HIV/AIDS Activism: Lost in Translation

After dedicating two years of my life to the cause of sustainable development in the Republic of Mali, I came to loathe so-called "aid" projects which are unnecessarily expensive, relatively ineffective, and either achieve their intended goals at an obscenely high ratio of costs to benefits or they accomplish absolutely nothing at all. Perhaps the greatest potential for stupid, wasteful “aid” projects lies in the sub-field of HIV/AIDS education. Part of it is because HIV/AIDS is such a relatively trendy cause and there is simply such a volume of Western aid dollars allocated to HIV/AIDS projects that there is so much more potential for waste. Part of it is because HIV/AIDS is such an ideologically-loaded subject that Western do-gooders are wont to apply their own belief systems onto poor, unwitting Africans. And part of it is that benevolent do-gooders are so completely ignorant of their host country’s culture that when they try to intervene in matters of sexuality they are simply doomed to failure.

Imagine a couple of humanitarian aid professionals – one has a Masters in African Studies from Yale, another went to Princeton to get their Ph.D. in International Relations. A well-meaning NGO just raised $200,000 to send them to do something about AIDS in some poor West African country, say, Niger. So they are sitting around the air-conditioned boardroom of their NGO in the expatriate quarter of Niamey, brain-storming ways to raise the Nigerien people’s awareness about HIV transmission and prevention.

“What if we made a sign to raise awareness about HIV/AIDS?”

“Great idea! Let’s draw up a hundred of them and put them up along heavily-trafficked roads!”

So they will spend about $10,000 to hire a graphic designer in San Francisco who will email his design to a factory in Lyons which will manufacture a hundred or so signs for $20,000. And it will cost another $30,000 to ship the posts from Lyons to the port at Marseilles to the port at Lagos and overland to their NGO headquarters in Niamey. Another $15,000 will be lost to bribing the customs agents. And they will pay the local contractor some grossly inflated price, say, $25,000 to drive around the country, hammer posts in the ground and put up billboards along one lane-roads leading into various cities and towns in Niger.

So when everything is said and done, the perfectly benevolent NGO will have plopped down 100 billboards for a price of around $1,000 each to the grand total of $100,000. Take a hard look at this sign, scrutinize it for about a minute and try to understand why it is such a stupid, festering piece of garbage.

Every piece of information that could possibly be conveyed by this sign can only be understood by those who can read French. Officially, Niger is a Francophone country, there are indeed some people in this country who can speak French – a miniscule minority of teachers, doctors and police officers. But the overwhelming majority of the people only speak their native Hausa, Songraï, Peulh or Tamashek – it is not unfair to assume your typical market lady does not know any “White People Language” beyond “Bozu le Blanc sava sava byen”. Also, the vast majority of people in this country are absolutely illiterate; 71.3 percent of the population, according to the CIA World Factbook – and even that figure is padded by an extremely liberal definition of “literacy” which recognizes anyone who can scrawl their name as “literate”. To 9 out of 10 pedestrians who might be walking down the street in Niamey, that public service announcement might as well be written in ancient Greek.

Likewise, this billboard on the road to the Malian city of Koutiala is also a festering piece of garbage. Imagine you are an illiterate Minianka millet farmer riding your donkey cart to sell your goats at the Koutiala market – what useful lesson in disease prevention could you possibly gain from viewing this $1,000 sign?

This billboard was placed by the Christian NGO World Vision in my former home of Sanadougou. I will give them due credit for writing their public health message in Bambara – Mali’s vernacular lingua franca. It reads “Hey! Be careful, AIDS is here! There is no cure for it.”

Indeed, writing a public health message in Bambara is certainly more sensitive to the local culture compared to writing it in French. But this World Vision billboard is still fatally flawed by the fact that their message was written in any language at all; instead of writing their AIDS-prevention message in ancient Greek, they decided to write it in the equivalent of modern Greek.

To pass the time, I asked scores of my illiterate neighbors for their interpretations of this billboard on the road leading to town. Not a single person I asked was able to tell me that it had anything to do with HIV/AIDS. The closest thing to a logical response I ever heard was “don’t leave razor blades in your bed – they will cut you.”

Sometimes I wonder what part of “illiteracy ” these well-meaning Christian aid-givers don’t understand. To refer to someone as “illiterate” doesn’t me that they can’t fully appreciate the works of Proust; “illiterate” refers to an individual or a group of persons who cannot read or write anything at all. To refer to these cultures as “predominantly illiterate” is not at all a judgment of intelligence or character – it is simply a statement of fact. Likewise, one cannot mount an effective public health campaign in a country like Mali, Niger, Mauritania or Burkina Faso without taking into consideration that the vast majority of your intended audience in these countries is completely and utterly illiterate.

One time I met a World Vision missionary/humanitarian agent in Bamako and took issue with their billboard campaign. She accused me of “insulting the Malian people’s intelligence”; “I work with a number of local staff who are all very capable of reading and writing – one of my colleagues was educated at the Sorbonne and he can read English, French and German!”

This well-meaning church lady’s response was quite telling. When practitioners of “humanitarian aid” and “economic development” live in the expatriate Green Zones of their respective African capitols, they can manage to go months at a time interacting with only the extremely-Westernized, French- or even English-speaking, literate elite, completely sheltered from the social and economic realities of the other 99.999 percent of the population. Such an experience establishes an absurdly rose-tinted perspective of a country’s predominant living conditions – and it allows these naïve, bumbling do-gooders to waste all of their funds on projects which could only benefit the 0.001 percent of the indigenous population with whom they interact at official state functions and the American Club racquetball courts.

Here is another one of my favorite signs posted in the city of Koutiala. If you were a simple unlettered shepherd who speaks the hyper-literal Bambara language completely devoid of metaphor or simile, what would you interpret it to mean?

If I were an illiterate goat-herder, I would think that this billboard meant that AIDS is an anthropomorphic fire demon with a face and arms and legs. In a society where grown men are genuinely afraid of witches, warlocks, hairy field demons, mischievous forest demons and dwarf spirits with backwards feet, it makes perfect sense that benevolent Tubabs would seek to warn the Malian people about the anthropomorphic fire demons which have been wreaking havoc upon America. Likewise, I would interpret this billboard to mean that if this fire demon were to ever try to get into my house, I should push the door shut.

