics are built entirely by government contractors in the towns, with no contribution expected from the people, whilst villagers have to provide voluntary labour for the construction of similar facilities in the countryside. Actual expenditures are usually lower than budgeted for rural projects, and higher than allocated for urban biased activities. The Accountant General in Ghana explained to me that this was inevitable as when, for example, the Vice Chancellor of a university wanted to discuss with him the need for supplementary budgets his door was always open, as the Vice Chancellor and he had studied together and knew each other socially, whilst if the headmistress from a rural primary school in the North of the country came to ask why she had not received the budget officially allocated and approved by parliament, she could only meet low level officials, and would probably return to her village without restitution of the budget due. Almost every year actual government expenditures in Ghana on higher education were 30-50% more than budgeted, and those on primary education 5% less. Most of the political leaders with whom I have worked have been as concerned with their wealth and prestige after leaving office as they were when they were in power. Memoirs, lecture tours, high fee consultancies, interference in the political activities of their successors, and a lifetime of high status and immunity from prosecution have been the norm. President Jimmy Carter is a notable exception to this norm, and is one of the ex-leaders that I have talked with who seemed more concerned in using his influence to help the poor and vulnerable in his retirement, than in hobnobbing with the rich and powerful. He was personally involved in promoting grass roots food production in Africa through the combination of extension services, training, and readily available credit and inputs that had sometimes been shown to be effective.

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During one of his visits to Ghana to follow-up the progress of this programme, I had the opportunity to have a long private discussion with President Carter on the relationship between human rights and grass roots development, something that I had been thinking about and working on for some time. He strongly believed that there could be no meaningful development if the social and political rights of the people who were supposed to benefit from this development were not respected. For him there was nothing more important than defending human rights, and the real heroes of our time were those who risked everything, including their lives, in defending these rights. Too often dictatorial leaders justified political repression, arguing that it ensured that everyone’s energies could be concentrated on promoting development, when in fact what they were really justifying was their continued grip on power. A few years after these discussions the World Bank financed studies in fifty-seven countries on the ‘Voices of the Poor,’ to find out what the poor saw as the main constraints to any development taking place that would improve their quality of life. Most of the poor surveyed complained of the constant misuse of authority and exploitation by the police and other Government officials, and their resulting lack of security and justice. They believed that if they could merely be left alone and no longer exploited by officials, they would be able to improve their quality of life themselves. As President Carter felt in his gut, the poor confirmed. For meaningful rural development to take place, human rights come first.

Holidays I have always been fascinated by the way people from different cultures organise their lives, how primary school systems and adult literacy programmes are run, and how revolutionary ideas can be applied to help reduce the poverty that permeates every society all over the world. Thus whenever I have any free time I travel to places where my work would never take me, to have new experiences and meet people who can stimulate me, and fill me with new hope for the struggle ahead. Sometimes I have travelled with my wife, and sometimes also with my four children. What seemed normal in our family would have been an adventure of a lifetime for others. As soon as our children could walk they were staying in African villages and eating the local food. Just to mention a few family holidays before the age of mass tourism, we have trekked amongst the hill tribes in the opium fields of the Golden triangle in Northern Thailand, come across the giant leatherback turtles struggling up the beach to lay their eggs in Eastern Malaysia, and cycled in India. We have stayed in long houses in Sumatra, had to fight off the giant pigs who tried to attack us every time we went into the forest to empty our bowels, and climbed live volcanoes. We have been washed out to sea, celebrated Christmas in a remote valley on the frontier of Nepal and Tibet at 16000 feet, and cycled in the Himalayas. When asked by their teachers what they did during their holidays, though our children have told the truth they have been accused of being lost in a world of make believe.

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Washed Away Since my walkabout Africa and before I have never been averse to taking risks, because without risk half the things that I have done in my life would not have been possible. I have thus always encouraged my children to be ready to take risks in their lives. The ocean can be a friendly place, but can also be deceptively dangerous. When we lived in Thailand I would often take my family to the sea, and we must have swum from dozens of islands and hundreds of beaches. In those days before mass tourism many of Thailand’s most beautiful beaches were totally deserted. We thus got into the habit of moving elsewhere if there was anyone on our selected beach or island that might disturb our privacy. Though all our children were good swimmers, I would check the shore and its currents before I let them into the sea. One time, having done so, I was sitting on a beach with my wife and my youngest daughter, and suddenly realised that my three other children were being washed out to sea, and struggling hard but failing to get back to us. I dashed into the ocean and managed to pull my son out to where he could stand, and then went after my other two daughters who grabbed onto me, almost drowning me, and making it difficult for me to swim. For about half an hour I kept my daughters above water, swimming parallel to the shore, and finally managed to get my feet on the sand, and totally exhausted pull them onto the beach. My wife had recurring nightmares over the next couple of months of half her family being washed away into the distance. Before the country disintegrated, Sierra Leone was beginning to develop a tourist industry on some of its beautiful beaches, so I assumed that swimming would be relatively safe. One weekend we went with friends to visit one of the more developed beaches. The water looked so inviting that I lost no time in diving in and swimming. Much to my shock I found myself caught in a current that pulled me out to sea. I tried to draw attention to my plight by waving frantically, but my wife thought that I was merely showing how much I was enjoying myself one or more kilometres from where she was. I stopped panicking and swum parallel to the shore, and finally

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managed to get back to land about two kilometres away from where I started. In order to return to my wife and friends I had to walk across a small river, and to my horror I realised that I was sinking in a quicksand. I had to throw myself flat to stop being sucked down, and swim through the squelching mud. Finally I arrived on the other side, again totally exhausted. When we were living in Ghana we had a small hut on a beach about 45 minutes from Accra, and also a share in a fishing canoe belonging to a villager. Every Sunday he would give us a dozen or more rock lobsters as my rather poor share in his weekly catch, which he would also cook for us. Most weekends we invited colleagues visiting from the World Bank in Washington to join us at our beach hut, as this was the only way we could get them to talk about things other than World Bank politics. One high level economist, who could not swim, was paddling in the sea in front of our hut, and suddenly he was screaming that he was drowning as he was being washed out to sea by a freak current. A colleague and I dived in to try to save him, but could not manage to get him to the shore. It was only thanks to the owner of the fishing canoe, who rapidly took his boat out and caught us and the drowning man in his net that we managed to save him.

Cuernavaca In the 1970’s it was still possible to challenge anything and everything. The marriage between politicians and big business, and the insatiable greed on which this is based, was more than a decade away, and several different development models and strategies were still being discussed and tried out. Many of us believed that conventional economic development was leading us all into increased dependency on institutions outside our control. Learning had become equated with schooling, health with doctors and hospitals, and development with increases in Gross Domestic Product. Ivan Illich, a Jesuit priest who had resigned from the priesthood in 1969 when ordered to close down his multi-cultural study centre in Mexico, was already exciting us with his attacks on some of society’s holy cows with the publication in 1971 of his ‘De-schooling Society,’ which

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was rapidly followed by ‘Medical Nemesis’ and other books challenging widely held views on employment, development, and gender. In 1972 I heard that Illich was attending a conference in Kuala Lumpur, in Malaysia. I was eager to meet him and so sent him a telegram suggesting that if his conference was boring as it almost certainly was, he should come to Bangkok to stay with us. Within twenty four hours he was in our house! I introduced him to some leading Thai thinkers, and spent several days taking him to visit Thai villages to study the traditional technologies that were still being used, and to discuss how some of these could be adapted and maintained. The next year he invited me to give a two week seminar on my ideas on village based development at his institute, CIDOC, in Cuernavaca, a small hill town around seventy miles south of Mexico City. CIDOC at that time was one of the most exciting places to be, as revolutionary ideas were being formed there for Latin America. There were Ministers from Salvador Allende’s socialist regime in Chile, members of Fidel Castro’s politburo, revolutionaries from Bolivia, and university Presidents from Mexico. Everything was being discussed, and everyone was full of hope that it would be possible to build a new society where the peasants and workers would be liberated from their present oppression, and not be re-enslaved by powerful institutions from the U.S.A. and Europe. Discussions and impromptu lectures were taking place at all hours of the day and night, and my own ten part seminar on ‘Barriers and Bridges for Rural Development’ was well received. The belief that it was possible to build a new society in Latin America based on the inherent wisdom of peasants and workers was crushed soon after my visit to CIDOC, when the CIA organised a coup against Salvador Allende’s government, on September 11, (synchronicity!) 1973. President Allende was assassinated, and at least 3,000 of his most active supporters murdered, so that Chile could be safe for capitalism and foreign investment, and the wealthy could reclaim their huge estates and become even more wealthy.

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On our return from Cuernavaca we stopped in New York to discuss with the Ford Foundation the possibility of them running an international seminar on a paper of mine, ‘Primary Education in Rural Communities: An Investment in Ignorance?’ At the airport we hailed a Taxi, and climbing in, the hippy taxi driver said, “I know where you guys have come from: Ivan Illich’s Institute in Mexico.” He had evidently picked up Ivan Illich from the airport a few weeks before. That night he took my wife and I all around New York for free. A couple of days later we stopped in a cafeteria near Grand Central Station. It was bigger than a football field, and there were hundreds, if not thousands, of peroxide-dyed, over made-up women shovelling plastic food into their sad tight mouths. They were so much wealthier than the Thais that I was working with, and so much less happy. How right Ivan Illich was about being trapped by the institutions that come with development. We fled, taking the next available plane out of New York.

Cuernavaca Revisited As a part of the human rights struggle that I was involved in after the October 1976 military coup in Thailand, I ran intensive nonviolent training for all the activists involved in our campaign so that they would be able to react non-violently to any provocation from the army, the police, or provocateurs. I was in touch with several academics involved in non-violent studies, as well as international trainers, mostly in the United States. I was using some of their training materials. We decided to create an international network of trainers in non-violent action, ready to provide training assistance wherever this might be needed, and that to launch this network we would bring activists from all over the world together to share experiences of training and action. I managed to obtain considerable financial support for this network from very high level UN officials. It was agreed that two Thai human rights activists should attend this workshop with me. Much to my surprise the organisers of this network decided to hold this training workshop in Cuernavaca, this time in a Benedictine Monastery. The first two times that I went to the Americas were to the same small town in Mexico.

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The Thai community in the U.S.A. had been helping us in our human rights activities through networking, helping arrange legal assistance, and providing some financial aid. As soon as they heard that I was going to Mexico they insisted that I stop off in Los Angeles to meet with them, give a few lectures, and brief the lawyers who were ready to take up the case of the detained student leaders. Arriving in Los Angeles airport, I was whisked through immigration and customs and taken by Thai community leaders to a part of the city that most people knew nothing about, a little Thailand. Street after street, with Thai people walking around, all the shop names written in the Thai script, only Thai newspapers available, and Thai foodstuffs and drinks sold everywhere. During the four days that I spent in California, apart from briefing the lawyers, I only met Thais, and only spoke Thai. There were around a hundred thousand Thais living in this area. In other parts of the city, little Ethiopia, little Nigeria, little Korea, and dozens of other self-contained foreign communities were providing extraordinary diversity in the midst of homogeneity. Participants at the non-violent training workshop were very different from those who were at Ivan Illich’s institute five years before. The former were young men and women who were organising small scale struggles: indigenous people for their rights; minorities against the mainstream; human rights activists; labour leaders; and even worker priests. The latter were older men, associated with one of the revolutionary governments in Latin America at that time. Both were an inspiration, ordinary people ready to risk everything to better the lot of people less fortunate than themselves, and both had an impact on my life and work.

Himalayan Journeys When we first moved to Nepal we lived in a small house in Kathmandu not far from the main Tibetan Buddhist temple at Swayambu. Some of the most faithful adherents would move around the hill on which the temple had been built, taking three steps forward, prostrating themselves, getting up, and repeating the

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cycle 70,000 times, chanting all the time. I did not want my children to prostrate themselves, but I did want to toughen them up. We went everywhere by bicycle, heavy gearless Indian bicycles. These were fine for riding to town on, but were not good for cycling up hills. I was having daily Nepali language and cultural lessons, given by a lecturer from the local university, and discussed with him what I might do with my children during their school holidays. He suggested that I take them cycling, first to Pokhara, an important town in the centre of the country, and then on towards Western Nepal. He said that the roads generally followed the river valleys and were quite flat. So I planned our trip, and on the chosen day we loaded up our heavy bicycles and set off. We realised in the first couple of hours that the road was not as flat as expected, as we had a gruelling climb out of the Kathmandu valley, and then a two hour descent on the other side down to a river valley. There were two facts that my teacher forgot to mention. First, Nepali rivers flow very rapidly, and thus if we were following a river valley we were either climbing up or coasting down hills. Second, we would be travelling at a lower elevation than Kathmandu, and thus it would be quite a bit hotter. The morning’s mood of adventure as we had set off rapidly changed to one of fatigue, and then irritation. It seemed that the uphill parts were so much longer than the downhill, as we would zoom down the hills and slog up them. I would not let my family stop, as we had to reach a village where we could stay the night, so my children would rush ahead, stopping a few hundred meters along the road to cool themselves under a waterfall by the side of the road, until my wife and I caught up with them. Arriving at our planned night stop, we discovered that there was only one lodging house, which had only one very big bed that was shared by all guests. After eating, my wife tied scarves tightly around the heads of our children to protect them from getting lice, and the six of us took our places on the bed. A bit later a couple of other guests arrived, one of whom was coughing as if he had TB, and settled on one edge of the bed, and during the night it seemed that others came and went.

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The next morning, only partially refreshed, we set off and had an immediate 18 km climb on our gearless bikes from one watershed to next. Half way up I had to stop one daughter from throwing her bike off the road over a precipice into the river below, and near the top even my wife decided that she would divorce me as soon as we got back to Kathmandu. Spirits improved as we reached the top and could see the snow covered mountains in the distance, and improved even more during the long gradual descent into the valley below. That night we had a room and bed to ourselves, but slept badly because of the mosquitoes buzzing in our ears, and the rats scurrying under the bed. A third day was only possible after negotiations with my family in which I agreed that this would be the last day of cycling, that we would take our bikes back to Kathmandu by bus, and that we would also spend the next night in a luxury hotel in Pokhara. Later on that year we decided it would be very special if we could have a white Christmas for once, and so I talked to people and studied maps to find the nearest place to Kathmandu where it would be likely that we would find snow. The most appropriate place seemed to be the Langtang Valley, at 16,000ft, and around four kilometres from Tibet. This valley was only half a day by car, followed by five days walk from Kathmandu. Unfortunately, on the planned day of our departure one of my daughters had a high fever, and only after treatment with antibiotics was she fit to travel two days later. This meant that if we were to reach the valley before Christmas day we would have to complete the five days trek in four. Even in the best of times it would not have been easy to get my adolescent children climbing into the Himalayas, instead of partying with their school friends in Kathmandu, and this accelerated trek was not the best of times. The last day of our climb was the hardest of all, as the air was thinning and each step was more difficult than the previous one. All my children announced that this would be the last of our family holidays that they would join (it wasn’t). And then almost with our last breath we arrived, and were all overawed by the beauty of the scenery. The snow field only partially covered the valley, but there were craggy snow covered mountains on three sides, with a few fir trees somehow sur-

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viving. A herdsman was grazing his flock of yaks and sheep there, and we eventually bought a sheep and a can of alcohol from him for our Christmas dinner. We decorated a fir tree with toilet paper, ate the roasted lamb, and drank the alcohol with the herdsman and our porters. The only difficulty we faced was the altitude. We would even get out of breath taking off our boots. My wife spent half the night checking that none of us had any symptoms of altitude sickness before she herself went to sleep. We spent Christmas day feasting on our sheep, relaxing and getting used to the altitude, and the next day took a few short trips in the valley. On the third day we started our descent, which was so much easier than the ascent. After we had been going down for a few hours we passed a helicopter, which had stopped on the trail with a group of tourists. We chatted with them for a few minutes before we continued our descent. Before evening we saw two army helicopters flying low over our route. One stopped in front of us and asked us whether we had seen a helicopter with tourists, which had been missing for several hours. When we said we had, they wanted my son to go with them to show them where, which he refused to do. A few days later the wreckage of the helicopter was found. The pilot had misjudged its landing on a terrace, and it had rolled down a mountain slope crashing near the bottom. The two pilots and all the passengers were killed. We had been the last to see them alive. With this we all learnt how precarious life can be.

People Can Survive Anywhere: Lake Titicaca One of the most extraordinary train journeys I have ever taken is the trip across the altiplano in Peru, from Cusco, near Machu Picchu, to Puno on the shores of Lake Titicaca. The train climbs into the deep blue sky, across the near barren plateau, overtaken by wild horsemen as it struggles ever higher. It stops at each village, where crowds of bowler hated Indians, stocky in colourful skirts and shawls were trading coco leaves, dried meat and trinkets. In common with Tibetans and with people from other high mountains, these Indians never washed, and never changed their skirts, merely adding new ones as those underneath rotted. Since the altiplano is

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severely overpopulated, the government had tried to resettle some of the Indians on more fertile lowlands. The settlers were given everything to help them in their new environment, including block houses with showers. In a few months most had died, because they were never helped through adult education to become conscious of the need to change their clothes and wash themselves. It was just assumed by the resettlement experts that this was obvious. At times our steam engine had to stop on a long climb, almost to catch its breath, before climbing ever higher. As night fell the carriages became dark, as the last light bulbs stopped working many years earlier and the sky came alive with the bright points of millions of stars. We had to keep our hands on our bags at all times to stop others doing so. In contrast, Puno was an ugly damp town, a centre of trade between Peru and Bolivia across the grey and choppy lake. Lake Titicaca is the largest lake in South America, and is also the highest navigable lake in the world, at 3,800 meters above sea level. But this is not why we had taken the long journey there. It was to visit the Uro people, who had been driven away from the land many centuries earlier by more powerful tribes, and had built their own world from the long reeds they cut in shallower waters near the shore. Their boats were made from reeds, the islands on which they lived were created from reeds, as were their houses, their schools and their churches. Even the soil for growing their potatoes and other crops was made from rotting reeds. We visited a three room reed school, with the children sitting on reed benches but with wooden desks and blackboard. The instruction was disappointing, as even in first grade Spanish, and not the children’s maternal language was used, and everything was teacher centred. It was only the appropriateness of the reed school building and benches that were fascinating.

