The Road to Hell

When I think of a contemporary western aid worker, the image is that of an educated liberal steeped in the sociology of development theory. He or she has studied books on the history of colonialism, multinational corporate exploitation and the deceptive “tied aid” that even supposedly enlightened countries such as Canada use as a quid pro quo to ensure that our economy benefits from the exercise; and that person, a product of the exploitive West, seeks, in part out of guilt but also out of passion, to counter this legacy. Our culture also tends to view aid workers uncritically, perhaps because they exemplify what we consider some of the best traits of being Canadian, seeking to bring change in a non-violent way.

Film maker and journalist Larry Krotz pokes a hole in that mythology in his book, The Uncertain Business of Doing Good: Outsiders in Africa. Krotz has written and filmed extensively about Africa over two decades. He has gotten a close-up look at the civil war in Angola in the 1990s, been among AIDS researchers in Kenya and followed the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda.

Originally sharing many of the values of aid workers, medical researchers and western government foreign bureaucrats, Krotz increasingly questioned their impact. “The biggest items we all carried in our luggage were exalted motives,” he writes at the beginning of the book.

Krotz understands that modern aid workers are people who would not explicitly condescend to their developing world counterparts, whom they often call partners. But their impact, he argues, can be condescending nonetheless. Are westerners racing around in “fleets of white four-wheel- drive Land Rovers” any different from “their pith helmet-wearing antecedents of a century ago?” For those on the receiving end, the message can seem “ambiguous.”

While the book, at once reportage and a kind of meditation, is larger in scope than this, it is punctuated by numerous vignettes that vividly illustrate the unintentional clashes between first and third worlds.

For example, upon arriving in Angola, Krotz and another photographer found humour in the fact that they were wearing identical Banana Republic photographers’ vests. Their outfits proclaimed, as much as any military uniform, “I have a right to be here.” Yet despite the hyperrealism of being on the ground among the wastes of a war zone, “I wasn’t in any way part of this … this had started without me and would go on without me.” And when bombed-out roads prevented land transport, aid workers were able to travel in the best conditions: a Beechcraft King Air plane owned by a Christian mission group. Says Krotz, “such luxuries are possible if you have connections and money—in an odd way, even more possible than in better functioning societies.”

During his Angolan stay, after more than 15 years of war there was an uneasy peace with elections in the offing and an optimism that eventually proved false. The leaders of one of the factions, UNITA would reject the election’s first round results. Soldiers were remobilized, and a few months later another 100,000 Angolans lay dead. “All we outsiders had been no more than, what, hopeful tourists?” he laments.

In Kenya, Krotz made a National Film Board documentary about Canadian AIDS researchers working among prostitutes in a Nairobi shanty-town, specifically about why a group of sex workers never contracted the virus. When he met the head of the prostitutes committee, Krotz used a Swahili expression. But instead of “how are you?” it meant “I am fine.” Those in the room, he writes, “had a good laugh at the visiting white man’s expense.”

His NFB film was about the Canadian micro-biologist overseeing the work “at the very epicentre” of the AIDS epidemic. The researcher’s family lived in a sprawling Mediterranean house with a pool, cook, housekeeper, driver and night guards. “The old colonialism was dead,” Krotz notes, “but, in a kind of ironic twist, foreign aid programs … had fallen neatly into its place.” Local authorities deferred to foreign researchers, the best jobs locals could hope to get were in the employ of foreigners. Meanwhile, “collaborating scientists from North America and Europe flew in like visiting bishops” and stayed in the best hotels.

But that is the thing about this new age of soft colonialism: it is paradoxical. For example, the AIDS researcher Francis Plummer of Winnipeg undertook work that looked to be making a difference. And the Kenyans paid him the highest compliments: “he didn’t fuss, didn’t push too hard, they described him ‘as real Kenyan kind of guy’.”

On a visit to a field clinic doing trials on whether circumcised men are less prone to contract HIV, Krotz’s taxi driver asks if he is from a non-government organization, “the inevitable question for the newly arrived white person.” The clinic, operated jointly by the universities of Manitoba, Illinois and Nairobi, was “smart and stylish” while across the street a private girls’ school “looked decidedly shabby by comparison.” This clinic research ultimately did benefit the Africans, since there was considerable evidence that circumcision helped prevent transmission.

One ubiquitous group of foreigners are the medical scientists, whose myriad projects Krotz likens to a “gold rush” because of the widely available funding from universities and agencies back home. Nevertheless, researchers are embraced “with gusto” by the Africans, not least because research dollars have local spinoffs.

In Tanzania, Krotzreported on testimony at the Rwandan war crimes tribunal. But the very infrastructure needed to support the tribunal created a kind of artificial city. This included United Nations officials, stratification between outsiders and locals, and expatriate suburban enclaves with their own schools and restaurants “catering to the kind of money they had to spend,” all of which was regarded “more of an irritant” by locals.

Krotz covered the trial of two defendants, one a 70-year-old Seventh-Day Adventist pastor on an indictment brought by tribunal prosecutor Louise Arbour of Canada. The pastor was defended by Toronto lawyer David Jacobs, who argued that the pastor and the other defendant, a doctor, could have been the victims of local jealousies. Critics had accused the tribunal of being a series of show trials to absolve world guilt for doing nothing at the time of the 1994 Rwandan massacres. The trials themselves were conducted in the European “inquisitorial” method, with judges acting “more like agents of the prosecution.” Krotz says defence lawyers “complained bitterly” about the quality of evidence. If denunciation was all it took to secure an indictment, he writes, the system could be perverted “and unscrupulous or bitter persons” could use the court “to settle their local and private or family vendettas.”

The book is certainly not a wholesale condemnation of aid workers. But it does suggest their impact is often mixed. And clearly some self-examination by the workers themselves would be in order. As a journalist, however, Krotz had no personal stake in the projects, making it easier to see the disparities and offer a critique. The situation is different for people working in the field, who may have no choice but to implement western practices if that is the most expedient way to get results. If it means Land Rovers or planes, so be it. And if westerners have to manage projects because they have the skills and hire locals for the menial jobs, that may be inevitable too. Ultimately when two ways of life come in contact they will collide.

Krotz recognizes this but can offer no solution. Like the missionaries and explorers before them, who also had good intentions, today’s researchers and aid workers “might assume their motivations to be faultlessly self-evident,” he says. “In point of fact, they never are.”