My all-time favorite HIV/AIDS public service announcement is the one line of billboards in Bamako which actually dares to show the image of a condom. Take a look at this public health campaign and try your best to imagine its unintended consequences.

Hardly any Malian men in Bamako ever buy condoms to wear while engaging in sexual intercourse, but – thanks to this fiasco of a public service announcement – when they do buy a condom they are likely to wear it on their two fingers. So they go to the brothel, they fuck a prostitute for 500 francs (~$1), they wear a 100 franc (~20¢) condom on their fingers, and – big surprise – they still contract HIV! So now if any of men or women ever get tested and discover that they are HIV+, they are going to go around telling everyone that either condoms don’t work or that it was the condom itself that transmitted HIV, and any lesson that the well-meaning NGOs might wish to convey will be thoroughly discredited in the public mind.

A ham-handed public health campaign like the infamous “finger bang” billboard is not merely ineffective in combating the transmission of HIV/AIDS – it actually makes the problem worse. Partly thanks to this train wreck of a public health campaign, many young men in Mali think that AIDS is just a hoax. Some have concluded that since people have followed the “finger condom” billboard’s instructions and contracted HIV, The White People are telling Black Africans to wear condoms because we want them to stop reproducing. Others think that AIDS is real, that it was concocted by the CIA to decimate the black population of Africa. Word on the street is that it’s the reservoir tip of the condom which contains the deadly virus; so some people actually buy condoms and cut off the very part of the prophylactic which makes it functional. Since these Western public health campaigns have crashed and burned so egregiously, it figures that polygamous young men resort to “traditional” i.e. witch doctor-prescribed methods like drinking snake oils, herbal teas and having unprotected sex with virgins.

So if these billboards are such absolutely ineffective pieces of garbage, why on Earth do humanitarian aid organizations waste their money on them? Part of the reason is surely that some of the individuals implementing these humanitarian aid campaigns simply don’t get it. But these professional aid-givers with their Ivy League graduate degrees are generally intelligent people – I can’t imagine that all of them are so dense that they don’t understand the folly of expressing public health messages with the written word in a thoroughly illiterate culture.

A more rational explanation for this embarrassing waste might be that Foreign Service Officers and professional development agents are often so lazy that they can’t be bothered to learn the local tribal language(s) of the culture they’re working in – the vernacular tongues without which they can’t possibly engage in any meaningful health education campaign. But they need to demonstrate to their superiors that they did something, anything constructive with their time in Namibia other than gallivanting around on the taxpayers’ dime. Constructing 100 undecipherable billboards – though they might be utterly useless for the Namibian people – at least makes for a solid bullet point on a professional aid-giver’s résumé.


But an even more rational explanation might lie in the political/economic interests of the rent-seeking aid agencies, private aid contractors and NGOs themselves. The unfortunate metric by which they all measure success is not the number of HIV infections averted or the number of Africans educated but the sheer volume of funds dispersed – the more money they spend, the more “successful” they can claim to be; e.g. “This year we spent $100,000 on a campaign to raise awareness about HIV/AIDS”. It doesn’t matter if that $100,000 was spent on a particularly ineffective awareness-raising campaign, or if it didn’t reap any positive health-related results. All that matters on the bottom line is how much money they spent, because the more funds they spend one year, they more funds they can justify raising from donor agencies, banks and private donors the next year.

So do I think that we – the vanguard of humanity who genuinely care about alleviating the disease and misery which defines life in so much of the world – should just give up on teaching Africans about HIV and AIDS? Not at all. I just think that we should stop throwing our money away on such unforgivably stupid wastes of finite resources as visual media which Westerners will never be able to produce for the consumption of peoples who do not understand our system of symbols and imagery, who cannot read our language, who cannot read any language at all – not even their own.

After spending two years living amongst the Minianka tribe in Mali, one lesson I came to understand is that though a literate culture remains alien to these people that have only begun to enjoy access to books, pens and paper, the Miniankas do have a rich and vibrant oral culture. This is a culture in which farmers will dispatch their child from one village to another to rely a simple message, in which virtually all business is transacted through oral contracts, the theology of the Qur’an is disseminated from the mouth of the imam to the ears of the faithful, and where griot troubadours transmit the tribal history from one generation to another through song. If you want to get a message across in the Minianka culture, the only appropriate medium for doing so is the spoken word.

Likewise, you can’t possibly hope to impart unto the Miniankas any useful lessons about health and hygiene unless you speak Minianka. This is one area in which I believe that the Peace Corps is leaps and bounds beyond any other development agencies and NGOs in the field because we are the only organization which bothers to learn the local tribal languages and live out in the field where we can practice them to fluency. I myself did not spend a whole lot of time disseminating seeds of knowledge about HIV/AIDS – I was much more preoccupied with the more ubiquitous scourges of diarrhea, giardia and dysentery. And it took me untold months of building up my language skills, sitting around the teapot chatting with the locals, gradually gaining their trust until I could convince anyone to take even the most modest steps to treat their drinking water.

Teaching the Miniankas about HIV/AIDS is a whole lot trickier because you have to have an exceptional command of the local tongue before you can gracefully converse with the locals about their most intimate relations. And even though my language skills might have been good enough by the end of my two years, I would have never become comfortable enough to talk to conservative Muslim Minianka women about their vaginas. The only people in Sanadougou with whom I could converse about matters of the nether-regions were the teenage-to-twenty-something boys who couldn’t stop asking me about penises, vaginas, and the various other instruments with which Americans engage in sexual relations.

“So Madu, how do Americans do it? Y’know, putting the penis into the vagina?” (Amadou demonstrates by inserting his index finger in and out of a curled fist)

“Well, in America the men have to always wear a condom on our penises before we engage in any sort of hanky-panky. You have to wear a condom every single time – unless, of course, you and your wife are married, you have a lucrative career, a good health insurance plan and enough funds in your savings account to have a baby.”

“But I do not want to wear a condom on my penis. It is not natural!”

“In America you would not have a choice. You must wear a condom on your penis every time you have sex. If you have sex with anyone and you don’t wear a condom – even just once - then everyone will think that you might have AIDS and no one will want to have sex with you ever again.”

“But I am a good Muslim! American women should trust me that I do not have AIDS.”

“Just about every American woman whom you will ever meet in Africa is here to work on HIV/AIDS projects. Hate to break it to you, Amadou, but you live in Africa. You are an African. If you have ever had sex without a condom, and you are open and honest with an American woman about your sexual history, then you have zero chance of ever having sex with her.”