Deserts The Sahara is the largest desert in the world, stretching 1,600 kilometres from north to south, and 5,500 kilometres from east to west. 8,000 years ago this desert hardly existed, with people living throughout, and dry land crops such as millet being grown every-

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where. Since then the encroaching sand has been driving the inhabitants north to the Mediterranean, and south to the African plains. During the drought of the 1970’s and 1980’s, overgrazing accelerated the spread of the desert. In some of these drought years, a few kilometres of the Sahel, the dry pasture land joining the southern edge of the Sahara, was lost per year. Though the Sahara’s features can change from one day to the next, and water sources are few and far between, it is still peopled throughout by nomadic groups such as Tuaregs, Berbers, Hausas, and black Arabs, who survive by trading salt, cloth, sugar, tea, gold, and sometimes even slaves, relying on their camels, and navigating by the stars. The water holes are usually foul, insect-infested swamps, and sometimes the water is so far down that three men are required to get it out, one lowered on a rope to the water, the next on a ledge high above, and the third even to a higher level, with the buckets of water thrown from one to the next before being poured into a leather trough at the surface. These desert nomads have been excluded from education and other developments taking place in the countries where they live, and are usually amongst the poorest of the poor. In recent years there have been violent conflicts between the Tuaregs and the Government of Mali; and the Berbers and the Governments of Morocco and Algeria. Attempts have been made to bring these nomads into the mainstream of the school system, with concrete block schools constructed near the key water holes, and staffed with qualified teachers. These attempts have usually failed, partly because the nomads never stay in one place long enough, partly because they do not feel comfortable in a hot concrete building, but mainly because all the schooling takes place in a foreign language, and what is taught does not seem to be of much use. More successful have been programmes such as the barefoot teacher project in Nigeria. The teacher travels with the nomads, and runs non-formal education classes for both children and adults in their native tongue whenever and wherever the nomads stop. In my initial African walkabout I had planned to cross the Sahara on my way back to England, but had only managed to reach Timbuktu before being forced south by the closure of the desert to vehicular traffic by the French. Timbuktu, on the northernmost bend

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of the Niger River, was once one of the most important trading and learning centres in Africa. Even in 1961, thousands of camels would come from the salt mines 150 kilometres further north, loaded with great slabs of salt ready to be traded for sugar, tea, gold, and for slaves brought by traders from the countries to the south. At that time I did not know that the salt was mined by prisoners in the most atrocious conditions. Thirty years later, whilst living in Ghana, my wife and I planned to drive to England, spending several days crossing this roadless desert. We took out the back seats from our small Toyota jeep, and filled the space with 150 litres of extra fuel, 100 litres of water, food for twelve days, a tent and camping equipment, spare wheels, tyres, some other car parts, and sand trays to help us extricate ourselves from soft sand. I took a crash three-day mechanic’s course, and my wife fended off prophets of doom who were full of stories of the thirty to forty trans Saharan travellers who lost their way while crossing the desert and died of dehydration each year. As we drove inland from the coast the land became dryer and the people poorer. First tropical forests; then through the dry cultivation of millet, corn and cotton; and finally onto an endless savannah of golden grass, gradually thinning, until at one moment we realised that there was nothing growing ahead of us, just what seemed to be a vast empty plain of dirty sand, and a strong hot wind that never stopped. Though there was no road, there was what seemed to be an immense river of tracks in the sand, twenty or more kilometres wide, as thousands of vehicles had searched for firm sand to drive on. All the tracks were flowing in the same direction. We realised that if we remained within the confines of this river of sand it would be difficult to become lost. Only once were we filled with fear, as the track that we were following separated from the main flow and gradually disappeared, and we had to turn around and retrace our way back to the main flow. We could always see the areas of soft sand way ahead, as they were usually surrounded with burnt out carcasses of vehicles which had failed to extricate themselves from the sand, had overheated, and exploded. For each of these soft spots we had to let half the air out of our tyres, have the sand trays ready, and drive as fast as possible across the difficult areas. We then had to pump up

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our tyres again, and load up the sand trays before we could continue on our journey. At times we could hear the noise of a distant truck, overloaded with contraband and illegal immigrants, grinding its way through the sand, far away on the other side of the river of tracks, and once near an oasis we came across one of these trucks, which had broken down a week before, and was waiting for spare parts. Bedding rolls and buckets were hanging from every available niche on the truck, and more than sixty despondent African passengers were seeking what shade they could find from the heat. The desert was continuously changing, the colour of the sand from white to brown, and flat plains to huge dunes, rocks and mountains, and back again. The nights were extraordinary, completely silent, and lit with a million stars. Nor was this immensity of sand as lifeless as we had imagined. One night camping 300 kilometres from anywhere we saw a desert mouse and some insects, and we often came across a lone Tuareg wrapped in blue cloth, and riding a camel across the dunes. Another time, far from the nearest town, some of the clothes that we had hung outside our tent were taken in the night by unknown, unseen and unheard people of the desert. A year later, some colleagues from the World Bank in Nigeria, who were travelling in a convoy of three vehicles across the desert, were stranded when their land cruisers were stolen one night from near the same place. It rained for the first time in several years on the northern edge of the desert, so much that many wadis had flooded, and a vehicle ahead of us had been overturned by the torrent. An entrepreneurial tractor driver was on hand ready to pull us across the flood. The surface sand from the immense surrounding dunes was whipped up by the tempest, and impregnated everywhere including our eyes and mouths, until we covered our heads with the winding scarves that the local Arabs always wore. Further north the Algerian government was drilling tube wells in the desert every few kilometres, searching for water to help them reclaim some of the land that was being lost on its southern edge. At each successful borehole a few families were settled to plant date palms and other crops, and join the struggle to reclaim the desert.

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At last the security of a tarmac road, leaving the silence and the ever-changing emptiness of the sand for the noise, the crowd, and the greed of our modern world. Still there was the desert on both sides, with the Atlas Mountains in the distance, herds of camels, and poverty ridden Berber settlements, and onto what must be one of the artisanal capitals of the world: Fez. Brass beaters, dyers, carpet weavers, leather tanners and workers, lamp makers, and many more working, always working in the maze of narrow streets. These workshops, as well as the hammans and mosques, made up the old town, which was so complex that only those who had lived there all their lives could find their way around. Leaving Fez we climbed into the Atlas Mountains, to be confronted by hashish sellers on the side of the road every few hundred meters, before descending to Ceuta, a Spanish enclave on the northern tip of Africa. It is ironical that the Spaniards insist on maintaining this enclave whilst protesting vehemently about the presence of British Gibraltar on its southern tip.

Meandering the Mekong The great rivers of the world have always fascinated and drawn me to their mysteries: the Congo, the Niger, the Nile, the Mekong, the Ganges and all its tributaries, including the Seti. For so long, the most intensive agriculture and the most important trade routes have followed these and many other river basins. Nineteenth century explorers used these rivers as their main way through unknown and often hostile lands, and accepted the challenge to find their sources. Whilst working in the Central African Republic I had planned a two week journey down the Ubangi and Congo rivers to Brazzaville on a barge. These river barges had a thousand or more permanent residents, trading with, cooking for, and in other ways servicing the three to four thousand passengers, as the steamer and its trail of barges plied up and down the Congo and its tributaries. Despite the fact that most roads in central Africa had long since been washed away, and these steamers were the only method of transport apart from the plane, they were very few and far between, followed no schedule, and frequently broke down. Not so the boats on the great

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Asian rivers, with barges and river buses, steamers and long tail boats passing every few minutes. We lived on the banks of a canal in Bangkok in the 1970’s, and our children went to the international school by boat, as did I to work. Most of our marketing was done from passing vendors in their canoes, and ready-made meals, strong coffee, and ice cream in bread rolls with sticky rice were always available. At that time it was possible to travel to most villages in the central region of Thailand by boat, along rivers and connecting canals. Every year the central plains were flooded, the people moved to the top floor of their houses, and the boat replaced the motorcycle as the main means of transport. The silt deposited by the great rivers in the annual floods was crucial in maintaining soil fertility. Gradually over the years, roads and dams, floodgates and pumps mitigated these annual floods, and rice farming became more and more an industrial activity in central Thailand, with large doses of fertilisers and agricultural chemicals used to make three harvests a year possible, where two used to be produced for free thanks to the annual flooding. Other great regional rivers were also beginning to be tamed. The Mekong in its 4,200 kilometre length runs through six countries. It rises in north-eastern China near Tibet, forms the border between Burma and Laos, cuts through central Laos, forms the border between Thailand and Laos, and then meanders through Cambodia and into the sea through the Mekong delta, south of Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam. In the early 1990’s it was clear that the days of this free flowing river were numbered. China was planning to construct 54 dams, and to blow up various rapids to make the river more easily navigable, and Laos and Thailand were planning large hydro-electric dams within their own countries. We thus decided to travel down the Mekong River in 1994, from the golden triangle, through the road-less central mountains of Laos and on to the flood planes of North-eastern Thailand whilst this was still possible. Chiang Saen was the start of our journey, a bustling river port where the borders of Burma, Thailand, and Laos join in the so called golden triangle. Steamers festooned with banners in Chinese would

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tie up on the river bank, and dozens of coolies would offload their cargos of apples and pears, truck tires, electric toys and gadgets, running along long narrow gangplanks from the boat to the shore, each loaded with 50-100 kilograms, taking in return loads of dried fruits, live turtles, and other culinary delights for the Chinese palate. Further up river was one of the many casinos and resorts that have been established the length of the Burmese border with Thailand, satisfying the need of the Thai Chinese to gamble on anything and everything. A bit further down river there was a Thai immigration office, and on the other side of the river its Laotian counterpart. Completing the immigration formalities we crossed the river into Laos, moving a few decades backwards in time into a sleepy wooden village untouched by the noise and high-pressure commerce of Thailand. For the next ten days we travelled through the mountains of central Laos on whatever types of boat we could find: a cargo barge loaded with sacks of sesame seeds, long tail boats which sped over the rapids, yet another cargo boat which picked up Chinese blankets, toys, and other cheap consumer goods from a roadhead, and a bus boat. Except around the royal capital, Luang Prabang, there was little official presence, despite the fact that Laos still had a supposedly communist government, which was ironically headed by members of the royal family. We had to have our passports stamped on our arrival and departure from this historical city, which was a fascinating place, with dozens if not hundreds of temples built on the banks of two big rivers. We ate with the crews whatever they were eating, and usually had to sleep on the boats, creating nests for ourselves amongst the sacks. My wife was normally the only woman on board and found it almost impossible to find a way to urinate out of the view of the crew or our fellow passengers. Most of the time we travelled through forested mountains, with small villages clinging to their sides, high above the river. Already the Thai timber barons were in evidence, as great swathes of the hills had been denuded, and we sometimes came across rafts of fine timber floating downstream to where it could be smuggled out of Laos and into Thailand. At night the barges and boats would tie up as near to a village as possible and everyone would wash in the river before settling down for the night.

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In the morning I would talk to the villagers on their way to their fields, which was relatively easy as the Lao language is very similar to the dialect of Thai spoken in the Northeast of Thailand. Many had worked in Thailand, and several still had daughters working there. One ‘been to’ had saved enough to buy a TV and generator, and was able to receive Thai TV programs, but not those produced in Laos. Sometimes we would stop near a rudimentary hotel in a wooden building perched over the river, which enabled us to lie, cramp-free, for a change. Coming out of the mountains the river flattened and widened again to become the frontier between Laos and Thailand. We left our barges for good, and transferred to one of the bus boats that plied this section of the river. Our fellow passengers could not understand how our children, all of whom were employed in the West, could allow their poor parents to travel on uncomfortable boats instead of taking the aeroplane. Unfortunately, as we approached the capital of Laos the water level in the river became too low for us to continue, and thus we left further exploration of the Mekong in Cambodia and Vietnam for another trip. Vientiane, the capital of Laos, was a sleepy city on the left bank of the Mekong, where Aid Donors and Non Governmental Organisations were more in evidence than factories. Long gone were the days when Vientiane was the sin capital of Southeast Asia, where drugs and prostitutes were more easily available to the pilots and staff of Air America than vegetables or secretaries. Air America was a private charter company, which used the city as its base for its daily blanket bombing of the frontier of Laos with Vietnam. Since Laos was ostensibly a neutral country, protected by treaties with the U.S.A., the United States could not officially bomb the Ho Chi Minh trail as it snaked through Eastern Laos, so the U.S. hired a private company to act in its place. Since this company was paid according to the number of bombs that it dropped, more bombs were used on the frontier of this small country, which had a population of less than four million at that time, than by all sides during the Second World War. Even now, a quarter of a century later, peasants and their children are still getting blown up by unexploded bombs and mines.

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Communism with a Human Face Kerala is very different from most other states in India. It has a population of around 20 million, of which about 20% is Christian. It even has a small Jewish community. It is claimed that Jesus Christ sailed to Kerala when he was young and learnt his miraculous powers there. The coastal area is criss-crossed by rivers and canals, and as in central Thailand most transport and commerce is by boat. Every house had a small jetty with a large square spring net, which was more developed there than anywhere else. My wife and I spent a fortnight or more moving from village to village to get an idea as to how illiteracy had almost been eliminated in that state. In this journey we developed a different sense of time, as we could see the peasants laboriously building small embankments on the edge of the lakes, and bringing mud by boat from the shallows to create new fields, which would only be ready to be used to feed the next generation. For most of the period since independence Kerala has been governed by an enlightened communist State Government. Too often we equate communism with the monolithic dictatorial failed states of Europe and Asia, such as Albania and North Korea. But then Laos and Kerala have both had communist governments for many years, and their social indicators are considerably better than those in most of the capitalist states that surround them. Kerala has almost universal literacy, whilst other Indian states have literacy rates of 60-70% or less, and a greater proportion of youth attend secondary schools and higher education there than elsewhere. Basic health care is also better developed, and life expectancy is by far the highest in India. Just because there is less scope for businessmen to grab a large proportion of available resources, and fewer opportunities for corruption, does not mean that the ordinary people suffer. Nevertheless, young school leavers were dissatisfied with the State Government, as there was little industry, limited modern sector employment opportunities, and what there was, was lowly paid. As much as 15% of the adult population have found work in the Middle East, thanks to their relatively high educational qualifications.

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The adult literacy programme in Kerala always fascinated me, largely because it was not directly run by the Government but through non-governmental organisation, each of which received subsidies from the state as well as some small support from participants to cover the cost of lighting. Many literacy organizers argue that learners should contribute something, however small, to the costs of their learning, as this encourages them to attend class regularly. Since it is often the poorest of the poor who have not been to school and thus join literacy classes, I have always believed that we must use other ways to encourage regular attendance instead of making learners pay. Even the effort they make to attend class after a long day working in the fields or in factories is often contribution enough. In Kerala there were two important initiatives for maintaining the literacy skills of new learners, one public and the other private. In many villages there were State sponsored community TV viewing and reading centres. New literates would be encouraged to go to the centres, to meet with their friends, and watch TV. The centre’s facilitator also persuaded the new literates who came to watch TV to borrow newspapers, magazines, books and booklets, many of which were designed to be particularly easy to read. The few centres that we visited consisted of a small room, about half the size of a classroom, with a TV high in one corner, and bookshelves and newspaper racks in the opposite corner, with a few benches in between. The facilitator was paid a small allowance. The centres were open from late afternoon for children returning from school, to late evening to cater for adults. Those that we visited had quite a few young adults watching TV and discussing the programmes at the time of our visit. Equally interesting was that in most village and urban markets there were small scale private libraries, often run as a sideline by cigarette or sweet drink vendors, who would hang out strings of comics, magazines, and gaudy books, which he would rent to his customers on a daily basis at a very low price. They were not offering anything that could be called literature, but they were providing what people wanted to read, and thus helping ensure their newly acquired literacy skills would not be forgotten.

More Educational Reforms Development begins in the minds of men and women. For sustainable rural development to take place new and appropriate knowledge, attitudes, and practices are needed. Despite the poverty alleviation rhetoric from donors and governments alike, there has been far too little attention paid to preparing and financing quality education for adults and children living in rural areas. Per student expenditures in rural schools can be half or less the levels in urban schools, and qualified teachers are few and far between. This despite the fact that rural children are less prepared for school than their urban counterparts, and whose parents can not give as much help to their children’s learning as parents in the towns. Even more serious is the fact that what the rural child learns in school is usually of little relevance, and almost no value to him in his future life as a farmer or rural entrepreneur. There have been many relatively well prepared and appropriate primary curricula designed for children living in the African and Asian countryside over the past fifty years or so, often with teaching taking place in the local language, and an emphasis on agriculture and other immediately useful life skills. In almost all cases insufficient attention has been paid to getting some children into the mainstream of the educational system from these rural based programmes. Most of these curricula have faded away after a few years, as they have been perceived by rural parents as providing a second class education, and who wants their children to have a second class anything? They have seen it as a way for the urban middle class to maintain their dominance of quality secondary and higher education places, and subsequent salaried employment, and to keep their children forever in the rural areas. These curriculum develop-

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ers failed to create the bridges that gave a real chance for some rural children to enter good public secondary schools, and then onto subsidised higher education and regular employment. Barriers are required to prevent the domination of curricula developed by urban educators for urban middle class children, but the bridges which allow some rural children to compete effectively in further education are equally essential. In my work on the Education for Rural Development Project in Nepal the barriers, albeit geographical, were already in existence, and it was only the bridges that needed to be built, that would connect the new and effective rural education system we were developing with that which already existed in much of the rest of the country. This was not an easy task, as there was a concentration of secondary and higher education facilities and resources in the Kathmandu valley, and the administration was so centralised that there was very little interest by Government officials in what was happening in the rest of the country. Most senior central Government bureaucrats had never travelled out of the Kathmandu valley except on their way to India, Europe, or the U.S.A. In the rural areas of the majority world there are around ten times as many teachers as all other government officials combined. It has always struck me as strange that such a high proportion of officials living in the countryside are merely involved in teaching children to read, write, and calculate, when villagers are facing so many pressing problems in their daily lives, and are receiving so little assistance in their resolution. In order to mitigate this imbalance, in the Nepali Education for Rural Development Project we designed and ran a one year pre-service training course where each teacher was trained not only on how to teach children and adults effectively, but also in one development skill. Four months of the training course was spent on preparing prospective teachers to teach children, two months on giving the trainees’ community development and adult literacy teaching skills, and four months on training each teacher in a development skill; some as primary health care workers, able to identify and treat around thirty common illnesses; some as agricultural extension workers able to advise on composting, crop cycles, and intercropping; and some as veterinary extension agents. Each

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primary school was allocated at least one of each of these multipurpose teachers, who by their very presence in the village promoted rural development and improved nutrition and health. Each school was also given an initial set of medicines and seeds, which could be sold to villagers and the proceeds used to replenish their stocks. Unfortunately, this rarely happened. Nevertheless, in this way the status of the village teachers improved, the school became a community centre as well as a school, and more parents sent their children to be educated than had previously been the case. This was particularly so in the non-formal education curricula that we had developed for out of school girls, the Cheli Beti programme, which enabled the four years of the primary school curriculum to be covered in two years of part time studies, an hour and a half a day, and which allowed participants to take the Grade 4 examination and, if successful, enrol in Grade 5. This became so popular that it spread to other parts of the country where, on pressure from parents, it also enrolled boys. A decade after its initial inception, as many children were enrolled nationally in part time non-formal education schemes as in normal primary schools. In order to give disadvantaged rural children a chance to progress up the education ladder and compete with middle class students, various combinations between formal and non formal education have been used. In a hill tribe education project I was working on in Thailand, all the children passed through four years of part-time non formal education with a curriculum designed around the problems faced by the children in their tribal environment. After graduating, a few of the brightest children enrolled in a special two year formal compensatory programme, which took place in special schools, to take them from where they were at to where they would need to be to compete with other children in Grade 5. In Ghana children could enter academic secondary schools directly from primary school (Grade 6) or from middle school (Grades 7 to 10). Many children from rural or poor urban areas would enter from grade 10, enabling them to compete with those who had been to private primary schools and were entering from Grade 6. In Nigeria, Federal Universities would run special one year preparatory courses for girls and students from underrepresented states, before they could be admitted into


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regular undergraduate courses. The downside of these schemes is that children and youths have to spend many extra years before they graduate. For example, in Ghana the middle class child took thirteen years before graduating from high school, but the rural child as much as seventeen years.

