The question for Blair: what is it that keeps on killing hope in Africa?

January 08, 2005

Matthew Parris in Ethiopia

CAN a ruler ever be in touch with the everyday lives of ordinary people? The age-old question, with the numberless tales it has spawned of princes moving disguised among their people or messiahs passing unnoticed through the crowd, pressed itself on me as I made my way through the fortified gates of the Addis Ababa Sheraton in Ethiopia eight days ago. Armed guards in pith helmets conducted a bomb search on cars as we drove through into another world: of landscaped gardens dotted with plastic palm trees in primary colours (ironic) and old-fashioned British red telephone boxes (to make rich visitors feel at home).

Here Tony Blair stayed when he arrived last year for a summit to promote the launch of his Commission for Africa. I was calling at the Sheraton to e-mail last week’s column. Briefly I entered Mr Blair’s planet. Music tinkled, glasses of iced drinks clinked, Westerners — tourists, plutocrats and men and women of affairs — in bright casual clothes drifted between swimming pool and souvenir shops as uniformed porters hovered ready to help with the smallest bag. Outside there was an illuminated fountain in a pool built from Ethiopian marble. At the entrance the air-conditioned Mercedes-Benzes of the wabenzi — the African elite — awaited their masters.

Etcetera. This sort of prose tripped easily enough from the sweaty ballpoint of a columnist now sitting, fly-tormented, amid the camel dung beneath a solitary thorn tree at the foot of Hertale, an active volcano in the Danakil Desert in the north of the country, as clouds of sulphur dioxide blow over us in almost intolerable heat. Easy to dramatise the contrast with the Africa Tony Blair saw.

So why do it? We should not begrudge prime ministers every comfort and convenience. Security is obviously a problem. They have a job to do. They should not be bothered by flies. Their time is precious. They should not walk when they can drive and not drive when they can fly. If a helicopter can get world leaders quicker to more places, why should they be detained or tormented by the places in between?

Nor do I think that Mr Blair is careless of the places in between. At least he went. At least he tried. He visited a project when he was here. He was photographed with children. I know from my own small experience as a parliamentarian that one’s motives for doing such things are tangled beyond unpicking, even alone in the self-examining watches of the night. You do want to advertise how in touch you are with those at the bottom of the heap; but you do also really want to help, and to understand their condition. You have long ceased to know where or how your ambition has corrupted your goodwill, but you still feel the goodwill and the hunger to hear the truth.

So I am not asking about our Prime Minister’s motives, or any leader’s motives. They do want to know what it is like. But can they? That is my question. Especially in Africa, can you, by diligent study and the highest quality briefing, know how things really are?

I think you cannot. Or, rather, I think you can know what the conditions are, but I doubt whether you can fully grasp why they are so. Mr Blair, in common with the rest of us, can watch a video which pitilessly records catastrophe in Africa — or Aceh. He can watch relief efforts in Sumatra — or project work in Addis Ababa — almost as if he were standing behind the camera. He can be better acquainted with facts and figures than many on the ground. People can show Bob Geldof, and Geldof can tell Mr Blair, what the needs and opportunities are.

But why, in Africa, has it come to this? That is what it is hard for him to know by briefing. Even to begin to answer that question you need time, so much time, dead time. Time has to hang heavy on you. You need to be stuck, bored, and to watch: to watch not attentively, eager to prove or disprove a lively hypothesis, but listlessly, with your eyes roving and your mind empty, and nothing to do. Only then do truths begin to swim into vision.

What the heck does my armed guard think he is doing here, sitting at the foot of this tree? He has a rifle and a sort of uniform and is intrigued by my binoculars (once he works out which end to look in, for he has not seen binoculars before). He seems a bright and helpful chap. But he is here because he is one of the local Afar tribe and, though our splendid guide and organiser, Solomon Berhe, is Ethiopian too, Solomon is from the highlands, and in the highlands they advise not to travel in the lowlands without two paid and armed Afar guards. We picked them up by the Afrera salt lake and they will earn many times the local wage by just hanging around. The Afars are volatile and distrust strangers and it’s a sort of protection racket. However, when we reached Dodom, a tiny, primitive settlement ten miles away, the village people insisted one of their own village join us as an extra armed guard.

I have no objection to three men and three guns — the cost is chickenfeed — but I do mind that the instinct among the men, on observing a new form of economic activity — tourism in their midst — has been not to join it but to demand with implicit menace a cut. That is Africa, or part of it.

