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“Cholera!” cried Lucy Gomball, doing a blue-jeaned, barefooted, pink-toed jig of excitement around her kitchen table.
“Cholera!” she cried again, her husky voice rising a pitch.
The test had proved positive.  Thousands of residents of the Kireba slum were at risk.
“I knew it, I knew it.”
She punched the air in celebration.

*

The delight of Lucy is understandable. She is the fictional East Africa representative of an Oxford-based aid agency called WorldFeed, a leading member of a cast of journalists, diplomats, aid workers and politicians assembled in my novels set in Kireba. Doing good and easing suffering are part of the raison d’etre of Lucy and the tens of thousands of well-meaning European aid workers based in Africa.

But another of my characters, the Oldest Member of the Thumaiga Club, a gin-drinking survivor of colonial rule who is ending his days in his favourite chair on the club’s red-polished veranda, looks at the aid agencies with a jaundiced eye. In the third of the novels, now under way, the Oldest Member lets rip, his hardened cynicism a marked contrast to Lucy’s idealistic enthusiasm.

“It is time for another revolution”, he declares, while taking care to make clear that he is not abandoning his conservative roots. “Never had any sympathy for the last lot, but they had one thing going for them,” he goes on to argue.

The Kenyattas and the Kaundas, the Nkrumah’s and the Nyereres were able to tap into the nationalist fervour of the time, and channel this sentiment into a force that  liberated the continent from colonial control. Today, the Oldest Member maintains, international aid has sapped Africa’s resolve and dignity, instead of freeing the continent from readily eradicable disease, help educate the children, provide jobs for the for the unemployed and feed the hungry.

“It’s time we had a fresh look at the aid johnnies,” he tells anyone who will listen.

“All we hear about are debt relief, mosquito nets and even more aid. Only encourages the chancers and second-raters who come to Africa and get paid a fortune to run it all. No wonder they all cry: Dish out more aid! Comes out like a bloody mantra. Reminds me of Pooh Bear and his hums. Think of the first line, and if you sing it fast enough and often enough, says Pooh, and you’ll be singing the second line before you know it”.

After helping himself to a handful of his favourite cashew nuts and washing them down with a swig of his gin and tonic, the OM delivers his verdict on foreign financial support: “It doesn’t do what it says on the tin.”

A 70-something white man, a former district commissioner during the days of the country called Kuwisha was under British rule,  is an unlikely banner carrier for a revolution.

But his concerns are understandable.

The high hopes that accompanied Africa’s wave of independence some fifty years ago have been largely dashed. The story of the continent has been dominated by debt, disease and disaster, both man- made and natural.

And in the 20-odd years since the World Bank first sounded the alarm bells, and warned of the disasters that lay ahead, billions of dollars of aid has failed to bring about the changes that were promised. More people in the region are living in poverty than ever before. Something is missing from the development strategy, argues the Oldest Member. And so profound is the failure of aid that we must consider the possibility that there is a link between the role of the development industry, Africa’s low self-esteem and the continent’s failure to conduct a radical reappraisal of its relations with the West.

Traumatised by its past, demoralised by post-independence failures, and accepting its victim status accorded it, Africa is in danger of missing a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

It should be re-assessing old alliances and forging new partnerships with that group of countries whose stunning economic growth poses a challenge to the old dominance, cultural as well as material, of Africa’s traditional partners – the so-called Bric states: Brazil, Russia, India and China.

Instead, the 50-odd countries that make up sub-Saharan Africa are behaving like one of the late President Mobuto sese Seko’s cabinet in the last years of  the country then called Zaire.

Asked the significance of one of the dictator’s many reshuffles, the US ambassador memorably replied:
“What do you get when you shake up a can of worms? Dizzy worms”, he drawled, “dizzy worms.”

Five decades after Ghana led the way to independence from colonial rule, Africa displays as much sense of purpose as a can of confused worms. Its diplomatic thrust is still focused on Washington, Paris, Brussels and London. Trade with China is not a partnership, but is led by Beijing’s determination to secure access to Africa’s oil and minerals. Africa’s business schools and universities fail to do justice in their courses to the powerful new economies; and not a single African media outlet has its own correspondent in Beijing, capital of the world’s most rapidly growing economy.

