The Road to Hell (46 page)

—Lindsey Hilsum, British journalist

War is the beast which eats children. With food aid, we think we are feeding the children, but we may be feeding the beast.

B
uffalo Bill's is ripe with the stink of cooked meat, stale beer, and very cheap perfume. Rooted to the floor around a horseshoe-shaped bar, bare steel poles rise to menace customers who crowd around waiting for beer. Back when this was Nairobi's first American-style burger joint, the poles, topped with saddles, served as barstools. Parts of the western motif remain; Conestoga wagon tops arc above the booths nearest the bar. Early every evening young African women wander in and order soft drinks, which they share with each other while they wait for the men who will buy them alcohol, and maybe take them away.

Then the Land Cruisers start to arrive. Groups of white men enter the bar. They are as young as twenty and as old as sixty. They have a swagger about them; masters of this universe. At the very least, they own the night. Some of them are white Kenyans, known as Kenya cowboys. Others are foreign aid workers. Most of them make their money from the aid business. While some of them work directly for NGOs, many are part of a different class of aid workers. They are aid entrepreneurs—truckers, mechanics, consultants,
engineers, pilots, and others who do the real work of aid, the moving and lifting. They execute the plans of the humanitarians and missionaries.

In the summer of 1994, they are having their best year ever. Just as the relief effort in Somalia was winding down, Rwanda exploded. For three months they waited on the sidelines while members of Rwanda's Hutu ethnic group took machetes, clubs, and knives to 800,000 Tutsi countrymen. Then, after the Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front captured the country and the Hutus fled across borders into Tanzania and Zaire, the good times returned. Two million people in refugee camps meant lots of work for everyone. And everyone at Buffalo Bill's is in high spirits.

Kevin, a middle-aged South African, runs a trucking company that is now covering the roads between Mombassa, Kenya, and Goma, Zaire, where a vast refugee camp has pitched itself on volcanic rock. The refugees need everything, and Kevin's trucks are there to deliver. Kevin talks loudly and throws back beers as a Kenyan woman rubs his neck and attempts to slide onto his lap. He passes her some money and says, “Fuck off and get some beers, will you darling.”

The women at Buffalo Bill's, nearly all of them prostitutes, outnumber the potential customers by a factor of four. It's a buyer's market, but a few jobs a week can earn the women a lot more money than an African office worker with a good education and secretarial skills, and office jobs are impossible to find anyway. Many of the women are educated, and most of them have tried to find jobs in other fields.

In Nairobi and all over Africa, prostitution flourishes wherever it is not actively suppressed. From an economic point of view, going into prostitution is a rational decision for an African woman. It's one of the rare avenues open for her to make real money. The sex industry is one of the few points where the local economy and the expatriate economy intersect.

Like most African nations, Kenya runs on two parallel economies. The expatriate economy, which includes most high-level government officials and some powerful businessmen, is a First World economy. It is the world of Mercedes-Benz automobiles, palatial homes, servants, nightclubs, and expensive restaurants. Four-wheel-drive vehicles can cost $90,000. The average Kenyan earns less than $400 a year.

This really struck me one day when I arrived at a friend's home where I was staying in Nairobi with several bottles of whiskey I'd just picked up at a local liquor store. In my friend's absence, I was paying the salaries of his cook, gardener, and watchman. As I was handing them their cash, I saw price stickers, which were still on the bottles. I suddenly realized I'd just
paid for a single bottle of a standard blended Scotch what amounted to the gardener's monthly salary—and he had a decent salary by Kenyan standards. In industrialized countries, even the lowest-paid worker can occasionally spring for a good bottle of whiskey or a decent pair of shoes. Rich and poor exist on opposite ends of a broad economic continuum. In Africa there are few places where the two economies meet.

