A Requiem for Malian Democracy (1993-2012)

             As I write this, the Sun is just coming up in my former home of Diaramana, in the erstwhile Republic of Mali. The first call to prayer has already been issued. It is hot season now, too dry to do much farm work. But the women are already busy at work, pounding away at millet to cook a simple porridge for their family’s breakfast. This year their porridge is much leaner because there is a food crisis; it might be the family’s sole meal for the day. This year’s sharp rise in grain prices is partly because last rainy season’s rains were pitiful. But the real reason grain prices are so harshly inflated is because hundreds of thousands of families have fled from the fighting in the North - food becomes rather scarce when an ethnic insurgency creates a refugee crisis and a subsistence agriculturalist population can’t farm.

            Though the Sun is just now rising, today might be the darkest day in the history of this young nation. Though it is still too soon to say for sure, today, March 22, 2012, may mark the death of Malian democracy. A group of mutinous soldiers calling themselves the NCRDRS, led by a certain Capt. Amadou Sanogo, appears to have achieved a coup d’état. In a matter of hours, the mutinous soldiers have seized the state television and radio network ORTM, wrested and looted the presidential palace, and arrested numerous government ministers.

 NCRDRS has used ORTM to  announce that they have suspended the Malian Constitution and dissolved all "state institutions" i.e. the National Assembly, the Supreme Court, and - notably - the special high courts which exist specifically to try government officials for treason.

            To understand the import of these events, one must contextualize them in Mali's 51½ years as an independent state.

            Between independence in 1960 and 1991, Mali was governed by strongmen.  Modibo Keíta first ran the country as a First Wave post-colonialist state, conducted a disastrous experiment in African socialism and collectivist agriculture, and suffered humiliating losses to the Tuareg rebels. In 1968, Lt. Moussa Traoré led a military coup against Keíta and seized control of the Malian state - which he grafted and embezzled as his personal fiefdom for almost a quarter century. Traoré's one positive contribution was his system of decentralisation in which he established a federalist-style system of local governments on the level of Region, Cercle, and Commune;  they were still for the most part as corrupt as sin - but at least the corruption was local. Traoré even allowed elections in the local governments, but only one party (his) was on the ballot.  

But something profound happened in 1991, when paratrooper commander Amadou Toumani Touré in turn deposed the President of Mali. “ATT”, as he is popularly known, declared that he would organize multiparty elections in 1993, that he would not be a candidate, and that he would step down from office. And remarkably enough, Touré did exactly that.

           In 2002, Touré ran for the presidency himself as an independent candidate. Having shown that he respected republican institutions enough that he could do the unthinkable and relinquish power without a fight, ATT won election handily. The Malian people called him “le Soldat de la Democratie”; he allowed free, multiparty elections, promoted freedom of the press and political rights for women. Sure, Touré had his faults – over ten years, his administration was criticized for political cronyism; he made some major military blunders regarding the rebellion in the North, and he was famously aloof from public opinion. But ATT never rigged any elections, he never took political prisoners. He was an authentic democrat who planned to abide by  the constitutional term limits, step down again at the end of his second term, and go back to tilling his millet fields like a Malian George Washington.  

Malian democracy (1993 – 2012), as established by President Touré, has had its share of hiccups and bumps in the road. It was of course difficult to establish a democratic culture in a country where the bulk of the population lives in small villages, often quite far from the nearest polling stations. The vast majority of the population is illiterate, and only a small minority has completed a high school education. It would be an understatement to say that corruption, cronyism, and general incompetence in local government are all quite common. 

When I was working with the Office of the Mayor of the Commune, I kept on submitting typed policy proposals to the Mayor for water projects. He would look at my drafts for a few minutes, nod, and hand them back to me. "Perfect! No problems!", he would say. It took me a few months to realize that the Mayor - a guy whose job was to type up official government documents - was completely illiterate. If he didn't have a stamp with his name on it, he signed his name with an "X." It follows that Monsieur la Mairie was not very effective at typing birth certificates and marriage certificates on his typewriter. But if the majority of the population of a given Commune is illiterate, the important thing is that the people have the right to choose which among their illiterate fellow citizens gets to serve in public office - that's the beauty of democracy.

On the other hand, there are a number of outstanding public servants in Mali who are dedicated to the cause they serve. I have met with village chiefs and advisory councils who lead their communities in the daily struggle of subsistence and development. I have worked with Malian water committees who valued improving their environment and quality of life.  Most importantly, I have plenty of teachers and principals who are earnestly dedicated to teaching the next generation of Malians to be educated and capable citizens.

 Not everyone in public life is involved for altruistic reasons, there are a number of politicians who are just looking for a lucrative source of income - those are some of the outstanding problems in Malian politics. But there are some people in Malian history who have risen to the top and have demonstrated their capacity for leadership in a democratic society; namely President Amadou Toumani Touré, who planned to step down after his second term this spring. Among the candidates running for President in the elections scheduled for April 29th include Modibo Sidibé, a former Prime Minister, Sidibé Aminata Diallo, a former Minister of Education, Oumar Mariko, a member of Parliament,  Ibrahim Boubacar Keïta, another former Prime Minister, former speaker of the National Assembly, and Cheick Modibo Diarra, a Malian astrophysicist who worked at NASA and Microsoft Africa.

Warts and all, the Malian experience in electoral democracy has been considerably successful.  They have conducted four presidential elections, and a fifth is scheduled for April. Especially on the level of Communal government (the equivalent of a county), much of the population personally interacts with their elected Mayor. When I lived in Diaramana, my host mother Durcas Dembele ran in the Mayoral primary, and she rode from village to village on her motorcycle stumping for votes. In the end, Durcas lost among the nine candidates on the primary ballot.

In April 2009, le Commune de Diaramana held its general elections at the primary school. People came from every village in the Commune dressed in their finest clothes to vote for their Mayor. Election Day has become a national holiday woven into the fabric of Malian society.


An independent committee of active citizens conducted the balloting process and made sure that each citizen is registered to vote in the Commune. The voters dipped their fingers in purple ink to mark their ballot. Because so few people can read, the ballot was listed by party and each party’s line was marked by its official symbol; ADEMA is a bumblebee, SADI is a lion, etc.


Each citizen casted his or her vote in privacy.


My good friend Sidiki showed off his purple ink-stained fingers. In a country where democratic self-government has only truly existed for 19 years, voting is a matter of great pride. Sidiki wouldn’t tell me whom he voted for, because the principle of confidentiality is taken so seriously.

            The great tragedy of this coup is not just that an elected President has fallen, subverting the will of the people. The tragedy is that with the declaration of the suspension of the Constitution and the dissolution of all state instutions, the NCRDRS may have permanently extinguished the fire of Malian democracy. All of these institutions of representative self-government which the Malian people have been developing for decades may have been stamped out by a new military junta.

              It is difficult enough to eke out a living farming in the parched Sahel. It is even more difficult when the heavy hand of a tyrannical government oppresses the people with extortion, bribery, graft, embezzlement, and exorbitant taxation to fund a war that many analysts say cannot be won. That is why, in order to facilitate sustainable development and improve their standard of living, the people of Mali must be able to guide their own destiny with a truly representative self-government.

The people of Mali do not have very much. They are one of the very poorest nations in the world. But one thing that they did have was democracy.

They will have it once again, insh’allah.

Ala k'aw deme.

Ala ka here caya.

Ala k'a ban pyu pyu.

Eating With My Hands

To preclude accusations of “cultural imperialism” the educational philosophy of the Peace Corps is all but one of cultural relativism. We are supposed to teach the people of developing countries about which new varieties of sorghum offer the highest yields, how to start a business and manage their accounts, sometimes we work in the classroom as math and science teachers – but we’re supposed to teach only objective truths and we’re explicitly not supposed to tender criticism of our host country’s indigenous culture. Understandably, few self-respecting nations which have lived through the humiliation of Colonialism – particularly those nations which have suffered under the yoke of French overlords who appointed themselves mission civilatrice and sought to discredit and dismantle the beliefs of tribal heritage – would now petition the United States to come and tell them that their culture is wrong.

However, maintaining a position of absolute political correctness is impossible when the prevailing practices in a given field are in fact objectively wrong. When Malians greet me “bo swa” at 8 in the morning, when bus drivers have filled their car beyond the legal maximum capacity and tell me to cough up more cash so they can bribe the police, when people ask for leaves from my lemon tree so they don’t feel guilty about not buying real medicine for their child in a malarial coma, it would be a disservice for me to just go along with the prevailing practices of this culture and not criticize the way people live in this country to their faces. Of course a liberal would argue that all of the above are the muddling of Western modernity, so all of this present-day African nonsense can be attributed to the corrupting influence of French colonial rule. But some of the most self-defeating customs which people follow here were established long before there even was such thing as a France, it would be obtuse for thinking people to subscribe to the absolutely non-judgmental broadmindedness of mushy-headed liberalism and tell themselves “it’s not wrong, it’s just different.”


