Stolen aid and a disappearing culture

Ahead of Human Rights Day on 21 March, Patricia McCracken reviews books that ponder the ongoing abuse of human rights, from the diminishing of cultures and individuals to the theft of aid money.

FIRST PEOPLE: THE LOST HISTORY OF THE KHOISAN by Andrew Smith (Jonathan Ball, R250)

This useful book traces the ‘lost history’ of the Khoisan people, the original inhabitants of Southern Africa. In his title, Smith gives a global perspective that could settle the issue of the inoffensive naming of the people of this fascinating culture. The name Khoisan was coined in 1928, but has only become widely used during the past 50 years, with the earlier term ‘Bushman’ still in everyday use. This naming controversy tends to detract from the achievements of these extraordinary people who hunted, gathered, herded cattle, extracted medicine from plants and painted extraordinary scenes on rock faces. But their existence came under unbearable strain with the arrival of settlers who sought their old hunting lands and brought disease to their society. That they survived at all was nothing short of a miracle.

Mercifully free from political preaching or jargon, this is a book worth reading.

FEMALE FEAR FACTORY by Pumla Dineo Gqola (Melinda Ferguson, R280)

Following Rape: A South African Nightmare, Gqola takes a global view of patriarchy and its fellow travellers, and how it casts women not only as safe to harass repeatedly, but also “safe to violate”.

She dissects the warnings and advice to women of all ages that effectively connive in oppressing them, saying this narrative “manufactures female fear” while appearing to be about pragmatism and self-defence.

She also analyses individual cases of violence against women, continually asking how particular men could have allowed themselves to perpetrate this or indeed be influenced to do so.

The ultimate question is how this can be overcome both individually and within society as a whole, by “refusing the prison of fear”.

Gqola creates an overview that is breathtaking for the incidents it pinpoints, and heartbreaking for the fears it depicts.

EXPENSIVE POVERTY by Greg Mills (Macmillan, R360)

In a shocking quartet of numbers, Mills points out that Africa today receives a third of the US$150 billion (about R2,3 trillion) contributed by all annual official aid, or US$1,2 trillion (R18,5 trillion) since 1990. This amounts to US$1 000 (R15 400) per person over three decades, but average income in sub-Saharan Africa has increased by just US$350 (R5 400).

Mills takes a deep dive into the main problems, including the time and cost of knowledge transfer and the donors who provide photo opportunities of handouts at sites festooned with donor banners. He explores the double-edged impact of involving local governments, which provide buy-in and further skills transfer but eat budgets, and examines how the elite tend to close their eyes to need and siphon off a share of funding.

Mills, as always, has kept his eyes wide open, and delivers his findings with a punch.

VIOLETA by Isabel Allende (Bloomsbury, R330)

In her latest book, renowned Peruvian/Chilean/American author Allende explores time and culture, passing between the Spanish flu and COVID-19. The narrator, Violeta, is in love, but deliberately leaves the identity of the person with whom she is enamoured a mystery that gradually reveals itself through the book.

The only place idealised and romanticised is her family’s period of ‘exile’ on a farm in the far south of Chile.

Allende captures the factual, occasionally pedestrian, tone of general memoir.

Shocking events can be told in a matterof-fact tone, yet shake the reader all the more for the understatement.

This particularly relates to the 1970s overthrow of Chilean socialist prime minister Salvador Allende (a first cousin of Allende’s father), the rise of the generals, and the nightmare of the era of the disappeared.