Where Have All the Teachers Gone My greatest pleasure throughout my career has been my visits to schools and adult literacy classes, evaluating teaching and learning, and discussing with and testing children and adults. I have also found it fascinating to listen to parents and community leaders, to learn what they expect from children’s schooling and from adult education. I would guess that there has hardly been a year when I have visited less than fifty schools, most of which have been in rural areas. Arriving at a school I make a quick round of the classrooms, and by looking at the children, at the atmosphere in the classes, and at the overall level of cleanliness, I can tell whether the school is well managed or not, and whether student performance will be good or bad. Only after this rapid appraisal do I go to the head teacher’s office, and spend time with him in observing teachers in their classrooms. From visits to thousands of schools, only around one third of teachers had been teaching at the time of my arrival. Others come to school an hour or two late and leave early, and yet others do not come at all. Too often teachers are chatting with their friends or drinking tea on my arrival, and it is of course the children who suffer. I have always made an effort to visit schools that are unlikely to have been inspected recently. Once I even swam for about ten minutes for a surprise visit to a school on an island in a lagoon in Ghana, and was the first outside visitor the school had ever had; another time in Ethiopia I had to wade through six inch deep mud for more than an hour, only to find no teachers had been near the school for several days; and worst of all was a footpath in Chitlang, not far from Kathmandu, which was completely covered with a thick coating of writhing earth worms which we had to squelch and slide through for ten or fifteen minutes.

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Everywhere I go it is clear that it is usually only the parents who are concerned as to what is happening in primary and lower secondary schools, and whether a teacher is teaching or not. Unfortunately, the parents also have little or nothing to say in the management of their children’s learning, since most teachers are civil servants employed by some distant agency, and usually the school belongs to the state and not to the local community. A teacher can be so drunk that he can hardly stand in the classroom, he can be absent from school for long periods of time, and he can even molest schoolgirls in his care, and still not be punished. Another teacher might be working for two shifts a day for no extra pay, establishing good relationships with the local community, and be concerned with the learning achievements of his students, and still not be rewarded. It is from these dedicated teachers that I have learnt most of what I know about effective teaching, the preparation of teaching aids made from freely available materials, and the maintenance of good relationships with community groups. Only when we have made parent groups responsible for rewarding and sanctioning of teachers are they likely to take their attendance in the classroom more regular. Just because the teacher is present does not necessarily mean that any teaching actually takes place. Many is the time that I have driven on precipitous roads or walked long distances to visit schools, only to find the school building open, but both the teacher and his students absent. The parents living near the school insist that the school is open, but neither children nor the teacher are anywhere to be found. Hours later the children arrive, sweaty and dirty, carrying hoes and baskets. The teacher has taken the pupils to work on his farm, not as a learning experience as might be gained from a demonstration plot, but as unpaid child labour for his personal benefit. This can discourage parents from sending their children to school as if children are going to do farm work in any case it might as well be on their parents’ plots. From my experience it is better to recruit teachers from as close as possible to their homes. Locally recruited teachers speak the language used in the community, are used to living in simple traditional accommodation built by the villagers, and enjoy the local staples, however unpalatable these might seem to outsiders. Less time will


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be lost on travelling to marriages and funerals. Some colleagues argue that if teachers from other regions are recruited, they can make no claim on agricultural plots, and thus would be less likely to use school children as unpaid labour during school hours, and would also not be involved in local politics. Even so, they would have little loyalty to those living around the school, and might desert their post to return home on the slightest excuse. In Ghana before embarking on the 1987 education reform we carried out a comprehensive school census, the first in almost a decade. Much to everyone’s surprise this found around 250 ghost schools, 1000 ghost teachers, and a thousand or more ghost supporting staff. In other words, there were schools, teachers, and staff who were paid but did not exist. Local officials had failed to inform the Ministries of Education and Finance when schools had closed down, and when teachers and other staff died, deserted their posts, or emigrated elsewhere. They merely pocketed the money sent to pay for these schools and staff. At the same time around 6000 nieces, aunts, and girlfriends had been recruited for non-existent posts such as sewing teachers, when there was no sewing in the curriculum, and were being paid illegally. In one night of the long knives, in early 1987, around a quarter of all senior education administrators and head teachers were dismissed. Not an auspicious beginning to a participatory reform! The employment of ghosts is not peculiar to schools in Africa; there are even ghost soldiers in the French army! In order to get teachers to be present at the school and teaching, however poorly, it is necessary to move authority relating to the recruitment, discipline, and payment of teachers away from a distant bureaucrat to the village community, or as close as possible to the parent. There has always been a tremendous reluctance by central government bureaucrats to relinquish authority to supposedly untrustworthy parents, and thus any transfer of authority has always to be done surreptitiously. In Thailand and Nepal the first steps in breaking away from central Government control was done by creating clusters of schools, with five to ten primary schools grouped around a middle, or secondary school. The former were considered the satellites and the latter a resource centre. Responsibility for supervision and inspection of the satellites was moved from central

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Ministry supervisors to the resource centres, along with the power to recommend sanctions, rewards, and promotion of the satellite teachers. The resource centre was responsible for supervising the satellites, and one afternoon a month there was training of all the satellite teachers at the resource centre. The distance from the satellite to the resource centre should never be too great; in Nepal it was rarely more than three hours walk. As the young boys and girls who competed for places in the resource centre were inevitably drawn from the satellite primary schools, it was in the interests of the resource centre that the quality of education in the satellites was as high as possible. In both Thailand and Nepal the resource centre could recruit one extra qualified teacher, and was allocated some additional funds, which could be passed onto satellite schools, or used for interschool activities. In Nepal the inclusion of a school in an active school cluster reduced teacher absenteeism to less than 15%, compared with around 70% before. In Cameroon, which devalued its currency by 50% in the mid 1990’s, and subsequently faced such a budget crisis that it was unable to pay most of the running costs of primary schools, Government agreed to decentralise the finance and the management of schools to newly established School Management Committees, in which parents of students were in the majority. Of course parents had to pay for this privilege, as they had to raise money to provide for almost all the non–salary expenditures at the school. These management committees were also responsible for overseeing the use of any government funds allocated, and in recommending the replacement of teachers whose behaviour was unacceptable. Teacher attendance in the classrooms increased significantly, and it was claimed that endemic corruption in the use of school funds by officials was reduced. In Ghana, in a pre-election build up, there was pressure from the teachers’ union to house teachers posted to new schools in rural areas. The only way that this could be done was to get funds from an external funding agency. The World Bank was approached, and agreed, as a part of a large primary education expansion project, to finance the cost of housing for the head and other teachers, as long as the parents were involved in the selection of these teachers. Re-


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cruitment panels were established in each school, and in theory the parents were in the majority. In fact, in most cases parents were intimidated by local officials, and civil servants continued to make most of the recruitment decisions, which were merely endorsed by the Parent Teacher Associations. Nevertheless, a framework was established which would eventually allow parent empowerment in key decisions relating to teacher employment.

Who Wants to Learn When a child enters primary school I can see the quest for learning in his or her eyes. All the children are struggling together to try to understand what the teacher is saying. As the child climbs up the educational ladder, cooperation changes to competition, and learning to the regurgitation of often misunderstood facts in examinations. It is the tail of the dog that wags the dog. Most children, and their parents, are more concerned with their ranking in an exam than whether they have learned anything from school or not. What is important to a child is his or her examination grades, and in many circumstances it is immaterial as to how these grades are obtained. Many children learn that nothing is more valuable than finding some way to cheat, by having examination papers in advance, or the answers to the questions during or before the exam. Safes with examination questions have been blown in Ghana, Sierra Leone, and Sri Lanka. In Cameroon the price of an examination paper was very high days before the exam, and fell to more affordable levels on the day of the exam itself. In Botswana it has been reported that female students could get the examination questions from their teacher by agreeing to sleep with him. In Nepal I have stood outside an examination hall watching the examination questions wrapped around stones flying out of the windows of the hall, and some minutes later the answers flying back by the same route. Even where security is strong and no one has seen the papers before the exam, there is no equality of opportunity. Everywhere in the world the chance of success in an exam of a middle class child coming from a literate environment, with electric light, benefiting from private tuition, going to a better endowed school, is many

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times greater than that of a child from a rural area or urban slum, with poorly educated or illiterate parents, no electric light, and attending a school with few if any text books and unmotivated teachers. School systems create the pretence of equality of opportunity, without the reality. In Ghana and Cameroon, more than 90% of university students come from the wealthiest 10% of families. Children learn that no matter how hard they study there is no way that they can succeed, and that there is no equality of opportunity. In both Thailand and Nepal schools are classified according to their exam performance, and thus children and their parents make extraordinary sacrifices to get their children into one of the schools at the top of the examination league tables. In Nepal, instead of trying to build up the poor performing schools to an acceptable level Government reduces their subsidies, whilst additional support is given to those schools that perform the best, and needing it least, but which are attended by middle class children. Many see schooling as if it were a lottery, the more you pay, the more tickets you buy, the greater your chance of winning. In the past, obtaining a Primary School Leaving Certificate could guarantee a job that provided more security than farming, then later a secondary leaving certificate was needed, and now even a university degree cannot guarantee regularly paid employment. The idea that schooling leads to learning is far from most people’s idea of what its real function is. Given the fact that schooling has become divorced from learning, the most pernicious and corrupting impact of the school system on the youth in the poorer countries is that they are failures. In some of the countries where I have worked, half the children who enter Grade 1 fail to graduate from primary school, another half at the end of lower secondary, two thirds of those who are in upper secondary schools fail to go to higher education, and half of those who enter university fail to get a degree. Many of those who graduate fail to get an acceptable job. Given that the ultimate objective is to get regular salaried employment, over 95% of the youth learn that they are failures. Someone who considers himself to be a failure cannot have a stake in the development of his country. The crowds of un-


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employed youth on every street corner in every Sub-Saharan African city, ready to threaten and frighten, are a manifestation of this phenomena as is the Maoist insurgency in Nepal. The youth, uprooted from their past, and unable to believe in their future, live only for today. Schoolgirl pregnancy is common, and more recently HIV AIDS. In one Ethiopian urban high school, an 80% HIV prevalence rate was reported amongst senior female students. It is only by introducing automatic promotion and eliminating all exams at basic compulsory education that these problems can be partially mitigated. Sometimes I have felt that it would be better to give everyone their certificates when they enter a particular level of education so that schools can concentrate on learning rather than on preparing children for examinations.

The Irrelevant Curriculum This sense of failure is intensified by the inappropriateness and irrelevance of much of what is taught. A high school in the mountains of Nepal was teaching about Pope Pontius Septus and the crusades. The French African history books that opened with ‘Our ancestors the Gauls’ have fortunately now been withdrawn. The Thai primary school curriculum initially had the children giving apples to their teacher, even though apples are not grown in Thailand. All these examples may seem petty by themselves, but together lead the children to believe that their ultimate objective is to leave their country. Whenever I visit a high school or a higher education class, whether in Anglophone or Francophone Africa, or South Asia, I always try to find out what the young men and women want to do when they leave school. After going through a list of professions, I end with the question, “and who wants to work in Europe or America?” All hands shoot up. This is hardly the foundation that is needed for the development of their countries. The alienation created by many of the curricula and texts that African and Asian children follow does not have to be so. In Thailand

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in the 1970’s, an adult literacy curriculum was developed involving parents and development experts, as well as educators. Each group worked separately on the problems faced by illiterate adults, the cause of these problems, and possible solutions, only coming together at the end of the exercise. An extremely relevant and effective curriculum was developed which enabled adults to reach the grade four level in two part-time courses, each of six months, with only an hour and a half of studies a day. The curriculum in Thai primary schools has benefited from this work. In the 1977 curriculum it was decided that during the first four years of primary education there would be no subjects taught, but instead the child would have his or her environment gradually widened each semester. When the child entered school everything would be centred on ‘myself.’ This would include language: my name and the parts of my body; maths: the number of eyes, arms, and fingers, and simple addition and subtraction; science: nutrition, breath, and disease; and social science. The second semester would deal in the same way with ‘my family,’ and move on term by term to study ‘my school,’ then ‘my community,’ ‘my country,’ and finally to ‘my world.’ Language and maths drills, used to reinforce this integrated learning, were the only teaching activities not related to these themes.

Language of Instruction In most of the countries in Africa most school children are expected to be far better linguists than their teachers, and to somehow almost by magic master several foreign languages in school. Quite obviously the language used in teaching has an extraordinary impact on what and if children learn. Ethiopia is exceptionally poor, and has lower educational expenditures per child than almost anywhere else in the world. Many unfortunate Ethiopian school children are supposed to master three languages, and use two totally different scripts by grade four: their maternal or another local language, a language of regional communication, and English, taught by teachers who were a master of none. It was no wonder that they were learning almost nothing. Having to use several languages at the same time can even be psychologically disturbing for many children.


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All evidence that there is shows that a child will learn more rapidly and effectively if she starts learning in her maternal tongue, and only when she is literate in this, starts to learn to use other languages. It is hard enough for a child to leave the security and freedom of her family for the enclosed classroom and alien environment in school. It is even harder for her to make the leap from verbal communication to the symbolism of literacy, and it is virtually impossible for this to be done easily in a foreign language. For there to be effective learning in multi lingual environments, teaching should start in the maternal language (the language of local communication) until the child is able to read and write in that language; and only then, a second language added (the language of national communication). Only if really necessary, when this language has also been mastered can a third language (the language of international communication) be taught. One of the greatest difficulties faced in teaching languages in school is that if these languages are not used they are rapidly forgotten. For most of the children most of the languages taught in school are rarely, if ever, used by the children. In the centre of the Ashanti kingdom in Ghana there is a holy lake, Lake Bosumtwi, probably volcanic in origin and which, after clambering several hundred meters down to its shore, takes a couple of days to walk around. Tradition says that the gods would be very angry if any metal object was put in the lake, and thus all fishing is done from flattened logs on which the fisherman sit cross-legged, and from which he casts his net. Much to the amusement of the villagers, I could never keep my balance on the logs and would rapidly fall into the lake each time I tried. A few years ago a local entrepreneur ignored the warning from the gods and brought a metal boat, which he used to bring people from the villages surrounding the lake to the road head. Within a few months the gods of the lake struck back, and the heavily overloaded boat returning with the drunken supporters of a local football team overturned in the middle of the lake, and dozens of supporters were drowned. So much for ignoring tradition. The use of the boat was immediately and henceforth totally banned.

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In order to visit primary schools in villages around this lake after the boat had been grounded I had to walk along footpaths in the steamy forests around its shores. An extremely obnoxious teacher attached himself to us as we trekked, and not knowing that I was on my way to visit schools, including his, complained vehemently about the stupidity of his students and their parents, neither of whom could speak English, the language in which he had been taught in the Teacher Training College from which he had graduated. Arriving at his school we noticed that there were more than twice as many children in first grade as in second. The smaller children who had enrolled that year were on the left hand side of the same classroom and were not taught anything. It was hoped that they would pick up some understanding of English during their first year in grade 1 and be ready for instruction during their second year in the same grade. All the bigger children who had enrolled the previous year were on the right hand side of the first grade classroom, and since by that time had learnt some English, could be taught. With such an awful introduction to schooling it was not surprising that dropouts were extremely high. A small child is sent to school when he can put his hand over his head and touch his ear, as he is then about six years old. Instead being gradually eased into the constriction and discipline of the African class, he is threatened and lectured by some outsider (teacher) in a foreign language, and beaten too. The school is such an alienating experience everywhere I have worked, that around half the children who enter school drop out before reaching grade 4, and gain almost nothing from their time at school. In designing a new curriculum we not only have to start teaching in the maternal tongue, but also ensure that each year that a child spends in school she learns something useful, and in this way it becomes less essential that she completes the four years of the lower primary cycle or not. Everywhere middle class parents want their children to be fluent in English or one of the other languages of international communication, and they believe, quite falsely, that the earlier instruction in this foreign language starts the more fluent their children will eventually become. I have seen 4 year old children in a kindergarten in the mountains of Nepal singing Bah Bah Black Sheep, with no idea


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as to what they were saying; and ten year old children in public primary schools in Ghana still totally bemused with the English they had to face. At least in Thailand, with the 1977 curriculum reform there was a much clearer idea as to how children learn languages. Thus, up until the end of lower secondary school, English was only taught as an extra-curricula subject outside normal school hours, as it was considered far more important for all Thai children to have a mastery of the national language rather than any foreign language. This policy is unfortunately currently being reversed, as the aspiring bourgeoisie feel that there are strong advantages for their children to master English from an early age, and thus there has been an explosion in the number of private international schools, where English is the medium of instruction, and to which the more wealthy Thais send their children. There are now many thousands of rich Thai youths illiterate in their maternal language, and unable to communicate fluently with their countrymen. We have all had colleagues where both the husband and the wife have been working full time, and frequently go out with their friends in the evening, spending almost no time with their children. These children are brought up by a maid, often from another country or tribe. The parents realise with shock when they go on holiday that they have no common language with their children, and no way to communicate with them. One acquaintance of mine in Bangkok fell sick at work, and returned home early to find the maid sleeping and her baby missing. Despite threatening the maid in every way she knew, the maid refused to say where the baby was, until a beggar woman came to the house with the baby wearing rags, and with a muddy face and dirty hair. She had been hiring the baby from the maid in order to enhance her beggar’s earnings! In several African countries not only the language of instruction and the curriculum are corrupted by colonial values, but also the organization of the school year. In Chad, Cameroon, and elsewhere in francophone Africa, there is a ten day skiing holiday in February when outside temperatures can reach 45 degrees. All primary and secondary schools have to close before July 14, as the few French

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teachers in high schools all go on holiday on that day. The schools in Chad, where the majority of the population are Moslems, close for All Saints Day, Christmas, and Easter, and are fully operating during Ramadan. School systems by their very design get children to look out of their countries, rather than in. The rural school is supposed to be open five days a week, even if one of these is the village market day. Most children do not go to school on that day, but help their mothers in the market. The school calendar is so inflexible that the school is not allowed to close on the market day, and open on a Saturday or Sunday in its place. The school calendar often takes no notice of the labour requirements of the agricultural cycle. In villages in southern Chad no sooner does the first rain fall than all children disappear from school. It is no wonder that the actual length of the academic year is so short, and so little learning takes place.

Teachers Can be the Problem In far too many schools that I have visited the teacher tries to beat knowledge into the minds of the children under his care, which further alienates them from the school. A ruler, a stick, or most popular of all, the black snake, a long piece of rubber cut from an old used tyre, are enough to ensure the bravest student cowers whenever the teacher approaches. Just to see the teacher passing the black snake from one hand to another gets the children to sit up straight and in silence, and stops them from daring to answer any question the teacher might raise. In all of the education reform programmes that I have been involved in, we have tried to move away from the situation where the teacher knows all and stands in front of the classroom telling his pupils the correct answer to every question, to one where there is a three way interaction between pupils, from the children to the teacher, as well as from the teacher to the children. An interactive classroom has been shown to be a more effective learning environment than the teacher centred approach. Unfortunately, many of our efforts to implement a more child friendly teaching learning process


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have failed because of the ingrained belief of the teachers that it is possible to beat sense into stupid pupils. It is a very slow process to change the public perception of beating children, first at school and then at home. I was frequently beaten at school, but never at home. The teacher unconsciously impedes learning in several other ways. Merely by assuming that some children in his class are bright and others are dumb determines outcomes, as he encourages the bright students and ignores the dumb. Often boys are seated in the front of the classroom as they are seen as bright and more likely to progress to further education, whilst girls who are seen as dumb and unlikely to move to the next level of education are kept at the back of the classroom. Analysing school textbooks in the Cote d’Ivoire it was clear the sexual stereotyping supported this ingrained belief that girls were dumber than boys. In these texts men were the doctors, the engineers, the politicians and the airline pilots, whilst women were the housewives, the market mammies, and the nurses. Boys tended to be the heroes in the stories, and mentioned more frequently than girls. Even without this sexual bias, it is hard enough for a girl to succeed in school, as she has many more chores to do before and after school than the boys, and has to fend off pressures for early marriage and avoid becoming pregnant. Schoolgirl pregnancy is unfortunately widespread in Africa, but in none places that I have worked have we been allowed to teach sex education in school, or to explain how to avoid unwanted pregnancy. The bourgeoisie somehow believes that this will encourage promiscuity. When Djibouti, a largely Moslem country, held its high level National Education Forum in 1999, we persuaded a young woman who had managed to get into university to make a public presentation to the forum and on national TV on the difficulties she had faced in her schooling. These included being treated as dumb by many teachers, being teased and bullied by the boys in school especially when she did better than them, being followed every day leaving school by out of school unemployed youths, being beaten and touched up by her teachers, and having to fend off more serious advances from some of them.