Perhaps the most difficult custom for a mushy-headed liberal to digest is the way that Malians eat – because it is an objective truth that the traditional way of eating is one of the most significant vectors of disease transmission in this society. Malians by and large eat their food with their hands, and so long as they are eating with family or friends they eat with their hands from a single communal food bowl. Most Malian men tend to livestock and spread their manure over the fields, almost everyone wipes their butt all women wipe their children’s with their left hand; somehow or another over the course of the day their hands are likely to come into contact with fecal matter. Hardly anyone ever washes their hands with soap, so when Malians eat with their hands from the communal food bowl they share and consume each other’s fecal germs. Hence the primary reason why giardia, dysentery and all other forms of severe diarrhea are endemic in this culture is the purely cultural factor of how one brings food to one’s mouth.

When I arrived in Mali for Peace Corps Training, the language and cultural teachers collected me and my fellow trainees into groups of six, sat us around big aluminum bowls of zamé: fried rice with chunks of beef, cabbage, hot peppers and onions. The object of our lesson that day was to learn to eat our lunch with our hands. This task was not so daunting for a dedicated multiculturalist such as myself; I had spent a month in Sri Lanka where I learned the Indian subcontinent’s method of folding one’s four fingers into a V-shape to scoop up a mouthful of rice and sauce and pushing it towards one’s mouth with the thumb – the Sri Lankan finger scoop method could be so refined that at the end of a meal an apt practitioner should have their palm perfectly clean. In my prior experience, eating with my hands was something exotic and worldly.

“Exotic” – yes, but “worldly” is not the first word that usually comes to mind as a Westerner watches Malians eating with their hands. Unlike the Sri Lankans and their graceful finger scoop, a Malian is wont to grab a heaping handful of rice with their right hand, squeeze it in their palm, open their mouth as wide as they can and place their palm to their bottom lip as they shove the handful of rice into their gaping gullet, then thrust the entirety of their four fingers deep into their mouth so they can suck off every last drop of sauce. If they are the staple dish of grayish-green millet goop called toh, Malians will cup their hand a little more as they dip the millet goop balls into a separate bowl of sticky sauce made from baobab leaves, dried fish and peanut oil – the sucking of the fingers remains the same. All of this is done as quickly as possible with no conversation between wolfing down handfuls of food, because the faster one eats the more they can consume. After they have eaten their fill, a Malian licks his or her saucy hand clean in a manner not unlike that of a cat preening the fur on their head.

I went with the flow as I tried to integrate into the family of Karitie Sanogo and Durcas Dembele and their Minianka subgroup of the Bambara tribe. I found eating with my hand sloppy, and it was quite impractical if I was eating lunch alone and trying to read a book. But when I sat down with a group of men around the communal food bowl, I thought “When in Rome…” and shoveled away. I feared that eating with a fork or a spoon would set this hairy, light-skinned Jewish boy apart as an even more distinct Other.

Cheap aluminum forks and spoons are widely available at any sizeable market for no more than the price of a small box of tea, so there were some times though when I wondered how Malians had never developed the custom of eating with utensils by their own initiative. On special occasions Durcas would cook spaghetti seasoned with a bit of tomato paste and a heaping volume of peanut oil, and since food here is served directly from the kitchen with no time to cool off people would begin to dig in while the oil on the spaghetti was still scalding hot. The oil would be so hot that even the old men with their thickly-calloused hands would be wincing at the touch. And long strands of spaghetti are not designed to be eaten manually; every time the men around me would reach down for another painful handful they struggled to shove eight inches of floppy, steaming noodles into their mouths – at least half of the spaghetti strands would be dangling out of their mouths as they chewed, splattering hot burning oil all over their faces and all over their clothing. All of the men seemed to be in such pain and discomfort that it was hard to believe that any of them really enjoyed eating this impractical delicacy.

After a few experiences with this nonsense, the third time that Durcas prepared spaghetti I came equipped with a fork and showed them a much more efficient way of twirling it into practical, bite-sized portions. “You see, not long after the Italians learned how to make spaghetti they invented these things called forks so that they could it without burning their hands and making a mess with the sauce.”

“Maybe they eat with forks in Italy” I was reprimanded, “but here in Mali we eat with our hands.”

“Suite yourself” I thought, and twirled my spaghetti with a fork as all the other men in the family continued scalding their hands.

So long as we weren’t eating spaghetti covered in scalding-hot oil, I thought that eating manually from the communal food bowl didn’t have to be a bad thing, for I could use every meal as a forum to inculcate proper hygiene by washing my hands with soap and water and insisting that every man I ate with do the same. This should be no minor formality in a society of people who wash after defecating by sticking their left hand up their asshole, scrape their rectum with an extra-long pinky nail, and then flush their asshole clean with water from a plastic teapot. Malian culture stresses that anal cleansing is to be conducted exclusively with the left hand – “the good hand”, and that one eats with only the hand on the right – “the rice hand”. But all of this business about separating the right hand from the left comes to naught only a few seconds after anal cleansing when Malians “wash” both hands with only water from that same plastic teapot which was up their asshole only moments ago. Before eating from the communal food bowl, they will pass a calabash or tin can full of water around in a circle starting with the eldest so that everyone can mush their left and right hands together in the increasingly-filthy water. In this culture where just about everyone is completely ignorant of modern germ theory, people think this is actually a hygienic practice.

The fact of the matter is that the prevalent Malian “hand-washing” practices is one of the primary reasons why the population of Mali suffers from more giardia and dysentery than almost any other culture in the world, it goes a long way in explaining why 2 out of 5 children in this country die before the age of 5 and why life expectancy is only 45 years for men, 48 for women. If a circle of men are mushing their shitty hands together in the same calabash of water then after the calabash has gone around everyone has the fecal matter of other men on his hands. And if these men are then eating with their hands from the same bowl of rice or toh, over the course of a meal they are most likely consuming each other’s fecal matter. The Minianka village in which I have lived for two years is an unwittingly coprophagic culture, for a person to eat with their hands from a communal food bowl without having adequately washed their hands is to directly subject other people to the consumption of human feces.

I don’t think that it is going too far out on a limb to say that traditional Minianka eating habits are not just distasteful to the cultural norms to which I am accustomed but objectively wrong. Let’s say that I had in my possession a syringe containing Ebola – wouldn’t it be immoral for me to inject it into an innocent bystander and infect them with the deadly virus? Or if someone knew that they were infected with HIV, wouldn’t it be immoral for them to exchange bodily fluids with another person and subject them to that deadly disease? Knowing that the consumption of human feces is a surefire way to make someone sick, wouldn’t it be wrong to furtively slip a fresh stool from a cholera patient into someone else’s milkshake? How about if someone with dysentery wipes their ass with their hand and then puts his hand in someone else’s rice bowl? Even if someone has yet to be diagnosed with a particular malady, in this day and age when (at least in the Western world) people understand how diseases are transmitted it is unambiguously wrong to engage in practices known to spread serious illness. Ignorance might obviate moral culpability, but it does not change the fundamental wrongness of a practice which inflicts harm upon others.

Where the Peace Corps Volunteer comes into the equation to break the cycle of disease and poverty is to simply eat with the people and still live up to our own standards of cleanliness. Accepting the fact that the Minianka villagers of Sanadougou crouch around a communal food bowl to eat with their hands, I made my point of washing my hands with soap before eating and insisting that all the other men eating with me do the same. I even bought this nifty plastic contraption to replace the calabash so that everyone could wash their hands with a clean, non-toilet plastic teapot over a receptacle without dirtying their hands in other people’s filth. I was eating with the Director of the elementary school Karitie Sanogo and two bachelor teachers Lazar Balo and Boubacar Coulibaly – if there was anyone in this society who could understand proper hygiene it should be this literate elite – and even if they preferred to not wash their hands with soap they grudgingly obliged to accommodate this foreigner’s eccentric ways.


That is not to say that I didn’t have any trouble getting my eating partners to wash their hands. Karitie and the teachers were generally cooperative, but they would have guests come to eat from the food bowl on a regular basis. When we passed the soap and water around the circle, guests would usually just rinse their hands with the water and mush them together like usual. I would nag them about the soap, and they would usually retort, “In our country, we don’t wash our hands with soap – we wash our hands with water.”