The result is that at a time that should be exciting for Africa, shaking off an unhealthy preoccupation with a declining West, the continent is moribund and drifting. If ever there were a point at which Africa’s friends should speak out, this it.

But their voices are silent.

Celebrities have nothing to offer on the subject, no fresh ideas to put forward; they keep their heads below the parapet of conventional wisdom and accepted opinion.

It is said that one can know a man by the nature of his friends. If this maxim holds good for continents, Africa is in a bad way.

Its many trials and tribulations are trivialised by the attention of  lightweight personalities from show business, who boost their profiles by adopting black babies or use the continent as a location for their latest TV series, while pop stars lecture and hector from arenas around the world.

Meanwhile Britain’s middle class despatch their restless teenagers to the continent, who regard Africa as little more than a gap year adventure playground; feckless young royals curry the favour of the London tabloids by ensuring they are photographed with African Aids orphans. Rich businessmen treat the region as a real-life laboratory for their philanthropic schemes.

Above all Africa is seen the best friend of  ten of thousands of non-government organisations who help stuff  billions of dollars of aid down the continent’s collective throat, like a force-fed Strasbourg goose – but one that stays infuriatingly thin, seemingly unable to put on weight.

Far from providing a reliable assessment of the impact of our aid dollars, the NGOs use a language which cushions and distances both user and receiver from reality. Thus challenge replaces problem, potential means disaster, as in the challenge of Zimbabwe and the potential of Congo, and budgetary anomalies means fiddling the books.

It serves a purpose: the language of aid agencies helps conceals the fact that international assistance has failed; or, at the very least, its performance has fallen short of the claims made on its behalf. Yet there is no systematic evaluation of development agencies’ performance, a multi-billion industry that should be opening its books to independent scrutiny.

True, much has changed in the years since the Economist warned of “Africa: the hopeless continent” in a cover story that caused a furore, as much because of the blunt language of the headline as the tough appraisal inside.

Africa’s economic growth is twice what it was then and its minerals are in huge demand. Military regimes have all but disappeared. State-owned corporations are either back in the private sector or under commercial pressure. Deregulation rules. Foreign investment is picking up. Mobile phones and the internet are sweeping the continent.

But the gap – material and technological – between Africa and the rest of the world is widening; Africa is losing the battle for sustained and self-sustaining economic and political recovery. Let us remind ourselves:
Three million children die under the age of five every year of preventable diseases, with AIDS adding ever-increasing numbers to that total.

The tragedy is more than a challenge to humanity – it continues to undermine Africa’s already limited management stock. Each year some 60,000 of the continent’s brightest and best leave for Europe and North America – medical workers, dentists, engineers, bankers, accountants and lawyers. There can be no more telling an example of Africa’s loss of self-confidence.

As skilled Africans leave, their places are often taken by some of the 100,000 ‘experts’ or ‘consultants’ who flock to the continent every year. Many of them will swell the ranks of the ever-growing non-governmental organisations – a movement whose impact on the region can often be damaging.

Foreign NGOs increasingly assume the functions of what should be the preserve of the state, routinely playing an important role in the provision of basic services – such as primary education and health facilities – with unintended results. They not only weaken Africa’s management capacity, but undermine the contract between citizen and state.

If the government cannot deliver the essential services its citizens expect in return for their loyalty, their allegiance is transferred to ethnic or regional leaders – the ‘big men’ who still dominate politics across the continent.

At the same time, Western donors unwittingly subvert local attempts to encourage the democratic process by funding African civil rights and good governance initiatives, thus creating a quasi-professional class of NGO activists. Donors fail to realise that the links between these activists and the people they claim to represent are all too often tenuous. The result is a growing number of organisations whose leaders are without a mandate.

Meanwhile the Western media remains the bogy man African leaders love to hate, regularly accused of misreporting the continent.

It is true that Western dominated news outlets are often guilty of arrogance and ignorance – but to focus on these shortcomings is to neglect the beam in Africa’s eye. Pick up the local papers, listen to the radio or watch local television and rarely will one find that the African media does a good job in reporting the continent to the world, and explaining the world to the continent.

