No Longer At Ease

There's a book by Chinua Achebe called No Longer at Ease about corruption in Nigeria circa 1960. It's about a Nigerian educated in England, who comes back to a government job and a cultural disconnect fromhis family and tribe. He eventually loses all hope and becomes hopelessly corrupt.

I had a conversation today with a man who used to know Shannen back when CC was just getting started. He picked me out because of the motorbike - marked with a logo on either side. He told me the story of how he lost his job, working as a security guard for the Volta River Authority which is the main power company here.

The way he tells it, he was one of the few security people who weren't helping themselves to company property. He made an issue of it, and was ostracized by the rest of the crew. His boss reassigned him to a new posting with only one other coworker who was also considered 'difficult'. The hope being that they would screw up, which more or less happened. The other guy stole a motorbike, which was a pretty stupid move.

The police found it quickly enough, and arrested the coworker. The corrupt boss wrote to Accra, saying essentially 'we had two guys there and a motorbike went missing'. The man I was talking to subsequently lost his job.

He makes a point of emphasizing his commitment to principle. He repeats that he can't stand to watch stealing. His kids are in Bolga now, being taken care of by their grandmother while he tries to find work in Tamale. He talked about trying to take up his court case again. The first time, he says, someone bribed his lawyer not to show up. He blames Africans in general, and thinks that they are universally corrupt.

I'm not really sure what to make of this relatively common attitude. I've seen it from villagers and urbanites, people who are relatively well educated and people who aren't. Often it's a phrased as a joke - oh, you know Africans. It sounds like Canadians joking about being the 51st state. Uneasy. It's hard to argue against history, and there's just no standout theories.

I was at Taha community today, filming the installation of a piping project we're working on. The work stopped around two o'clock because one of the children of the Assemblyman of the community had died of malaria. I was with a man named Dawuda, who (as one job among many) is in charge of collecting birth and death data from communities in the area. He has been working to try to get people in these areas to take sick children to the hospital. They say they have nomoney, and aren't willing sell a precious cow to pay the doctor. They have many children, and they are often sick. Dawuda would like them to sell the cow.

He's fighting against a culture, in the same way that the Volta Authority man was. It's an uphill battle in both cases. Cultural practice seems to exist in a self-perpetuating state. It normalizes itself.

So Achebe's protagonist finds. Initially he resists, of course, and stays clean for a while. Eventually, his personal life falls apart, and he sinks into a despair from which he emerges a corrupt and unprincipled bureacrat. We're chameleons. We match our environment or sometimes we get eaten.