“I know – and that’s why so many people in your country die from dysentery. In my country, no one ever gets sick with dysentery – it just doesn’t happen because we wash our hands with water and soap.”

Some men simply refused. “SHUBAGAW!!!” they hollered – “evil sorcerers”. Though they publicly identify themselves as Muslims or Christians, the people in Sanadougou cling tenaciously to their animist superstitions; not knowing anything about germs or viruses, they believe that illness and disease come from these evil sorcerers' black magic spells. And according to ancient lore, washing your hands with water protects oneself from such malevolent witchcraft – soap, however, negates water’s protective powers and renders one vulnerable to sorcerers and their evil ways. Grown adults seriously believe in this twaddle, to such an extent that they would raise the tone of the conversation into a shouting match.

“NO!!! I REFUSE to use soap!!! EVIL SORCERERS!!!”

“Evil sorcerers ARE NOT REAL!!! THEY DON’T EXIST!!!

At this point in the conversation, Karitie would look his guest sternly in the eye and lash them in Minianka “If you’re going to eat with the American, you have to wash your hands with soap. Just do it.”

In a society where old men are considered to be a depository of all knowledge and wisdom, people thought it was downright subversive for 24-year-old me to tell a 50-year-old cekoroba how to wash his hands. This went for anyone. Even on the occasion when the chief of the village or the Mayor of the entire Commune would come to eat with Karitie and me, without batting an eyelash I directed the upper crust of society to scrub their hands with soap. And they were duly offended. No one likes to be told that they’ve been eating shit their entire life – let alone by a foreigner half their age.

I ate like this for about a year, getting in fights with Karitie’s houseguests and winning so long as Karitie was there himself to provide the moral support. But on some occasions he would be gone on business and I would be eating alone with the teachers Lazar and Boubacar – neither of which had any desire to be cursed by evil wizards any more than the next guy, they were only washing their hands to humor their boss. One night Lazar looked me defiantly in the eye, mushed his hands in a pot of water and plunged them into the bowl full of rice, “You can’t make me wash my hands with soap.”

“You’re right. And I can’t eat with you, because I don’t want to eat rice with your shit all over it.” I got up and walked home to cook dinner by myself. Durcas was so thoroughly insulted that I had walked away from her afternoon’s work that she gave Lazar an earful; from then on before eating he would dip his hands into the soap dish while casting me the stink eye.

I put up with this shit for quite a while, but after a year of struggling to convince my eating partners about the merits of soap from time to time I would still find myself running to the nyegen with giardia. I was filtering and treating every drop of water that went into my body, so the only way I could possibly be getting giardia was from the food I was eating. I began to watch the other men eating from the food bowl more closely, and I realized that that a lot of them were merely feigning to apply soap; most dinner guests – and Lazar of course – were meekly touching the bar of soap with the tip of their forefinger and calling it a day. Apparently they thought that hand-washing with soap was just some sort of Tubab eating ritual (though it isn’t – we don’t eat with our hands from any sort of communal anything). No matter how many times I tried to explain how soap actually has chemical properties which detach particulate matter from one’s skin and kill the microorganisms which cause diarrhea, they thought that I was just spouting off American mythology equivalent to their own folklore about witches and wizards. No matter how hard I tried, it seemed that science, reason and the moral power of example had no use on these people – and that for me to eat with my hands from a food bowl meant that I would inevitably be eating other people’s feces.

I thought long and hard about this. Eating from the communal food bowl was more than just a ritual in Minianka society. Even though conversation has nothing to do with it, eating together with another person is the most basic social activity which I could partake with another Minianka man as a sign of friendship and camaraderie. To be a part of this society meant eating with the same food as them, to eat from a food bowl with another is to treat them as one’s equal. To eat alone would be interpreted as a strong demonstration that I truly wished to set myself apart from this society.

I called to seek the wisdom and sagacity of my elders, and my dad recounted a conversation we had had when I was a senior in high school driving around New England looking at colleges. I had made a point of checking out schools where Greek life was small to nonexistent, because I didn’t want to be faced with the choice of either joining a fraternity or having no social life.

“Don’t worry about it, Zac, even if you go to Dartmouth or Cornell that doesn’t mean you have to join the Deltas. There are better ways of creating lasting bonds with friends than running some dehumanizing hazing gauntlet.”

“If I did want to join a fraternity, what would I have to do in order to pledge?”

“Let’s put it this way: if you’re invited to join a secret society and you’re told you have to eat a brother’s feces, just say nothing more and walk away. If you have to eat someone’s shit in order to be a member of a society, there can’t be any compelling reason for you to be a part of it.”

Thus I concluded that I could no longer eat from the communal food bowl.

I came to Karitie and Durcas’ house one day with my own plastic bowl and explained that from that day onwards I could only eat alone. They really didn’t know what to make of it – no one had ever done or said anything like this before. I didn’t have the heart to explain to them the real reason why I couldn’t eat from the men’s bowl, I feared they would interpret it as a grave insult and they would disregard anything else I had to say. So I offered a little white lie that my doctor told me I needed to lose weight and that I should start exercising portion control: “It’s not that I don’t like eating your rice and peanut butter sauce, it’s that I love it so much that if you put the whole bowl in front of me I’m going to eat the whole thing!”

But Karitie and Durcas are intelligent people. Eventually they figured it out.

For the rest of the year, guests to their food bowl would make a stink about me eating alone. People would accuse me of being an elitist or a racist; they would ask “You think you’re better than us?” I didn’t want to make a big deal of it, but in regards to the very significant matter of hygiene I certainly did think so – I knew so, it was a fact.

And eventually I realized that since I was eating by myself, and conversation has nothing to do with the Malian eating ritual anyway, I might as well bring a book or magazine with me to read while I ate from my private food bowl. But it was difficult to turn the pages when I had peanut butter sauce all over my right hand, so I started bringing a spoon with me to all of my meals. Eventually I dropped the eating with my hands business altogether, because I had discovered a much cleaner, more efficient and hygienic manner of bringing food to my mouth.

The more I thought about it, there is really no compelling reason for me or for anyone else to eat with their hands, that it’s simply a primitive practice employed by those cultures who have yet to embrace modern sanitation. Hand-washing with soap is a harm-reduction practice which can reduce the spread of disease among cultures that eat with their hands much like if heroin addicts were to shoot up with clean needles instead of sharing them – but the harm can be eliminated if people would stop shooting heroin altogether. I resolved to never eat with my hands again.

Once I started eating with utensils again, Durcas remarked that I was “eating like a Tubab.”

“No matter how long you look at it, a tree stump will never turn into a crocodile”, I replied. The one and only proverb in the Bambara language means that some things just don’t change.

And eventually I noticed that Karitie, Lazar and Boubacar had given up on washing their hands with soap. It was plainly obvious that they had been going through that charade the whole time to humor me – not because they were actually serious about adopting this practice. Despite a whole year of my lectures about the giardia, the fecal-oral cycle and disease prevention, the most educated men in the entire community were still content to be ingesting each other’s fecal matter.

“No matter how long you look at it, a tree stump will never turn into a crocodile”, Karitie said.

I was really disappointed with this outcome, both with my host family and with myself. I interpreted it as my greatest failure in two years of Peace Corps service.

The people of this village requested a Peace Corps Volunteer to help them build the capacity to improve their water and sanitation, so the United States government decided to take this former lifeguard with three years experience testing and chlorinating the pool water, they trained me to build concrete wells, latrines and wastewater receptacles, and sent me to Sanadougou. With the help of the Water Committee and my expert mason counterpart, we secured roughly $6,000 in USAID , NGO and private donor grants to build 112 latrines, 96 soak pits, 3 infiltration trenches and 6 top-well platforms in families’ homes, we built a row of latrines at the secondary school, we built a row of latrines at le Bureau de la Mairie, we even repaired and reorganized a broken solar water pump-to-tap system so that the people of Sanadougou could enjoy clean, potable drinking water. After all the work that we did, Sanadougou is now a visibly cleaner place. Though I have no way of compiling exact statistics, our work to improve this community’s infrastructure should lead to a significant decrease in the transmission of diarrheal diseases.

Though as I prepare ready to leave for America, I fear that all my work has come to naught because I wasn’t able to make a dent in Sanadougou’s eating habits. The World Health Organization estimates that if people would only wash their hands with soap it would reduce the incidence of diarrheal disease by 43 percent. Even if Engineers Without Borders were to expand the solar pump-to-tap system and bring running water directly to every family’s kitchen, even if some charity were to give the people of Sanadougou a lifetime supply of bottled Evian so long as people keep on eating the way that they do now they are still going to be consuming each other’s shit. Until people in Mali are willing to change their habits, giardia and dysentery are going to forever remain facts of life and children in this town are still going to die from simple bouts of diarrhea.

