BRIAN DEER:
TRAVELLING WHITE Page
4
We
returned to Accra by the long way - road - and in a
16-hour drive saw the full sweep of the country, as
beguiling as so much of Africa. I hadn't slept a lot
in the previous week, had drunk a lot of tea made
with local water and vaguely wished I'd stuck with
fashion. I remember us crossing the Black Volta
river, where the dry northern savanna gives way to
humid rain forest, which swathes the Ghanaian
midlands. Then came damp lowlands as we approached
the coast, and finally, after sunset, the city, dark
and chaotic, suffering seasonal electricity cuts.
One
thing that struck me was the huge numbers who waved
(mostly children, it's true) as we passed. We were
not quite Madonna, but elsewhere on this continent
the accumulated history of colonial conduct has made
attitudes to strangers more varied. Unlike, say, in
East or southern Africa, the climate here was
considered so unhealthy that there was never much
land-snatching during days of empire, so white people
were often seen as quite benign. One legacy is a
respect still granted to Europeans which they can't
always depend on at home.
White
aid workers have astonishing status, whoever they are
and wherever they come from. As Seewraj told me one
morning as we drove up to Karni: "People think
that if a white man says that something will happen,
then it will happen. It is definite."
Krish
Seewraj was a white man. His local fans stressed
this. But in Hampshire (the town of Basingstoke), he
was black. We talked about this paradox. He was aware
of it himself. And the image he sported - including
the necessary bush hat - nagged in my mind almost as
much as my worry that some projects might prove to be
disasters.
Returning
to Accra, this image threw me back to an evening with
volunteers in the town of Wa. We had sat in a circle,
ten white, one black, and some yelled their orders at
waiters. It felt too reminiscent of ex-pats and
empires, too loaded, to allow to pass. That night I
recorded an interview in my notebook with another
volunteer, Bonnie Horbach from Amsterdam. She was 28,
a lawyer, and worked on a project in a village called
Tibaani (where residents put on a play in our
honour). She was a "motivator", she told
me, concerned with "women's empowerment",
but was quitting to live in Mali after only six
months because she had fallen for a VSO man.
"Being
white in this society means that you have a kind of
superiority, and you can use that," she
explained that evening about her work with the rural
poor. Then she talked about funding aid projects in
terms that, to me, were no less unnerving. "If
you buy a tractor, then at least half should come
from the recipient," she said. "It's like
buying children's toys. If a child is given a toy he
will break it. But if he buys it himself he will look
after it."
Such
a casual comparison between black people and children
brought me right back to Kipling's verse. Although,
like Seewraj's comment, it was probably the product
of a battered idealism, it ought to make us think
about the racial role models being offered to the
Third World's young. Are these authoritative,
superior and adult white people providing the kind of
"inspiration" of which the bishop was
thinking? What worries me is that maybe they were.
But
if they seem too faithful to VSO's strange origins,
then Britain has altered in the four decades since
Fleming and Dickson's letter-writing deception. And
after the long Conservative years, during which the
organisation - a registered charity - came to depend
on the taxpayer for an astounding 80% of its income,
ministers say they remain to be convinced that this
spending is properly used. A white paper on world
poverty issued five months ago warned of a review
"to ensure that all our resources are used
effectively and in accordance with our policy
priorities."
If a
report last year is anything to go by, there may be
jolts on the road ahead. After investigating VSO's
work in Kenya and at its London headquarters,
management consultants accused senior staff of acting
as if "the volunteer's needs are as important,
if not more important, than the needs of the overseas
partners". And they warned: "Our view is
that the current position is no longer tenable, not
least because VSO's principal funders are interested
in alleviating poverty, whether through volunteers or
by other means."
It
remains to be seen which way Clare Short will jump,
but such is the scale of the organisation's
bureaucracy that any cutbacks may not be too painful.
Its two London headquarters buildings house some 200
staff, and at each of its 38 field offices there can
be up to another ten. Moreover, although it swallows
1% of Britain's £2.2 billion overseas aid budget,
more than half of its spending is in the United
Kingdom, with much of the rest going on air fares and
phone bills.
Doubtless
VSO can change, as it has been forced to in the past
- if only to defend its existence. But British
attitudes towards the world and to foreign travel
have shifted so much that the desire to experience
them as volunteers, rather than tourists, has gone
into free-fall decline. The number of applications to
the organisation has dropped by more than one fifth
in the past two years, while those for technical
jobs, such as Seewraj's assignment, have slumped by
more than half.
VSO
's response has been to return to its past -
launching a 40th anniversary crusade combining
nostalgia with promises of personal advantage. The
slogan for its new recruitment leaflet is: "A
world of opportunities," and it goes on, not to
emphasise service to others, but to explain that
"many volunteers find that their skill base has
been broadened and their career prospects
enhanced."
Another
of its responses that worries some observers is an
effort to boost raw numbers of volunteers by diluting
its commitment to the poor. Three quarters of
potential recruits interviewed last year were
actually selected for placements - and with the
"fashion volunteers" VSO maintains in Ghana
you can see the kind of results. You might justify
such activities, as you might justify anything, but I
have to ask the question: who exactly is teaching
fashion to whom in this hotspot of African design?
The
clue, perhaps, was contained in biographies, also
pasted in my notebook with the letter. They said that
one fashion volunteer (who I never did get to meet)
"designed the cover of the latest VSO publicity
leaflet 'Is VSO for you?', using traditional Ghanaian
batik technique." When she returns to Britain,
armed with such skills, it seems likely she will put
them to use.
So,
that is my story about VSO. I didn't find servants,
but masters. Like the old colonialists, the
volunteers are adventurers - and they adventure on
the moral high ground. They usually gain more for
themselves than for those they aim to help - and
although they feel happiest when others seem to
benefit, that appearance may sometimes deceive.
And I
would reassure the bishop (were he not too dead to
sue) that, in the body which he founded with a letter
to The Sunday Times, it is still 1958.
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Brian Deer. All rights reserved. No portion of this
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