Politics

Power to Miss Cherry

`By what means,' said the prince, 'are, the Europeans thus powerful? or why, since they can so easily visit Asia and Africa for trade and conquest, cannot the Asiatics and Africans invade their coasts, plant colonies in their ports, and give laws to their natural princes? The same wind that carries them back should bring us thither.'

'They are more powerful, sir, than we,' answered lmlac, 'because they are wiser; knowledge will always predominate over ignorance, as man governs the other anim- als. But why their knowledge is more than ours, I know not what reason can be given, but the unsearchable will of the Supreme Being.'

from Rasselas by Samuel Johnson Rasselas, of course, was prince of Abys- sinia, and so, if he had been allowed to roam beyond the Happy Valley where he was confined, he would not have asked his question in quite the same form. Abyssinia/Ethiopia, today, as during most of its history, makes it painfully clear that Africa is not in a position to give Europe as good as it gets. The only Ethiopians who have colonised Britain are those who have claimed Ethiopian nationality without ever visiting the place — the Rastafarians.

What about Imlac? He was a courtier who had travelled to Europe, India and Persia, and whose opinions were the fruit of that experience. If he were to use the same words today, he would, of course, be execrated, and if he were to say them in Ethiopia itself, one presumes that Col Mengistu would make short work of him. But what he says is what most people in the West believe, instinctively, if not avowed- ly. We do think of ourselves as wiser than Africans. This is not just what people who hate blacks think. It is the opinion, too, of all those who find the misdeeds of whites against blacks in South Africa far more horrifying than anything that blacks do to one another. Whites, they think, should know better.

But if you are looking for evidence for the superiority of European wisdom, the worst place to look is in Europe's,relations with Africa. Greed, stupidity, naivete, aggression are much easier to find; and you can find them pretty much wherever you choose to look — among imperialists, communists, 'anti-racists', nationalists, Brandt Reporters, among Lord Milners, Trevor Huddlestons, Edward Heaths. It does seem odd, not to say wrong (but definitely not to say 'obscene'), that west- ern governments cannot do rather more to anticipate a famine; it seems even odder and wronger that when a famine is present rather than prophesied these governments cannot quickly release some of the large

amounts of food which they have in store. For when you have accepted the objections that much emergency aid gets pilfered and misdirected, that African governments are unpredictable to deal with, that their air- strips are small and blow out that tyres of the RAF etc, you are left with the fact that a large number of people in a few places which are not hard to identify are dying because they cannot get food: we have that food, and could, with greater skill or determination, get it to them more quickly.

It is not as if our Government never knows that a famine is happening until its ministers watch it on television. In the case of Ethiopia, we have diplomats in Addis Ababa, and warnings sounded for some time, not only by the erratic and disagree- able government there, but by Oxfam, Save the Children and the rest. The Over- seas Development Administration itself knows what is happening. It has an Africa division, of course, and it also has a Disaster Unit, perhaps the only invention of Dame Judith Hart which deserves to have any posterity at all. The Unit is run by Miss Dorothy Cherry, and her job is to respond quickly. When she is not at home or in her office, she carries a paging device, so that she can never be more than a few minutes from news of a disaster. Last year she and her Unit dealt with 54 disasters. They can spend up to £250,000 per disaster without authorisation, and they can de- spatch equipment and medical supplies (not bulk food), hire aircraft, reimburse charities for emergency spending and so on. The Unit has treated Ethiopia as a disaster three times since 1982. If it knows when there is a disaster, then the Govern- ment can know, if it wants to.

The official explanation why the Gov- ernment is not prepared to offer much more than Miss Cherry in the face of an average disaster is that its first duty is towards public opinion. Mr Timothy Raison, the Minister for Overseas De- velopment, has argued that the Govern- ment needed the authorisation of public concern before it could assign extra funds to Ethiopia. This is a curious doctrine. When a fishing boat is in distress off the Lizard, coastguards do not waif for the switchboard of Radio Truro to be flooded with pleas to rescue it before they will set out. What if the British public gets bored with the Ethiopian famine and stops writ- ing to Buckingham Palace and stuffing fivers into collection boxes? Will Mr Raison order the Hercules to turn back?

One suspects that there is some more basic reason for the reluctance and delay.

Part of it must be parsimony, more of it bureaucratic inertia, still more of it the presence of the EEC as the chief agent for

the buying and distribution of bulk food. But as well there is a nervousness about what the problem is. According to Oxfam and the like, it is important not see famine in isolation. It is a sympton of a huge economic crisis, the explanation for which, as stated in Oxfam's advertisement in this paper on 13 October, is simple: 'Why? Because of greed. The rich world in which we live, comprising 30% of the global population, consumes over 80% of its resources'. The answer? The usual 'mas- sive transfer of resources', the paradise of the Brandt Report, in which each missile Is beaten into 40,000 pharmacies. The gener- al idea is that IT IS ALL OUR FAULT. Naturally enough, governments do not want to accept this theory, but they also do not have the energy to refute it. So they make feeble gestures of deference towards it, and their will to act is semi-paralysed.

For what the Brandt Reporters are reallY saying is that Africans are completely hopeless. Theirs is an extreme version of Imlac's statement that Europeans are wiser

for it assumes western superiority to be so absolute that the only way to relieve Africa is by a western economic act far bigger than anything which we tried out on our colonies. Aid, in the Brandt scheme of things, is not an effort to relieve, but a new way of governing Africa. It is because its colonial aims are so exorbitant that it has to be couched in language sycophantic to Africans. The pretence that we Europealls are all bad hides the assumption that we are all-knowing.

It is interesting that Imlac does not try to explain why Europeans have more wisdom than anyone else. He was wise not to. People who do so usually end up formulat- ing a nasty racial theory which argues that the case of the 'inferior' races is hopeless' Of course, the wisdom of Europe is not only or even mainly an accident, but it is not true to say, as the aid lobby does, that Africa is doomed. With the exception of a handful of countries (including Ethiopia), African economies have grown faster In the past 20 years than those in the West' Places like Kenya and the Ivory Coast maY not have the blessings of what we would consider good government or good drains, but they are far from being the heart of darkness. It is not obvious that a continent which 20 years ago threw off the politic control of Europeans now needs their economic direction. It is obvious, though, that there is no immediate prospect of an Africa free from starvation. It is a piece of European wisdom to hold both that, starvation is something that can and shoulo be relieved, and that governments should only attempt what they can reasonablY hope to attain. We cannot run or revolutionise the African economy, we can get food to the starving. It is worth spend" ing more money on disasters, less on speculative economic projects. More power to Miss Cherry's Unit.

Charles Moore