The fact of the matter is that sometimes tree stumps do, in fact, turn into crocodiles. There’s a word for this phenomenon: “progress”. Hundreds of years ago, the disparate Slavic tribes from which I am descended, the Franks, Teutons, Angles and Celts all lived in earthen huts, they farmed the little food they had with simple hand tools made of iron and wood, they lived in poverty not unlike that of the present-day Miniankas. They didn’t have toilets, they didn’t have toilet paper, and they ate their potatoes with their hands, so the tribes of Europe suffered from endemic giardia and dysentery and they had a life expectancy about as low as that of the Miniankas today. But sometime around the 10th century the French and Italian nobility popularized a simple technology which made eating all the more cleaner: the fork. It took a few more centuries for the peasants and lowly serfs to follow in kind, but eventually all the people of Europe adopted this new custom which not only made eating easier and more pleasurable but also reduced the incidence of disease.

There was also a time in the not-so-distant past when Europeans didn’t quite understand disease transmission either; they thought that sickness was spread by the Devil, the cold and the wind. There was a time when angry mobs massacred Jews by the hundreds because they could think of no other explanation for why the plague had come to their city, they burned so-called witches at the stake for causing outbreaks of cholera – very few Westerners took the time to question whether the spread of disease had anything to do with the complete and utter lack of sanitation in the cities where people lived amongst and ate and drank their own filth.

Now America, Europe, Japan, Australia and all the countries of the developed West have established a culture in which it is absolutely unacceptable for people to eat most foods with our hands, we all eat from our own separate bowls and separate plates with our own separate sets of utensils. And even though a surprising number of Westerners are not conscientious about washing their hands on their way out of the bathroom, we have developed our cultural habits to the point where even if you invite someone over for dinner and they did have microscopic pathogens crawling all over their hands, it wouldn’t really matter because at no point over the course of the meal is your guest ever going to put their hands in your food. As a result, giardia, dysentery and cholera are all but nonexistent in Western societies, it would be a freak occurrence if a child were to die from diarrhea, and we can expect to live to a ripe old age in our late 70s. It is only a rare occasion when someone falls so sick that they cannot work, and since we are so much healthier and more productive we have so much more wealth and a superior standard of living.

When I try to explain this to Malians, they typically respond along the lines of “Well, you Americans are healthy because you have so much money and you can buy so much more medicine” – they think that every time we contract dysentery we just pop some expensive pills and that’s the end of it. I insist that Americans don’t ever contract dysentery to begin with and few will believe me – gastrointestinal disease is simply accepted as a fact of life in these parts. More worldly Malians might understand that everyone in America has flush toilets and tap water in their home, but they can still attribute that to our superior wealth – it seems that no one is willing to be critical enough of their own culture to realize that maybe our superior health has more to do with our superior hygiene and superior methods of disease prevention, and that they could improve their own health if only they adopt new methods of eating.

The people of Mali have a choice; either they can overcome the pagan superstitions about evil sorcerers and start washing their hands with soap, or they can start eating from separate food bowls, or they can start eating with forks or spoons or chopsticks or spatulas or flat-nosed screwdrivers - anything besides the hands; even better, they can adopt some combination of all of the above. Or they can continue what they’re doing and forever remain mired in this endless cycle of disease. This kind of change is not something that white-skinned NGO workers can do for them – changing the habits and customs of Malian culture is something that only Malians can do for themselves. And when they do take this great leap forward, the people of Mali will finally understand that development is not just about building roads and factories but that it is also about changing behavior, that positive change doesn’t require massive foreign aid and that it can be done on the cheap or for free, and that the future of their society truly rests in their own hands.

Development with a Healthy Dose of Conservatism

I would probably sound like too much of a cliché of myself if I were to tell you that this guy who spent his days until recently stomping his sandal-clad feet around campus, spouting incendiary rhetoric about Democracy and Socialism and rousing the masses to the barricades, has spent a year in the Peace Corps and has since been so violently mugged by the cruel realities of human nature that he has transformed into a Conservative.

So I’m not going to tell you that. It is very difficult for those of us who have come of age during the intellectual leadership of George W. Bush, Tom DeLay and Sarah Palin to respect Conservatism with a capitol “C” as a coherent ideology. To me and so many members of my generation, the history of the past decade has utterly discredited the movement which seeks to build a double-layered fence across the Mexican border, to amend the Constitution to ban same-sex marriage, to defend "real Americans" and Western civilization itself from illegal immigrants, homosexuals, atheists, French people and the United Nations. Especially in the midst of this prolonged recession, with their hostility to any sort of government intervention in anything to do with the economy asides from more tax cuts and more bailouts to the banks, the dogmatic amalgam of supply-side economics and right-wing Christian fundamentalism that is the American Conservative Movement is rapidly atrophying into an obscure cabal as completely divorced from matters of this world as is the Church of Scientology or Zoroastrianism.

But nevertheless, I must sheepishly admit that my after one year in the Peace Corps, my experience so far has made me substantially tempered my faith in our power to “remake the world anew”. Living in a real-life African village and seeing first-hand the innumerable failures of past governments and foreign NGOs to revolutionize Malian society, I have unintentionally come to terms with the fact that one can only do so much. If after two years I can walk from my house to the center of town without having to tiptoe around puddles of human waste, I will consider my service a roaring success. Not only have I come to appreciate the values of prudence and restraint, but experience has taught me that private property, capitalism and individual responsibility are remarkably more effective in achieving long-lasting institutional change than any socialist principles of collective ownership. It would be fair to say that I have become significantly more conservative with a lower-case “c”; as defined by Merriam-Webster:

“con•serv’a•tive, adj. 1. skeptical of change. 2. avoiding excesses. 3. of or relating to a political philosophy based on tradition and social stability, stressing established institutions, and preferring gradual development to abrupt change.”

To be a Peace Corps Volunteer in Mali is in many ways like being bashed over the head with a hardbound copy of Atlas Shrugged all day, every day after day after day. Part of it is for the first time in my life having my own house and plot of land which I can call my own, and being completely and utterly responsible for its upkeep (technically I don’t own the property, but we’ll get to that in a minute). Part of it is the realization which comes with biking way out into the bush where its just me, sand, trees and scrub as far as the eye can see and realizing that if I were to fall and crack my head open on a rock, no one is ever coming to get me. Technically there is the Peace Corps Medical Unit in Bamako – but that’s two provinces and 400 kilometers away. If I get a nasty cut, if my latrine is dirty, if my house is full of termites, no one else is going to do anything about it out of the generosity of their heart – I have no choice but to be completely responsible for maintaining my own health, my home and garden. In this neck of the world, it’s really every man for himself.

By no means can my sharp veer towards rugged individualism be attributed to my having adopted the values of my host culture. The Bambara society amongst which I currently reside is tremendously more communalistic than anything I have known in America – even the semester I lived in the Vegan cooperative house. Here in the village of Sanadougou, every man and every woman share almost every daily activity with their family; they plow their fields together, they plant their seeds together, they reap their harvest together and then the women cook it together, it is unthinkable that anyone would ever eat a single meal alone. Though the dugutigi assigns each plot to certain families as determined by their historical usage, the fields are officially held amongst the whole village. There are even a handful of fields which are explicitly shared, and every couple of weeks during rainy season a man marches through the streets beating a drum to hail all the men to till the commons. There is a significant degree of familial autonomy – the head of each household has their own indivisible property and is responsible for feeding his own progeny, but no Bambara man would ever his relatives go hungry while stores remain in his own granary. And since 90 percent of all the families in this town share the last name Sogoba, the traditional family safety net for all intents and purposes extends throughout this entire society.

That is not to say that Bambara society is a Socialist Utopia for the whole world to emulate. The sharing of food is a practice born out of evolutionary necessity in this culture where death by malnutrition if not outright starvation is fairly ordinary. If Boubacar sees that Amadou’s millet granary has gone empty, he is probably going to invite his neighbor to na duminike until the next harvest – not just because Boubacar is such a nice guy, but because he would like Amadou to reciprocate the next time that he suffers the same fate. If there were a few more months of precipitation, if agricultural production was more efficient and food were not so scarce to begin with, food-sharing might not be such an indispensable bedrock of Bambara culture.

