GIVING AND RECEIVING: THE NOTION OF DONATIONS
BY TAARIQ
Giving is a human instinct, perhaps the oldest, if we are to believe the Adam and Eve story of the paradisiacal apple the serpent offers to the woman who in turn shares it with the man. We give hoping to receive something corresponding to what we’ve offered. We give in the hope that our gift will express our affection and compassion towards the recipients. We give, as members of a group, to confirm our loyalty to it. We give to meet the demands of a contract, or the obligations and rights others have on our property. We give and may consider this act as part of our penance. We give in order to feel superior to those whose receiving hands are placed below ours. We give to corrupt. We give to dominate. There are a million reasons why we give, but here I am concerned with only one: European and North American and Japanese governments’ donations of food aid to the starving in Africa, and why these are received.
Last week, the world ran and Africa starved. Last week, millions of people broke Olympic records. A Sudanese runner flew across the globe to light a torch in New York. Last week, millions of cameras clicked, capturing scenes of rejoicing men and women who breasted the finish ribbon — scenes that were the culmination of media events. The sports activities organized to commemorate the day were a round-the-clock affair, keeping busy radio commentators and TV crews in Western Europe, North America, Japan, South-East Asia and India. In the end, the events were reduced to a compilation of statistics; how many people participated, how much money was collected to aid the starving in Africa? Last week, while the non-starving peoples of the world ran, taking part in the self-perpetuating media exercises of TV performances, Africa waited in the wings, out of the camera’s reach, with an empty bowl in hand, seeking alms, hoping that generous donations would come from the governments and peoples of the runners. Empty brass bowls make excellent photographs. Video cameras take shots of them, from every imaginable angle. To starve is to be of media interest these days. Forgive my cynicism, but I believe this to be the truth.
Africa’s famine became a story worthy of newspaper headlines when you could sell pictures of faces empty of everything, save the pains of starvation. Jonathan Dimbleby of BBC TV was the first to use the power of the televised message spelling clearly, in letters huge as the politics of drought, the one and only underlying sub-theme of hunger on a massive scale: powerlessness. Dimbleby produced a sensitive programme on the Ethiopian famine in the early 1970s. In this half-hour documentary, he used alternative shots of starving masses and pictures of the world’s powerful politicians attending the Emperor’s lavish feast at which delicacies like caviar had been served. A few months later, the Emperor was overthrown.
The question is, how come the same story in 1985 and 1986 is used by governments all over the continent in their favour and no heads roll, no despot’s regime is overthrown? Unhelped, with no food aid reaching the country, the Emperor was toppled. Can we conclude that if foreign governments stop aiding the African dictators with food hand-outs, then their people will rise against them?
Famine is a phenomenon the African is familiar with. In Somalia, there are people who bear the names of the years of drought. People adjusted the holes in their belts, but they did not beg. They held their heads high, allowing no one to humiliate them, letting no one know that their hearths had remained unlit the previous night. Those who had the people’s mandate to rule were united in the belief that he begs who has no self-pride, and he works responsibly who intends to be respected. But we know that a great many of the men at the helm of the continent’s power do not have the people’s mandate to be there in the first place, and have no self-pride or foresight. We also know that their incompetent five-year plans cannot be executed without the budget being supplemented from foreign sources. Are we therefore up against the proverbial wisdom that people get the government they deserve, and we deserve beggars to be our leaders?
There is a tradition, in Somalia, of passing round the hat for collections. It is called Qaaraan. When you are in dire need of help, you invite your friends, relatives and in-laws to come to your place or someone else’s, where, as the phrase goes, a mat has been spread. But there are conditions laid down. The need has to be genuine, the person wishing to be helped has to be a respectable member of society, not a loafer, a lazy ne’er-do-well, a debtor or a thief. Here discretion is of the utmost significance. Donors don’t mention the sums they offer, and the recipient doesn’t know who has given what. It is the whole community from which the person receives a presentation and to which he is grateful. It is. not permitted that such a person thereafter applies for more, not soon at any rate. If there is a lesson to be learned from this, it is that emergencies are one-off affairs, not a yearly excuse for asking for more. Now how many years have we been passing round the empty bowl?
Famines awake a people from an economic, social or political lethargy. We’ve seen how the Ethiopian people rid themselves of their Emperor for forty years. Foreign food donations create a buffer zone between corrupt leaderships and the starving masses. Foreign food donations also sabotage the African’s ability to survive with dignity. Moreover, it makes their children feel terribly inferior, discouraging them from eating the emaciated bean sprouts, the undernourished corn-on-the-cob and broken rice. Forgive me for dishing out to you cliches and, if I may beg your indulgence, let me quote a statement made by Hubert Humphrey, who said in 1957, “I’ve heard … that people may become dependent on us for food. I know this is not supposed to be good news. To me that was good news, because before people can do anything, they have got to eat. And if you are looking for a way to get people to lean on you and to be dependent on you, in terms of their co-operation with you, it seems to me that food dependence would be terrific.” Well put, wouldn’t you agree? Now we may continue.
An East African leader, known to be of socialist persuasion, recently granted an interview to a London-based African magazine, in which he said that the developed nations must help Africa. But why must they? What makes him think that the African has a proprietory right over the properties of others? Did the country of which he has been a leader the past quarter of a century donate generously to the starving in Ethiopia or Chad? One could understand if this most respected African statesman made his statement in the context of a familiar or tribal society where obligatory or voluntary exchanges of gifts are part of the code of behaviour. In such a context, the exchange is direct. You give somebody something; a year later, when you are in need, today’s recipient becomes tomorrow’s giver. Does this intellectual statesman foresee the time when Africa will be in a position to donate food to Europe, North America or Japan? Is he aware that he is turning the African into a person forever dependent?
Every gift has a personality — that of its giver. On every sack of rice donated by a foreign government to a starving people in Africa, the characteristics and mentality of the donor, name and country, are stamped on its ribs. A quintal of wheat donated by a charity based in the Bible Belt of the USA tastes different from one grown in and donated by a member of the European Community. You wouldn’t disagree, I hope, that one has, as its basis, the theological notion of charity; the other, the temporal, philosophical economic credo of creating a future generation of potential consumers of this specimen of high quality wheat. I have two problems here.
One. It is my belief that a god-fearing Bible Belter knows that publicized charities won’t wash with God. The only mileage in it is an earthly sense of vainglory. Second. The European Community bureaucrat need not be told that the donated wheat is but a free sample of items that it is hoped will sell very well when today’s starving Africans become tomorrow’s potential buyers. There is enough literature to fill bookcases, surveys written up by scholars, following America’s policy of donating food aid to Europe, Japan, South-East Asia. I suggest that you walk this well-trodden path in the company of Susan George or Teresa Hayter. But let me deal with the mentality of the receiver and his systems of beliefs and what gifts mean to him.