Self Service: ‘Saving Africa’ to achieve personal growth is not the way to see the world
EOPLE HAVE their reasons for going to Africa. Mine was accident and opportunity. Near the end of the last century, I applied for a journalism internship in England. The intergovernmental organization in question, however, had promised a Canadian of similar qualifications to a forestry institute in Nairobi. I pulled up a map to find Kenya (true story), and off I went.
Over the course of ten months, I joined the long line of interlopers who had failed to save Africa despite considerable expenditures of various governments’ money. This didn’t strike me as a terrible thing: I came with no pretense of saving anything, and the Western development workers I met bent into earnest pretzels in an effort to distinguish themselves from their colonial forebears and the generations of aid workers who followed. “Capacity building” was in. Scarce was the office without a “Teach a man to fish” poster. Rather than arrogantly presuming to save anything, I decided to learn something.
So I read all the local history I could and wrote about my doings on a primitive early-2000s blog. It seemed like a suitable post-colonial endeavour, coming of age in the spirit of the grand tours of bygone centuries. In its wonky way, my internship—a none-too-revolutionary fact-finding mission about online learning—still felt like an experience to be proud of.