Citizens who depend on their local media soon start to suffer from a form of intellectual scurvy: without perspective, lacking depth and without insight, the coverage lacks these vital ingredients.

There is no easy remedy for the debilitating condition called aid dependence, or for ending intellectual self-doubt. But Africa can begin the process in several ways. It can start by reducing the links with the donors, and raise a far higher proportion of funds for development from its own resources. The first step should be the radical reform of land ownership, the release of ‘dead capital’, and allowing land to serve as security against borrowing.

The continent needs to undergo a revolution of the mind, recalling its past achievements: from the ancient universities in Timbuktu to the bronzes of Benin. The recovery of self-confidence is as important a part of the development programme as any.

Will any of this happen? A hundred years ago the Afro-American writer WE du Bois raised a taboo which resonates to this day.

“Between me and the other world,” he wrote,  “there is ever an unasked question: unasked by some through feelings of delicacy; by others through the difficulty of rightly framing it. All, nevertheless, flutter round it. They approach me in a half-hesitant sort of way, eye me curiously or compassionately, and then, instead of saying directly, How does it feel to be a problem? they say, I know an excellent colored man in my town; or, I fought at Mechanicsville; or, Do not these Southern outrages make your blood boil? At these I smile, or am interested, or reduce the boiling to a simmer, as the occasion may require. To the real question, How does it feel to be a problem? I answer seldom a word.”

Yet without the revolutionary change in attitude that answers the awkward questions raised by du Bois, the Oldest Member’s fears will be borne out.

“I can hear the blighters all singing their hearts out, ‘Aid for Africa, aid for Africa’.”
He takes a sip of his gin and tonic, then continues.
“The problem is, while they sing the first line well enough, I still cannot hear the next lines.”

Michael Holman was brought up in Zimbabwe, and was Africa editor of the Financial Times from 1984 to 2002, when he took early retirement to write novels. His first, Last Orders at Harrods, was acclaimed by Alexander McCall Smith as one of his ‘novels of the year’; the second, Fatboy and the Dancing Ladies was published earlier this year. He is currently writing Dizzy Worms, the last of the trilogy.

Do you remember that picnic we attempted? It was a Saturday in late May and we took the car thinking at some convenient spot we would be able to pull off the road, unfurl our blanket, and have leisurely salmon sandwiches and white wine in a dappled glade awash with bluebells. But it wasn’t like that. The country lanes were too narrow to park, the fields were strictly off-limits, and every village in England is trimmed with double yellow lines. Where was it we got to? Was it north Essex, or Hertfordshire? I don’t know, somewhere out in the environment for sure. After scootling around for an hour getting tense we fetched up at a pub. The kind of pub which is full of townies, and if not real townies, ex-townies, people who had moved out of town and were still having a go chasing the rural idyll. Or real townies like us who just thought it would be nice to spend a day in the country.

Most of the pub’s food had gone so we lunched on crisps and alcohol. Probably too much alcohol. I downed a couple of pints quickly, just to relax after the chasing around in circles. And with our feelings running a bit freer some home truths started to escape, like steam from a badly clad pipe. And then I came back from the loo and you said you wanted to leave me. And I said ‘Oh.’ For a while I didn’t say anything else because it suddenly became clear that what you had said was right, you should leave me. A lot of unstated resentments suddenly crystallised; a host of little antagonisms had found their form. Yes, you should leave me. So I said, eventually, as you were fixedly looking at the other customers, ‘Yes, I think you’re right, it would be better.’ And I managed a smile of sincerity.

We drove back slowly towards London. The afternoon was lovely: hot and clear. By chance I spotted a turning into some woods with a track which would take the car: exactly what we had been looking for earlier. I swung off the road, went a hundred yards over crunchy twigs and said, ‘Would you like a walk?’ It was so nice to act civilised. The wood seemed to recede in different planes of sunlit foliage with a floor interspersed with happy colourful flowers. ‘Yes,’ you said.

We strolled slowly. It wouldn’t have been right to hold hands. You stopped to stare at the bark of a tree. I asked, ‘What’ll you do?’ You didn’t reply. It was one of those moments when you were totally absorbed in something else. Moments which could be rather charming, but which had become intensely irritating. There had been times when whatever I said provoked no response in you, when even ‘Excuse me, can I say something’ had been met by nothingness, silence. ‘OK,’ I thought, ‘OK.’

