African perspective on government intervention in the economy

by philg

The December 21/28, 2009 New Yorker carries an article (sadly not available online) on Greg Carr‘s efforts at ecosystem preservation in Mozambique. The article relates a story about a politician visiting a small village:

Politician: “I’m here to save you, and we will bring hospitals, schools, …”

A villager stood up and said “We are very happy, very touched, because you came from so far away to save us, and that reminds me of the story of the monkey and the fish.”

The city folks didn’t know the story, so the villager told it.

A monkey was walking along a river, and saw a fish in it. The monkey said, Look that animal is under water, he’ll drown, I’ll save him. He snatched up the fish, and in his hand the fish started to struggle. And the monkey said, Look how happy he is. Of course, the fish died, and the monkey said, Oh what a pity, if I had only come sooner I would have saved this guy.

Speaking of Africa, I’m enjoying listening to A Bend in the River as a book on tape. The prose is so beautifully crafted that one doesn’t mind the slow pace of an audio book compared to reading ordinary text. Based in part on the author’s visit to Zaire in 1975, the book has some themes that will be familiar to those who read newspaper accounts of present-day African life. Naipaul describes ethnic tensions based on white colonialism, Arab slave-trading, and conflicts among native tribes (not least among them the fact that some tribes were employed by Arabs to enslave other tribes). Every now and then the tensions get so strong that neighbors hack each other to death. There is a boom-and-bust economy based on a natural resource. Transportation is arduous and unreliable. There are high hopes for a bright future of sustained development and everything depends on the Big Man who is running the country.

2 thoughts on “African perspective on government intervention in the economy”

  1. Until I investigated it a bit, I thought you were talking about The Shape of the River, the seminal treatise on Affirmative Action in U.S. higher education.

    Would it be unfair to guess that the villager in the block quote is smarter than Princeton’s William Bowen and Harvard’s Derek Bok?

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