Why do I live in African villages?
Michael Kevane
Dept. of Economics
Santa Clara University
December 13, 1999

Whenever someone asks me my opinion about some policy matter confronting the U.S. or the world, like the recent controversy over the W.T.O., I almost always preface my remarks by saying, "From the viewpoint of an African villager..." Social justice, to me, means taking the view of African villagers, for they remain the "wretched of the earth."

Learning to appreciate the world through this lense took some time. I am the product of a Jesuit high school, Colegio San Ignacio in Puerto Rico, and college, Georgetown University, and let’s see, how many years times fifty-two weeks makes.... a lot of Sunday Jesuit sermons. (Many penned by the former academic vice-president of Santa Clara, Father Charles Beirne.) So I feel comfortable in thinking that Jesuit education gave me, among other things, a vision of a just society, and a desire to contribute to its realization. There was a lot of inculcation in Jesuit education, and a little bit of incantation, but the learning mostly happened through personal example in tiny, powerful, incidents. One that sticks to my mind is a rainy afternoon in eight grade, and involves le père Ferrand, the dreaded French teacher. As we stood outside the classroom, I was doing what any twelve year-old might be doing, slashing a broadleafed tropical plant with a stick, very methodically ripping it to shreds. Père Ferrand came walking along. We dreaded him because he only spoke French in class, which none of us knew. (One story that circulates involves him repeatedly shouting, the first day of class, for a young student to Coupe l’appareil!, Turn off the projector!, which, to our Spanish-speaking ears sounded awfully like Escupe la pared!, Spit on the wall!) Well, Father Ferrand came walking along, and as he passed me he stopped, looked, and commented in English: "Don’t you know Mr. Kevane, that’s not very nice. Plants have feelings too." I never slashed a plant again.

My father is an accountant, and when we moved to Puerto Rico he was a partner in Arthur Anderson, so we were definitely quite well-off by local standards. I never felt privileged; after my father left Arthur Anderson to set up his own practice we were always one step away from bankruptcy (according to him!), and eight brothers and sisters competing for my mother’s affection left little time for smugness. At San Ignacio we had weekly community service. We took the bus down to public schools, in the caserios, where we tutored kids for two or three hours. That was probably my first realization of what I take to be a primary truth, that people are basically the same. (It still amazes me how many academics persist in ‘testing’ the hypothesis that people from different social groups and classes are ‘different’.) Until then my relationship with kids from the caserios was one of fear. They were the kids who stole your bikes, who stole your bb gun, who punched you as you walked past; they were tough. Tutoring made we realize very quickly that they were also incredibly vulnerable, and nice, and cheerful.

So my moral education went from plants, to neighbors, and finally to foreigners. The last bit I owe to Leslie (my wife, and a faculty member in the Environmental Studies program and Political Science Department). It happened that she studied Arabic at Georgetown, and we met at the end of my senior year, just before she flew to Cairo for an internship with Catholic Relief Services. I joined her over the summer, and discovered that Egypt was just like Puerto Rico. People were the same everywhere. We met wonderful Egyptians. We lived in an apartment very typical of a middle-to-lower class Egyptian (i.e. about the same as Santa Clara student housing except with intermittent water and electricity, temperatures of 110 degrees, and very nasty mosquitoes). While we were in Egypt we dreamed and talked about the Sudan; here I confess that while my moral sense of justice was evolving, it remained abstract. I think we were both filled with the enormous realization that if other people lived in the Sudan (the Sudanese), then there was absolutely no reason why we could not live there too, in the same circumstances.

The Sudan is by many accounts and measures among the poorest and least developed countries in the world. Again, it was Leslie who got us there. After returning from Cairo, a famine broke out in war-torn Ethiopia in 1984. Refugees walked across the mountains into the Sudan, thousands every day. C.A.R.E., the relief agency, was desperate for Arabic-speaking volunteers to work in the camps. In a few months Leslie was on a plane to Khartoum. I was lucky enough to have read the bulletin board outside the economics department at Berkeley where I was a first-year graduate student: there, one day, I spotted an announcement by another development agency, PLAN International, offering a graduate student fellowship to go and do research in their field site in Sudan. There was my ticket, and within a month I joined Leslie.

Sudan, it turned out, was also just like Puerto Rico. It was considerably poorer, but the people, they were the same. I joined a team of Sudanese who worked for the development agency, and I remember all of them well, fifteen years later: Mirghani, Abdel Gadir, Beshir, Yousif Fadl, Fatih Rahman. We lived together in group houses in the villages, shared meals and dishes, and very long rides across the savanna back to and from town each week. PLAN operated a great establishment if you were an educated young Sudanese. At the head office in town they had thirty women translating letters from U.S. ‘foster’ parents and Sudanese ‘foster’ children. In each village was another young woman social worker. The guys worked out of central villages, touring the district and meeting with village leaders. Everyone earned great salaries by local standards; they were educated, funny, and working for the betterment of the country. The projects were all fantastic: starting poultry farms, bringing water and electricity to rural villages, improving schools, building community centers.