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In Nepal, the Cheli Beti programme gave village girls a head start. In Ghana, Chad, and Cote d’Ivoire the textbooks were revised to reduce their male bias. We expected that if there were more female teachers, then there would be a further improvement in the environment for girls in school. Unfortunately, though many more women are now being trained in Teacher Training Colleges than was the case a couple of decades ago, most are unwilling to accept assignments in rural schools far from any town or in urban slums, and prefer to be unemployed rather than leave their parental home. Eventually girls will only enrol in equal numbers with boys in primary schools when social and cultural attitudes change, and this takes time, especially in a Moslem country such as Chad or Djibouti.

Are Classrooms Necessary? The Buddha did most of his teaching from the shade of a Bo tree. Young boys are taught the Koran in the courtyard of their teacher’s house. The high caste guru teaches the Hindu scriptures to young men in the temple compound. Learning from all these, the competent and motivated teacher can teach the modern curricula in any shady and quiet environment. The Cheli Beti programme in Nepal took place at any appropriate shelter or open space in the village, as do all adult literacy classes. It is clear that a specially constructed classroom is not essential for learning. In rural areas if it is raining or about to rain, most children do not go to school in any case. Though the costs of constructing a school building are far the highest of all inputs that go into establishing and running a school, its impact on learning is far less than lower cost inputs such as textbooks or even blackboards. It is only the indirect impact, such as the pride a community might have in their school building, and thus their likelihood to send their children to school, which can make a high investment in a special classroom worthwhile. In Chad most primary school buildings in the capital have been constructed with foreign donor resources, and consist of permanent concrete block classrooms, but in the rural areas most teaching takes place in temporary shelters made from tree trunks and rough hewn branches with a hay covering, and are totally airy! The main prob-


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lems with these temporary structures is that they cannot be built until the hay has been cut, and this is only done two months into the academic year, and thus children do not start learning until then. This loss of two months of learning time means that most rural children do not even graduate from primary school, and those that do only manage after repeating several grades. Around 10% of the population of Chad are nomads, and despite the construction of some concrete block classrooms by the African Development Bank near water holes, almost none of their children have ever graduated from primary school. In resource-strapped Ethiopia the Government banned mud and wattle classrooms and decreed that all new classrooms should be in concrete block buildings, even though the vast majority of rural schools had mud walls and thatched roofs. These rural classrooms were both suitable for teaching and learning, and could also be built by the people themselves with readily available free local materials. In the Education for Rural Development Project that I worked on in Nepal, we designed school buildings around the traditional construction technology used by the people in building their own houses, but also made design changes to ensure more air and light and larger room sizes. This again allowed the schools to be built by the people themselves. In Ghana almost no primary classrooms were built from the mid 1970’s to the mid 1980’s, a period when there had been significant population growth and degradation of many existing school buildings. We estimated that in 1989 there was a shortage of around twelve thousand classrooms. The challenge that we faced was how to provide acceptable and durable classrooms in the shortest time, with the greatest possible community involvement. We came up with the idea of using large scale contractors to construct prefabricated and durable ‘roofs on legs’ or school pavilions, and the communities would then fill in the walls and install the doors and windows. These pavilions were designed to last at least thirty years, and to withstand seventy mile an hour winds. For economies of scale they were always built in groups of three, and gave shelter from the sun and the rain even before the walls were built by the community. Before any school pavilions were built the community

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would have to sign a simple contract, committing them to construct the walls with the most appropriate local building materials, and make the doors and windows within six months of the installation of the pavilions. Since the walls did not need to be load bearing, it did not matter too much if they fell down after a few years, as they could easily be built again. Contracts were signed with large-scale international contractors, financed by the World Bank, and the twelve thousand pavilions were installed in areas far from roads, with the prefabricated parts carried on tractors, floated down rivers, and loaded on boats, and all this in a little more than two years. The new classrooms enabled half a million out of school children to enrol in primary school who previously had not such opportunity.

To Feed or to Educate Perversely, the higher a child progresses up the school system the more the state pays him to continue his schooling. In public primary schools, where there are more poor children than rich, there is often a small fee or Parent Association levy that has to be paid, which can amount to as much as 30% of the total per student costs. This can be sufficiently high to discourage many poor parents from sending their children to school. In the best secondary schools, frequented by the more wealthy children, there is free food and lodging, and no fee or levy; whilst at university, which is almost entirely the preserve of those from the highest income brackets, there is not only free board and lodging, but also a grant to cover other living expenses. The richer you are the more your children benefit from state subsidies. I have struggled hard and long to reverse this perverse situation. In Ghana the best secondary schools, by far, were boarding schools which, up to the mid 1980’s, received a special per student feeding grant, as well as the salaries of kitchen and cleaning staff used to look after the boarders. Travelling to a number of these schools it became clear that for the headmasters, feeding their students had become more important than educating them. The food subsidy from Government only lasted for about half the academic year, and rather than face student discontent, a headmaster had to


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close the school whenever the subsidized food ran out, losing half of the learning time that was needed to complete the curriculum. There were more non-teaching staff employed to deal with the boarders than teachers in many schools. Since it was mainly the children of the middle classes who went to these boarding schools, the tradition of this privilege of free board and lodging was so entrenched that, despite the fact that the Government claimed to be socialist, and was also nearly bankrupt, it took four years of concerted pressure to abolish this subsidy, and have all students pay the full cost of their food and lodging, so that schools could return to their initial mission of teaching and learning. School feeding programmes are common in primary schools in regions where malnutrition is common, or where enrolment rates are low. Often an organization such as the World Food Programme donates food commodities, and the school community is responsible for providing firewood and paying the cook. Again the head teacher has to devote a lot of his time and attention to ensuring that there is sufficient food available, and it is cooked on time for the children’s lunch, and has less time to checking that the children are being well taught. When there is a mid-day meal enrolments swell, and when the food runs out, attendance shrinks away. This makes teaching difficult, as there are always children who only come for the food, and do not follow any course with regularity. Some lower grade primary classrooms I have visited in rural Chad are stuffed with more than two hundred and seventy children when a midday meal is available, and shrink to twenty or thirty when there is no food. Since the children who are fed at school get a smaller share of food at home, it would be simpler to give each child who attends school a bag of uncooked foodstuffs to take home once a week. If this were done, the head teacher would at least not have to worry about fuel and the cooking of food, and could concentrate on improving the children’s learning. Even where there are no student feeding or lodging facilities, the management of schools can be very difficult. Near the centre of N’djamena, the capital of Chad, is one of the biggest schools I have ever visited, a secondary school with twelve thousand students. Managing an institution that size is like managing a small town, but

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so much harder. This is because the adolescent students are charged with hormones and ready to challenge the status quo. Government only provided the salaries of the teachers, and all other expenditures had to be raised by the parents’ association, who naturally insisted on managing directly the resources they raised. There were thus two managers of this mega-school, neither trusting each other. It was not surprising that examination results were poor. Just down the road was a Catholic secondary school, fully supported by the state, to which the Moslem leadership of the country sent their children. The good examination results from that school enabled its students to get scholarships and dominate the places in the highly subsidised national university.

Things Happen The coming of the monsoon used to be welcomed throughout Thailand, as the flooding rivers and canals would spread their silt throughout the central plains, ensuring the rice paddies would be well fertilized. Two crops were possible a year without using any chemical fertilizers or manure. The traditional Thai house was built on stilts, and was as functional during the annual floods as during the dry season. Things that were stored under the house merely had to be moved upstairs during the annual floods. Everyone already had their small canoes, so they could still visit friends and go to the market and the temple. It was not possible for people to travel long distances during the rainy season, and thus it was a time when monks were supposed to stay in their temples and follow a simple life, meditating and reading. In fact, it is still prohibited for a monk to leave his temple during the rains, except in exceptional circumstances, and traditionally he is supposed to stay in the temple of his ordination for five rainy seasons. Monastic discipline is now much less severe than it used to be. Until fifty or sixty years ago Bangkok and its sister city Thonburi were built around a few main canals which emptied into the Chayo Phrya River, and these were crisscrossed with hundreds of smaller canals. Heavy downpours would not flood the streets for long but would empty into the river. By the time we moved to Bangkok in 1970 most of the canals had been indiscriminately filled in to make roads, with no attempt made to maintain the charm of a canal-based city as was done in Amsterdam or Venice. With reduced drainage in a rapidly growing city there was often serious and prolonged flood-

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ing. Once when I took my family to a city centre cinema we had to wade through water up to our knees to get to our seats, and during the film we saw rats swimming by. At other times, during prolonged periods of heavy rain, traffic would become totally snarled, and the less the traffic moved, the greater the number of cars that would break down, or run out of petrol, further jamming the roads. On one particularly rainy day my secretary set off in her car from her home at 7.30 a.m., and only arrived at the office ten hours later at 5.30 p.m., just as we were closing for the day. Neither my children nor I were ever late that day or any other day, as we lived by a canal and my children went to school by long tail bus boat, as I did to work. When a Thai man, woman, or child goes swimming they will almost always do so fully dressed, letting their clothes dry out on their bodies afterwards. The first few times we went with my colleagues to the beach, my wife felt like a Playboy model in her swimsuit, surrounded by Thais in their sarong or jeans and T shirts. Shortly after we arrived in Thailand I went with my family and friends to visit a famous waterfall a couple of hours from Bangkok. Thais love waterfalls, with the cool spray from the cascading water, and thus there were several small restaurants there, and crowds of people, many splashing and swimming in the pool below the falls. The water looked very enticing but I had no swimming costume with me. Most of the Thai men were swimming with a cloth around their waist and tucked between their thighs, and a T shirt. I borrowed one of these cloths, and not wanting to be outdone by the children who were jumping into the pool, I climbed to the top of the falls and dived from there into the pool below. Much to my wife’s horror, as I dived my cloth flew off and seemed to stay behind, and I zoomed down in front of the crowds totally naked! This was a first lesson in Buddhist detachment. During the rainy season it would usually rain very heavily for half an hour or so, and then everything and everybody would rapidly dry out. Most people do not dash for shelter as we do in the West when a torrent comes, but would enjoy the coolness of the rain pouring over their clothes and bodies. Some of the sexiest women that I

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have seen in Thailand were not in restaurants or nightclubs, but those standing or walking in the rain, hair and face dishevelled, and clothes soaked. Unlike in Thailand, where the rainy season can last six months, in Djibouti on the horn of Africa, in wet years it may rain two or three times, and in dry years only once. People are shocked when it rains, and if it pours for more than an hour Government grants a special holiday as it is just too difficult for people to get to work!

Wavering World When I was last in Djibouti visiting schools in a desert village, I was puzzled to hear the heavy rumbling of a loaded train passing nearby when there was no railway line anywhere in the vicinity. It was one of the many earthquakes that have shaken me in my wanderings. Sometimes I feel that I invite coups and revolutions, floods and earthquakes, as they all have plagued me with some frequency wherever I go. I will always remember both my first and my latest earthquakes. Late one night I was driving the twenty two miles from Kampala to Entebbe. The night was black, the road deserted, and I was feeling the worse for wear as I had been attending a party where local gin and beer had flowed. When I noticed the road ahead moving slightly to the left and then back to the right again, and then vibrating in front of me I thought that either I must have drunk too much, or the spirits of the forest were more real than I had previously imagined. Sweating profusely, I gripped the steering wheel as tightly as I could and continued to drive, though more slowly than before, until I reached Entebbe. Much to my relief when I arrived in the town everyone was outside their houses in the streets, terrified that an even stronger quake would hit them. Forty years later we were enjoying Christmas holidays with some of our family in a beautiful apartment overlooking the ocean on the Southern Thai resort island of Phuket. We knew the area well, as we had been exploring the beaches and islands around many years before any tourist development had taken place, and had observed a

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gradual uglification of the hinterland over the years. But still with sand as white and soft as snow, and with the warm sea reflecting the colour of the sky, we kept on returning. On this particular morning we had finished our breakfast, and a daughter was getting ready to go to the beach when we heard what sounded like screaming from the sea below, and looking out we saw a churning mass of deck chairs and people. A few minutes or seconds later we saw the sea go out far further than the lowest tide, and then come crashing in again. Four times the uncovered sea bottom followed by the crashing waves, and then stunned silence. For more than an hour we did not know what had happened, and only gradually did it dawn on us that we had witnessed one of the greatest Tsunami in recorded history. Physically we were not hurt as our apartment was perhaps thirty meters above sea level, but emotionally it took my wife and I months to get over the trauma of what we had seen, followed by the bombed out appearance of much around us. One fisherman who we were helping, who had lost his house and his boat and all his possessions to the Tsunami, told us that in seven minutes he had lost what had taken him forty two years to earn. For a long time even many of our highly educated Thai friends were unwilling to visit us in Phuket because they were afraid of the multitude of ghosts around. According to Thai beliefs, if someone dies unexpectedly and violently, his or her spirit cannot escape without assistance, and remains trapped where the violent death took place. Though the ghosts might be there they are not necessarily all malicious. Towards the end of my time in Nepal I had an Englishman working for me. We got to know him and his Portuguese wife well, and when we were both in the mountains our wives would spend time together. One day my wife invited her to go to a hotel swimming pool, and instead of welcoming the invitation her friend went green, sweated all over, and refused point blank. With some prodding she explained that she had met her husband when they were both working in Sudan, had fallen in love and got married there, and went to Mombasa, a coastal resort area in Kenya, for their honeymoon. The first afternoon of their marriage her husband rented a catamaran to go with his new wife for a romantic cruise in the bay, sailed a bit too close to the reef with calm water inside and ocean breakers outside, and got hit by a freak wave. He was knocked in-

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side the reef, and she outside. He was a good swimmer, and she could not swim at all. She spent seventeen hours clinging to a fragment of the boat, saying over and over again that her husband would find her, her husband would save her. He spent the same seventeen hours leading a failed search for his wife, and then having to phone his in laws for a day, and tell them that it seemed that their daughter had drowned. Early the next morning, twenty kilometres down the coast, some villagers returning from a night of fishing came across a bloated naked white ghost on the beach, a ghost that appeared to be breathing. After consulting the village elders, a messenger was sent to the nearest police station. The wheels of bureaucracy began to turn, and within a few hours she was taken to a local hospital and later that day was reunited with her husband. Some very strong spirit must have kept her alive in the ocean and eventually lifted her up and dropped her on the beach.

Poisonings It is surprising how rapidly we learn to adapt and accept the differing cultural realities in different countries, however macabre these might be. In Cameroon I worked in a small office with perhaps 20 Cameroonian colleagues. During the three years I spent there, two brothers and one sister of these colleagues were poisoned to death. The woman was a police officer and had gone out for dinner with some friends. Towards the end of the evening she started having terrible stomach pains, and in the morning was dead. The autopsy showed strong poisons in her gut. Poisonings were so frequent that no one would ever accept a drink from any open bottle, whether a soft drink, a beer, or even a whisky. I became so aware of the poisonings around me that if a waiter brought an already open bottle to my table I would immediately send it back, and when we were invited to a Cameroonian home to eat, we would always wait till the host or his wife tasted the food before we served ourselves. Even one time when the Minister of Education invited me for some champagne in his house I politely refused to drink from a tray of already filled glasses brought by his servant, as the bottle had not been

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opened and the glasses filled in front of me. Unfazed, the Minister called for another bottle which he gave me to open. When anyone died of any undiagnosed disease in Cameroon we would first consider the possibility that he had been poisoned. We would express our condolences over the death, and sooner rather than later we would ask, “was he poisoned?” Cameroon was not the only country where poisonings were common. Part of the witchdoctor’s trade has always been that of selling various charms and potions, the most popular of which were those used to get a man or woman to fall in love with you, and those to get rid of your rival in a love triangle. It is rare in West Africa to visit an open market without a witchdoctor selling some magic brew. The voodoo market in Lome, the capital of Togo, was huge. All the ingredients needed to make the most powerful charms and potions, not involving human body parts, were openly available. Dried toads and lizards, snake venom, monkeys’ brains, tree bark, and toadstools were all available, and could be mixed by the salesman to make any poison or medicine. The Minister of Health in Ghana announced in a public meeting that when sick he would always go to a witch doctor before he consulted any Western trained specialist. We used to meet a black Brazilian woman most mornings jogging with a friend on the beach, and would chat with her from time to time. For more than a month we did not see her, and when she finally returned she told us her story. She had been living happily with her husband and her children, had been going to work as usual, but had began to feel sicker and sicker, particularly in her office, and no doctor could find anything wrong. One morning she started to feel she was having a heart attack as she was driving, and so she took a swig of coffee from her Thermos and immediately felt worse. She suddenly had an insight that there might be something in her coffee, and took the flask to the husband of her friend who happened to be the feared head of the Ghanaian security service. He had her coffee analysed and found traces of arsenic in it, and realised that this was the only thing the woman ate or drank away from her family. He challenged and threatened the woman’s maid, terrorising her with his position and power, until she confessed that she had ob-

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tained the poison to get rid of the Brazilian woman so that she could take her place and live with her husband, who was Ghanaian like her. To save her skin she led the security chief to the witch doctor who had sold the poison, and the chief had him arrested and jailed, and the maid sent in exile to her maternal village. It was not only the poisonings that we had to get used to in Cameroon, but also the car hijackings. During our first year in Cameroon four cars were hijacked from people we knew well. One of the office cars in the World Bank office was taken from the driver at gun point, and after a chase was totally destroyed in a crash. The husband of a colleague at the office was hijacked with his car, and luckily was thrown out in the bush unhurt. The wife of the United Nations representative had two cars taken from her at gunpoint within two weeks of each other; the first was at the dry cleaners and the second at the tennis club with her children. Again these car hijackings resulted in not so subtle changes of behaviour on our part. My wife would always go out with our dog in the car, which would growl ferociously at anyone who approached her or the vehicle, and at night I would drive very fast, and if I felt that someone was following us, I would go as quickly as possible to the Hilton Hotel, where there were several armed security guards.