There is a fair argument to be made that Mali is so poor, that the output of its primarily agrarian economy is so diminutive precisely because of the traditional practices of communal land ownership. There’s plenty of land, and there’s certainly no shortage of labor – but there is not enough capital to spur significant economic growth. Almost all planting and harvesting is conducted with simple manual plows, hoes and scythes made out of wood and iron; no matter how hard and how long a family works with such limited tools, it will always remain a challenge to eke out a subsistence diet – let alone see enough windfall profits to invest in new physical capital and expand agricultural output. In the history of American and European economic development, farmers were able to escape this poverty trap by using their real estate deeds as collateral to take out loans and invest in tractors, irrigation pumps and other machine tools which expanded yields many times over. But such innovation will forever remain elusive to Bambara farmers who have only the dugutigi’s word to their parcels of the communal fields, who technically have no landed property to their name, and will continue to be shut out from the credit which they need for investment and growth.

During the heady days after independence in 1960, the nationalist revolutionary President Modibo Keíta tried to take Mali’s communalistic ethos even further and institute a People’s Republic modeled after the Soviet Union and China. Keíta aimed to establish Malian Communism on the organic village level; every man was ordered to harvest a pre-assigned quota of millet which was to be stored in village-wide granaries – which were in turn distributed back to central granaries in the capitol city of Bamako, and then redistributed back to each village and to each individual in order to ensure a perfectly egalitarian division of wealth. It goes without saying that the government kept the lion’s share of each harvest for in Bamako for its own purposes, Communism eviscerated the private incentive for industry, millet production plummeted and famine was the order of the day. Since it was widely accepted that the only way for many individual subsistence farmers to survive Malian Communism was to shirk their national obligations and fend for themselves, the People’s Republic soon became a parody of itself. By 1968 it was clear to all that the centrally-planned economy was so mismanaged and public opinion had so turned against the Communist regime that Modibo Keíta was overthrown in a coup d’état led by General Moussa Traoré – who would dismantle the state-run agricultural economy and institute one of the World Bank’s first structural adjustment programs.

And yet the most jarring aspect of Malian culture to my Western bourgeois sensibilities is not this country’s land ownership practices or its short-lived membership in the Communist bloc, but something which I encounter at least every day I take public transport or walk down city streets. Here – as in all of Muslim West Africa – there exists a class of religious beggar-children known as "garabouts". Picture a 12-year-old boy, barefoot and gaunt, rushing to shove a plastic bucket in your face while mumbling some fusion of Bambara and Arabic “prayer”: Allah ka dumini di n ma/Allah ka I deme ka n kongo dogoya... There are blind men and widows begging for coins in every country without a welfare safety net. But the garabouts are different in that they are fully capable, able-bodied boys who should be in school learning how to be a productive member of society, or rather, in the fields with their fathers learning how to farm. Ostensibly, these garabouts are instead begging on the street in order to learn humility and submissiveness to their Lord as a part of their “Islamic education”.

I often find myself duly offended by these garabouts – and not just the ones who yank on my arm and scream Tubabu! Donne-moi un cadeau! It has less to do with religion than it has to do with child labor, slavery and exploitation. These pre-pubescents are not begging for money because they have chosen a life of poverty in order to be closer to Allah – they are begging because their “Quranic teacher” commands them to bring in a certain amount of cash each day with the threat of a stiff beating if they fail to deliver. The garabouts are assigned this Dickensian fate by their parents, some of whom sincerely believe the marabout who comes to their village and promises to teach their boys the way to enter Paradise. But a good portion of all garabouts are praying for coins because dad did the math and realized that this year’s harvest was too paltry to feed the mouths of his 17 children, and so he decided the time is right to send his sons to the closest city’s Quranic teacher. And thus a not-so-insignificant number of Malians use the institution of the garabout as a fig-leaf for their own lack of responsibility as parents, and to pass the buck for feeding their children onto society as a large – all under the respectable and even admirable pretense of “Islamic education”.

A problem of scarcity occurs not just when these garabouts are on the streets praying for subsistence farmers to part with the fruits of their labor – eventually, these beggar children grow up to be adults with wives and children of their own. And a lot of them seem to have taken home some valuable lessons from their “Islamic education”; namely, you don’t have to work to eat, you can just count on other people, and in the end Allah will figure it all out. Talking to so many farmers in my Malian village who spend eight months every year sitting, drinking tea and complaining about how poor they are, these guys know very well that they can plant a vegetable garden, but don’t bother because of such deep-seated fatalism and renunciation of control over their own destiny that has crippled their sense of personal initiative. “If Allah wants me to be poor, then that is his command.” “If Allah wants me to find money, then Allah will provide.”

The sense of fatalism and helplessness perpetuated in this society is downright jarring. There was one Peace Corps Volunteer who recently watched as her host father more or less let his daughter die of what was probably simple pneumonia. As the Volunteer noticed that this 5-year-old girl was having trouble breathing and her wheezing was becoming worse and worse, she suggested that the man give his daughter some medicine. “No, there is no medicine for this illness.” The Volunteer insisted that there was, and offered to pay for it. “No, Allah will heal her.” A few days later the girl was dead, drowned in her own mucous. The father concluded: “She is gone. Allah has taken her.”

What it all comes down to is that a good share of people in Mali are poor – not just because the government doesn’t provide enough social services or because they are being oppressed by Global Capitalism – but because they and/or their parents have made some really irresponsible decisions. In the past I have written about how overwhelmed I became after seeing my neighbors’ gaunt kids with their black rotten teeth and their bellies protruding with protein deficiency and realizing they looked so sickly that they probably wouldn’t make it through the year. I was so beset that at one point I considered buying a sack of beans and condensed milk and giving it to their poor parents. But my attitude changed after I saw that these kids’ dad had a brand new Yamaha motorcycle. And you can only imagine the sound system at the party a month later when this guy married his second wife. And they’re almost certainly going to have many, many more offspring. As callous as it sounds, for me to intervene and provide these children with protein and calcium would only further enable their father to blow his money on toys and parties.

The bleeding liberal in the left ventricle of my heart is inclined to giving money, write a check as a knee-jerk reaction. This attitude is nothing new; to my recollection, there was this Judean rabbi back in the day who healed the sick and gave eyesight to the blind, who gave a big sermon about giving alms to the poor, clothing the naked and feeding the hungry, and how this moral obligation of selflessness is so absolute that it is easier for a camel to go through a needle’s eye than for a rich man to enter Heaven and so anyone with surplus wealth must give it all to charity. Judging by the African development scene today, apparently a lot of people still believe that this is an effective means of conducting economic development.

It is difficult to drive down any major road in Mali for any considerable distance without passing by a school built by Christian NGO X, a water pump built by Muslim NGO Y, or a clinic built by International Relief Organization Z – the road itself was probably financed by the Belgian Embassy. When missionaries and secular-minded do-gooders parachute in for Spring Break, distribute medicine and shoes and soccer balls and candy, take the mandatory photo-op of themselves hugging skinny black children, and within a week or two hop on the next plane home, they can then brag about their superior worldliness to the Save the World Club and put another chit on their résumé to help with grad school applications. Due to the sense of satisfaction derived from building schools and handing out goodies to poor malnourished Africans, there is no shortage of humanitarian relief programs on the ground here.

There is a shortage, however, in any sort of humanitarian relief programs that do anything more than perpetuating the sense of helplessness and instilling a mindset of inferiority among the Malian people. Imagine how a typical Bambara millet farmer might feel when he has been breaking his back in the fields for months just trying to eke out enough grain to feed his family for the coming year – maybe if this year’s harvest was particularly bountiful he can buy them all a new pair of cheap plastic sandals – and he sees a bunch of white people drive up in an SUV, distribute brand-new Nike high-tops to all the kids in the village, and leave. He’s probably going to think “Hamd’allah! And to think that I was almost going to buy my kids shoes! How foolish of me! Now I can blow that money on tea and sugar!”

And a few years down the line when that Bambara millet farmer sees that his kids’ Nike high-tops have all fallen apart and they’re walking around in the mud barefoot again, do you think he’s going to buy his kids new pairs of shoes? “Of course not! I can just wait for the next SUV full of white people to come!” No one in this village is ever going to by their children shoes again.

The fact is that African subsistence farmers might be poor – but they sure aren’t stupid. They are rational beings who respond to economic incentives just as much as anyone in the developed West; rather, since they have so little, and the simple act of receiving a free pair of shoes is so relatively generous, they respond to these incentives much more dramatically than the bureaucrat sitting in an air-conditioned office on the Upper East Side might ever imagine. Oftentimes these perfectly benign donations can lead to the most sinister repercussions.