“Hm… maybe I should start wearing condoms - that way I could convince an American woman to sleep with me!”

“That's awful, Amadou. I have just lost a lot of respect for you as a human being. But you know what? There's no such thing as a bad reason to start wear condoms!”

In such a fashion, development agencies and NGOs should make greater efforts to utilize the mass media potential of radio and television – media which are lapped up readily by even the most illiterate Minianka. This is a culture in which an entire village will sit around the car battery-powered TV set watching the soap commercials as raptly as their dubbed Telemundo soap operas. If there is ever to be a cost-effective means to encourage Africans to practice safe sex, it would be stop selling them prophylactics the way we sell them rheumatism ointment and arthritis palliatives and to start selling them prophylactics the way we sell them beer, soda and powdered milk – by insinuating that this product will help the consumer to get laid. After all, this is how Trojan and Durex market condoms in the developed West – it’s absolutely bizarre that the one product that should be sold with sex appeal isn’t marketed in Africa as a catalyst for more frequent and more enjoyable sex.

So if there is one thing that we Tubabs should be doing in Africa to halt the spread of HIV/AIDS, I would say it would be to start aggressively marketing condoms to Africans. USAID and the World Bank should start underwriting the filming of commercials with Akon, Jay-Z and the entire Ghanaian soccer team making culture-sensitive advertisements for these wonderfully cost-effective products, perhaps even buying advertising time on the various African radio TV stations. Such a marketing strategy might be aiming for the lowest common denominator, it might be completely bereft of science, and it might not be as intellectually sound as a bona fide public health announcement. And free market fundamentalists might shudder at public subsidies to benefit certain for-profit corportions. But in consequentialist terms I can’t help but think that it would be the most cost-effective strategy to encourage Africans to practice safe and hygienic sex.

From Here to Modernity

Culturally speaking, the Bamako International Airport functions to serve foreigners. The majority of its patrons consist of German tourists, American diplomats, French NGO personnel and Arab oilmen. There is often a smattering of native-born Malians who somehow got hold of a visa to Spain or Italy years ago and have now returned to see their extended families luxuriating in their remittances. Usually the only kind of Malian residents you will ever see boarding a plane are the Bamakois elite who have salaried careers in government or banking and take in at least 1 million CFA (~$2,000) a month, who speak to their family exclusively in French, who wear stylish suits and closed-toed leather shoes, who are so proudly Western that they are – as Modibo Keita said of Leopold Senghor – “plus français que le plus français des français”.

In a country where the economy is all but defined by subsistence agriculture, travel by air is simply not something that your average Malian can even dream of. Very rare is the Bambara peanut farmer who can save enough cash to buy a $400 ticket to Tunis, a $800 ticket to Casablanca or a $900 ticket to Paris.

As I stepped inside terminal at Bamako International Airport to say goodbye to Mali for the last time, I was greeted by a very unusual sight: actual broussey Malians who were quite obviously leaving Mali for the first time. There was a troupe of 30 Bambara women taking the same flight as me to Tunis en route to their final destination in Mecca. Judging by their simple dresses and head wraps, their general lack of teeth, the facts that their luggage consisted of rice sacks and plastic buckets, these were obviously not the wives of the wealthy Bamakois elite.

As I later found out, some wealthy Muslim somehow paid for these 30 simple village women to embark on the hajj as a grand act of charity. To go on the pilgrimage to Mecca is one of the five pillars of Islam, and it should be one of the defining moments in the life of any Muslim who can afford to do so. Now imagine how exciting such an adventure should be for a simple Bambara woman who does most of her travel by donkey cart, who has maybe traveled on a run-down minivan to Bamako four or five times over the course of her 50 years. And now she is going to Mecca, in Saudi Arabia – by airplane!!!

Just try to imagine how wild an idea this must be for a woman from a society defined by a means of production that has not changed much since the advent of the Iron Age. The sighting of a pankuru – a “jumping boat” – was a very big deal in Sanadougou. As the Minianka villagers tilled their fields with simple iron hoes and picks, every couple of months someone might see a pankuru soar above the clouds across the baby blue sky. It would be the talk of the town for weeks on end. As I the fair-skinned American had obviously taken a pankuru to get there, they would ask me all about the technical matters of aviation:

“How does a pankuru jump so high in the sky?”

“How do people get all the way up to find their seats?”

“How does the driver hit the breaks on the wheels?”

“Where is the road?”

These ladies embarking on the hajj might have bitten off more than they could chew. From the moment they somehow got past the check-in counter, it was obvious that the process of air travel was such a foreign concept entailing such a long series of elaborate rituals for which they had absolutely no point of reference. With much difficulty the Bambara-speaking airport staff was able to guide them through the metal detector and security checkpoints, and even then they were confused and frightened by these strange futuristic plastic wands being waved around their bodies. Once they arrived at the gate – there is only one gate at the Bamako International Airport – they were in the hands of Tunis Airlines.

Once a passenger gets through check-in and security, the next step in boarding an airline usually entails waiting on line to show one’s ticket. There’s not much sense in rushing the gate, because everyone going on to a plane has an assigned seat. Though the broussey women could have only known the protocol of getting onto a Malian bus; a fierce gauntlet elbowing one’s way through a crowd of peanut vendors and beggar children, speed is of the essence because the bus drivers usually sell more tickets than there are seats and those who don’t have to kneel in the aisle, those ticket-holders who can’t find room to kneel are simply out of luck and have to wait for the next bus. So all of the Westerners and cultivated ruling class Africans recoiled in disgust as the group of 30 cut and clawed their way to the front of the line.

Naturally, by the time they clawed their way onto the plane the 30 broussey women on hajj all chose to sit together. However, this posed a problem as 30 other people held the tickets to those very same seats. Technically the French-colonized Malians and French-colonized Tunisians should be able to resolve their differences with a lingua franca, and the Tunisian staff did indeed speak beautiful French – but that meant little to a hoard of illiterate, unschooled housewives who knew little “white people language” beyond “Bo swa”, “Bozu le Blanc” and “Saba saba byen”. Also, provincial Bambaras tend to have a difficult time understanding the concept of other people not understanding what they say in Bambara.

“Pardonnez-moi, madame, mais quelqu'un d'autre a le billet pour cette place.”