Of the money that Western organizations, businesses, and charities spend in Africa, a small part goes into the African tier economy. This is the money paid to servants and workers, the pennies passed out to beggars and street children for watching their cars at night. The vast bulk of the money that Westerners spend is in the upper tier of the economy. Rents are paid at European rates, often in foreign exchange. Planes are chartered and trucking companies are engaged to move aid and relief supplies. The landlords and car dealers are the government officials who live in this upper tier with the expatriates, who show up at the restaurants and clubs. NGOs generally pay their local staff well, by local standards. But even the lowliest foreign-born volunteer aid worker exists in the expatriate economy; these unskilled Westerners earn multiples of what highly qualified nationals get paid.

The disaster in Somalia was a windfall for Kenya. The Kenyans charged landing fees for airplanes at Wilson Airport, where most charter and civilian planes are based. NGOs moved in thousands of personnel, and the United Nations operated most of their relief effort from Nairobi. In addition, hundreds of thousands of Somali refugees flocked into Kenya, where they were met by an army of aid workers to take care of their needs. Relief organizations purchased water, food, blankets, and other materials in Kenya. They rented houses. All of this was money going to Kenya's politician-businessman class. With Kenya's crucial tourism industry slipping, aid workers became a permanent tourist presence, filling hotels and restaurants as tourists once did. And just as the Somalia operation was ending, Rwanda arrived to fill the gap.

Most Kenyans stood helplessly by and watched the aid parade file through town. Only a few were in a position to benefit from it, and many of them hang out at Buffalo Bill's.

On this particular evening at Buffalo Bill's, I've come specifically to meet Kevin to ask about food diversions from the refugee camps in Zaire. A colleague of his told me with certainty that he would be here on any given night.

I find Kevin at a table with a group of others from the aid business. There is an American who works with CARE, and a Kenya cowboy in his
late fifties who is head mechanic on Kevin's fleet. He has psoriasis on his wrists and a gaunt, infected-looking face. There is also a younger Englishman, tall, thin, blond-haired, drunk.

I tell Kevin I've heard that much of the refugee food is falling into the hands of the Hutu extremist hit men who engineered the massacre of the Tutsis in the first place and then frightened their own people out of the country and into the refugee camps. Yes, true, he tells me. His truckers deliver all the food. The food is checked in at the camps. But, he tells me, his trucks don't leave empty. They leave the camps with some of the food they came in with. “My drivers make what money they can on the return trip. They carry coffee or whatever they're paid to carry. So they truck food out of the refugee camps.” On the return trip, the drivers are working for the Hutu leaders, who steal the food and use the money to purchase guns and ammunition to retake the country. Once again, it appears that an aid effort is financing a war. Once again, an investment in aid is ensuring that there will be another disaster in the future.

As I'm talking to Kevin, his attention is only half focused on me. I grab my answers as he alternately nuzzles and abuses the young Kenyan woman, who accepts the insults with professional good humor. “Didn't I tell you to piss off? I'm talking to a journalist here.” His friends laugh and encourage him. Other women are gathering around and campaigning for their attention.

The tall blond Englishman says his name is John. When I'm introduced to him, he offers me his limp wrist to shake. He says that since I'm a journalist, I should buy a round. How long have you been in Kenya, he asks me, with undisguised hostility. This is a standard question, it is what determines the expatriate pecking order. When expats sit and talk about Africa, they display their combat ribbons. Length of stay is the most important. The ones who have been here the longest earn the right to say whatever they want. Their interpretations of African behavior and politics are given the most weight at gatherings like this. I've been here since 1977, I tell him, seventeen years. John is quiet for a moment.

“I was born here,” he suddenly blurts from the silence. “Buy me a fucking beer.”

His friends ignore him. They start talking about business and trucks and refugees. Kevin and his friends are the prime beneficiaries of the aid business, which is why they hold most NGOs in such contempt. They know they can overcharge, produce shoddy work, and still get paid. They joke about forming an NGO called Somalia Community Assistance Committee—SCAM. Everyone laughs. As in Evelyn Waugh's
Scoop
, where journalists
invent a war to write home about, they've decided that they should invent a famine, to get the food and money and work. Who's going to know? Skinny Somalis always look like they're starving anyway. They live in hovels even when they're rich.