Religions and Killing Most of the world’s religions are totally against any killing. In the Judea/Christian religions one of the Ten Commandments is ‘Thou shall not kill,’ and in the Hindu/Buddhist traditions the avoidance of killing is exhorted in the Noble Eightfold Path. In Thai Buddhism one of the five precepts that ordinary lay people are supposed to adhere to is not to kill any living creatures, including human beings. Mouthing religious principles is one thing, but applying these to daily life and practice is something different. Too often religions are used as an excuse to kill, even innocent women and children, rather than to treat each life as something sacrosanct that has to be protected. Often it seems that there is one morality expected of the poor, and quite a different one for the rich and powerful. In almost all the countries where I have worked very little value

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is attached to the life of an ordinary boy or a girl, a man or a woman, by the religious and governing elites. The Orthodox Christian Prime Minister of Ethiopia did not think twice before sending thousands of adolescent boys and girls to certain death on the minefields of Eritrea so that his regular troops could pass unscathed. Muslims from Northern Nigeria have not hesitated to kill tens of thousands of Christians, egged on by their imams, and vice versa, and a famous Buddhist monk in Thailand with a huge following said it was not a sin to kill communists. On another continent the Christian-based Lord’s Resistance Army in Northern Uganda has slaughtered many thousands of villagers and kidnapped around twenty thousand children to use as soldiers and sex slaves in its attempt to conquer the country and govern it according to the Ten Commandments. All these examples are not to say that there are not also wonderful Christian, Moslem, and Buddhist leaders who attach the greatest value to the life of every sentient being, merely that religion is used far too often as excuse to devalue and demonise the lives of its opponents. Thailand, with its long Buddhist tradition, might be expected to be a country where human life would be more valued than in most other places. Instead it is a country with one of the higher murder rates in the world. Ten years ago 180 young women were burnt to death in a toy factory near Bangkok, because the gates and windows had been locked by the manager to stop workers sneaking away. The owner responsible was never arrested or charged, and his shares are still quoted on the Thai stock exchange. A policeman who murdered two foreigners in a restaurant in cold blood was released on bail, as he had never committed a crime like that before! More recently, Buddhist troops killed 80 Muslim youths in the South of the country through suffocation whose only crime was that they were Muslims, and a year after still no one had been charged. Kidnapping children and women and imprisoning them in brothels is another way that lives are destroyed. It is the same Christians, Buddhist, and Hindus who are involved, the same people who pray when they get up in the morning and when they go to bed at night. Throughout my life I have done what I can to assist those who are

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working to help these damaged children and women escape, and reestablish themselves in their communities. It has always been an uphill task, as the brothels are usually protected by the police and other powers that be, and a lot of work is needed to rehabilitate each child or woman that is released. Once or twice our house has been used as a safe haven for a few days by a freed prostitute. It is one level of evil to keep children and women in brothels in their own country; it is quite another thing to sell them in other countries. Whilst we were living in Ghana a local entrepreneur imported a container load of twenty five Philippine and Thai prostitutes, and forced them to have sex with African men in the streets around the main square in the capital Accra. HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases would inevitably lead to their certain death within a couple of years. I talked to a few of the Thai women, and they had no idea as to where they were, and did not expect that their lives could get better. A successful campaign was mounted to free these prostitutes, but since the man who had imported the women was ordered to return them to their home countries I did not have much hope for them.

Robberies Some people are prone to being robbed and others, like me, are not. This is not to say that I have not been robbed from time to time. When I was living in Uganda in the 1960’s every morning after breakfast I would get into my car to drive to work. This became such a habit that I rarely looked at what I was doing, but one morning I could hardly pretend that everything was fine, because when I started to reverse my car into the road it made such a racket that I had to get out and see what was wrong. Someone had stolen all four wheels during the night, and I was driving on the hubs. So much for my mindfulness. I quickly went to the local thieves market and managed to buy my wheels back before someone else did. I had a very close colleague in Uganda who was working in the Ministry of Education. Together we developed a methodology, and carried out the first-ever cost benefit analyses of investments in edu-

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cation, or in any social sector for that matter. We showed that investments in primary education in Uganda produced a far greater social rate of return than investments in secondary or higher education. In fact, there was no sector in the economy where there were rates of return of a similar magnitude. This colleague was lodging with friends in Kampala, and would always lock his bedroom door when he was there so that he would not be bothered by his host’s children. He woke up one morning to find his door still locked, but that everything he owned had been taken from his room; everything, all his clothes, his books, his radio, and even the watch from his wrist. He had to borrow clothes from his landlord to go to report the theft to the police. Evidently a very patient and skilful robber had spent the night fishing with a line and hook through his bedroom window. There was something about my wife that invited bag slitters and snatchers on four continents to try their luck with her. My bags were never tampered with, even though I usually carried most of our money and our important documents, but my wife seemed to challenge potential thieves. Perhaps it was the fact that she always had such beautiful handmade bags, designed by artists and made by artisans from different tribes and ethnic groups that attracted these robbers, or perhaps it was just the challenge of emptying such unconventional bags. The first of this long heritage of destroyed bags was in the largest clothes market in Bangkok, and the thief only escaped with a small amount of cash. The second time was perhaps the most mysterious of all, as she drew a significant amount of money out from a bank to pay for our family’s holiday, crossed the street to buy some flowers for her aunt, only to find her bag empty. The holiest temple for Hindus in Kathmandu is Pashpatinath, and by far the biggest annual festival there is Shivaratri. During this festival hundreds of sadhus flock to this temple from all over India to show off their skills, and to smoke hashish together. Some were naked except for the ash that covered their bodies, some lying on beds of nails, some had not spoken for seven years, and others had learnt how to twist themselves into the most extraordinary positions. There was a thriving market in religious pictures and relics. Crowds of food and trinket vendors and almost the whole population of

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Kathmandu thronged around the temple. I was thus not in any way surprised that when it came for my wife to pay for some street food she had no money, only a large slit the whole length of her bag. We had always wanted to trek to the old Inca ruins in Machu Picchu, in the mountains of Peru. It was a two day slog up the mountain, and we arrived early on the third morning just as the sun was rising over the silent and empty ruins in the plain below us. A few hours later the ruins began to fill up with thousands of tourists who had come by train. We made a rapid retreat to the bottom of the hill, and caught a slow local train that chugged upwards into the deep blue sky of the altiplano. We finally got off at a small town where there was an active market. All the women were wearing multi coloured shawls and bowler hats, and the men heavy ponchos. I was walking some distance behind my wife, and saw three extraordinary old women slash my wife’s bag with a razor, take what they could and disappear into the crowd. A few years later we moved to Ghana, and the first weekend drove to a beach less than an hour away from Accra. Since there were no security boxes in the guest house in which we were staying, we were carrying all our documents, credit cards, and money with us, which we locked in the car. When it was time for us to return to Accra, a fisherman asked us if we could give his brother a lift to the main road. Half way to the road this man asked us what we would give him, and when we said nothing, he demanded to get down. I stopped the car, and as he was leaving he grabbed my wife’s bag with everything in it, and both she and I had the same reaction. My wife bit his right wrist and I his left, and shocked by the ferocity of these two white savages, the thief dropped the bag and fled. Though I have worked for international agencies, with their Headquarters in the U.S. or Europe for most of my life, I have often tried to adapt some administrative procedures to local customs, which has not always been welcomed by Headquarter bureaucrats. One time when I was running the World Bank office in Ghana, $2,000 that a driver had drawn from the bank disappeared before it was put in the office safe. All the local staff were against calling the police, as they were afraid that the police would use violence to ex-

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tract a confession from some low level staff member or other. It was thus arranged for one of the most influential fetish priests in Accra to come to our office and find out for me what had happened to the money. He came twice, the first time he merely looked at the place from which the money had been taken, but the second time called all the local staff together and chanted in front of them until someone broke down and admitted the theft. The payments I made to this fetish priest were rejected by World Bank accountants as unauthorised and unacceptable expenditures. Because of my unconventional approach and my willingness to support committed people wherever I found them, and because I did not run away from first hand experiences in villages and urban slums, some politicians and civil servants wondered who I was working for, the CIA, or the KGB, or whoever. They found it difficult to understand my motives and so spied on me, opened my letters or tapped my phone, and have on at least on two occasions searched for incriminating evidence in my house. The first time was in Uganda when someone climbed through a window, left footprints all over our house, and took nothing. The second time was when I was working in the mountains. I always locked one room in my house whenever I went away for a few days. When I returned after a short absence I found the door of my room had been forced, and everything I owned moved from its normal place to somewhere else, but again nothing had been taken.

Murders and Attempted Murders Perhaps the greatest hardship that we have faced through our itinerant life style has been to loose many of the good friends that we made along our way. It has been difficult to keep in touch with people that we have been close to in one country when we are two or three countries further on. Since we are no longer involved in their work and their struggles, we reduce contact with each other as our interests diverge. When we do finally return to visit a country in which we once lived, we have frequently been shocked and dismayed to find that so many of our friends and colleagues have dis-

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appeared or been killed in the turbulence that has engulfed so many of the poorer countries over the past decades. Uganda was the first country where I got a job in development. I went as a traveller and left four years later an expert. It was where I carried out a national manpower survey on June 31, a date that does not exist. It was a happy place, fertile, becoming prosperous and full of hope. I made many good friends: politicians, academics, journalists, and civil servants. When we fled Uganda in 1968 we did not return for ten years, during much of which time Idi Amin had been President, and more than 300,000 Ugandans killed. I had wanted to re-establish contact with about forty friends and colleagues, but met only three. At least seven had been murdered by Amin’s goons, ten had disappeared without trace, and the rest had fled the country. My next job was in Thailand, which though supposedly a Buddhist country is one of the most violent countries in which I have ever lived. During the nine years that we spent there, there were two bloody changes in Government, a couple of other military coups, as well as one of the most repressive regimes in the history of the country. Several students who used to visit our house and who we knew well, were killed or disappeared, and as a part of my human rights activities I became aware of hundreds of other disappearances and killings. When I finally left Thailand I went straight to Nepal, and worked for most of the six years we spent there in the mountains of the Far West. I trekked widely throughout that region, staying in villages, and talking with villagers until late at night. I got to know many of the village leaders, and planned with them the literacy, the women’s education, the school building and other activities to be carried out through our project. Unfortunately, this region has now become one of the main centres of conflict between the Maoist revolutionaries and the King’s army. Several of the villages I used to stay in have been destroyed, and others are still being fought over. The death toll must have been particularly heavy amongst those who had offered me hospitality, who were always the most active in village affairs, and thus suspect to the Maoists, the army, or both.

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In Nepal death was always near the surface, and it was there that I became fully aware of how fragile life is. I have stayed in villages where a quarter of the children were dying of measles, and have seen a woman bleed to death when half her face was taken off by a bear. It was also the country where I first had to deal directly with murderers or their victims. When I first launched the Education for Rural Development Project, I was aware of caste problems but not fully conscious of the extent to which some upper caste people tormented those from lower castes, particularly if these lower castes were also economically disadvantaged. I had noticed that a project school supervisor always seemed to be criticising one of our peons. I had several times suggested to this supervisor in private that he cooled down his attacks. A few weeks later I went on a trek to open several training programmes, and after a few days returned to find that the peon had run amok in our village one day on his return from work, and had decapitated his brother and two other members of his family with a cutlass when they suggested that he was not man enough to stand up against the insults of that supervisor. He was also about to decapitate his wife when his sister in law said to him that if he killed her who would look after his children? With this he collapsed, and recovering went to give himself up to the policeman in our village. He was quickly tried and found guilty of the murders, and jailed for life. There had never been a murder in our village before, though several of the inmates in the jail were there for life from killing a cow. On talking to my staff I learnt that the supervisor had been particularly insulting on the day of the murder. I had no grounds to dismiss him, but made sure that he was never again assigned a peon, and a year later he resigned of his own accord. The wife of the murderer was in a really pitiful state, ostracised by her family, ignored by the other villagers, and with no one to help her feed her children. My wife and I would visit her most months, give her some money, and to try to lift up her status amongst her fellow villagers. She never visited her husband, and as far as she was concerned he was dead. I went to see the convicted peon in the local jail a few times, and eventually persuaded him to join an adult literacy class that we were running there.

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I was never particularly close to the Nepali official who the Government had assigned as my first co-manager of this project, and the more I knew him the less I liked him. However, to begin with we got on relatively well. We carried out the initial survey of the region together, which was for me the first really serious Himalayan trekking I had ever done, and he taught me how to walk up the mountains, not resting until I reached the top, and how to dance down the other side. He had an attractive and educated wife and two children, who during the early months of project implementation lived with her husband in our village, and who we got to know well. After a while she returned to Kathmandu with her children, and never again visited the region. One night at around midnight, she came to our house in Kathmandu. Her clothes were torn and dishevelled, and her face badly bruised. My wife set up a bed for her, and in the morning we learnt that her husband always beat her terribly whenever he was drunk, which was often. She decided to go to Bangalore in India to seek advice from an extraordinary famous guru, Sai Baba, who she followed. A couple of weeks later she returned to Nepal in a state of exaltation, and when my colleague could neither control her with entreaties or violence, had her incarcerated in the local insane asylum, and replaced her in his bed with his maid. In the best of cases asylums are depressing and often frightening places, and since Nepal was one of the poorest countries in the world, its asylum was truly Dickensian. We visited our friend in the asylum two times and saw the terrible effect the incarceration was having on her. The third time we went to visit we were not allowed to see her, and were told that her husband had authorised an experimental treatment. A week later she was dead. Since I always felt that my colleague was responsible for her death our relationship progressed from bad to worse, and eventually I managed to get him replaced. In Lagos, in Nigeria, violent robberies were so common that anyone with money, whether Nigerian or foreign, would arrange a bullet proof haven on the second floor of their houses. There would be a bullet proof door leading upstairs so that any robbers could empty the ground floor, steal the cars, shoot the servants, but could not hurt

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the owner or his family. Though friends of ours were shot in Thailand and Ghana, and a World Bank driver wounded in Cameroon, the risks we faced were a normal part of our lives. Much to our surprise, when we moved to Addis Ababa in Ethiopia to work in the World Bank office there, there was an extraordinary level of paranoia. The houses where the foreign staff lived were fitted with these bullet proof doors, and in addition each staff member was allocated an armed body guard or two. We refused the offer of the door, and completely rejected the idea of having body guards. Imagine how awful it would have been to always have an armed stranger in your car, following your every move, and hearing every private conversation. We were never robbed or attacked during the three years we spent in Ethiopia, even though we went to every part of the country and all over Addis Ababa. Only one of my colleagues was robbed. She was walking in the huge open air market in the city that sold everything one could imagine and more. Someone came up behind her, lifted her up, and his partner stole her shoes. So much for bodyguards!

Whitewashing the Ivory Tower Action oriented functional literacy programmes can have a significant and immediate impact on rural development, but they are difficult to develop and implement, as they must teach in the maternal language and sustain the interest and regular participation of learners in the classes, which usually take place at night after a long day working in the fields, the market, or at home. At least we know that this effort is worthwhile, as a literate peasant is more productive than his illiterate brother, and children from a literate mother have lower rates of mortality that those from an illiterate woman. What happens in public primary schools is usually far from the concerns of the elite in the countries where I have worked, as they send their children to private primary schools. Despite this it is still very difficult to reform the primary school curriculum so that it is relevant and useful to the needs of all children, both those from poor families in rural areas and those from the more wealthy families in towns. Implementation of any new primary school curriculum is much more difficult than preparing good curriculum materials. Even a relatively small country has hundreds of thousands of teachers and tens of thousands of schools scattered everywhere. It should be far easier to reform the curriculum in the University than at any other level. Compared with primary and secondary schools, there are very few universities and these usually only operate in one language: either the national language or the language of international communication. They are staffed by a significant proportion of a nation’s high level manpower, consume a disproportionate share of national education budgets, and the economic rate of return is very low, suggesting that reforms in their structure and cur-

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ricula are urgently needed. More seriously, universities play almost no role in rural development, and a large proportion of their graduates migrate out of the country. Even though it is clear that universities built on colonial models do not meet the manpower needs of the poor countries where they are situated, it is almost impossible to implement significant higher education reforms, as what happens in the university is too close to the concerns of the elite. They had obviously benefited from tertiary education as it was, and see no reason why reforms are needed. The University is the tail of the dog that wags the dog of the whole of the school system. University professors determine the intake requirements that must be met by higher secondary school students for entry into the university. This then determines what must be taught in secondary schools, which eventually has an impact on the curriculum that is used in primary schools. The unwillingness of the university to change its organisation, financing, curricula, and intake requirements makes reforms elsewhere in the school system especially difficult to implement.

Bringing Universities Home In the mid 1960’s most intellectuals, myself included, believed that Africa would develop rapidly and transform itself socially and politically. Interventions by colonial powers had nipped a number of military coups in the bud, tribal conflicts remained muted, and governments had not yet become kleptocracies. The universities entered a short period of vibrancy where African and foreign scholars lived and worked together in harmony. Makerere University in Uganda became a centre where scholars, who would later become famous, began to establish their reputations. Several of these coalesced around my close friend, Rajat Neogy, who successfully published the Pan African intellectual journal ‘Transition’ for many years, until he was arrested and jailed for suggesting that the Ugandan secret service was less concerned with human rights than was claimed. Like many African intellectuals his period in jail did much to destroy his health and self-confidence, as well as his family life.

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Makerere was a traditional British colonial university with a self contained campus just outside Kampala, and well isolated from the African world around it. It was loosely modelled on a British residential university, with comfortable accommodation for students and staff, three nutritious meals a day for students, beautiful buildings and well-kept grounds, and good schools and health services for all those living on campus. It was an island in the African bush, a foreign island, designed to train the new governors of Africa in the British tradition. It had almost no links with the world outside its walls, and played no role in people centred rural development. Most of the senior staff was still white and the students black. In the 1960’s the three national universities, one each in Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda were loosely joined together as the University of East Africa, and the grants provided for their operation were determined by a University Grants Committee, on which I was involved. It was through my work on this committee that I realised that the per-student costs per year at the university supported by Government were about forty times those in primary schools, and that not only was the university totally fee free, but East African students received allowances to help them buy their clothes and books. I became uneasy about the separation of the university from the world around it, and the way that university students were treated very differently from students enrolled at the lower levels of the school system. I was also unhappy over the way the grants committee accepted the status quo. Arising from this grant allocation and my manpower planning work, I wrote the first of many articles on the need for major reforms in university education. This article, entitled ‘Whitewashing the Ivory Tower,’ was published in Transition, and caused quite a stir at the time. I left Uganda in 1968, with Makerere University still managing to maintain some of its academic excellence and its isolation, and did not return until after the first decade of Idi Amin’s rule. When I finally came back for a visit I could recognise nothing. There was no longer any barrier between the university and the surrounding African bush, as the campus was covered with plantains and maize farms, and even professors had to grow their own food. Despite the new social and economic realities, the academic staff were not try-

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ing to create a more appropriate model of higher education better suited to the new economic realities, but instead they were hibernating: waiting to return to the glory days of the past. The University of Ghana at Legon, outside Accra, was another British colonial style self-contained campus university. Jerry Rawlings, Ghana’s revolutionary president for most of the 1980’s and 1990’s, recruited many of his key ministers from amongst the more radical university teachers, but apart from that there was little love lost between him and the academic community. This was partly because Jerry Rawlings often felt insecure in the presence of colleagues with advanced degrees, as he had only completed a secondary education himself, but far more because during the early years of his presidency he fought against privilege wherever he found it, and the university was a centre of all kinds of privilege. During the first few years of his administration students were frequently demonstrating against the government, not on behalf of the underdog, but to demand better food and accommodation for themselves. Academic staff continuously complained over their salary levels, as the range in salaries between the highest and the lowest staff had been reduced to a record low of two and a half times. The University was closed several times for months at a time, and once even for a full academic year. Jerry Rawlings was fired with revolutionary zeal during the early years of his government, and like Julius Nyerere in Tanzania was convinced that it was the duty of new high school and university graduates to use their education to help their less fortunate brothers and sisters in the rural areas. He established a National Development Service, where all high school and university graduates had to serve one and two years respectively, on low pay working in rural areas, often as teachers. The National Development Service programme was designed and successfully run for more than a decade by two Ghanaian revolutionaries, who were also friends and protagonists of mine. Of course, middle class parents were dead against this development service as they did not want their sons, and especially not their daughters, to waste years working and living for low pay in some distant village, and thus as the Rawlings revolution be-


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came embourgeoised, participation in development service changed from being compulsory, to voluntary, to non existent.