I wish Tony Blair could look through those binoculars himself. He would see a mountain ridge dividing Ethiopia from Eritrea and cutting Ethiopia off from the Red Sea, and understand the idiocy of this division. This is Africa, too: self-defeating. If our PM had travelled, as we just have, the hundreds of hot and lonely miles down Ethiopia’s only good link to any port — the route from Addis to Djibouti up which Bill Deedes and Evelyn Waugh travelled (though by train) 70 years ago, the latter to write Scoop — and if he had killed a few hours just sitting on the roadside in a shanty village grown to service the hauliers, and if he had watched as lorry after laden lorry crawled by on its journey up to Addis, and watched as empty lorry after lorry thundered down towards Djibouti, might not a question have occurred to Mr Blair with more dismaying force than seems to have been the case: what can Ethiopia make, what can the rapidly multiplying Ethiopians do, in exchange for the food and soda pop, and bathroom suites for the senior personnel of resident NGOs being dragged up from the Red Sea port? How will Ethiopia compete in manufacturing with countries such as Thailand and Indonesia?

And if Mr Blair had watched with me as we filled our tanks and jerry cans with fuel (all imported) for our expedition, and watched idly as an all-woman workforce (“the ladies,” an Ethiopian said to me, “labouring and packing and loading camel and cooking and looking after children; the man watching cattle and carrying a gun and looking out for enemy and making sure hair look nice with butter”) undertook the construction of a huge six-storey office block in the middle of 10,000 square miles of useless, unoccupied land for a “regional authority” headquarters (“they tried to give them fancy offices with desks but they never using them — just lying on floor”) might he have wondered whether the overseas aid making this possible is being well spent? The case on paper for this regional authority must be formidable; but stand and watch and you know that all is lost.

The scrubbed-up African kids Mr Blair met will have been sweet. But were he stuck for a while in the sand near a desperately poor and isolated village of tiny thorn-bough and hide huts, as we were, and were he to see the fresh, alert, intelligent, fascinated little faces of tribal children anxious to learn, anxious to help, itching to be and become, he would see what every traveller with time on his hands sees: the tremendous, untapped genius and energy of youth in Africa. And he might ask, as I ask: where does it go?

What happens to them? What is it that keeps killing hope in Africa?

The global spread of English is a seismic event in Man's history

January 15, 2005

Matthew Parris

It struck me forcibly as I sat in the back row of a classroom in a remote part of Ethiopia

WHAT WOULD you think was the biggest thing to hit human culture, worldwide, in the past quarter century? To the anthropologist of modern Man, what change would head the list? The explosion of air travel? No, most of those alive today will never fly. HIV-Aids? No, just one of many terrible scourges our species has faced: diarrhoea and malaria still kill more. The collapse of communism and rise of the global free market? The internet? These point the way, but still reach only a minority.

The answer stares us in the face. Like much that does so, it is widely overlooked. But it struck me forcibly in Africa this week (and I bet it will have struck Gordon Brown) as I sat in the back row of the Grade 1 class at Digum Complete Elementary School, by the side of a dirt road nearly 1,000 kilometres north of Addis Ababa in the Tigra region of Ethiopia.

This country, you will recall, was for many centuries a remote and independent African kingdom whose only colonial experience was as an Italian possession for a short period before the Second World War. The British never came here much. Ethiopia is in nobody’s “sphere of influence”.

My class at Digum school were aged between five and seven: 44 boys and girls, some barefoot, some decently dressed, many in rags; some fit and healthy, some with sores or burns, or eye problems. Few would ever have been to Addis Ababa. None had seen another country and few ever will. None will ever have been in a lift or seen an escalator. Some will not have entered a two-storey building. Most will never have made a telephone call and some will never have seen one taking place: a fascinated crowd gathered as I made a satellite call from our campsite to The Times. None will ever have had a television, though some of their parents will have owned a radio and all of them will have listened to one.

The children were divided into a morning shift and an afternoon shift. Thus did their impressive headmaster, Mr Getachew, and his 30 staff, manage to run a school of 1,644 children housed in six long single-storey cabins scattered over an acre of dust.

I had arranged my visit quite by chance. Our guide thought we would be welcome, and we were. Every child stood as we entered a class. “George Bush and Mr Tony Blair will never visit our school,” said the Grade 8 teacher, Mr Hailay, “so you are our most important foreign visitors.” He should invite Mr Brown.

