African Laughter - Doris May Lessing [172]
Now, while we drink Coca-Cola and eat meat pies, I listen while they share scorn for the big Aid organizations. ‘They sweep into Harare, can’t even begin without offices, word processors, computers, a staff, and enormous funds.’
Cathie says, ‘I still only have a desk and we use the house telephone, and I only have a typewriter, no machines at all.’
‘And yet we have a network of people working for the Team all over Zimbabwe.’
‘It works because we have the goodwill of the people themselves.’
They make many jokes about the experts known as Consultants. ‘Many of them have never set foot outside Harare. If they get down to village level they stay in a three-star hotel and visit the local district offices. They know nothing about local conditions but they lay down the law about what we should do with their Aid money.’
‘Just imagine! We get back from a month’s trip all around the villages and then some Dane, or German, or American tells us, No, the main thrust of the problem according to our information is…’
I have a cutting with me.
They lean over the table, reading, their faces slowly spreading into smiles.
‘If we had only a fraction of that money…’
‘Even a thousandth of it.’ ‘Even a millionth of it.’
Advising Africa has become a major industry, with European and North American consulting firms charging as much as $180,000 for a year of an expert’s time. At any given moment sub-Saharan Africa has at least 8,000 expatriates working for public agencies under official aid programmes. More than half of the $7 to $8 billion spent yearly by donors goes to finance these people. Yet in the two and a half decades since African Independence Africa has plunged from food self-sufficiency to widespread hunger. Is Africa getting the right advice?
Lloyd Timberlake, Africa in Crisis
Cathie produces from a string-bag material for the forthcoming seminars and shares it out. There will be this problem and that problem, says Cathie. The four are leaning forward, looking into each other’s faces, intent. Sylvia speaks, then Talent. If they did not know how to concentrate these moments when they are together, not actually working, nothing would get done. This break under the trees is the equivalent of an organizing meeting, but it is not called that, nor do they think of it as a meeting. If this fragile little organism, so full of life, developing on its own inner impetus, allowed itself to fossilize and demand a structure, then they would need hours-long meetings to get through what they do now in a few minutes.
They are all people under pressure in their ordinary lives. Talent has three small children and takes a good deal of the responsibility for the running of the collective farm. She can only come on these trips because of the support of her husband–it was he who said, ‘There are no men and women, there are only people on this farm.’ Sylvia with her eight children finds the going hard. She is a large, queenly woman, confident, competent. Cathie whose energy incandesces not only her, but everyone else, is the queen-pin of the Team, one of the world’s natural organizers. She has children, and says she could do none of this work without her husband’s help. When the four sit together like this, the ‘family’–for they say they are one–their differences of temperament and style show in every gesture, in how they sit, how they talk. Cathie leans forward, smiling,