Kevin has been contracting for NGOs for fifteen years and doesn't see much difference between his business and theirs. To him it's all about contracts and getting paid on time. He turns back and tells me I should ride with his trucks for a week, see what happens to the food. John says nothing now but sporadically bangs loudly on the table. When people look at him, he affects an innocent look. Sorry. What did I do?

As the crowd gets drunker, the prostitutes move closer. They sit on laps. Fuck off, John says to one of them, getting into the spirit. But she doesn't fuck off. Later he corners me in the men's room. He looks to be about six feet four. He's blocking my exit, and asks to borrow money. No, I tell him. Then he demands money. I just met you, I say. Ask your friends. Then John begins to cry and starts telling me about the embarrassment and pain of not being able to buy a drink for his friends.

“No” I tell him again, and I push past him out the door.

“You're a bore,” he shouts after me.

Rick, the CARE guy, tells me later that John wasn't born in Kenya. He came as a VSO volunteer, Britain's Peace Corps, about six years earlier. He fell into the Nairobi scene, the drugs and alcohol and prostitutes. He married a prostitute and now she works to support them both. Occasionally he finds good-paying work in the aid business, helping the poor African refugees.

T
he Rwandan Hutus who fled their country were frightened out of Rwanda by their own leaders, a situation similar to Siyaad's creation of a refugee crisis in Somalia after the Ogaden war. Refugees attract aid. Aid is a resource. As in Somalia, the Hutu militants wanted to use the camps to rest, regroup, and rearm for the second phase of the battle. The UN and the U.S. and the NGOs could provide day care for the women and children while the men prepared for war. They begged for mercy while making their own people prisoners of fear; they raised money on the shivering, emaciated bodies of their own children.

The Hutu exodus was a political success for the leaders for one reason: They knew that relief aid would be there when they crossed the border. They knew the West would respond. And when the West did respond, it was a signal to other refugees to desert Rwanda and head for the border. The word was out in Rwanda that food and medical care existed on the
other side. Aid made the exodus possible. Aid made the exodus logical. Life was better on the outside, despite the scenic horror of the camps. The killers fled into the open arms of international charity.

Everyone involved knew that the Hutu leaders were preparing to reinvade Rwanda. A UN document states: “It now looks as if these elements are preparing an armed invasion of Rwanda and that they are both stockpiling and selling food aid distributed by caritative [sic] organizations in order to prepare for this invasion.”
*

The emergency nature of a refugee operation usually means that accountability is sacrificed. Losses and leakage of aid supplies are tolerated for the sake of expediency. In the short term, all hands are needed to dispense the aid, so there's no one around to really check what happens to it. And in the long term, no one cares. Few people will pay attention to an emergency after the dramatic crisis phase has passed. The consequences of misdirected aid are rarely brought to light. Who, after all, was going to blame charities if the Hutu invaded Rwanda? For the donating public, the aid workers are there to help. Whose fault is it if the damn Africans screwed up their own lives? The West is not at fault. The West is not accountable.

Hundreds of times I've heard aid workers heap blame for failure on the recipients of their generosity. I've often been reminded of these lines from Kipling's
The White Man's Burden:

In Nairobi I met with a Somali businessman friend who runs a trading company that had been bidding on relief projects. It's really the only business in town. The Red Cross and other international organizations pay promptly and in hard currency. My friend can import anything, and between the Somali refugees in Kenya and the Hutu refugees in Zaire and Tanzania he's been doing well in recent years.

He started complaining to me, however, about the Red Cross and a recent contract they just issued to supply blankets to Rwandan refugees in
Goma. “They tendered to buy 100,000 blankets, specifying that they be 60 percent wool and 40 percent synthetic. Those blankets cost seven dollars apiece.” He showed me a photocopy of the contract that went to another firm to buy the blankets: total cost, $700,000. The blankets were purchased from Raymond's Blankets, a huge Kenyan manufacturer in the Rift Valley.