“EHHHH?!?!?! A KANNA MUSO KOROBA TORO!!!! E BE N TOY!!!!”

“Madame, vous devez rester assis dans votre siège attribué.”

“EHHHH?!?!?! N YE NI PLACE SORO FOLO NI N TE TA!!!!!”

The rest of the passengers were held up from boarding for about 10 minutes until a native Malian who had expatriated to France acted as an intermediary between the Tunis Air stewards and the 30 broussey Malian women, showed the latter how a ticket worked and led them one by one to their designated seats. At this point the Mali musow were downright hostile. The airline staff realized that this was going to be a long night.

The flight was scheduled to take off at midnight, but due to passenger troubles we were already quite delayed. At about 12:20, as the plane was sealed and driving into position on the tarmac, not just the broussey ladies but just about every Malian on board whipped out their cell phones to make one last call goodbye before flying off into the wild blue unknown. Of course, dozens of passengers making phone calls can severely disrupt the pilots’ radio communications with the air traffic controllers, so the stewards and stewardesses had to tell the pilot to stop and wait as they proceeded down the aisle and one-by-one explained via miming and gesticulation that everyone had to turn off their phones.

The Malian ex-pat stood up and shouted, “NI HALI MOGO KELEN BE TELEPHONI WULI PANKURU KONO A BE NA PANKURU TIEN NI MOGO BE FAGA!!!!!” - "If anyone makes a phone call in the plane then this plane is going to crash and everyone is going to die!!!!" The cabin was filled with screams and shrieks and at least one broussey woman broke into hysterics about how she was going to die and never see her family again. We had not yet left the tarmac.

During this time I made friends with another surprising broussey Malian seated to my left; a Fulani cattle herder wearing an eye patch. Zoumana explained to me that one day an angry cow charged and gored him in the socket, he went to his village witch doctor who prescribed some homeopathic placebos. Over a few weeks his eye was only getting worse, so Zoumana built up the courage to see the real doctor who told him that the kind of medical attention he needed could only be found in an Arab or European hospital. So over the course of months he sold half of his herd and took out some loans and applied for a passport and visa and eventually raised enough funds to fly to Tunis and back. When I did the math I computed that Zoumana had been suffering from his massive wound for about 6 months, and I didn’t have the heart to tell him that the chances of his eye looked rather slim.

“May Allah make your pain be gone.”

“Amina”, he concurred. Zoumana told me that he had never been to Bamako before – let alone an airplane to Tunis. He was frightened by the fact that we were flying so high off the ground.

“Don’t worry, you’re only 6 meters off the ground. We’re still just driving around the runway like a car.”

"But isn't the pankuru supposed to drive in the sky?"

“Yes, but first it has to jump really, really fast to get off the ground. You know how sometimes cars can’t get into first gear unless all the passengers get out and push the car really fast? It’s kind of like that – only we’re going to go even faster because the plane is going to make a big fire!”

“WHAT?!?!? A FIRE?!?!”

“No, don’t worry – the fire is just in the engine like in a car. It is going to be all under control.”

As we did finally take off Zoumana was holding onto the armrests so tight that he was shaking. I encouraged him to shut his eye and get some rest, emphasizing how well-trained and experienced the pilot must be.

The rest of the flight went largely without incident – if only because most of the passengers sleep on the red-eye to Tunis. Though it was nonetheless amusing to watch as the first-timers tried to adjust to the ultra-modern airplane from an innocently Malian perspective.

All of the 30 village women made good use of the complimentary eye-folds. They were all wearing them over their mouths. You see, in Mali motorcyclists often buy black-marketed surgical face-masks to protect their mouths from all the dust stirred up along the dirt roads. And superstitious Malians think that sickness is contracted from exposure to the wind. Apparently they thought that the plane traveling at 510 miles an hour was going to churn up a lot of sky dust into the hermetically-sealed cabin.

Traditional Bambara/Fulani culture also collided with mile-high modernity as the food cart came down the aisle to serve a Tunisian meal of chicken and couscous. “I think it is Tubabu rice” one voice explained. The broussey women washed their hands in the plastic cups of water and shoved handfuls of the strange couscous into their mouths and licked their fingers clean. Zoumana made an effort to use Tubabu utensils and struggled to get the couscous to his mouth with the handle of the plastic knife, throwing a mess all over the floor.

Accordingly, some of the broussey Malians must have had difficulty on the other end of digestive track etiquette. All that I will say is that a Bambara villager who has only relieved his- or herself in a mud nyegen - i.e. a hole in the ground - must have been so confounded by the space-age modernity of an airline bathroom stall that… well… they did what they usually do in a mud nyegen. Upon discovering this vivid manifestation of cultural cognitive dissonance, I proceeded to notify one of the in-flight attendants who promptly locked the bathroom for the remainder of the flight.

As our plane began its decent into Tunis, I noticed that one-eyed Zoumana to my left was moaning in agony - it was quite obvious that no one had explained to him how to adapt to changes in atmospheric pressure. So I taught him to hold his nose and blow to equalize the pressure in his sinus and the rest of the cabin. As evinced by the screams and hollers throughout the rest of the cabin, no one had had the initiative - or the language skills - to impart this vital skill to the rest of the first-timers.

You can probably imagine how similar disasters awaited the 30 village women who threw a collective tantrum over the fact that they were being forced to leave the plane without their checked luggage - they thought that the airline had stole it all, and the pitfalls which trapped the multitude of absolutely illiterate passengers who had to write out their embarkation cards, etc.

The one last image which I would like to leave you with was one of the 30 Mecca-bound women who came to the luggage carousel and saw suitcases and boxes coming out one hole and back into another - she must have thought that once a suitcase went back into the wall it was gone for good. And she must have not been able to differentiate her plastic-wrapped rice sack from the other dozens of plastic-wrapped rice sacks, so she ran down the luggage carousel knocking each and every one of them down to the floor. After she eventually found the rice sack she wanted the poor lady realized that she had committed a grave taboo, so she tapped me on the shoulder and grunted and pointed to one of the rice sacks she had knocked to the ground. I grudgingly obliged and lifted it back to the revolving carousel. Then she grunted and pointed to the other three dozen rice sacks she knocked to the floor.

I tried my best to explain to her in Bambara how the luggage carousel keeps on moving in circles until each passenger identifies and removes his or her own bag. "Maybe next time you should sit and let the machine do the work for you."

