Monday, November 21, 2005

Freezing, The Constant Gardener, Corporate Social Responsibility and Isegawa...

It's freezing today and even though it's clear and crisp and sunny, I fear that the predictions for a very cold winter will come to pass. I have managed so far not to lose any gloves or my hat or any of the other winter paraphernalia, so feel that I'm doing quite well.....but it's early days yet....

Started reading Moses Isegawa's Snakepit today. He's the Ugandan author of The Abyssinian Chronicles which I loved. Snakepit is again set in Idi Amin's Uganda but I don't think (so far) that it is as accomplished as The Abyssinian Chronicles which flowed smoothly. Snakepit seems a lot jerkier, even though there are flashes of brilliance and humour. What does come through in both books is a sense that Isegawa is quite angry at the situation of things in his country and one almost senses that he has turned his back on Uganda.....the bio at the front of Snakepit simply says that he was born in Uganda and now has Dutch citizenship and lives just outside of Amsterdam....

I also went to see The Constant Gardener at the weekend- I went to see it with my cousin who was born and brought up in the UK and has only been back to Nigeria a handful of times. We were both struck by the authenticity of some of the African market and slum scenes - Nairobi could pass for Lagos or Ibadan or Enugu or the slums on the outskirts of Abuja (far away from the glistening pristine highways). I also agreed with Jeremy Weate of naijablog http://naijablog.blogspot.com/ that again the Africans were largely the backdrop for the white actors , and I suppose the film producers retort would be that "audiences will not come to see a film featuring mostly African actors". True? Like the chicken and the egg, we'll never know which comes first.......except of course the Nigerian movie industry starts making coherent, powerful films and find a way of marketing them to the world........Bollywood anyone?

An English friend who had watched the film earlier asked if I felt that Western companies could act as ruthlessly in Africa as they were depicted as doing in The Constant Gardener. I had to admit that while I had no direct experience or proof, speaking to friends who have lived and worked in the Niger Delta, I was horrified at some of the things the oil companies get up to there.......He was convinced that in this era of "corporate social responsibility", things had changed......I was more cynical- the companies are merely better at covering their tracks...... and Africa where neither the governments nor the press nor the activists have the capability to take them on provides a vast playground for these interests......

1 comment:

Jeremy said...

Your friend who has blind faith in the power of CSR as a lever to change corporate malpractice of multinationals in the non-West needs to take a reality check and question whatever liberal pieties continue to delude him.

Western companies can do whatever they want practically in Nigeria as long as the money's there: use ingredients in food that have long since been banned elsewhere (witness the bromide-in-bread scandal); sell GMO seeds and force farmers to buy; create a complete environmental catastrophe, witness the Delta (Shell alone has create over 2000 oil leaks in the past 20 years) - arm local militias to keep trouble at bay...without getting into a well known intelligence agency's continued destabilisation of the region. Sadly, the plot of the Constant Gardener is all too plausible. If you take arms trading alone, it is undisputed fact that for eg the UK sells most of its weapons in the lucrative arms trade to developing countries (including leg irons, land mines and other torture equipment). Whenever Blair goes somewhere in the non-West, there's usually an arms contract behind whatever is going on in front of the cameras.