Book Report

In part due to having stayed here for over a year life feels normal and it requires more focus to find the aspects that might be interesting to share with people in America.

Classes have started, and apart from getting malaria, I have been doing well.

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I have also been continuing to read, and the latest two books, The Invisible Cure and Imperial Reckoning, have been particularly good. The Invisible Cure is about HIV/AIDS in Africa. 

In the book the author gives her perspective on the progression of international aid given to Africa to combat HIV/AIDS.  What is dis-heartening about the system she portrays is that there seems to be a very low correlation between amount of money given and successful programs.  Yet, western countries continue to give billions of dollars a year.  PEPFAR, for instance, gives around $500 million per year to Kenya alone and is widely praised at home in America.

The “Invisible Cure” that the author alludes to is, collectively, the mass of locally born programs, which often times do not receive western aid.  The directors of these programs usually volunteer and struggle financially to serve their communities, yet they continue to serve despite the challenges.  This is in contrast to aid funded programs which have larger budgets, but also have goals designed with as much interest for receiving funding as for serving communities.

Certainly, international aid has improved many peoples lives.  For instance, aid, to my knowledge, has been effective at distributing ARVs and, in Kenya, setting up counseling and testing centers.  The short-coming of these programs is that they do not feed the many hungry Africans that are receiving the ARVS, nor do they address, in terms that the local population internalizes, the root causes behind the wide spread of HIV in Africa compared to other regions of the world.

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The other book, which I am currently reading, is Imperial Reckoning.  This book makes me seriously wonder why Kenyans trust any programs that come from the west.  The author of the book began investigating the final days of the British occupation of Kenya for a PhD history thesis at Harvard.  Through her research she uncovered the story of hundreds of thousands of Kenyans that were tortured – some being castrated or excruciatingly electrocuted.  Almost the entire Kikuyu population was put into detention camps or barbed wire villages, where they had no food and no land to farm.  Even those that were not in the camps were put onto overcrowded reserves and not allowed to sell produce or cereals in the open market.

This happened here.  It happened in the 1950’s.  Many of the stories in the book come from interviews with the author.  Many Kenyans lives are clearly worse due to the past occupation by the British and yet the many white people here today are not kicked out.  This seems fairly phenomenal to me.

An interesting factoid that I learned from the book is that chiefs did not exist, at least in Kenya, before the British.  This shocked me because all of my life I have imagined chiefs as being an integral component of tribal society.  In reality, chiefs were Kenyans loyal to the British, who were willing to abuse their own people for a share of the profit. 

There is so much talk about corruption in Kenya today, but people usually forget the circumstances that led the country to where it is today.  For instance, people complain that the courts are not good and that if you want to get your case heard it is likely that you will have to pay a bribe, but most people in my circles do not mention the case of Jomo Kenyatta. The governor of Kenya came up with the idea that incarcerating Kenyatta would stop the spread of the Mau Mau movement.  Unfortunately, he did not have enough evidence to convict Kenyatta, so he charged Kenyatta with the ambiguous crime of “managing an unlawful society” and paid a British judge to convict him.

Although most of these atrocities were committed against the Kikuyu, Meru are quick to add that they are closely related to the kikuyu and that generally the bantus were lumped together.  Regardless of who was most attacked, the racial fight was ultimately between the white settlers and the legitimate Kenyans.

Knowing the history helps to put this society into context.  It also helps to put into context the people who are now purporting to help Africans.  With this context it is not surprising that some Africans believe AIDS is a weapon created by white people to destroy Africans.