For those who think I'm being haughty or mean, please understand that I recount these little anecdotes not because I wish to ridicule these poor simple folks, but because I wish to explain to relatively tech-savvy people like you why we have to make our modern ways more easily-understandable and accessible to those who live in mud huts, eat with their hands and exist in a world defined by medieval Iron Age technology. Airplanes are just the tip of the iceberg - the same kind of confusion and frustration and all-too-often outright dismissal often comes when people like Zoumana the Fulani herder are introduced to modern technology that could improve their day-to-day health and standard of living like the water pump, the toilet, the mosquito net and the condom.

The culture shock between simple African villagers and an ultra-modern airport is more than just something which causes awkward scenes of confusion and humiliation - it really is a matter of public safety and national security. Men who have never heard of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab would probably see nothing wrong with boarding a plane with a box of matches so they can continue their hourly cigarette habit. Women who haven't the slightest idea who Mohamed Atta was might be surprised that they can't bring their knife or knitting needles on board. If a Malian man knows that he will be sitting down for an extended period of time, he is going to want to break out charcoal, lighter fluid, matches and a kettle so he can boil up a round of tea - on a number of occasions, passengers from tea-drinking cultures unaware of the physics of a pressurized cabin have initiated in-flight explosions killing everyone on board. Yes, security technology exists which should be able to prevent such scenarios from occurring in the first place - but anyone who has lived in Africa for any extended period of time would know that technology often fails, humans often err. And just because the airport puts up a poster with pictograms to represent the guns, grenades, nail-clippers and nuclear materials that one must not bring onto a plane, that does not mean that people from an illiterate culture completely bereft of symbolism or figurative language will understand what those pictograms are supposed to mean.

The aviation industry should try to find ways of making the tools of their trade and the convoluted protocol of ticket counters, security checkpoints, baggage claim and customs more understandable to first-time passengers. Even if they make up a small minority of their total clients, responding to these needy few is imperative to ensure the comfort and safety of all. One way to start would be to have the personnel at the check-in desk ask if their clients are flying for the first time - not to be stereotyping, but a Malian ticket teller can probably spot aviation virgins from a mile away. Institutions like Bamako International Airport - probably most other airports in Africa and the underdeveloped world - should have personnel employed to hold these special-needs clients' hands and walk them from check-in to the departure gate. While waiting in the passenger lounge, they could explain how an airplane works, how it takes off and how it lands, how a pressurized toilet works and how to properly use one without the aid of a plastic teapot. This need not be done in a way that is insultingly patronizing; I would imagine that someone who has never taken a taxi to the airport let alone a plane to Mecca would really appreciate some guidance on how to navigate the strange unknown.

Though at the present such professional airline passenger instructors don't exist. That means that this vital role must be filled by volunteers. So next time that you're taking a plane departing from anywhere in Africa and it's clear that somebody riding with you has never before left Sanadougou, act like you're a Boy Scout and that person who has never ridden a plane before is an old lady trying to cross the street. Be sure to teach them how to equalize their sinuses and fill out their disembarkation card. And most importantly, let them have the window seat - believe me, they will appreciate the view.

The Number Five

There are so many deficiencies in human capital which make it difficult for the Malian economy to function that one might be tempted to cast the blame on economic illiteracy. Very few people here understand that profits = revenues – costs because the Bambara language has not evolved different words for money to express those three distinct concepts. Quite often rural shops fail because the butigitigis purchase their wares in the cities and then resell those wares to their customers in village for the same exact prices – with every sale, they actually lose money. Most vendors don’t even bother to keep ledger books; they just eyeball how much money is flowing through their business in relative terms; “a little”, “a lot”, “enough”.

But economic illiteracy is only the tip of the iceberg; it has not been uncommon for merchants to hand me incorrect change – not because they are necessarily trying to cheat me, but because they simply cannot handle the math. Most owners of big shops in this country are able to invest 500 francs in a small calculator, and most are so uncomfortable doing subtraction in their heads that they whip out their machini every time they make a transaction – but that doesn’t mean that they know which buttons to push. The deficiencies in Malian human capital run even prior to arithmetic.

I myself never really understood how devastating ignorance can be on the local economy until I sat down one day in market to talking with a Malian vegetable-seller named Ma about the prices of the goods she sells at market. As we were discussing all of these numbers Ma stopped her own thought in mid-sentence, smiled radiantly and hunched over to trace her index finger into the dirt:



“One, two, three, four, five, six!”

And that is how I was introduced to the concept of “innumeracy”: the inability to read or write numbers. Innumeracy is a phenomenon causally related and integrally tied to illiteracy, of course, but it comes across to the numerate observer as incredibly more astonishing. In a society completely bereft of novels and plays or anything application of the written word more complicated than the labels on tea boxes, being unable to read does not seem to be all that much of a handicap. But numbers are an intrinsic part of material existence prior to their utterance by humans, and for an adult member of society to be unable to recognize or portray the visual representations of these numbers in any system at all means that they cannot possibly comprehend a base-ten system, that they can at best comprehend mathematical concepts as complex as the amount of digits they have on their two hands.

The sorry fact of the matter is that the Malian monetary economy is predicated on society’s inability to recognize and identify the numbers printed on their own currency. Back in the days of colonialism and the first two and half decades after independence, Malians conducted business with the sou – the smallest denomination of which was a 1 sou piece. But in 1984 the Republic of Mali joined the Economic Community of West African States and adopted the CFA as their new currency, and since this new currency had already depreciated in value from rampant inflation the smallest denomination in circulation at the time was a 5 CFA piece. Those who could actually read those numbers and speak a little French referred to the money with the proper French terms for each denomination: “cinq francs”, “dix francs”, “vingt-cinq francs”, “cinqant francs”, etc.

But very few Malians could make sense of the squiggles representing those concepts on their coins and bills, and even fewer could speak French. Though the different denominations of this new currency were easily distinguishable by size and color, the vast majority of the Malian population could make no sense of the “5”, “10”, “25”, “50”, “100”, “250” and “500” engraved on their coins, and they especially couldn’t decipher the “1,000”, “2,000”, “5,000” and “10,000” printed on their bills – that is, if an innumerate person could ever get their hands on a paper bill to begin with. So they referred to their new ECOWAS currency with the same names as the sou; since the 5 CFA coin was the smallest denomination like the 1 sou piece, innumerate Malians referred to it as the Bambara word for “one”, the 10 CFA coin as “two”, the 25 CFA as “five”, the 50 CFA as “ten”, etc. There were a lot of people who could in fact read those numbers, but if they read them correctly they couldn’t do business with the innumerate.