Financing Higher Education Even the more conservative politicians felt uneasy about giving university students allowances in addition to their free tuition, free accommodation and free food, as they were aware that most university students were the children of better off parents. Obviously the elite were not ready to willingly give up this support, and thus several governments, including those of Nigeria and Ethiopia, decided to give loans to their university students instead of grants. This proved to be an expensive mistake, as the loans were usually more generous than the grants they replaced, and almost none were ever repaid. In Nigeria there was only a 7% repayment rate, and in Ethiopia even less. Since all governments offering student loans had to establish complex bureaucracies to manage the distribution and repayment of the loans, these loan programmes tended to cost governments more than the earlier grants! Many of the poorer countries eventually dropped loan schemes, and replaced these with specialised taxes on university graduates. In revolutionary Ghana it was costing more to maintain a university student with food, accommodation, and allowances, but not including tuition, than he would be earning on graduation if he were lucky enough to get a job, and it seemed that there was nothing the Government could do to get the student or his family to share in these costs. There was just too much opposition from middle class parents to abolish or reduce any of these benefits. In order to get the student to pay for part of his higher education without antagonising the elite, we developed what we thought was a brilliant new loan system where all students would automatically pay back all of any loan taken. The students would borrow against their future state pension, guaranteed by at least two persons already participating in the pension system. Any loan they took would reduce the value of the pension they would eventually receive on their retirement. They would use the proceeds from this loan to pay for their food and accommodation, and other incidental living expenditures whilst study-

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ing in any higher education institute. If they defaulted, their guarantors would have their pension entitlements reduced automatically. Like many brilliant schemes it did not work, as we had failed to take account of inflation, which was running at over 33% p.a. in Ghana at that time, and which rapidly reduced repayment obligations to almost nothing.

University Reform I was involved in implementing a major reform in the Nigerian university system with U.S. $120 million credit from the World Bank. The first proposal that I received from Nigeria under this project was for a U.S. $2.5 million payment for non-existent books, with a substantial cut for me! My refusal to join in the scam resulted in my being attacked in the newspapers, with headlines announcing that I was planning to destroy the Nigerian university system, and suggesting that people like me were better dead than alive. In Nigeria it is necessary to take threats seriously. All in the cause of duty. The Nigerian Minister of Education at that time taught me that we should always introduce controversial reforms in higher education during the long vacation, when students were not on campus, and thus could not organise protests and demonstrations. To reduce later protests during term time, he suggested that all students would have to formally accept the particular reform as a condition for them to be readmitted into the university for the new academic year. Using this strategy, Nigerian universities opted out of the business of feeding and lodging students, and were able to devote resources saved from this in improving instruction. The university cafeterias were closed down, and private food shops established in their place, which incidentally were called ‘Bukaterias.’ Students could buy whatever dishes they liked, at a relatively low price, in hygienic conditions. The abolition of the obligation to accommodate all students was less successful. The available hostel space was rented to students who came from far off Federal States at a reasonable rent, which was lower than charged in the towns. Those students who were fortunate enough to have this accommodation sub-let space in


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their room to other students. I have seen nine students sleeping in a room that was initially designed for two! Cameroon went even further than Nigeria in its attempt to devote increased funds to teaching, libraries, and research. During one long vacation the Government closed down all the universities’ dormitories and cafeterias, abolished all grants and loans, and at the same time levied a fee on all university students of about U.S. $100, and in so doing doubled the funds available for libraries and academic activities.

Reducing the Brain Drain Far more important than the different ways of paying for higher education is what a university student learns, and how. I have nearly been lynched by students at universities in Nigeria and Ghana when in lectures I proposed to make the university curriculum more relevant to the problems faced by their countries. The students claimed that they had studied so hard, for such a long time, in order to have the chance of working wherever they wanted to, and would not accept the blocking of the road to the Promised Land in Europe or the U.S.A. by having to study courses that would not be accepted by accreditation agencies in the West. Medical science is more expensive than any other course in universities in Africa, but more than half the doctors ever trained in Ghana are currently working outside the country. The hospitals in England are dependent on doctors and nurses trained at the expense of the poorer African and Asian countries. Over the past three years, forty thousand nurses and thousands of doctors have been poached from health systems in the poorest countries by British hospitals, with no attempt made to compensate these countries for the high cost of this training. This brain drain is yet another area where the poor countries are subsidising the economies of the rich through the provision of trained manpower at no cost to the rich. In Ethiopia in the early 1990’s almost all students going overseas for post-graduate studies funded by the World Bank never returned

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to work in their country. In order to recuperate the costs of the schooling of those graduates leaving the country temporarily or permanently, it was proposed by the Ethiopian Government that any graduate leaving the country, even for a short visit, would have to have deposited the full cost of all his schooling before being given an exit visa. The nascent middle classes objected so strongly that this proposal was quickly dropped. In Singapore, far richer than Ethiopia, this has been done for several decades already. Income differentials are so great between poor developing countries and richer Western nations that highly qualified Africans and Asians with doctorate degrees can earn more working as taxi drivers or office cleaners in rich countries than as responsible professionals in their own nations. Special incentives to get these professionals to return home are sometimes financed by foreign aid donors, but are resented by those who never left their countries in the first place, who naturally object to those who deserted their nation receiving special benefits when they return.

It Takes All Sorts Throughout my life travelling, living, and working around the world there has never been a month when I have not met some extraordinary woman or man who has marked me. Revolutionaries, human rights activists, dedicated teachers, children, peasants, workers, thieves, murderers, and beggars have all influenced my life and ideas. My inspiration has not come from books or from statistical or research reports, but from listening, feeling, and speaking with people along my way. Speaking to many of these people has often been difficult, for even where I have made an effort to learn a language such as Twi, Swahili, Thai, Nepali, and Amharic, it has only really been in Thailand and Nepal where I have been fluent enough to be involved in a normal conversation. In most other situations I have had to use one of the colonial languages such as French or English, or in a worst case rely on interpreters or on non verbal communication. Even when I have been fluent in a language real communication is often difficult, as the relative status of the person that I speak to is often more important than the words that I use. A Thai peasant will, for example, look at me when I ask a question, and try to give me the answer he thinks I want to hear, not the one he feels is correct. Of course, benefits from the relationships I have had during my work and other activities have flowed in two directions, as many of those who have worked with me, or who have crossed my path, have gained as much as I. One Nepali National Assembly member started his career as a field supervisor in the project I was managing in the Far West of Nepal, and has always been grateful for what he learnt with me. The first thing I had him do when he joined the project was to send him on a 60 day trek into the mountains, far from

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any road. On another occasion I took a junior colleague from the World Bank on her first field trip to Ghana, and she has always remembered us deserting our official jeep when a road became impassable and continuing our visits to schools on foot.

Freedom to be me I have always chosen employers who let me work where I felt I could be most useful, and who had little control over what I was doing. I have had more than twenty contracts over the past forty years. Of all the agencies that have employed me, only USAID tried to impose unacceptable controls and I resigned almost immediately, whilst ODI, the Ford Foundation, and the World Bank allowed me the greatest freedom to be creative. UNESCO was the least efficient, and most queries took many months and some years before they were answered. I started to work with the World Bank in Ghana in 1986, and at that time we had to make a booking with the national telephone company 24 hours in advance for any international phone call, and we had no E-Mail. We were forced to immerse ourselves in Ghanaian realities, rather than those of the U.S.A. and the World Bank in Washington. During my stay in Ghana international phoning became easier, and an E-Mail/Internet link was established with a dedicated satellite line to the World Bank. The overall effect of this lopsided Western-based communications system was that I had to work a couple of hours extra every day with no improvement in the quality of the advice I was giving, nor in the projects I was designing and supervising. As communications with the World Bank Headquarters improved, colleagues would log onto the Internet to read their E-Mails as soon as they got off the plane from Washington in order to find out what was happening in their Headquarters instead of in the Ghanaian countryside. With these improved links with Washington, projects became increasingly standardised, taking less and less notice of the socio, linguistic, and cultural differences between countries.

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I did not like to fly from Ghana, Cameroon, or Ethiopia to Washington D.C., and preferred to have discussions with my bosses and colleagues in the World Bank Headquarters by video conference. In the middle of one of these the satellite link appeared to go down, but in fact I could still see and hear what my colleagues were saying about me, but they thought that the link was dead. For half an hour I felt that I was playing God, or an unseen but involved observer. I have often been working to improve the lives and the hopes of people, particularly those in rural areas, no matter whom my employer. Despite the fact that my mission has been pretty constant, the attitude of local Government officials to those from the U.N. and those from the World Bank has been radically different. The U.N. official is respected and trusted far more than someone from the World Bank. He comes from a weak and often ineffectual organisation similar to the host Government, and cannot force anyone to do anything. On the other hand the World Bank official has the power of dozens of experts and millions of dollars behind him, and is frequently trying to force changes on governments and its civil servants. Once I started working for the World Bank, governments insisted that I travelled and went to meetings with a minder, who would report back to the powers that be on what I said and did. Whilst working for the U.N. I would be lucky if I was even informed that there was to be a meeting. A few of my minders became close friends and taught me more about how the government and its civil service worked in the particular country than anyone else.

Russian Experts I have always been politically active. At the age of 16 I was secretary of the London Schools Left Club, and was invited with five other young activists to make an official visit to the German Democratic Republic….East Germany, over the Christmas/New Year holidays. As a part of East German hospitality we were all invited to a New Year party by officers of the friendly Russian occupation force, and were given a Russian/English interpreter to help us understand the patriotic speeches that would be made. There was not much

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need for an interpreter as the festivities consisted of drinking huge quantities of vodka, with each empty glass thrown over our shoulders to smash on the wall behind. My fellow activists started to pass out after their sixth glass of vodka, and by the tenth I was the only one still standing. At least the interpreter proved his worth, as together we spent the passing of one year to the next carrying my fellow travellers, one by one, back to our hotel. Six years later I was recruited under the ODA/Nuffield star graduate programme to work in the Ministry of Planning and Community Development in Entebbe, Uganda as an economist, responsible for developing the education chapter of Uganda’s second five year plan. There were so few Ugandan graduates at independence that almost any offer of technical assistance was accepted. Shortly after my arrival, three Russian development planning experts from the Soviet Central Planning Agency were also assigned to the same Ministry. Unfortunately, they did not speak a word of English, nor any other language except Russian for that matter, and they did not seem to have any understanding of the weak indicative planning approach being used in Uganda. For the first few months that they were in the country they could only talk to each other, and smile at us as we worked on preparing plan documents for the consideration of the cabinet. Finally an interpreter arrived, and spent every morning reading the local English language newspaper to the experts in Russian. In the afternoons they would prepare detailed plan documents on the basis of the morning’s readings, and in the evenings invited us to join them in their heavy vodka drinking sessions. They spent almost two years in the Ministry of Planning, and contributed virtually nothing to our plan deliberations. There was almost a complete lack of any of the quantitative data on Uganda that they needed in order to make the detailed projections that they were used to preparing in the Soviet Union. No one could say how much coffee or cotton would be produced next year, let alone in five years’ time. It was not possible to determine the trucks and roads needed to support agricultural production, nor even calculate cost benefit analysis for most of the investments being made. It was much more a question of determining broad political priorities, such as Africanising key positions in the economy, or increasing the spac-

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ing between children born to each woman, or diversifying export crops, than quantifiable targets. From these broad goals, some implementable projects were prepared for the next one or two years. In addition, surveys and research that needed to be carried out in order to clarify future priorities were identified, and attention devoted to mobilizing community resources. I had many discussions with the interpreter about life in Russia. To start off he would tell me how perfect everything was in the Soviet Union, but as we got to know each other better, cracks began to appear in this Utopia, and after a few months I realised how happy he was to be away from Russia and living in Uganda. Abruptly he was sent back to Russia and replaced with a new hard line interpreter who was prohibited from talking with me under any circumstances. Throughout my career I have come across many Russian experts who have been unable to speak any of the languages used in the country where they were working. One time I spent two days shaking every bone in my body, being driven along a broken tarmac road to Kankan, an important town a few hundred kilometres West of Conakry, the capital of Guinea. The area around Kankan was beautiful, with thick forests, flowing rivers which had to be crossed on bamboo suspension bridges, almost no motor vehicles, and small villages scattered here and there. I had to visit the University there to see what assistance it might need from the World Bank in order for it to become more effective. Much to my surprise, all the teaching staff at the University was Russian, none could speak French, the national language at that time, and there were only a few interpreters. Thus most of the academic staff was giving their lectures in Russian, with no translation. Only the brightest of students had picked up a bit of Russian, but most sat bemused in the classroom understanding nothing. Learning was further complicated by the fact that the university library only had five books in French, and a few hundred heavy, out of date tomes in Russian. Returning to Conakry I learnt that all the Russian staff at the University was being paid by the Guinean government with the proceeds from leasing out all their offshore fishing fields to the Soviet

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Union at a ridiculously low price. Russia negotiated many onesided barter agreements with African governments. Under one of these agreements they provided Uganda with snow ploughs, instead of the bulldozers needed for road building that had been ordered. It was evidently technically impossible to disconnect the central heating on these snow ploughs, despite the tropical weather outside. Similarly, Russian teaching staff (and their interpreters!) in a technical college in Ghana was paid for through a barter agreement involving cocoa, which could easily have been sold in the international market for a transferable currency.

Other Consultants I have been a hard manager. Whenever I have had consultants working for me I would send them out of the capital city, far from any large town, before allowing them to spend time studying the second and third hand information in the multitude of reports that their suitcases were stuffed with. Too often experts use reports to provide them with security, helping them avoid facing the differences between African or Asian realities and those in the rich countries from where they come. E-Mail and the Internet are even more pernicious, as not only do they link these experts to some distant bureaucracy, but also checking their E-Mails is something they do in their home offices, and gives them the illusion of being busy. Many consultants who have worked with me have been fascinating people who have made good suggestions, shown how these might be put into practice, but have been unable to follow up the implementation of their ideas. Some have been totally fanatical; there was one British volunteer architect who worked on our project in Nepal. In order to remain fit enough to supervise several school construction sites a day he would take his morning walk with a rucksack full of rocks. Others were ready to face considerable hardship on the trail, or work far longer hours than was healthy, and many became my good friends. Not all the consultants who have been assigned to work with me have completed their assignments. I sent a Canadian, who was supposed to be an expert on community radio, into the Thai countryside by bus. I never saw him again, as he

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left the country five days later. We were sent a Swedish U.N. volunteer to work in the Far West of Nepal on our rural development project. The day he arrived I asked my wife to help him adjust to our village life, but even she, with all her care and charm, could not help him settle in. Arriving in the village after a three hour climb up the mountain, he asked her where there was a telephone so he could phone his girlfriend in Sweden, and my wife had to tell him that the nearest phone was three days’ walk away, and that she was not even sure that international calls were possible from that phone. He was unable to open his mind to the beauty of the world around him, and was always comparing everything with life in Sweden. When he realised that there were only squatting toilets in our village, he sneaked away and took the first available flight back to Kathmandu, and then on to Sweden.

Street Friends In every town or city where I have worked there have been tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, or more people living and working in the streets. They beg; they polish shoes; they carry bags; and are involved in petty trade such as selling cups of water, cigarettes by the stick, and flowers. They prostitute themselves, steal, and harass. They wrap themselves in plastic sheets, and sleep on building sites, by the walls of buildings, in parks, under trees, by famous monuments, and of course are beaten and perpetually moved on by the police. From time to time, in an effort to beautify the town for the visit of some foreign dignitary, they are all collected, put in trucks, and dumped in the countryside far from the city. I have known only a few beggars who have made a good living from their misfortune. One of these was a legless man, who worked in the street where we lived in Addis Ababa, and dragged himself along the road on a leather sheet. He did so well that he bought his own room, had two wives, and a cow. In most cases not only does a beggar have to face his deformities, but also exploitation by officials and unscrupulous entrepreneurs. In Bangkok, Indians controlled much of the begging trade in the 1970’s. Some mornings I would see a truck full of terribly deformed and crippled men, women, and

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children coast along the main thoroughfares where tourists pass, dropping one of these poor souls off every twenty to thirty meters. During the day an Indian passed every hour to collect each beggars’ takings. In the evening they were loaded back into the truck and taken to I don’t know where. In the poorer countries there is often a tradition of giving alms to beggars. This is because everyone’s livelihood is so precarious that people who are employed now accept the possibility that they themselves might loose everything, and have to live in the street and be forced to beg for their living. Shopkeepers in Nepal and India keep a pile of small coins on the counter, and automatically give a few to each beggar who passes the shop; whilst in Ethiopia the new middle class that has recently broken out of poverty always has a pocket full of small notes and coins to give to any beggar that crosses their path. In neither case would a beggar ever be befriended. The richer the country and its people, the less empathy there is for street people, and the more they are pushed out of sight and out of mind. We tried to help an old beggar woman who lived in the street near our house in Accra. She had been disowned by her family and driven out of her village in the North of Ghana because she had elephantiasis in her legs. Her legs were horribly swollen and covered with putrefying sores. She had quite a reputation in our neighbourhood, as she would frequently shout insults at passers by. We befriended her, gave her money, and fed her a couple of times a week. Whenever we gave her anything such as a blanket or warm clothes, by the next day it had disappeared, and we assumed that she was being robbed by other street people. We tried and failed to find a doctor who would be prepared to treat her in the street, as obviously no clinic would accept her on their premises. Much to our horror one morning when we were bringing her food we found her in a pitiful state, her body badly burned, and her clothes and other possessions a pile of ashes. It seemed that when she had been sleeping a group of youths had poured petrol over her and then set fire to her, her clothes, and her bedding. One of my daughters along with my wife bathed her blisters morning and evening until they had healed. Because of her terror of

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the youths who had tried to kill her, she accepted our suggestion that she move to a refuge being run by the Sisters of Charity, the order established by Mother Teresa. We drove her to this centre, which was in Kumase, a city a couple of hundred kilometres away, where she was welcomed by the sisters, and shown her own bed. A week later I made a visit to the centre and she was very happy, was being seen by a doctor every day for her elephantiasis, and was helping look after some of the crippled orphans. A couple of weeks later I was passing through Kumase again, and made a trip to the centre. Though she was still being treated by the doctor and was getting better, she begged me to take her back to Accra, which I refused. I had to sneak away to stop her getting in my car. On my return I went to see how she was getting on, and was not surprised when the sisters told me she had run away a few days earlier. Two days later we found her back at her old patch on the side of the road near our house in Accra. She had travelled more than 200 kilometres, in five days with no money, to exactly the same place in the city where she had been before she had gone to the Sisters of Charity. After much goading she admitted that she had left the centre as she could not get any alcohol with the sisters around. In the street she had been exchanging all the blankets and clothes that we and others had given her over the past few years for cheap local spirits. In Addis Ababa I used to have my shoes polished every morning on my way to work by the same young man. He had graduated from high school ten years earlier and had worked as an accountant during his compulsory military service, but for the past six years could find no work except for polishing shoes, and nowhere to live apart from the streets. Life there was very precarious, and many of his street friends had died from disease or even been beaten to death by the police. Whatever your trade, there always seem to be middlemen ready to help and exploit. Since there were more than 200,000 boot blacks in Addis Ababa, this was big business. The shoeshine boys and men purchased their box, brushes and cloths from these entrepreneurs on a high interest purchase agreement that never seemed possible to

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pay off, even though the total cost was only the equivalent of U.S. $3. These middlemen also sold them a small portion of shoe polish every few days. The boot blacks could never afford a full box even though it cost less than U.S. 50 cents. There was considerable solidarity amongst street people, and even though they did not earn enough to eat properly they would all be prepared to contribute a few cents to someone in need, or who was sick and unable to work. This young man would wait for me on my return from work to chat with me along the way, and we somehow became friends despite his fanatical Christianity. Even though he never had enough to eat, he would often have to go into long fasts demanded by his church. After some months, we rented him a room in a nearby mud and wattle house for the equivalent of about U.S. $5 a month, and gave him a mattress and some blankets so he would no longer have to sleep in the street and risk being beaten by the police. One morning a few months later he seemed particularly depressed, and after some persuasion he told us that it was his birthday, and he saw his only future in the street. It was clear that what he wanted above everything else was to get a job, and to have a good chance for this he would at least need a university diploma. On the spur of the moment I told him that I would finance his studies in accountancy, and also help him get a place in the best private university in the country, as I knew both the owner and the registrar. All he had to do was to get a copy of his high school diploma and ID, which he managed with some difficulty. He then succeeded in enrolling in a two year diploma in accountancy. My wife and I agreed that during his studies we would pay his rent, buy him a simple chair and desk, pay for any books that he would need, pay his fees and give him a monthly allowance. Every couple of weeks we would check his work, discuss any problems that he was having and the grades that he was earning. Even in a good quality private university the semester started late, the lecturers were not always present for their class, and even when they were, were often ill prepared. Socially it was difficult for our protégé as most, if not all his fellow students came from middle class families, and lacked the spirit of solidarity he had found on the street. Nevertheless during the first year he managed to get pretty good grades.

