PRIDE AND POVERTY
SIR,—I am slightly shocked at the article of Mr. Colm Brogan in your last issue. Like many of your readers, touched by the poster of a hungry negro child with distended abdomen and limbs like sticks, I am a modest contributor to funds for famine relief. It now appears from Mr. Brogan's article that the very people who ought to be most interested in famine relief, the educated Africans at our univer- sities, are the very ones who deny its necessity. They say the picture is exaggerated and the pathetic poster represents no more than 1 per cent of the children.
I do not know which particular countries are offered famine relief. I presume Ghana and Nigeria must be among them. The population of these two countries together is given in Whitaker's Almanack as about 36,000,000. If we take one-third of these to be children, that makes 12,000,000. One per cent of 12,000,000 is 120,000. Call it 100,000, to allow for further exaggeration. One would think 100,000 starving children would be enough to puncture the
over-inflated pride of independence of these Afri- can undergraduates and those who sent them here.
Mr. Brogan's account of the obstruction put in the way of would-be relief workers rouses ugly thoughts about biting the hand that feeds. Other thoughts, too, such as that the money spent on the higher education of these young gentlemen is more urgently needed to fill the empty bellies of these pathetic creatures. Starvation cannot wait. Education can. I have always been sympathetic towards African students in this country. I feel less so now. It seems they need some forceful heart-to-heart talk on the realities and responsibilities of independence in a community which aspires to be considered civilised. One feels like shutting down all these famine relief organisations, and telling the Africans to get on with it themselves, if the problem is as trivial as they make out.
But of course I am wrong. The children must not suffer for the arrogant pride of their elders which stops them being fed. We must swallow their pride if they won't, and go on begging to be allowed to do what we ought. With what credit the Africans will come out of it in the future is another matter. A. J. HAWES 32 Fitzroy Square, WI
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