Moreover, this is a culture that regularly bows to the lowest common denominator - no matter how absurd. The older generations who came of age during colonialism were disproportionately more likely to be unschooled and innumerate, and Malian society is largely structured upon youth’s deference to elders; in this country, if Grandpa has no teeth, then no one can eat solid foods for dinner so as to not hurt his feelings. So just as the House of Habsburg purposefully mispronounced every “s” as a “th” to humor the grotesquely underbitten, dreadfully lisping King Carlos II, the entire population of Mali established the practice of misidentifying their currency to accommodate those who do not recognize that the numeral 5 stands for the number five.

As though Malian shop-owners don’t already have enough problems staying in the black without any accounting or arithmetic, there is a unique problem which besets those who are in fact numerate; the spoken terms used to identify prices are five times smaller than when those prices are written down – thereby making every transaction at least five times more confusing than necessary. If a shop-owner does know math and he knows that a customer’s order is 9,750 francs, he has to ask his customer for “one thousand, six five hundreds and sixty” no matter how nonsensical that is.

Even I have a really hard time converting between numeric prices and Malian illiterate prices, accepting the cognitive dissonance between seeing one value of numbers on budgets and currency but referring to it as something else. Let’s say I’m haggling over cement prices and the market price for 83 sacks at 7,100 francs a sack and the vendor’s starting price should be 589,300 francs, but I don’t have any scratch paper on me so I have to figure out in my head, what’s 589,300 divided by 5?... well, 100,000… then… what’s 89,000 divided by 5?... um… 16,000… plus 1,800… then 60… so 100,000 plus 16,000 plus 1,800 plus 606 equals… 117,860…

“The price for this should be '117,860', but since I’m buying so much cement here how ‘bout you cut me a break and cut it down to '100,000'?”

“ '100,000' is too low. '107,225'.”

'107,225' ... what’s that in real numbers?... multiply by 5… 500,00… plus 35,000…”

And even I have to give up and take out the calculator application on my phone and translate every numeric price into an illiterate price, and even though I and the cement seller can actually do relatively advanced math the negotiations take so long that we get confused as to what the other is trying to say and we completely lose track of each other’s offers because the only common language we share requires that we manhandle our numbers out of deference to all of those who don’t know what to make of the numeral 5. This is why – as much as I hate speaking to people in French in this country – Bambara and all of Mali’s other tribal tongues are wholly inadequate and the language of the former colonial power is in fact necessary for dealing in transactions more complicated than a few thousands francs.

If you can imagine how difficult handling money in this country is for people like me who can in fact do math, now try to imagine how much harder it is for the masses who need to use their fingers to count to ten…

It is pretty hard to find statistics quantifying the population of the innumerate – maybe that makes a lot of sense, actually – but if slightly more than 70 percent of all Malians are absolutely illiterate, and identifying individual numbers is significantly easier than sounding out combinations of letters into words, then the innumerate population must number at least a few million persons out of a total population of 13 million. But seriously, when is the average millet farmer eking out a hand-to-mouth existence going to interact with any amount of currency so complex that it cannot be adequately expressed with the illiterate numeral system? The fact of the matter is that most people living in countries like Mali are still living in a pre-modern subsistence level agricultural economy in which they farm the coarse grains that they eat, they eat the coarse grains that they farm, and there usually isn’t enough to feed the whole family to begin with. Unlike cash crop farmers, it is fairly rare that subsistence farmers can produce any sort of surplus that can be traded for currency, the whole question of money is a relatively minor aspect of their overall business plan.

And so long as they are illiterate and innumerate, Malians are extremely vulnerable to exploitation by the better-educated urban elite. There probably isn’t very much exploitation present when two rural peasants trade between themselves, like when Amadou the farmer goes to his village market and sells handfuls of tomatoes or onions to his neighbors. Though exploitation is certainly present if Amadou farms cotton on a third of his fields and sells it all to the representative from the nearest big city textile mill. Mills like CMDT and Comatex enjoy perfect monopsony over their respective local cotton markets, so they can still collect supplies of raw cotton year after year by paying the farmers only 200 CFA for a kilogram of cotton. A typical small-scale farmer will sell about 100 kilos after an extremely successful harvest – so for that year, they will take home a monetary revenue of 20,000 CFA (roughly $40). To an innumerate farmer who does all of his counting on his fingers, all of those zeros equate to a completely incomprehensible sum of currency – he will consider himself such a wealthy waritigi that he will spend without abandon.

But in reality, the innumerate farmer is getting royally screwed. The only reason why the textile mills can pay below market value for their raw materials is that no one else in town is buying – the peasants can either take the below-market value offer from CMDT or get nothing. Maybe the executive leadership of the textile companies knows about this disparity, but Amadou the farmer has no means of tracking global commodity prices, he doesn’t even know that he is being exploited. He understands so little about the value of money that he thinks that he is coming out on top, so the next year he is going to whittle down his acreage designated for cereal crops so he can grow even more cotton.

What exactly is Amadou the farmer going to do with the 40,000 francs he earned from selling cotton this year? Perhaps he will invest it in a new plough, another donkey, some better hoes and shovels. Perhaps he will hide it under the loose brick behind his bed in case of emergencies. But most likely, he is going to blow it all on tea, sugar, cigarettes, warm Coca Cola, millet beer and prostitutes. If he hasn’t already, there’s a good chance that he will spend 20,000 francs on a cell phone which he will use can play Tetris and the snake game – he will have to pay more for credit if he wants to actually make any calls. Amadou will spend hardly anything on better food, clothing or medicine for his family; taking care of the children’s day-to-day needs is generally considered the complete responsibility of the women of the family. There’s a good argument that such profligate spending could be reformed if women had more say over family decision-making or if men knew enough about science that they appropriately valued modern medicine– but there’s an even better argument that money would be spent more wisely in this country if people actually understood its value.