This is not a phenomenon unique to Western donors. There is a village by the name of Yelemani located way up in the desert near the Mauritanian border; the economics of this village are drastically different from that of most communities in Mali, because a few years back a number of local men went off to France to find jobs and by some stroke of luck they succeeded. The men of Yelemani all live together in a one-room apartment and they are doing menial labor and custodial work that no Frenchmen would ever want, but compared to the mud hovels and hand-to-mouth existence they knew before the blue collar life in Europe seems to good to be true. They can afford to eat meat and drink Coca-Colas and watch TV every day, and what’s more, they are making such a surplus that each year they can send a big wad of cash back to their families in Yelemani.

During the first few years that these Yelemani families were receiving remittances, the problem was not that their expatriate sons were insufficiently generous; in fact, it was that they were too generous. When their subsistence farming fathers who made monetary incomes of less than $400 a year went to the bank and received checks worth ten times what they could ever make cultivating millet and peanuts, they had so much money that they didn’t know what to do with it. So they splurged on motorcycles, TV sets, cell phones, iPods, and fancy new clothes for themselves and for their wives. Yelemanikaw felt so rich that they didn’t even bother going to the fields during rainy season. Of course, they burned through their fortunes quicker than you can say “MC Hammer”. By the time they realized this, their granaries were empty and it would be months until they could even start planting again. And their children, the little brothers and sisters of the men of Yelemani who had made it, they ended up far worse off than the children of those who were not receiving remittances – while the latter were merely malnourished, the intended beneficiaries of such a liberal cash infusion were literally starving to death.

The best/worst example of this half-baked liberalism is a building which I see almost every day, Le Jardin d’Enfants (kindergarten) built by a perfectly well-intentioned Christian NGO named WorldVision. In addition to two classrooms for three- and four-year-olds, they also built two latrines, a well and a playground complete with three swing sets and a merry-go-round. The benefit of this Jardin d’Enfants to the education of Sanadougou’s youth, acclimating these children to sitting in a structured environment classroom environment is beyond doubt. However, their inept attempts at construction and ensuring simple maintenance practically negate any social benefits which might accrue from the existence of a Jardin d’Enfants in the first place.

To begin, WorldVision told Sanadougoukaw quite explicitly that after a given period of time they would be gone and the people of this village would be wholly responsible for conducting and financing any maintenance themselves. Within a year, the hinges on the metal doors to each of the latrines and also the large double-doors to the entrance rusted to the point that they could hardly open. This problem could have easily been fixed if someone in town had been willing to pitch in some simple axel grease – but that costs money, and few people feel like donating above and beyond their taxes to pay for public education. So they just took all of the rusted doors off the hinges entirely.


The latrines happen to be placed in an end of the schoolyard where the kids like to play. Without doors to these latrines, any child who wants to urinate or defecate there during the school day has to do so in plain sight of his or her classmates.


WorldVision also failed to build a storm drain in the walls enclosing the schoolyard. We’re not talking about anything complicated here; all they had to do was put a little piece of plastic piping into the wall at the lowest point where rainwater flows - like in every single family's concession in Mali. This slight omission was a humongous mistake, because without a storm drain the torrential rainy season downpours would flood the schoolyard and turned it into a giant pen of mud. So a teacher at Le Jardin d’Enfants had to take a pickax and pound a makeshift storm drain into the wall. Of course, he overcompensated and knocked out a whole much too big to only let out water runoff. Now even when one teacher might be watching the front gate, the children can easily crawl out the storm drain.


Controlling the children’s free movement in and out of Le Jardin d’Enfants’ schoolyard is so very important for reasons of public health, because now that the kids are too scared to pull down their pants in the latrines without doors, they either scurry out the front gate or crawl through the storm drain and urinate and defecate behind the perimeter wall. When school is in session, this area is covered with the children’s feces.


As for the playground, since no one could lock the proper entrance with its doors off the hinges, adults were able to enter and exit at their own leisure and cut the chains which once composed the swing sets. And they lifted the merry-go-round off its rotor and sold it as scrap metal.



No one has ever asked me to help them buy a new playground. The people of Sanadougou never asked for a playground in the first place – kids here are content to play with sticks and rocks. The idea that children need thousands of dollars worth of playground equipment which then needs to be shipped from France for at least another thousand dollars certainly never originated in the mind of a Malian who provides for his family's livelihood with simple hoes, picks and plows which cost no more than a few dollars.

Every day when I walk out my garden in Sanadougou, I am greeted by the enormous 2,000 square meter dongeyuro - “dance hall” – which was also built by WorldVision. I can only surmise that they had a conversation with a couple of teenagers who complained that there was not a lot to do here on weekends – et le voila, local demand! So WorldVision shelled out about $20,000 and bought enough cement and rebar to build sustainable, sanitary latrines and conduct top-well repairs for perhaps 40 or 50 families, and instead the hired masons from out of town to build a dongeyuro. Over the course of the year that I have lived here, there has been exactly one single event held there. I really don’t know where to begin on this monstrosity of a cadeau...

One would like to think that maybe giving out presents could serve some societal benefit if they came with strings attached. I am told that WorldVision wanted to do something about female genital mutilation, so they organized a meeting with the bolokomuso – the lady who makes an income on the side as this village’s go-to gal for circumcising little girls’ clitorises with a shard of glass and thus rendering them “marriageable”. WorldVision asked the bolokomuso, “What tools do you want us to give you so that you can have a new source of revenue? If you promise to stop this horrid practice, we’ll give them to you.” She wanted a donkey cart, two donkeys and a big wad of cash. WorldVision gave them all to her. And do you think she stopped bringing girls out to the fields and hacking away at their vaginas? Of course not – it’s the only job she’s ever had.

Other development agents are more liberal than I. In the town of Tominian, an NGO – let’s call them Basketball Court-Builders without Borders – swooped in and realized that this town was severely lacking in its basketball-playing infrastructure. Everyone knows that black people love basketball! So they gave the people of Tominian – whose wells all go dry for a good quarter of each year – what they most certainly needed more than anything else: a basketball court. Within a few years, the blacktop weathered under the extreme elements into a hardly-recognizable remnant of itself. In time the rim and the backboard were unscrewed and sold as scrap.

By then, another NGO rolled into town and realized that the public basketball court was in shambles. Instead of conducting repairs, they decided to start from scratch and build a brand-new basketball court next to the vestiges of the old one. And it was only a matter of time until it too decayed and the men of Tominian – it was probably the same ones as before – unscrewed this new basketball rim and backboard to sell as scrap.

When the new Peace Corps Volunteer rolled into town and started looking for projects to organize, you can probably guess what the young men asked him, “Hey, can you help us build a new basketball court?”

I suppose that the most cursory rule of sustainable development which one can surmise from these anecdotes is that 1) Giving people toys is not development. Even without foreign NGO and development agency intervention, people in Mali are perfectly capable of entertaining themselves. It is already somewhat obscene to see how men who live in mud huts – who cannot provide their families with adequate water, food or medicine, whose children might wear the barest of rags on their backs if anything at all – can somehow manage to scrounge enough money to treat themselves to iPhones and televisions. Philanthropic-minded Westerners swooping into Africa and building playgrounds, soccer fields, basketball courts and dance halls only makes things worse by teaching people that they can get something for nothing, that white people are bottomless sources of money, and that if Tubabs are spending all their cash on big, expensive toys then we should just continue to do more of the same.

2) No one should ever be in the business of simply giving people money – with or without strings attached. Money is perfectly fungible, and even if an NGO distributes cash to be spent on basic necessities, it is just as much if not more likely to be blown on tea, sugar, cigarettes or an iPhone (and thus violating Rule #1). This might sound quite paternalistic – it is – but for all their shortcomings professionally-run charities tend to be much better at spending their money in a constructive manner than individuals who have no sense of budgeting or even the basics of a monetary economy. If you are for some reason adamant about giving directly to a particular individual, it is best to give in the form of an in-kind transfer such as tuition at a private school or credit at a cereal bank; i.e. something which cannot be traded for booze and cigarettes.

Malians and Africans in general need to spend less of their own money on toys and luxuries and spend more on basic necessities like nutritious food, mosquito nets and medicine. Though except in the direst of humanitarian crises - e.g. catastrophic droughts or refugee situations - 3. No one should be in the business of giving to people what they can provide for themselves. Once this precedent has been set, it is nearly impossible to undo. Direct handouts of basic goods completely distort incentives to such a degree that they undermine the natural market forces which need to play out on their own if there are ever to be functioning economies of these necessary commodities. What development agencies and NGOs need to be doing is not giving away the basic necessities of life, but establishing the durable infrastructure needed for Africans to be able to provide these things without any foreign assistance.

