My computer was hopping with enraged e-mails regarding Kevin Myers’s recent Irish Independent article, in which the provocative columnist recommended we stop sending aid to starving people in Africa.
If we continue to send aid, he wrote, we would aid catastrophic demographic growth in countries such as Ethiopia. Like many others, I didn’t read the column until the ICI lodged a complaint against Myers for incitement to hatred; as far as I am concerned, life is better without Myers’s rants in The Irish Times since he moved to the Indo. Myers’s main argument is truly shocking. If starving children are helped to survive, he writes, they will become “Kalashnikov-toting, khat-chewing, girl-circumcising, permanently tumescent layabouts.” (‘Tumescent’ means ‘swollen or becoming swollen’ – a typical incomprehensible Myers expression.) Malaria, the eradication of which Microsoft boss Bill Gates is devoting many of his millions to, should not be targeted because malaria, according to Myers, “in the almost complete absence of personal self-discipline, is one of the most efficacious forms of population-control now operating.” Africa, he states bluntly, “with its vast savannahs and its lush pastures, is giving almost nothing to anyone, apart from Aids.”
The broad generalisations paint all Africans with the same brush, yet as Bryan Mukandi wrote in The Irish Times: “Where Myers sees violent, layabout and lazy Africans, I see myself – except I got the chance of a better life through education.” Many Africans, Mulkandi reminds us, are living in the most difficult conditions on earth, still suffering the after-effects of colonialism (and yes, some of these aftereffects do include corrupt leaders and exploitative practices). Myers warns mockingly that his article would provoke the wrath of “the self-righteous, letter- writing wrathful, a species which never fails to contaminate almost every debate in Irish life with its sneers and its moral superiority.”
So be it – I am proud to be one of those wrathful, because let’s face it, Myers himself is not important and I wouldn’t bother writing this if he didn’t represent a broader – dare I name it – racist and genocidal mindset. Whether Myers and his likes choose to contribute to aid agencies is their own business. But we – and in this ‘we’ I include Myers as well – have a responsibility to what the postcolonial writer Frantz Fanon called “the wretched of the earth”. Thinking only in terms of what ‘they’ can contribute to ‘our way of life’ – doing the lowest work both in the west and in their own countries (where western companies outsource for cheap labour) and providing the west with oil and raw materials – is thinking of people in terms of waste management and of getting rid of those ‘we’ consider surplus.
Myers writes that he had visited Ethiopia, so he must have seen the realities on the ground. Speaking of malaria as an “efficacious form of population control” is using the language of the colonial regimes that once bought and sold ‘natives’ as slaves, and of genocidal regimes that spoke of Jews as ‘vermin’ that had to be gassed. But it is Myers’s final sentence that reveals his true agenda – his persistent opposition to immigration into this country (omitting to mention, of course, that he himself is a migrant from Britain). If Bill Gates’ programme is successful, he w r i t e s , “tens of millions of child r e n w h o would otherwise have died in infancy will survive to adulthood. Oh good: then what? I know. Let them all come here. Yes, that’s an idea.”