And while Amadou the farmer has blown all of his cotton money on toys and candy, the cotton he planted last year has mined all of the nutrients from the soil and put nothing back in, so the third of his fields used for cotton production have become too barren for food production in the long run. Amadou might have money, and he might have even more of it if he expands his cotton acreage the next planting season, but if this trend continues he will eventually be forced to purchase his food – and the 200 francs earned for each kilo of cotton will by no means suffice to compensate for the lost food production. So even though Amadou made what looked like a lot of money this year, the nutrition and health of his family will suffer from the paltry stores in his granary. If Amadou was duped into planting too much cash crops in proportion to food crops he will have to sell off some of his cows or donkeys, maybe even take out a loan at an usurious rate of interest in order to feed his family until the next harvest.

Maybe the typical Malian farmer could avoid such hardships if they could buy better fertilizers, high yield seeds and machine tools. Maybe they could be better off if they actually knew how to manage their finances. But neither can become a reality so long as the typical Malian farmer does not comprehend that the numeral 5 stands for the number five.

Frambara

I believe that it is impossible for any reality to exist so miraculous that it can authoritatively prove the existence of God. However, the fact that the United States government assigned me to live and work in Mali because of my background in French is so absurd, in fact, that it ipse facto proves that if there is a God, He must have a sadistic sense of humor.

You see, the general rule among Peace Corps Assignment Officers is that if an applicant has any knowledge of the French language, they get sent to Africa, anyone who can speak Spanish goes to Latin America, and that one linguistics major who wrote her thesis on Kyrgyz poetry gets sent to Kyrgyzstan. This rule generally makes a lot of sense, for it efficiently utilizes Volunteers pre-existing skills and places them in communities where they can most readily integrate. And when PC Washington was going through my application way back when, they were apparently very impressed by the fact that I took 6 years of French back in junior high and high school – so much, in fact, that they decided that I should be assigned to a country in Francophone Africa.

The fact that I do know French has been more of a liability than an asset here in Mali. When people like me arrive with a solid background in French in this officially Francophone country, we wrongly assume that we can communicate with the locals and that they will understand what we are saying. I am one of those pretentious assholes who spends his free time reading Camus and Baudrillard in the original, so when I first came here and bank tellers told me that they too spoke French and I reflexively told them what to do with my money in the conditional pluperfect subjunctive tense, time and time again I would become enervated when they mangled my instructions. Presuming that people here actually speak French only leads to situations in which the Francophones get frustrated, the locals feel lorded over, and everyone loses.

Even in Africa where each and every tribe has developed their own language which they have been speaking for thousands of years, there are some African countries which have wholeheartedly embraced the language of their former colonial masters. In Ghana where there are 47 traditional tongues, the government is promoting English as the single national language in order to mitigate tribal identification and shore up national identity. Some former French colonies like Senegal and Benin have also forged such a post-tribal national culture that parents raise their children to converse exclusively in the official, formerly colonial language. And such profound cultural shifts don’t just happen with a presidential proclamation; the reason why English is the common vernacular in Ghana and French is so prevalent in Senegal and Benin is that the governments of these countries have spent the past half century investing in the education of their citizens, particularly in literacy and language instruction.

Senegal and Benin are exceptions in that they truly are Francophone countries. In the bulk of the former French colonies like Guinea, Côte d’Ivoire and Mali, there is an elite class of government officials, soldiers, gendarmes and teachers who use French for the workplace. And there is an even smaller minority of persons who do not work in government but can command the French language because they were born to such immense wealth to have attended private lycées. Though after decades of gross government neglect of the public welfare, the vast majority of adults have never received even a cursory elementary education, more than 70 percent of the population is absolutely illiterate, and they definitely do not speak more than a few token words outside of their local tribal tongue.

… But if asked, they will tell you that they do in fact speak Tubabukan ¬– the “language of the white people”. Of course, there is no such thing – the Tubabukan spoken here is a patois hybrid of French and Bambara we call “Frambara”; the nonsense that Malians who have never interacted with foreigners mislead each other into thinking is truly the “language of the white people”; usually, it is only Bambara laced with a few French nouns, maybe "est-ce que", "le voila", or - my favorite - "peut-etty". And likewise, most Malians are taught that if you see a Tubab, the proper thing to do is to address them in “their own language”:

“Bozu le Blanc!”

Here, the colloquial “Ça va?” – “how goes it?” – has transformed into functional equivalent of “Bozu”. People will shout “Sava! Sava!” and they think that they are greeting me. It is also common for Malians to greet Tubabs “Sava! Sava sava byen!” – which must have originated in the dialogue of an introductory French textbook “Ça va?”/ “Ça va bien!” and has now regressed into a greeting uttered by one single person. Thus it is thought that "Bozu sava sava biyen" is how we white people say hello.

The most entertaining phenomenon is how Frambara has taken certain phrases and so warped their meaning that they induce cringes in anyone with a rudimentary understanding of their etymological origins. For example, in Mali it is perfectly customary for people to come up to me at 8:00 in the morning and greet “Bo swa, Monsieur!”

“Soir means ‘evening’. You cannot greet anyone ‘Bon soir!’ until the sun is setting.”

“No, when you see a white person you are supposed to greet them ‘Bo swa’.”

“That… doesn’t make any sense.”

“That’s what we do in our country.”

“… As I said…”

Other times I am greeted “Bo swa, Madame!” When this happens I like to think that these kids must have learned this phrase in the context of a female teacher, which must mean that at one point in their short lives they have in fact sat in a classroom. But there are other Tubabukan bastardizations that suggest more nefarious settings.

Children in the cities greet me with a bastardization of French with a mission: “Bozu cadeau? Sava sava cadeau?” When I am confronted with such obscenity, it is apparent that some asshole taught this kid that if they see a white person, all they have to do is say these magic words and the white person will smile and give them a lollipop. But when you’ve been living here for an extended amount of time and have been petitioned for a cadeau every single day by kids and adults alike who think of white people as arcade machines which will give you a toy if only you toggle the joystick and push their buttons the right way, these childlike Frambara-isms quickly become downright dehumanizing.

The absolute worst bastardization of French is when I’m in the city and I’m approached by one of the barefoot, tomato can-toting beggar children and they blurt out, “Tubabu! Do mwa cinq mille francs!” Initially, such an utterance impresses me in that it is in fact a complete sentence – a lot more than can be said of 95 percent of the "French" spoken here. However, in every such situation it is fairly obvious that if I were to reply “Préferez-vous un billet de cinq mille francs ou cinq billets d’une mille francs?” or even “Tu t’appelles comment?” the kid would have no idea what I’m saying. These kids are never going to be taught proper French greetings, introductions, how to ask for directions or the weather. “Do mwa cinq mille francs!” constitutes the entirety of that garabout’s French, because their “Quranic teacher” only instructs their cash cows in that one saying to finance their sedentary lifestyles. Accordingly, the marabouts instill the despicable misunderstanding that the language of Senghor, Césaire and Fanon is the language of humble supplication to white people.

