Shaped By the Powerless

As an African living in the United States, I have often been called upon to explain the so-called paradox of societies not having enough food yet increasing their population at an alarming rate.

The questions seem so simple and demand simple solutions. Why the slash-and-burn farming tactics when the forests they destroy are so vital? Why kill animals on the verge of extinction? The answers to these questions would be as simple as the answer that would explain to a homeless person why another person needs a ranch in Wyoming or a condo in Palm Beach when he or she already lives in a penthouse in New York.

The indigenous people who are on the front lines of this struggle between the environment and scarce resources have never had to look at the global picture. Yet they are being called upon to understand and sacrifice for causes that are so abstract and distant.

Having lived most of my life in a tiny developing nation, I have seen firsthand how my people's relationship with land and the environment has changed. We lived just below the desert but in a vegetation zone that has always been capable of sustaining abundant life.

My people for thousands of years have lived on the savannah plains nestled between the rivers Senegal, Gambia, and Cassamance. These rivers all flow west from the Futa Jallon Highlands in Guinea into the Atlantic Ocean. They have never been dry, and the land around them has always been lush and green. Even during the dry season, when no rains came, people still thrived. They never felt that their resources were being depleted or that the land could not sustain them. Unfortunately things have changed since the advent of colonialism.

From the early 1800s to the 1950s, West Africa was taken over and administered by the British, French, and Portuguese. These Europeans operated under the premise that the Africans did not know how to govern their people or manage their resources.

After 150 years of European control, the nature of production and consumption in this region has changed drastically. It used to be enough for families to have good farmland or good fishing areas. Their food production and consumption had very little to do with cities and governments.

Now, with European-style governments in place, the focus has shifted from subsistence farming to wage earning. Even though 80 percent or more of the people are involved in farming in most countries in West Africa, farm products are not responsible for even a third of the national income. For all the goods and services imported into these countries, 80 percent or more is consumed by the 5 percent or less who have Western-style education, live in cities, and earn wages. This has resulted in the migration of people from farming communities to the cities.

My father joined this exodus from the rural communities when he was in his teens. His family had never needed to go to any towns or cities to buy food. In fact, when he wanted to build a house for his father, he and his friends went into the forest and cut the wood they needed and dug the earth for the mud to plaster the walls.

He was first exposed to the city when he was conscripted by the colonial government to work as a laborer. This was during World War I, and all available young men were forced to work for the colonial government to win the war. His experiences in the capital exposed him to other Africans who were earning wages and living like Europeans. He stayed in the city and gave up farming. By the time I was born, in the mid-1950s, he was a successful businessperson.

Others who migrated were not so fortunate. They remained low-paid wage earners and barely survived. The farms they left behind did not survive their departures. They left behind communities with no young men.

This was still evident in the late 1970s when I got my first teaching assignment out of college. I was pushed to teach at a village school. It was soon clear to me that all the teen-agers left as soon as they finished junior secondary school. Their parents still clung to their farms but could not make a comfortable year-round income. These are the people who are the front-line targets of environmental reform and family planning advocates-who have the intellectual arrogance to assert that the hunger crisis in Africa is merely the result of overpopulation and irresponsible environmental practices.

These villagers use negligible amounts of non-renewable types of energy such as petroleum and electricity; most of the energy is used in the cities. They are also targets of population control. With a life expectancy of 48 years and an infant mortality rate of 37 percent, it is not fair to ask them to engage in family planning.

When the first colonists decided that they knew what was best for the Africans, it was a racist assumption predicated on the idea that Africans were ignorant and incompetent. Today we seem to be headed that way again. In looking for solutions to the global energy crisis, Western planners take it upon themselves to come up with ideas without much regard to what it would mean to the local people whose lives are being altered.

Any effort to organize strategies to curb negative environmental practices has to be shaped by the people whose lives are being affected. This does not mean that every farmer in Gambia or every person living on welfare in the United States has to be invited to a global conference dealing with these issues. But it does mean that those whose voices have been silenced by the sociopolitical forces that disregard all but the powerful will be represented so that they can be heard. If we listen to Jesus' words when he speaks of "the least of these," we will begin to see the model that must be followed.

Powerful white people, both in and out of the spiritual community, must begin to accept that the call to a new way of seeing in regards to population, consumption, and all environmental issues means sharing the power to make changes with those who are the least of these. It is the only antidote for control and domination, and it is the only cure for racism.