The Grade 1 classroom where I sat had no teaching aids at all, save tiny wooden benches and single-plank desks, dog-eared newspaper-covered exercise books, a blackboard, and a keen and patient young teacher, Mr Hadush. Discipline was absolute.

“Let us sing, children” said Mr Hadush. “Come to the front Abraham.” A tiny boy marched confidently up, all the others rapt. “This is the way I wash my face, wash my face, wash my face,” shrieked Abraham, making face-washing motions with his hand. “This is the way we wash our face,” shrieked all 44 tots, in an ear-splitting chant, “Early in the morning!”

There is no piped water in Digum — just a well with a hand-pump, down by the dried up river.

“This is the way I put on my clothes, put on my clothes, put on my clothes,” shrieked Abraham delightedly, doing the motions. “This is the way we put on our clothes.” Yelled the class, full of excitement at learning and at showing off their learning, “Early in the morning.” Some of them barely had any clothes.

Mr Hadush called a little girl, who looked about five, to the blackboard and handed her a stump of chalk. She wrote out the English alphabet perfectly on the blackboard. Ethiopia’s native script, which she also knew, is composed of the bewildering symbols of Amharic.

The spread of English across the globe is a seismic event in our species’ history. It is one of the biggest things to happen to mankind since the dawn of language. Speech is fundamental not just to communication but to the process of thought itself. No single language has ever before approached universality. English is now doing so. No other language has ever advanced as far, as fast, as ours. This is the first time in history that it has been possible to denote one language as predominant.

Within the lifetimes of Times readers, every other serious contender for that status has been eliminated. French is dying outside France. “Francophone” Africa is turning to English. Portuguese Africa is abandoning Portuguese. German made a small, temporary advance across emergent Eastern Europe but elsewhere outside Germany it is dead. Russian, which we once thought we would all have to learn, is finished. The Japanese are learning English, and developing their own pet variant. China will resist, but Mandarin and Cantonese are not advancing beyond their native speakers. More of the world’s new Muslims are learning English than Arabic. Spanish alone is raising its status and reach — but among Americans, who have English already. India is making an industry out of English speaking, as call-centres daily remind us. A quarter century ago, as the dismemberment of our Empire neared completion, we might have thought that the predominance of our language had passed its zenith. It was only dawn.

It is imponderable what may be the consequences of the advance of this linguistic tide. Within a few generations and for the first time in the story of Homo sapiens, most of our species may be able to communicate in a single language.

The advantage lent to us British by our fluency (and that of the Americans) in this world language should not be exaggerated. The number of native English speakers may not grow much; our relative influence may decline. They know little of us in Ethiopia. Yet all over that country street signs and business billboards are appearing in English, beneath the Amharic. English is cool. The very lettering confers status.

At Digum school I also sat through a Grade 8 class of 56 students. Here in the top form boys and girls aged between 10 and 20 were being coached by the excellent Mr Hailay. He was teaching the uses of “just”, “already” , “up to now”, “yet”, “ever” and “never”, and, astonishingly, most of them had a pretty good grasp. Over the shoulder of the boy in front I read his battered computer-printout English textbook, instructing the reader in the correct tenses to use in reported speech. I asked Mr Hailay if I might ask his pupils a few questions.

Did they want to learn English? Yes, replied everyone. Why? “It is the language of the world, and I want to know the world,” replied one boy.

I asked what other languages they would acquire if they could. Spanish, Chinese and Arabic were cited in reply, but none had any plans to learn these. To my surprise, one of the boys asked me afterwards what language I spoke — was I Italian, he wondered? I saw that knowledge of English was not regarded as an indication of nationality, but as a possession, a philosopher’s stone: one which anyone could get. At Digum they were struggling to get it.

English, I realised, as I left the school while the children chanted “I was a pilot, a pilot was I,” isn’t really ours any more. We are losing ownership of international English. Internet English is already looking unfamiliar. Africans rely heavily on the present continuous, and manage perfectly well. Different parts of the globe will develop their own pidgins.

There will be no point in fighting this or regretting it. We should just take pride in what we have started. It gives us no mastery and nor should it, but it gives us a link. All the world will have an open gate into our story, our culture, our ideas, our literature, our poetry and our song. And we into theirs.