The logic of a Malian greeting white people in Tubabukan is inherently racist – not necessarily a vicious ideology of racial supremacy, but at least the belief that all persons of a similar skin tone are indifferentiable. Of course, if a given Malian is walking down the street and they see person with pale skin, to the Malian it makes sense to greet this stranger in Tubabukan when 70 percent of all of the melanin-deficient they will ever interact with are in fact French, Belgian, Quebeçois or Luxembourgian. But there are also a lot of Americans, Germans, Spaniards and Italians who come here speaking no French at all, and according to Malian logic they too are greeted “Bozu! Sava sava byen!” because Tubabukan is “the language of the white people” – all of them. The term Tubabu refers to Aryans, Slavs, Arabs, Persians, Latinos, and all non-African persons alike. Even when Japanese or Korean tourists trek through Dogon Country with their brand new video cameras, they too are greeted by the locals “Bozu! Sava bonbon!” When Malians address each and every white person with what they think is “our own language”, it only demonstrates how profoundly unaware they are of the outside world and the crudeness of their racialism.

Even when the adult population addresses made in grammatically correct, polite French along the lines of “Excusez-moi, monsieur, est-ce que tu es perdu?” or “Je vends du pain du qualité superieur!” it strikes me as patronizing and just as innocently racist. When people speak to me in French, it means they assume that I am a lazy NGO worker or gold miner who is only here to interact with government ministers and rarely leaves the hermetically-sealed, self-contained expatriate biodome – or even worse: a tourist.

So when anyone in this country ever speaks to me in French, I instinctively reply in Bambara – and after a few lines of dialogue in which the Bambara is speaking broken Tubabukan and the Tubabu is speaking fluent Bamanankan the former eventually realizes the folly of their efforts and switches gears into their own language. Now that I’m starting to pick up Miniankakan – the really, really local language which only has any use in the tiny homeland of the Minianka subgroup of the Bambara tribe, around my home base I can show off how dedicated I am to integration with an even greater effect. The response is universally effusive, for these people have spent their entire lives thinking that they have to learn the language of their former colonial masters if they ever want to do business with the West – with much detriment to their collective self-esteem. Thus when an Occidental comes to live amongst an isolated culture and takes the time to learn to speak to them in their own obscure tongues, the symbolism is lost on no one.

When people ask me why I do not speak to them in French like all the other Tubabs do, I point out the ideological chasm between my country and the Old World powers:

Americainw Mali la kono be Mali kanw kalan tiyenna barisa folofolo Angleterre tun be an mara i na fo jonw ye, ni an ye keleke fo an ye an yere ka jamana mine. I be se ka fo ka an te fe ka jamanw were mara.

“Americans in Mali take the time to learn Malian tongues largely because of our own history of exploitation by the British and our War for Independence… You could say that our own experience has left a particular distaste for colonialism.”

A Conversation with the Egg Sandwichtigi

Madu: Hey there Bakary, could I have a fried egg sandwich with three eggs and onions?

Bakary: No problem! By the way, Madu, I’ve got a question.

M: Shoot.

Bakary: When are you going back to America?

M: If all goes well I’ll be here until September 2010.

B: And then are you going back to America?

M: Eventually. But first, I think I’ll travel around Africa for a few months... I want to go to Ghana, Benin, Senegal, maybe even Tunisia, Libya or Egypt... Then I'll go back to America.

B: Ok, well when you do go to America, we will go together, right?

M: Bakary, you know that I can’t get you a visa – so don’t even bother asking.

B: Eh!!! Madu, don’t be so mean!!! Here in Mali we are poor and there are no jobs, but in America there is money and I can work and find so much money!!!

M: I’m not being mean, Bakary, I’m being honest. If I were to tell you that you can go to America and that you can find work there, I’d be lying.

B: But you live in America! Surely you help me find a job!

M: No I can’t!!! No one in America can find jobs!!! When I go back to America, even I probably won’t be able to find a job!!! Besides, you can’t even speak the language, and if you can’t speak with your boss how is he going to hire you?

B: Oh, but I do speak the language! I can speak Tubabukan! (“Tubabukan”, which in Bambara literally translates into “White People Language”, refers to the language of their former colonial overlords: French)

M: If you think that you can get a job in America speaking “Tubabukan”, then you definitely can’t. Personne ne parle pas le français aux États-Unis, tout le monde ne parle que l’anglais!

B: You speak Tubabukan!

M: I also speak Bambara, Minianka and Arabic, and those won't get you very far in the American job market either.

B: Well... I will work for you!

M: What are you talking about? I just told you that I’m going to be unemployed, I'll probably be living in my parents’ basement. I can’t hire you to sit around and play Uno with me.

B: What about your parents? For room and board, I will work in your fathers’ fields!

M: My father is a psychiatrist specializing in children and adolescents. He’s not a farmer. He doesn’t have any fields.

B: Oh, but there is so much money in America! You are all so rich! Surely there has to be some work there for me to do!

M: How do I explain this without offending you?... There are 30 million Americans who are looking for work and can’t find it. And that’s not counting the people who have some work but not enough so they’re looking for more work, that’s not counting the people who have work but it’s bad work and they can’t find any work that pays a decent wage, and that’s not counting the people who have given up looking for work altogether!!! Even if you somehow did get a visa to come to America and even if there were any jobs, there would be at least 50 million Americans already waiting in line - almost every single one of them has a high school diploma, maybe half of them have a university degree, and every single one of them speaks more English than you do because they know that no one in America speaks French – which until a minute ago, you didn’t. Unless you have some idea to create your own business¸ a completely new idea that no one in America has had before, there’s no way in Hell you’re ever going to find a job in America.

B: I could sell fried egg sandwiches! Everyone loves fried egg sandwiches!

(Long Awkward Pause)

M: Come to think of it, I could probably find you a job writing economic stimulus policy for a Republican think tank…

B: Really? What do I have to do to get this job?

M: Oh… nevermind…