There was another face to Sudan, one that I saw when I went to visit Leslie in other regions of the country. There were the refugee camps, with several hundred thousand people living in tents. Children were emaciated, wasting away. Flies covered all the food, spreading cholera and dysentery. Camels and cows lay dead by the side of the road, the pasture insufficient to keep them alive. Even well-off PLAN workers lived in houses with dirt floors, used ‘slop buckets’ for latrines, and died suddenly from preventable diseases. Their children died, too. One week I went out to visit Leslie in Kordofan, the west of the country, where C.A.R.E. had moved her to work on another famine. The trip took thirty-six hours on the back of a lorry, in the desert sun. We drank water from ponds along the way. My stomach, and my access to health care, could probably handle the amoebas in the water. But not a child, and all over the Sudan children die at early ages from diseases that could be prevented at low cost.

The most discomfiting thing about Sudan was the fear. The threat of arbitrary arrest was always with people, and a civil war raged in the south of the country. Once, on my way back from Kordofan I took a bus- a covered lorry with wooden benches- and sat next to a young man who spoke a little English. He was Nuer, from one of the tribes fighting the government. Over the decade, over two million southerners were to die in the war and related suffering. We, and two others on the bus, ended up sharing a small hotel room in a little town on the way to Khartoum. The Nuer man met a friend, they exchanged greetings. "Jin es sin!?" was what I heard. "Is that how you say hello in Nuer?" I asked. "Yes," my friend said, "Yes, we say, ‘You still alive?’ when we say hello."

So what does an economist study in a place where unexpected death and destitution are matters of everyday life. Like most economists, I focus on markets. When used under adult supervision, as they say, markets are the most flexible mechanisms for allocating resources and improving people’s well-being. The adult supervision, however, turns out to be crucial; markets depend on the institutional structure they are embedded in. Countries like the Sudan, or Burkina Faso, where I have also done research, have histories of violence, arbitrary rule, and instability. Colonial rule, because it lacked any local legitimacy, exacerbated the problem of legitimate market institutions. Violence and corruption remain common methods for appropriating private and common property. As a result, many markets perform poorly. Discrimination (ethnic and gender) is rampant. Monopoly power is exercised with impunity. Externalities, like pollution and land degradation, are common and unaccounted for. Contract enforcement itself is virtually absent. Reputations are poor guides to future behavior. In this atmosphere, people are much poorer than they need be. Moreover, through their actions (doing the best they can in the situation they face) they actually work to reinforce the same situation; where rules are easily manipulated, everyone tries to manipulate the rules.

My own research, and that of other academics interested in the economies of sub-Saharan Africa, tries to analyze how new rules for structuring economic transactions might emerge, and how these rules might persist. Some authors focus on the role of external actors, like the World Bank and I.M.F. I tend to focus on local, village-level rules, and the local processes through which ‘market rules’ are generated and negotiated.

My academic writing tries to win the war of ideas. Some ideas are easily defeated in argument, like the idea of self-sufficiency behind the slogan of the ruling military dictatorship in Sudan: "We will eat what we grow and wear what we make!" Fortunately, most people, including the villagers I lived with for a year, knew this was a very bad idea: "We’ll be naked." Still, it is amazing how many people cling to romantic notions of local, regional and national self-sufficiency. Reactionary regimes tap straight into those fears of change. While these dieas are easy to discount, most ideas are harder to figure out. Many questions do not lead to straightforward answers. Should people be allowed to buy and sell land when ownership of land itself is not legitimate? Is a large-scale credit program for farmers in Kordofan really necessary, or can local moneylenders handle the need for financing? Are women in Burkina Faso oppressed, and what is the best way to relieve that oppression? Should consumers from wealthy countries boycott the products produced by people who live in repressive societies?

One way I address these questions is through the courses I teach at Santa Clara. I offer electives in the economics program on African Economic Development and the Economics of Emerging Markets (for the MBA program, and for many of them it is their first chance to grapple with the complexities of political economy), and a new course next year on the Economics of Gender in Developing Countries. In my regular economics course, like the new Introduction to Economics, I try to integrate these issues into the class; students read, for example, the wonderful book Poverty and Famines by Nobel prize winner Amartya Sen.

In addition to work in the class, for the past two years I have helped organize spring term activities on Africa. Students returning from study abroad helped put together a library exhibit that focused on Africa. This year we hope to move the exhibit to the Benson Center to get more visibility. I have also organized several speakers on topic like the Rwandan genocide, the war in Sudan, and we had Hafsat Abiola, daughter of the elected President of Nigeria who was imprisoned by the military and then died the day he was to be finally released after several years in solitary confinement. We are planning activities along these lines for Spring 2000.

Ultimately, the goal of a social scientist is to foster and contribute to informed debate by rebutting bad ideas, clarifying legitimate arguments, and suggesting novel solutions. We live in a patently unjust world, by any stretch. But how to go from injustice to justice is not always clear. Those of us who are privileged have competing moral obligations (to our own life, to our children, families, friends, students, colleagues, etc). It may be sometimes presumptuous to act on a naive understanding of injustice. Occasionally an ill-conceived attempt to redress injustice might lead to greater injustice. I hope I convey to students an optimistic view of a world that is full of possibilities. Perhaps one day one of them will redress my most embarrassing failure. A woman in Burkina did not believe that I was there just to study village economic activities: "Why don’t you teach us how to make better corn fritters?" The weight of hundreds of years of exploitation of African peasants was on my shoulders. Alas, corn fritters were not taught in graduate school, and the weight is still there.