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Given the World Bank’s response to the pointless war between Ethiopia and Eritrea, I realised that I had to resign from the Bank and leave Ethiopia sooner than planned. We would thus not be present to guide our protégé through his second year of studies. Nevertheless I helped him open an account in a local bank, taught him how to operate the account, and made a deposit sufficient to pay his fees and to maintain him whilst he completed his diploma. I also encouraged him to rent a P.O Box so we could write to each other regularly. For the first two months that we were apart he continued to study well, and then gradually his letters became more and more incoherent, and within six months had become the ranting of a religious fanatic. A couple months later I was invited to Addis Ababa for the launch of a distance learning project that I had designed, and found this young man back in the street polishing shoes. He just could not manage the transition from the street to a bourgeois university without the constant social support that my wife and I had provided. Shortly after we had left Addis Ababa he began to slide back with his old street friends, and soon was treating them with food, drink, and drugs bought with the money he had in the bank to finance his studies. Within a short while he could not even pay his rent and found himself back in the street. We failed to change the destiny either of this young man or the Ghanaian beggar woman. The lure of the familiar was so much stronger than the challenge of the unknown.

Powerful Friends In 1964 I was active in a group that we called ‘spies for peace.’ One of our main activities at that time was to find out where the British nuclear shelters were where military and government leaders would retreat in the case of a threat of an atomic attack, to enable them to carry on their war in safety. We also got some information on who was to be in which shelter. Some of these shelters were those used by the Government during the second world war, but the most important were specially constructed for the atomic age, and were hundreds of feet below the surface and fully designed to pro-

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tect and sustain 400 self-declared key leaders for around three months. My job was to phone up the wives of those who would be in the shelters. I would ask each whether she could put in a word with her husband, to get me onto the list of those who had a place in the shelter, even though I knew that she and her children did not have places themselves. I pleaded with her to help me as I was so terrified of being frizzled or maimed in a bomb blast. I must have created quite a few conjugal conflicts with these calls. We were very disillusioned with the Labour Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, as he continued to ignore the decision of the Labour Party conference to unilaterally ban all nuclear weapons in Britain, so we planned our own coup. Some friends designed a special telephone system that could bounce calls from anywhere in the country, and an actor acquaintance trained so that he would sound very much like the Prime Minister. We managed to find the home telephone number of the deputy Prime Minister, and called him from the Prime Minister, making it seem that the call was coming from a naval harbour in the South of England. Our Prime Minister talked to his colleague about some of the intractable problems facing the country. He said that he had had enough, as despite all his efforts things only got worse and everyone attacked him. The Prime Minister said that whilst he still had the authority, he had decided to flee the country with enough money to ensure his comfort for the rest of his life, and was already in a submarine at the naval base ready to leave. He realised that he and the deputy Prime Minister often fought with each other, but was prepared to share what he had, and to wait a few hours for him to get to the harbour. Fortunately, the deputy was somewhat worse for alcohol, and so the argument became increasingly heated as he tried to stop the Prime Minister from leaving the country, and persuasion changed to personal insults thrown by both sides. After ten or fifteen minutes the deputy slammed the phone down, and the next day he resigned. This was the first of many encounters that I had with ministers, Prime Ministers, and Presidents throughout my career. I must have had discussions with half a dozen heads of state, and working relationships with fifty or more Ministers. I never grovelled in front of authority, only respected those who deserved respect, and have al-

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ways spoken my mind. As a long-term technical specialist and as a major donor the relationship has often been excellent, but has also sometimes been extraordinary difficult. I have found that by relating to the ministers as colleagues, ready to help them solve the problems as they see them, and playing down the power of the purse, the relationships have been good. Wherever I have inadvertently played a more dominant or overt managerial role, the relationships have been fractious. It was in Ghana where I developed a relationship with the President and his family. I would see him at the theatre, on the beach, and in various meetings and functions. His wife lived near us, and I would discuss the status of various projects with her from time to time. She was head of a nationwide revolutionary woman’s movement in her own right. In the early 1990’s the BBC decided to make a TV programme on the Revolutionary and the Banker. The revolutionary was the President, and I was the banker, as I was the World Bank representative in Ghana at that time. The President explained in the interview that he had been very unwilling to share his bed with the World Bank and the IMF when the economy collapsed early on in his revolution, but he had no alternative as the Soviet Union and other socialist countries refused his requests for assistance, and was thankful for the timely support from the World Bank. By the time of the BBC interview the President had lost much of his socialist zeal. The banker (me) was full of revolutionary rhetoric, and talked about attacking poverty, reducing income differentials, and making special efforts to increase the educational opportunities of those poor Ghanaians who had been marginalised by most Governments since independence. When I first arrived in Thailand in 1970, traditional values still held sway. The Director of the Planning Division in the Ministry of Education where I was working took me to see the Deputy Permanent Secretary in her office, and prostrated himself so much as he went to her desk that he looked as if he was crawling across her carpet. I had shoulder length curly dark hair at that time, which was definitely not the haircut expected of Thai civil servants. This caused the deputy some consternation, as the Minister kept on asking her to bring the new expert from Oxford University to meet him.

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After some weeks she could not delay the summons any more. I must give it to this Minister that he maintained his sangfroid when I walked into his office. This Minister was not one of those that I succeeded in winning over, but I developed a marvellous relationship with this deputy permanent secretary that I have maintained to this day. We travelled to every part of Thailand together, and even across some of the international borders where the immigration officials were told that I was her nephew. She was so well known and respected that wherever we stopped during our visits we would be served a splendid meal by local teachers and officials. Sometimes we had to enjoy seven or eight of these banquets a day. I developed strong personal relationships with a dozen or so ministers, and have always gone out of my way to help these whether this was officially part of my job or not. I have usually had much better relationships with women Ministers and high level civil servants than with their male counterparts. I guess that as an oppressed sex they have felt much more as to what I have been trying to do for the underdogs in society than have men, who think more in terms of their power and what this can get them. The treatment that some of these Ministers and leading civil servants received from their male colleagues was appalling. A Ghanaian Minister, who had been one of the first women in that country to divorce her husband publicly in a court of law, was accused during her confirmation hearings in parliament of being promiscuous, destroying the sanctity of marriage, and encouraging teenage sex by her male colleagues, most of whom were known to keep a string of ‘big bottom girls’ in addition to their multiple wives. It was not only in her own country where she suffered at the hands of men. Once when she was in transit in Geneva, changing planes on her way to a ministerial meeting in the U.S.A., she was subjected to a humiliating internal body search. In Ghana I had a really creative relationship with this minister, and three other formidable women ministers and revolutionary council members, with whom I spent endless days and evenings arguing, planning, and plotting with. Sometimes I would go into a meeting with one or more of these at around three in afternoon, and would not stagger out of her office, exhausted, until nine or ten in the evening. I challenged them to think in detail exactly what had to

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be done to reform the education system to turn it into a force for development, and who would do this. I argued strongly that they should loosen the central control they had over the school system, and to give greater responsibility to community and parent groups. They in turn challenged me to bring them more ‘white man’s money’ to support their efforts to rapidly rehabilitate and reform schooling. During my seven years working in that country we together implemented seven projects using World Bank credits for a total of around U.S. $240 million, covering all levels of education from Primary to Higher Education, as well as adult literacy, and informal apprenticeship training. We prepared one project for $60 million to improve rural primary schools, including building about 12,000 classrooms, and got it approved by the World Bank bureaucracy in three weeks instead of a more normal eighteen months. In Ghana I also oversaw World Bank projects in the health sector. All civil servants are conservative and resist change, and health administrators are the most conservative of all. We struggled to introduce some new blood into the Ministry of Health, and in these battles I developed a good friendship with the Minister of Health, who was also one of the most important traditional chiefs. Each time he came for a meal at our house he was accompanied by a different girlfriend, along with the wife he had married in church. He explained that he could sleep with almost any woman in his domain, and had to constantly resist advances. Many families wanted their daughters to be impregnated by him. Strangely, if a woman carried the chief’s child this would improve her marriage prospects, as the pregnancy would show that they were blessed by the spirits of the tribe and clan. Though there were more than eighty rooms in his palace these girlfriends would not live with him, and traditionally he would not be responsible for bringing up any of the children born from these liaisons. However, if he misused his position too much he could be deposed merely by taking his sandals away and forcing him to put his bare feet on the ground in public. He offered me a minor chieftaincy in his kingdom. This would involve me paying for the festivities during my coronation and installation, and in visiting my fiefdom, and hearing and ruling on the problems of my people once every six weeks. Once a year, on the

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anniversary of my coronation, I would receive tribute from my people: pots of palm wine, yams, and goats, but unfortunately my status would not be sufficiently high to warrant nocturnal visits from nubile young village women. I had to decline his offer as the duties, if I took them seriously, were very onerous, and I did not consider myself fluent enough in Twi, the local language, to resolve contentious issues amongst my people. Some of the Cameroonian chiefs automatically married any woman they impregnated. Arriving in the courtyard of one of the palaces of a minor chief, it was so crowded with what looked like a hundred pot bellied, snotty children of all ages from infancy to puberty, that I thought a school was operating there. It was soon obvious that this was not the case. Around the courtyard were hundreds of crude and tormented wooden carvings of people in various states of agony that the chief wanted to sell to visitors such as us. I could not imagine decorating my house with such horrors. We talked to one of the chief’s twelve resident wives. She must have been about eighteen, whilst the chief was over sixty. She had not wanted to marry the chief, but once he had chosen her, custom dictated that she had to go with him. She could not wait for him to die so she would be free to marry a foreigner and move as far away as she could from this awful place. She said that the chief did not even know the names of most of his children. Normally in that part of Cameroon when a husband dies the wife is supposed to bury his head in the floor underneath her bed. As long as he has been given a proper funeral he is not supposed to come and haunt her and any new lovers she might have, but if the funeral was not sufficiently lavish there is no saying what he might do. In Cameroon a Minister would be judged as to what he could bring to his home village, whether it was needed or not. In the village of one important Minister the primary school had twenty wellbuilt concrete classrooms, when six or seven were needed, and neighbouring villages were still trying to run their schools from temporary grass sheds. The Minister of Education during my time in Cameroon was a wise old political fox who had managed to survive many Government reshuffles, even though he did not come from the President’s tribe. Although he had been Minister of Educa-

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tion for some years, he had never ever spent time in classrooms seeing some of the difficulties children were facing in their learning. He agreed to let me organise a one day trip for him to visit ordinary schools. We saw classes with no teachers, with older students teaching the children, and classes where almost none of the children had any text books. What marked him most of all, however, was the overcrowding; one class had about half the children sitting on benches and desks at the back of the room, and the rest of the children squatting on the floor in front. Although we were as different from each other as we could possibly be we worked well together, and I could see him whenever I needed. I was trying to design a corruption-free basic education project, and I guess that he was interested in maintaining his political future. We both failed. Ethiopia has been fighting wars pretty constantly over the past six hundred years. Several Ethiopian colleagues told me that it was the only thing that they were any good at. The current Government came to power after a long and bloody civil war, and during most of the three years that I spent in Ethiopia they were fighting a pointless war with Eritrea, with huge casualties, many of them teenagers. Given my lifelong commitment to non-violence, I was less sympathetic to this Government than anywhere else I have worked. The school system was in a total mess, as real decentralisation was needed but only surface decentralisation was taking place. The Minister responsible for the Social Sectors was one of the most dogmatic people I have ever come across, and his wife was Minister of Education, and feared by most officials. Thus, though parts of the language policy and the decentralisation were close to ideas I had been developing elsewhere, I never managed to create a good working relationship with these politicians. Given my success in mobilising and coordinating other donors to the education sector, at times my presence was welcomed, and at other times resented by the political leadership, and several times I was publicly insulted. I should, of course, never have accepted a post in Ethiopia when it was fighting a war, and should have resigned when I understood the nature of its Government, but to my shame I did not. Only when my own employer, the World Bank, pumped huge sums of money into Ethiopia, when the guns were still hot and it was occupying a

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third of Eritrea, did I do what I should have done much earlier, and resigned. We all have an extraordinary capacity to fool ourselves that what we are doing is useful, and that our presence can make a difference, when for all I knew the money I was mobilising to reform the school system and improve learning freed the Governments’ own resources to buy tanks and other weapons of mass destruction. Most of the Presidents, Prime Ministers, and Ministers who have crossed my path had no more legitimacy for the power they held than would the widow we were supporting if she were head of state. The Ethiopian Prime Minister led a bloody civil war to get his position, and has clung on to this for more than a decade; the Cameroonian President has imprisoned or killed many of his opponents in order to maintain his position for more than thirty years; the Ghanaian President, during the time I was in Ghana, came to power in a military coup and killed several of his opponents, including judges and lawyers; and most of the Prime Ministers in Thailand during the 1970’s were either soldiers or sponsored by soldiers.

Young Friends My greatest joy in Ethiopia was from supporting a village and one particular family there in the mountains behind Addis Ababa. One Sunday shortly after we had arrived in Ethiopia, we were driving along dirt tracks in the countryside near the city and we came across a little girl, perhaps six or seven years old, with a big bunch of flowers and a huge smile. We stopped and the girl gave my wife the bouquet. Gradually we got to know her family. She had a younger brother and two older sisters, both of whom were already carrying eucalyptus branches down to Addis Ababa, as was the mother. The father had been conscripted into the army several years earlier and had not been heard from since. The Government generally did not inform families if their husband, brother, lover, son had been killed as this would make it unpopular, and thus the mother (along with tens of thousands of other women) continued to have some hope, though rapidly diminishing, that the father of her children was still alive.

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My wife and I decided to adopt this family, and have been and still are supporting them. We arranged for all the four children to be enrolled in the nearest primary school, which was half way down the mountain, pay all the incidental costs of their schooling, and also give the mother enough money each month for her to feed and clothe her family. All four children put on weight, and the greyness left their faces. Whenever we went to their village the mother would invite us into her hut, and press some inedible delicacy on us. We were even invited to share their New Year meal, which was the first time in a long while that they had eaten meat. We took the children to our house in Addis Ababa to celebrate my birthday. This was not a good idea, as they realised what they were missing, when previously they were relatively happy with their lot. In our house they saw hot and cold water come out of taps in several rooms, whilst they had to collect water twenty minutes away from their home, and saw the brightest light come from the click of a switch, whilst all they had were the shadows from a flickering kerosene wick. The wind did not blow through our walls, and there were beds with soft mattresses and quilts. Despite frequent requests, we never repeated this invitation. Five years after the children first enrolled in school, all four were still studying. The youngest daughter is doing particularly well, and if she can be helped and encouraged she maybe able to break out of her circle of poverty. A year after we left Ethiopia I made a brief stopover in Addis Ababa and visited the family. The two youngest children wept the whole time I was there, as it seemed that I had been playing the role of their absent father and then I too had disappeared. This whole experience was so much more fulfilling than my meetings with the war mongering Prime Minister and several of his more arrogant colleagues, and the supervision of U.S. $100 million for educational reform, some of which was no doubt diverted to other uses. Many years before, when I moved to live in the Far West of Nepal, I made a contract with a food stall opposite the peasant house that I was renting. For the equivalent of U.S. $10 a month I would be served two meals of lentils and rice a day, with a saucer full of

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lumps of grisly meat on Saturdays. Day after day the owner would dollop a cup of boiled lentils on a plate of steaming rice which I would swallow, along with my fellow customers, who were silent, grim, unshaven and often unwashed, and were consuming twice as much as me. No vegetables, no eggs, no milk, no spices apart from salt and hot pepper, and no yoghurt. I realised that with a few years of this diet my teeth and hair would start falling out. I also realised that I was not capable of cooking my own food, as this would involve carrying water from the spring, negotiating for bundles of firewood to be delivered, buying foodstuffs from farmers, and squatting by the fire in the smoky loft of my house. Given the remoteness of our Headquarters, most of the staff that we were recruiting were local people who had skills but no formal qualifications. Our agricultural specialist was a progressive farmer with a heart of gold, our artist was an untouchable who had innate drawing skills, and our Nepali typist was a young boy who had taught himself how to type. This boy, who could not have been much older than fourteen or fifteen at the time, was looking for somewhere to live. I agreed to give him free food and lodging in my house if he would cook for me. Much to my delight he was an excellent cook, and also very good at finding eggs, potatoes, onions, milk, yoghurt and ghee in the village. In the morning he would serve rice, potatoes, lentils and an egg all cooked in ghee, and in the evening the same, except that the rice was replaced by wheat chapattis. He taught me how to select good quality rice and wheat, and where to get the wheat ground into flour, and also taught me how to preserve seasonal fruits and vegetables. To begin with we had some misunderstandings, such as him serving me lemon coffee, but very soon these got smoothed out. Although this cook/typist was about the same age as my own children, when my wife was not with me in the village he was my companion in the evenings, helping me improve my Nepali language skills, and informing me about local festivals and customs. He came from a village about two days walk away, and his family, in common with most peasants in the hills, had enough land to give them food for about half the year. My cook/typist had to send almost all his salary home every month so that his father, mother, and

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younger brothers and sisters could buy grain from a feudal land owner, and would suffer a shorter period of pre-harvest hunger. My wife and I visited his village a couple of times, and stayed with his family in their dark and damp hut. His mother was a charming woman tired out from giving birth to a constant stream of children; his father seemed to be suffering from some mental illness, as he spent most of the day sitting in a catatonic state, staring at the horizon. Each time we met him he was increasingly silent and withdrawn, until one day he just withered away and died. His mother needed some help on the farm and in the house, and thus wanted our cook/typist to get married. I agreed to pay the bride price as long as the girl was at least sixteen. His bride was emaciated, had obviously suffered long periods of hunger, and seemed to be about thirteen, so we sent her off immediately to live with his mother, and gradually she got stronger as she ate more. A couple of years later she became pregnant and gave birth to an underweight baby girl. After a few months the baby died, probably of cot death, and this is when my cook/typist’s problems began to grow. His wife became quite weird in one respect and a bit crazy at times. Her next child was a boy, but she was convinced that he was the reincarnation of the daughter that had died, and thus decided to bring him up as a girl, and nothing anyone could say would disabuse her of this idea. The boy’s hair was kept long and tied with ribbons; he had female beads around his waist, and always had to wear dresses. Several years later both the wife and son needed psychiatric treatment, which was only available in private hospitals across the frontier in India. When it was time for me to leave Nepal, my cook/typist had to buy himself some formal qualifications, for without these, despite the fact that he could type faster and more accurately than anyone for hundreds of miles around, no government or private bureaucracy could hire this young man as a typist. It is strange that the world over, people with formal academic qualifications are supposed to be worth more than those with useful skills.