Since handing out free rice and mosquito nets distorts markets, you might think that the durable infrastructure which I describe as “sustainable” must be composed of permanent edifices made out of concrete which will last for decades. To a degree, yes, the work of an NGO which parachutes into Africa and builds a schoolhouse will probably benefit the people of Africa longer than a care package of calcium supplements. But even then such development must be taken with a grain of salt. With the erratic climate which shifts between scorching heat and dryness to torrential downpours, termite colonies so ferocious that they will eat through any organic material, unemployed youth ready to steal any materials that can be removed and sold at market, and of course the mobs of children who tend to manhandle the most important tools of public infrastructure as their playthings, here in Mali things really need to be made out of steel and concrete if they are ever going to last more than a few years. And even then, they would require constantly vigilant maintenance and upkeep.

Moreover, once the schoolhouse has been built, who is going to hold classes there? How is a village of 200 subsistence farmers supposed to pay for teacher? Who is going to pay for chalk and paper and pencils? And after a few years when the schoolhouse itself starts to wear and tear – even steel and concrete degrade over time – who is going to conduct the maintenance and repairs? Unless the schoolhouse-building NGO can adequately answer these questions, and if the answer to all of the above is not “the villagers themselves”, then that wonderful school they just built is going to remain empty, unused, and it will eventually be dismantled and sold for scrap or disintegrate into rubble on its own terms. Unless the local population is willing and able to manage this school themselves, it might as well have never been built.

So a year into my Peace Corps service, what do I think is the single best thing that foreigners can do to implement sustainable development in struggling countries like Mali? Waking up in the morning at the call to prayer and spending the rest of the day hoeing dirt and pulling weeds in my garden like every farmer in my village. Sanadougou has been downright spoiled by NGOs who pull up in SUVs, build schools, hand out cadeaux and leave. If I do anything in my two years here, I have made it my personal mission to fight tooth and nail that Tubabs are just a bunch of playboys so rich that we never work, that the only thing we should do is buy more presents. I see to it that when my neighbors walk by and see this hairy Tubab, 9 times out of 10 they see me caked in mud, toiling with a pick in hand.

If entanglement in foreign quagmires is inherently suspect, the most effective development work that Peace Corps Volunteers like me can possibly do is to simply do what the Malians are doing, just tweak their methods a little bit and demonstrate that there might be a new way of doing things a little bit better. Me tending my own banana trees doesn’t directly put any more bananas into the mouths of potassium-deprived children, but by doing so I have introduced this society to the wonders of Nafosoro pumps, drip irrigation and mulching. If I tend the banana trees so well that my Malian neighbors can see that I am producing more and better fruit, if my neighbors are so impressed that they take to these methods in their own garden, then insh’allah next season Sanadougou’s banana farmers might just see that their own banana trees produce greater yields. To date no one has yet to emulate my conservationist irrigation technologies, but I have seen that a couple of my friends have already adopted my compost rotation and urine fertilizer practices. And thus in a perfectly Jeffersonian fashion, the private gardens of Xanadu serve as a shining patch of sustainable water/waste management upon a hill.

And every once in a while when my orange or lemon trees bear fruit, after I have enjoyed consuming the fruits of my labor and composted the peels, there are some remnants which are even more useful still: the seeds. Though I am loath to give away cadeaux, I can see no possible harm in handing out seeds because they come into my possession for free, they can’t really be traded for anything else; in fact seeds have pretty much no economic value at all unless someone invests the time and energy into planting, irrigating and fertilizing them. The seeds borne by my orange and lemon trees are purely positive externalities of my own selfish labor.

I acknowledge that tilling my garden and occasionally handing out seeds might not live up to the incendiary rhetoric of which I am so fond. You might be thinking “Damn, Zac – you have just become the bourgeois reactionary which you used to despise.” Not quite – I never was too keen on smashing the capitalist superstructure to begin with, I've always been critical of left-wing extremism and making pains to accomodate with rational, lower-case "c" conservatism. I still have those same dreams of remaking the world anew, just now I have let go of my more socialist sentimentalisms and want to achieve those same ends employing the power of human nature, market principles and that all-American philosophy of pragmatism.

Sometimes sustainable development can only be achieved by narrow protection of private property. For instance, there is a solar pump-fed robinet used almost exclusively by myself, the two houses of doctors and teachers who live in its immediate vicinity – though occasionally a mob of kids will walk by and stop for a drink. And over time a group of kids manhandled the robinet so badly that they broke the handles right off the faucet heads – all three of them. The doctors, teachers and I pitched in to buy brand new faucet heads. And within a month kids somehow managed to destroy the new faucet heads as well. We could have bought a third, a fourth, a fifth faucet head and provided the kids with potable drinking water and expensive steel toys indefinitely. But instead we decided to cut our losses and buy just a third faucet head – one with locks on the handles which can only be opened by either myself, a doctor or a teacher.


It’s a pity that this privatization scheme must deprive a substantial chunk of the population from using this water source at their leisure – but then again, having a limited scheme in which only 3 key-holders can access the robinet derives a greater good to a greater number of people than the communal scheme under which no one could use it at all.

And every once in a while someone like Etienne Dembele rides their motorcycle up to my concession gate and asks if I know where he can find a man named “Madu Sogoba”. Dembele rode all the way from the neighboring village of N’tonto, 12 km away. He is one of those rare birds who was distraught by the fact that if children in his village wanted to continue their studies past elementary school, they had to walk those 12 km all the way to Sanadougou Secondaire Cycle. He organized the families of his village to try to petition the Communal government, the Cercle government, the Regional and even the National government to build a Secondaire Cycle in N’tonto - to no avail. So Etienne Dembele organized the families of N’tonto to pitch in and build the school themselves. And they did. I was taken aback by his story of Malian gumption.

“So what do you need me for?” I asked.

“We built the school, but we haven’t any nyegens. The children have no choice but to relieve themselves in the bushes. This is intolerable! We must change!”

“Monsieur Dembele, I think you’re the kind of guy with whom I can do business…”

… to be continued!!!

Evolution

Eating in Mali is – like all other basic life functions – tremendously more difficult and infinitely more times likelier to get you sick. There is an entire ceremony to every meal; the men sit around their communal food bowl on the ground and the women sit around theirs. Starting with the oldest man, the men pass around a tin can full of water to “wash” their hands i.e. dunking them in a basin of increasingly dirtier and dirtier water. The eldest man says a prayer, and in unison all the men plunge their right hands into the food bowl which is usually full of either toh or rice. Everyone squeezes their clump of food and shoves their entire hand into their mouth up to the knuckles to ingest every last morsel. If there are any pieces of meat or vegetables in the sauce, they are usually left in the middle for it is considered rude to gobble up the solid matter – in fact, it is considered polite to grab the chunks of sheep tripe and toss them towards the other side of the food bowl and insist that their guest eats the good stuff. “A dun, a dun” No one talks, the men just stuff their faces until they can eat no more, at which point one licks their hand clean, says “Barika” (thank you) to each and every person sitting around the bowl, and walks away.

Only after the last man can eat no more, the women and children may begin this procession on their own. Often a family only owns one bowl, so the women and children essentially eat leftovers for every meal. And anything the women and children don’t eat goes to the dogs and the cats. The animals know that they are served last, so they put up a fight to not be forgotten.

It goes without saying that Malian men have everything going against them when they try dating American women.

All of this pomp and ceremony notwithstanding, eating in Mali is really animalistic. I say this not because we are eating with our hands and without conversation, but because the whole time we are surrounded by very hungry animals. Dogs have learned to wait for their human masters, but cats have no patience and so we have to put a grass basket on top of them while we eat. But the one species which no one in this country has ever figured out how to keep from the communal food bowl is the chicken... Until now.

I fucking hate chickens. They are the worst animals ever. They are not cute, they are not cuddly, and they do not ever appreciate the company of humans. Chickens cannot be tamed, they have no respect for their human masters, they are dirty, filthy animals which eat carrion and garbage and they carry all sorts of parasites like worms and giardia cysts and amoebas which they can transmit to people. The only reason why God put these obnoxious creatures on this Earth was so that humans could chop their heads off, pluck their feathers and slow roast them over a fire with a garlic-pepper glaze so that we could savor the flavor their succulent breasts and chew the dark meat on their haunches.