‘Oh, I’ve forgot my ciggies,’ I said, and went back towards the car. I looked back. You were still staring minutely at the tree, as if it was about to divulge a great philosophical truth. I opened the boot instead of the door. The spade I had put in for winter snows was still there amongst the other debris. I came back towards you. You were still in rapt communion with what? Mother nature? I don’t think so. Your own elevated sense of self-importance, more like. It was so easy. I merely raised the spade, put a bit of effort into my shoulders, and struck your head from behind. You went down with an awful scream and I banged your head again. Twice. As hard as I could. Then I used the edge of the spade as an axe and swung again. It was very satisfying. But it did take four blows before your head was separated.

I glanced around. Summer in the country. All the lively noises of nature were there. A starling was eyeing me. There was no reproach in her beaky stare. I listened hard. Something passed on the road maybe once every two or three minutes. I went and drove the car back towards the entrance to the wood, stopping it plumb on the narrow track to discourage any other casual explorer. Then I came back and dug your grave. In it went your body. I spread leaf litter as best I could over the top.

I carried your head by the hair. Sure it dripped blood along the trail, but there wasn’t too much mess. Your good looks had gone with the life which had drained out. I looked briefly at the mouth which had given me so much pleasure. By chance I had an empty supermarket bag in the car. That would be good enough.

I drove out of the wood. There was earth under my fingernails. Eventually the lane I was following crossed the A1. I parked and sauntered back to the bridge with the bag, tying a knot in its handles. It was simply a matter of judging when to drop it. One didn’t want to be seen letting an object fall onto a busy road. The traffic, though fast, was pretty light in volume. A moment came when three articulated lorries, line astern, were about half a minute away. I let a couple of fast cars pass underneath and then dropped the bag. I didn’t stay to watch, but was confident your head would be pulverised out of all recognition.

At home I had the salmon sandwiches and the wine. Sure, I felt guilty as hell. But when I thought about it, you really were a bitch. It had got to the stage where I couldn’t bear to watch you eat. I hated your trinkets in the bathroom. And the way your lipstick came away on a glass.

The next day I checked the car and shovel for any stains. Nobody missed you. Your work as a freelance translator meant there was no regular employer who worried about your absence. People like you move on. There are no restrictions for Europeans. When your friend phoned I said we had split up, and you had gone back to your parents in Spain. But I knew the main reason you had come to England in the first place was to escape their oppressive regime. You had made a point of not writing to them.

No, no-one missed you. I miss you sometimes. That’s why I like talking to you. And it assuages my need to confess, having these little chats. You were fascinatingly foreign, to begin with, and we did make love very well. It would have been lovely to do it in the bluebells. You reminded me a bit of Francine, except that her head came off straight away.

Graham Buchan has worked in film, video and television as an editor, writer, producer and director. A regular on the London poetry scene, he has published short stories, travel writing and film appreciation.

That time in Efes, when the killer strolled in, I’m sure Mehmet saw it coming ‘cos he blanched, and his eyes moved from the door to the barman, then finally to the man. The gunman walked behind him, as he sat leaning back in his chair, pulled slightly back and popped him in the head.

I’d thought a skull would burst from a shot, but it was quite the opposite. As Umit said, “There never was much in that head of his.”

No explosion, no fountain, no split peach. Just a brief spray of blood. I remember the claret splashing the ear of a girl at the next table. Just that effusive spurt and then a dribble. He slowly leant to one side and settled. I’ve slept drunk at that self-same table many a time and looked deader.

The quiet was disturbing. Everyone’s Thursday night after-hours teetering on a chasm of murder, police and questions, questions, questions.

The assassin held the gun at his side, gave an embarrassed smile and said, “Sorry. So sorry, everybody.” With that, he calmly walked the length of the bar, around the side of the pool tables, and was gone into the night.

His calm lingered in the room for a few moments. It was only when a chap knocked over a glass as he fumbled for a drink that the first scream erupted.

Anyway, as I told the Old Bill, I was in the toilet when it happened.

Tim Wells is the editor of the poetry ‘zine Rising. He lives in North-East London and is doing very well.