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As a parting gift we gave this young man the money needed for him to build a house on the trail leading into the village where we had been living. In this way we hoped that he could supplement his income by providing food and lodging to travellers passing by. He never made any money from this business, as it was also on the trail from his village, and his countrymen expected free food and lodging from him. Misfortune followed misfortune, and he got more and more into debt over the costs of the psychiatric treatment for his wife and son. A few years ago I got a frantic telephone call, as his house was going to be repossessed by the local bank to cover unpaid debts. I agreed to pay off the bank, thus being in the strange position of having given him the same house twice.

Strange Friends When we first went to live in Thailand we took an immediate interest in Thai culture, language, and religion which has stayed with us ever since. We used to go to various Buddhist Temples in and around Bangkok, to listen to lectures and to make our first feeble attempts at meditation. It was very difficult for us to meditate, as our knee and hip joints were so stiff that after five or ten minutes sitting cross-legged on the floor we were in agony. A meditation teacher suggested that it was pointless for us to try to meditate until we became more flexible, and suggested that we practice yoga for a couple of years before returning to meditation. We could only find one yoga teacher in the whole of Bangkok, a cheerful seventy year old Thai living in a ramshackle house with his wife and his eleven children. He did not teach any courses, but had an open house from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. every day where we and others who wanted to learn some yoga would practice a position he had once demonstrated to us, and he would correct us wherever necessary. We could stay with him as long as we wanted and he would only charge a dollar a time. There might be three or four people in his living room each practicing a different yoga asana, him demonstrating another one, and with his children wandering in and out asking him questions.

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He had had a successful career in Bangkok as a journalist. According to him he had spent most of his free time drinking and womanising, and had only married late in his career. When he approached retirement he understood that much of his life had been pointless, felt sick, both spiritually and physically, and decided to go to India to search for greater contentment. He ended up in a famous ashram in Rishikesh on the banks of the river Ganges, where he cleansed his body and his mind, and studied yoga there for several years. When he returned to Thailand he gave up alcohol, followed a healthy diet, and started to teach yoga. This guru, as he was a guru in the true sense of the word, had a profound and lasting impact on our lives. Since 1971 my wife and I have been practicing yoga on a daily basis, in our own house or garden, or where this was not possible on any convenient piece of flat land. For around twenty years we also used to fast one day a week. My wife was so taken with yoga that she attended courses in several ashrams in different parts of India, wrote a beautiful book on the subject, and has taught yoga courses free of charge wherever in the world we stopped on our journey through life. There was a small indigenous Tibetan population in the mountains of Eastern Nepal. Throughout the high mountains arable land was extraordinarily scarce, and there was barely sufficient to provide some sustenance to a sparse population. In order to prevent a fragmentation of land holdings to such an extent so that no family would have anywhere near enough, in some Tibetan villages a form of polyandry was practiced. A woman would marry all the brothers in one family, so that the land held by the father would not be subdivided between his sons. It is the men living in these high valleys that carry most of the equipment and accompany western mountaineers to the tops of Mount Everest and other peaks. When we trekked to the Everest Base Camp, Tibetan porters also carried our loads, set up our tents, and cooked our food. Despite the shortages of fertile land in the mountains, there were several large monasteries living off the already poor villagers. We stayed in one of these, which had around thirty monks. I will always remember the thousands of butter lamps

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lighted by devotees, and the eerie horns blowing and deep drums beating at 4 a.m. to call the monks for their morning chanting. The novices would arrive in the dark and freezing hall first, followed by the other monks in order of their seniority. The most senior of all came last. Most of the Tibetans living in Nepal had fled from Tibet with the fourteenth Dalai Lama in 1959, and during the U.S.-promoted and financed insurgency that followed. There were two largish Tibetan communities in Kathmandu, each centred round important Buddhist stupas. There were Tibetan monks and doctors, Tibetan food stalls and restaurants, Tibetan bars, big warehouses where hundreds of Tibetan women and children sang very sad songs about their homeland as they wove Tibetan woollen carpets, and shops selling these carpets and prayer wheels and other artefacts to tourists. Tibetan monks were everywhere; some were married and even ran bars and discos, whilst others undertook the most severe austerities, such as meditating silently for seven years, seven months, seven weeks, and seven days. It depended whether they were taking the short or the long path to enlightenment. My wife and I got to know one Tibetan doctor who was living with his family near one of the stupas. He only had daughters, the eldest of which was evidently the reincarnation of his wife’s mother. The mother/daughter relationship was a lot more complex in this family than in most. Another daughter was being trained to eventually replace him as a doctor. Medical training usually started when the adept was around seven years old, and continued into their twenties. Though this doctor had been living in Kathmandu for more than ten years at the time we met him, he was still very much a villager, appeared unwashed, smelt of rancid butter and smoke, and wore a dark red yak’s wool robe. In the high mountains, villagers rarely washed. As the water was freezing, it was too cold for microbes and bacteria to multiply. It was difficult for people to change their habits when they descended to Kathmandu valley. Whenever I was down from my mountain Headquarters to do some work in Kathmandu my wife and I would visit this doctor, and with a daughter translating, get some idea of the principles behind

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Tibetan medicine. We learnt how to read the forty nine pulses, and what some of them meant, and also the importance of the eyes and the tongue in diagnosis. We saw drawings of many of the hundreds of herbs, flowers, and leaves used in making medicines, and were told where these could be found. Most important of all we observed the doctor diagnosing the illnesses of some of his patients. From our limited knowledge of alternative therapies, it seemed to us that Tibetan medicine was a cross between Indian ayurvedic medicine for the diagnosis, and Chinese herbal medicine for the treatment. We took one Australian woman friend of ours to visit him. She was both physically and psychologically unwell and had been told in Australia that she only had a few months to live. In the initial pulse reading the doctor became more and more perplexed, and in the end had to admit that he could not find her gall bladder. She was really impressed by his skill, as she had had her gall bladder removed some years earlier. After a month of taking the prescribed herbal medicines she was much better. Misfortunes often do not come in small doses, as a few months later her husband was diagnosed with leukaemia. Despite the success that the doctor had had with his wife, he refused point blank even to see this doctor, and for many months relied on Western medicine, as he got sicker and sicker. Even when it was clear that the Western approach was failing, and his wife got some herbs from this doctor to help him, he still refused even to step into the house of this doctor let alone try his herbs. Within two months he was dead. Obviously our Tibetan friend was not a miracle worker and failed in many of his treatments, including one for himself. He died a painful death of cirrhosis of the liver at the age of forty four, caused by his daily heavy drinking of Tibetan spirits. We had learnt a lot from this great doctor, particularly the validity of much traditional wisdom. It was clear that there were some ailments that are best treated with a Western allopathic approach, whilst others respond better using a different logic. Even for the same disease there is no universal cure, as it is the person, body and mind, who has to be cured, not the disease, and every person is totally unique.

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It has often been difficult for me to make friends as I zigzagged around our world. This was partly because I was increasingly rootless, no longer attached to the country and culture of my youth, and unable to belong to a place that I knew I would be leaving a few years down the road. It was also partly because I no longer fitted any stereotype; I was neither an aid bureaucrat, nor a specialist with ready made solutions up my sleeve, no longer a spiritual searcher or a political activist. I saw quickly the games that many in the aid business, both donors and recipients, were forced to play, and though sympathetic, had less to loose than they and thus could challenge them to think in different ways. I have welcomed hundreds of men and women working for multilateral, charitable, governmental and non-governmental organisations to our home over the past forty years, and made many friends, only a very few of whom have lasted the ravages of time and distance. These friendships have not been based on common professional backgrounds but on sharing feelings for each other as human beings, and are independent of class, sex, and race.

Bureaucrats Throughout my life I have had to deal with bureaucracies, both those in the organisations that employed me and those in the administrations I was supposed to be helping. I realised early on that most bureaucrats did not believe in anything really strongly, and thus if I was passionately involved in something I could usually carry the day. I also understood that bureaucrats often had many different issues and concerns that they had to deal with, such as their status, their promotion prospects, and their relationship to their peers, in addition to resolving key issues, and the higher that they were in the hierarchy, the more superficial their responsibility. Thus if I did not easily take no for an answer, and kept pushing one key issue, they would often eventually accept my point of view. It was also important to make it seem that I was making concessions to potential allies, even if the concession was inconsequential, such as changing the name of a project but not its coverage or objectives. In any educational or other reform process it is very important to grab the mo-

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ment. There are times when it is almost impossible to make fundamental changes, and other times when external and internal circumstances are both pushing in the same direction. I have often been carried away by my own beliefs and chased after impossible dreams. Sometimes, of course, the impossible became possible, including the campaign to get 11,000 political prisoners released from Thai jails that I led from 1976 until its successful conclusion in 1979. At other times I bit off far more than I could chew, such as my involvement with colleagues who were trying to reform the monster bureaucracy of the World Bank in Washington, with its eight or nine thousand staff. No one actually knew how many people were working in the rabbit warren of connecting World Bank offices in the heart of Washington, a few blocks from the White House. There were even cases of people who had nothing to do with the Bank establishing themselves in empty offices, and using the phone and Internet for many months before being discovered. Each time the World Bank tried to downsize, and paid off many senior officials with golden handshakes, the number of staff increased. This huge mass of staff ensured that everyone was dragged to look inward at bureaucratic concerns, rather than outward at the real needs of the poor in the third world countries. As I was one of the very few World Bank staff who had spent most of his career in African and Asian countries close to clients, in one of the World Bank’s many failed efforts to reform itself, I was nominated as a champion for decentralisation. As a part of this assignment I had to present reasons as to why the majority of World Bank staff should be moved out of the U.S.A. to live and work in developing countries. I had to present my arguments to large meetings of Washington based staff, and convince them that the Bank would be a more effective organisation in tackling poverty if the majority of the staff were reassigned to African, Asian, and Latin American countries. As my audience had their houses in the Washington area, as their spouses had jobs in the U.S., as their children went to Washington schools, and as most were well established in the U.S.A. and planning for permanent residency, my lectures went down like a load of lead potatoes.

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Brave Friends Immediately after the October 1976 military coup in Thailand our house became a refuge for young Thai men and women who were fleeing unjustified arrest and incarceration. It was safer than many other houses, as if the soldiers came our friends could escape by road, by boat on the canal in front of our house, or through the slums that lined this canal. At times we had thirty or more scared but determined men and women camped out in our living room. Most of these young people only stayed with us for a few days whilst false ID cards and transportation out of Bangkok was arranged. The military were not only arresting student activists, but also monks who had become advocates for the exploited. Some of these monks also turned up in our compound, as they were looking for somewhere less obvious to stay than a Bangkok temple. A monk is not allowed to sleep under the same roof where there were women, apart from his mother. The young people waiting in our house helped my son build a bamboo hut in our garden where monks could sleep unpolluted by their proximity to females. A few of these monks performed an extremely useful service carrying messages between students who had joined the communists in the jungle and their families in Bangkok. It required a great deal of courage for each of the 3000 young men and women students, most of them children of the bourgeoisie, to leave their families and friends, live hidden in the jungle, and risk their lives in an armed struggle against the might of the state. It was one thing to be emboldened with revolutionary rhetoric, and quite another to subject themselves to the dogma of a communist party whilst fighting for the liberation of their country. One of our closest friends, who had been one of the two key leaders in the non-violent student uprising in 1973 which overthrew the military dictatorship, threw his lot in with the communist party when the military staged their counter coup in 1976. Despite the fact I have been a lifelong advocate of non-violence, I did what I could to help him join the insurgency in the liberated areas of the Northeast of the country, passing through China and Vietnam to get there. He spent many years risking his life in an increasingly hopeless war, and eventually be-

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came disillusioned that the Thai communist party seemed more interested in following changes in Chinese party dogma than in developing the liberated areas of his own country. As his mistrust of the party grew, he realised that his life was as much at risk from his communist colleagues as from the bombing raids and attacks by the Thai army. During their time in the jungle his wife gave birth to two sons, both of which she managed to smuggle out of the liberated areas to the care of her parents in a distant provincial town. After seven years he escaped from the party cadres, accepted a Government amnesty, and friends arranged for him to get a scholarship to study at Cornell University in the U.S., to help him make the transition from guerrilla to intellectual. We visited him and his wife there. She was very worried, as he was very depressed and sometimes seemed close to a nervous breakdown. We did what we could to help him look forward to playing a positive role in Thai society, persuaded him to spend more time on physical activities, cycling and fishing, and encouraged him to start writing again. It was a further four years before he returned to Thailand, only to find that his sons were strangers, and that he was facing increasing problems with his wife. He paid a very high price for his decision to join an armed struggle in 1976, despite the fact that he had used non- violence so effectively in the October 1973 uprising. Several of the young men and women who passed through our house, and a few of our intellectual friends, had absolutely no desire to join any armed struggle as they had an inherent belief in the power of non-violence. These brave men and women had seen their friends and colleagues being shot by the army, guessed that thousands of others had been arrested and incarcerated somewhere, and knew that they had to do something, but had no idea what they could do against the might of 200,000 soldiers. Gradually a group of no more than a dozen young people in their early twenties began to coagulate around me, and together with a couple of older intellectuals, and two religious leaders who had not yet been forced to flee the country, began to develop the elements of a non-violent strategy to alleviate the suffering of the political prisoners and campaign for their release. These were the bravest people that I have ever had the

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chance to work with. In its early days the army could crush our little group as easily as we could squash a mosquito buzzing around our heads, and though I as a foreigner could probably escape with my life. The same could not be said of the Thais in our group. Of the core group, half were young women and the other half young men, half appeared strong and the other half weak. Only one had graduated from university, whilst one had not even completed high school. Two had siblings who had joined the armed struggle, four were motivated by a strong belief in Buddhist principles, and several looked up at me as their guru. Many others came, helped for a while and then left. This was our non-violent army, which in three years managed to defeat the combined might of the Thai military, and obtain the release of all the 11,000 political prisoners. A handful of young non-violent activists achieved more than their three thousand friends who had chosen the violent path. Equally importantly, they showed that a non-governmental organisation could have an impact on policy, and that non-violence was a meaningful political strategy. Non-violence was no easy way. All of us were totally washed out from three years of eighteen hour days, with our phones tapped and our mail censored, and often harassed by the police. Once the last political detainee was released we all gradually went our own way, as a monk, as a civil servant, as a university professor, as a trader, and as NGO officials. None went into business or party politics, as did several of their friends who had joined the communist party in its violent struggle. Many of the rural literacy teachers in Thailand, Nepal, and Ghana have showed a different kind of bravery in their efforts to tackle some of the issues that were keeping their learners in poverty. They were trying to change the rural status quo, especially land holding and crop sharing practices, and sometimes provoked the anger of feudal landlords and were forced to close the classes, and even move to a different region. This required great courage, as the risk of loosing a job and being unable to feed a wife and children was almost as serious as the risk of being jailed. I always did everything I could to help these brave souls.

A Never Ending Road It seems that I have been travelling since before I was born, and will continue until after I have died. In this journey I have had no destination, and hence no starting or ending place. I must have spent at least a year walking from one school to another, and a further year or more being shaken to pieces as I drove or was driven along thousands of miles of dirt roads and tracks, crisscrossing Africa and parts of Asia. I have climbed mountains, driven through deserts, and sailed boats on this journey. I have slept in the snow, in the jungle, on the sea, in brothels, and in five star hotels. I have hidden in the bush from giant herds of African elephants passing by, stared down an angry family of wart hogs, frightened away and been frightened by a huge troop of baboons, and too often had dangerous weapons pointed at me by drunken soldiers and police. This has been a learning journey. I have had to learn to be humble, and drop preconceived ideas however right they may seem, and listen, listen to men and women villagers, to teachers, to activists, to officials, to colleagues, to politicians, and to Heads of State, and to remain aware that the validity of what someone says is not related to his or her position. My biggest enemy has been my ego, as colleagues and clients have been conquered by my confidence and the clarity of some of my arguments, and won over by my free spirit. Too often I have been seen as a guru, above friends, and with solutions to every problem, and such situations have stopped me listening and learning, and reduced the effectiveness of what I was trying to do. My second biggest enemy has been my impatience, with so much to do and so little time I have tended to reach my conclusions without letting my clients and colleagues have the time to find solutions to their own problems.

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Throughout my career half my mission has been the ‘big picture,’ preparing and implementing development plans and projects, reforming educational systems, preparing school curricula and training teachers in their implementation, and developing programmes to help the rural and urban poor break the chains of their poverty and reduce their exploitation. There is so much that still needs to be done, as there remain hundreds of millions of children who have never been to school, further hundreds of millions who are learning nothing useful from their time in school, and a billion or more illiterates who are exploited, hungry, and do not believe that tomorrow will be better than today. The other half of my mission on this journey, the half that has given me the greatest satisfaction, has been the ‘small picture,’ trying to help reduce some of the individual cases of suffering I have seen around me every week and month of my life. Giving a small house here and a boat there; paying off a loan shark; sending someone to school or hospital; paying a bride price, and getting a young person out of jail. I have always believed that if everyone could make a small difference to one or more of those around us, the world would be a marvellous place. Perhaps the most important thing that I have learnt during this never ending journey is that I could not have done half of what I achieved had I been alone. Many brave friends along the way have helped turn ideas into practice. The road of those who try to make a small and positive impact on others around them is long and full of pitfalls and thorns, setbacks and disasters, but it is also multicoloured and beautiful, and full of hope. The red road, the purple path, and the orange dawn; the wind whistling, the waves roaring, and the silence around have filled me with strength to do more. A smiling man, a hopeful woman, an eager child, have lighted up my way. The hundreds of friends and colleagues that have joined me on part of this road have helped keep alive my belief that a better world is possible. My journey continues.

All in the Cause of Duty

In the Line of Duty

In the Line of Duty

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In Defiance of Duty

The Duty of Pain

The Duty of Pain

The Duty of Pain

The Duty of Pain

The Cause of Death

Duty

Duty

Duty

The Cause

Duty

Duty

The Price of Royal Duty

The Duty of a Beta

The Price of Royal Duty

The Duty of a Beta

The Duty of a Beta

The Duty of a Beta

The Duty of a Beta

The Price of Royal Duty

Line of Duty

Tactics Of Duty

Tactics Of Duty

Breach of Duty

Line of Duty

A Matter of Duty

Cause of Death

All in the Cause of Duty

In the Line of Duty

In the Line of Duty

In Defiance of Duty

In Defiance of Duty

The Duty of Pain

The Duty of Pain

The Duty of Pain

The Duty of Pain

The Cause of Death

Duty

Duty

Duty

The Cause

Duty

Duty

The Price of Royal Duty

The Duty of a Beta

The Price of Royal Duty

The Duty of a Beta

The Duty of a Beta

The Duty of a Beta

The Duty of a Beta

The Price of Royal Duty

Line of Duty

Tactics Of Duty

Tactics Of Duty

Breach of Duty

Line of Duty

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