Having lived amongst locally-raised, organic, free-range chickens for almost a year now, I can personally attest to the value of factory farms. By letting these awful beasts enjoy their natural liberty and walk wherever they like means that they too swarm around the communal food bowl when tigadegana is served. I have to swat cocks away with my left hand while I eat with my right, and these persistent fuckers cannot take no for an answer and try to make a run for my rice and peanut butter sauce over and over again. I don’t care what miniscule emotions might be felt in these vermin’s pea-sized reptilian brains – it is within the rational interests of human beings to cut off chickens’ beaks, cut off their claws, and force-feed them cornmeal in 12” x 12” chain-link cages so they become delicious sacks of plump white meat via minimal interaction with man.

A week ago something ticked as I was trying in vain to eat my tigadegana while simultaneously swatting away ravenous chickens. I had had enough.

“Ça, c’est absolument ridicule! J’en avais assez!” I proclaimed, stormed over to a small wooden table, brought it back to the circle of men and put it under the food bowl.

Karitie apparently thought this was a pretty ingenious idea, “If you raise the food on a table, … then chickens can’t reach it! Why haven’t we thought of this before?”

And from that day on, we have always eaten from a table.

And the world will never be the same.

Mud

During my first week at site when the last monsoons of rainy season gave me a compelling reason to stay in, I eventually became so bored of hours of silent meditation that during a break in the storm I ventured out into my yard of mud puddles. And I stood there in my raincoat taking in the violent reds and oranges of the rainy season sky, looking at the mud huts on the horizon and the mud puddles all around me and it gradually dawned on me that I was standing amidst the primary indigenous construction material. At that time I was only capable of thinking in the simplest of polysyllables:

Bogo
Mud.

As I have been sent here to organize the development of sustainable water sanitation infrastructure, it dawned on me that knowing how to make things out of mud is essential to my very existence. It was a slightly disheartening concept to grasp as I was just getting reconnoitered with my new neighbors, for after the last torrential downpours of August many of the huts in the neighborhood had collapsed entirely. When I was meeting the kindergarten teacher Jirré whose house is in back of my garden I could not help but stare at his concession wall which had just fallen into rubble the night before. Though I possessed the Bambara vocabulary of maybe a slow 2-year-old, I thought it was a good occasion to offer a friendly neighborly hand.

“We… Make… Wall… Together.”

Jirré told me that there was no point in rebuilding the wall then when the rains still fell and there were still cereal crops to tend to. People in Sanadougou save their construction for dry season when agriculture has come to a standstill.

Now that that time has come, Jirré and the other men in his concession started amassing mud bricks and I told him that I still wanted to help him rebuild the wall. He thought it was a funny idea. Despite my last name, I’ve never built a wall before and I know nothing about making walls. But the educational component of the Peace Corps goes both ways: I teach the people of my village how to treat their drinking water, they teach me how to survive in Mali. As my numerous trips to the medical bureau can attest, surviving in Mali is remarkably difficult and so I am grateful to my neighbors for teaching me how exactly it is that they do it. An essential part of learning how to survive in Mali is making use of mud.

If there is anything I can do to create a sufficiently vivid imagery of my Malian village, think of mud huts. Dirt and water are mixed up into a formable consistency, mushed into the desired shape and left in the sun to harden. Many people have wooden molds which they use to form mud into uniform bricks which are dried for at least three days and then mortared together with wet mud to make walls which are then slathered with another smoother layer of mud. Only the very wealthiest people in society have tin roofs and cement floors, but except for logs as support beams and thatched roofs many people build their houses exclusively out of mud. Mud is the primary component of just about every house, latrine, stable, chicken coop, butigi, granary, mosque, even the Grand Mosque of Djenné – just about every structure not built by the State or a foreign NGO – which exists in the country of 11 million people which is Mali.

Now that my Bambara skills have progressed significantly, the level of the conversation went up a few notches. It only went up a few notches though, because it has gotten to the point where I have had this conversation about a hundred times before.

“Madu, when you go to back to America, bring me with you.”

Other than just saying flat out “No, Peace Corps Volunteers are not sent out to site with a suitcase full of green cards… by the way, what’s your name again?” whenever I have to deny this request for the umpteenth time I try to be as polite as I can and make this into a learning experience about why my Malian friends want to flee their country.

“People can find a lot of money in America.”

As I am mucking the tops of the bricks with a fresh layer of adhesive mud, I tried my best to explain that it is not as easy as that. In Bambara, one does not “earn money” or “gagne de l’argent”; E be wari soro – “you find money” in America, as in “I was walking in the woods and I found a four-leaf clover”. It’s not as though they have a business plan set up or even the slightest idea of what it is that people do in the industrialized West, it’s as simple as the fact that money is there – and they are going to find it. The best image which comes to mind would be the first English colonists who came to Virginia and and thought they could just start digging until they struck gold.

I also think of the tens of thousands of Malians who descend upon Bamako especially in dry season to find themselves some money. There aren’t many factories even in the capital city, there is hardly any value added to the food products grown in the villages – there are really only middlemen. But people are buying things, currency is changing hands there, and it is thought that if you somehow stand in the middle of the flow of goods and get your hands on some of those goods and pass them from Point A to Point B that you might be able to skim enough from the top to eventually buy yourself an mp3 player. The number one job for men who migrate to the cities in search of work is to buy a 12-pack of phone cards for 11,700 francs and after standing in the middle of the road all day waving phone cards in pedestrians’ faces maybe if they're lucky they can hawk them all for 12,000 francs - a day's profit of 300 francs which is equivalent to about 60 cents. When women come from rural villages to the big city most likely they will end up finding money in the oldest profession: prostitution. A good number of fortune seekers realize that since there are phone card peddlers on each corner and the bars are of course full of hookers realize there is simply too much competition and so the only way to find money is to walk between cars in the congested crossroads and hold their hand out hoping that one of the middlemen will find some sympathy and toss them some small change.

So when people tell me that they want to do in America, I ask them what exactly it is they want to do when they get there.

“I will farm millet.”

I try my best to explain politely that no one farms millet in America because Americans like to eat corn and wheat and rice and barley and oats instead. Millet is an inferior good with so little nutritional value which is only grown in the West African Sahel because it is the only crop which can feed the exploding population with so little rainfall. What I don’t say is that you couldn’t pay people in America to eat toh with leaf sauce and that millet is only sold as birdseed. And in America you can’t just mosey on over to a fallow field and till it until the village accepts it as yours; unless you feel like homesteading in the Alaskan tundra, in order to farm in America you have to first buy your land – the Anglo concept of private ownership of land according to a titled deed is an alien concept amongst traditional farmers.

“Then I will build houses.”

When I am rebuilding a wall out of mud and mud bricks because it disintegrated last rainy season and my fellow masons tell me that they can simply go to America and find themselves some money in the construction business, I find myself at loss of words. In America, if a carpenter were to build a house which collapses in the rain then he could face millions of dollars in fines and litigation if not imprisonment. I am pretty sure that if one were to build a Malian mud hut in the United States, then housing authorities would prohibit anyone from living in it and would probably force them to tear it down.

I have yet to find a way to explain the fact that there is absolutely zero demand in the American labor market for the millet farming and mud construction skills possessed by your average illiterate Malian who knows not a word of English without slaying hopes and dreams. So I simply tell the truth that they have to understand that America is not Heaven, that there are in fact many problems in my country. This is a hard concept to convey to a people whose only knowledge of the outside world comes from the state television station whose managers know very well that no one in Mali wants to sit down after a long day’s drudgery and learn about watch news broadcasts about poverty in America.

"On TV there was a man from America and he owned many cars!"

An even more difficult concept to convey is that the United States is currently suffering from an economic crisis, let alone to explain how exactly this crisis came about in the first place. “Well, due to a climate of low interest rates and predatory lending practices the real estate market was distorted by artificially-high prices…” Here in a traditional Malian village, you build your mud hut where your father built his mud hut and you sow the fields which have always been sowed by your family since time immemorial, and if your fields lie fallow then the dugutigi will grant them to someone else to make use of. The concept of holding a legal title to land simply does not exist. It is remarkably onerous trying to translate into Bambara that my mother earns her income by selling real estate, let alone what a mortgage is. If formal land ownership even existed in the world's third-poorest country and the banks could accept as collateral sandy farmland which only receives precipitation 7 months a year, the only mortgages which would exist would be subprime. The concepts of stock exchanges and investment banks and derivative markets, the basic ingredients of the modern crisis in capitalism are completely unexpressable in the language of a culture which is just beginning to develop private property ownership.

So I try my best to bring it down a few levels and explain that the car factories are closing and there are already 12 million Americans who speak fluent English and have been to high school if not college and graduate school who cannot find any jobs (the population of Mali is 11 million), so maybe they should wait in Mali for a while and pick up some more skills before they try to make it big in America.

“But Barack Obama is the President. He will solve all problems to make peace and riches.”

Insh’allah.