New Orleans
And The Third World
By Mukoma Wa
Ngugi
09 September, 2005
Zmag
The devastation of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina is being compared
to disasters in the Third World but with no specific countries
or disasters named. And if not compared to this black hole or repository
of disaster that is the Third World, a comparison to Africa
is as specific as it gets. New Orleans is a scene from the Third
World, like the Third World, US Handles the
crisis like a third world country, bodies floating on water
reminiscent of Africa etc. This has been a constant with news
commentators, analysts, members of the senate and congress and other
sections of America commenting on New Orleans. The accompanying statements
to this have been I cannot believe this is America or This
is not supposed to happen in America. It is supposed to and can
only happen somewhere else. Attending a food festival event in Madison,
Wisconsin I overheard a joke Where is New Orleans again?
New Orleans is next to Somalia.
What role is the Third World playing in how Americans are
dealing with the disaster? Where does the Third World fit
in the imagination of the American? What does it mean to say that this
is not supposed to happen in the United States? To me, it is almost
as if by displacing disasters and human suffering to the Third
World, the New Orleans disaster is not really happening in the
United States. New Orleans is out there and everyone else
is ! safe and American the crisis in New Orleans is happening
in a Third World outpost and the United States remains rich,
strong and invulnerable.
The American citizen has been stewing in nationalism, manifest destiny
and the myth of the democratic society that errors but never oppresses
or marginalizes for so long that even a natural disaster cannot be seen
and understood outside this lens. And the fact that most of the victims
are predominantly poor and African American is not being understood
as a creation of very specific domestic policies and conservative ideologies;
it has to be filtered through the Third World. As if a disaster
from that part of the world somehow managed to sneak through
the porous Mexican borders.
Bushs Remarks
It is interesting therefore to look at President Bushs remarks
after touring New Orleans on September 2nd after four days of inaction.
His first sentence was I've just completed a tour of some devastated
country. A detached statement but it gets worse a little
later he says I know the people of this part of the world are
suffering
and he goes on to talk about how progress is being
made. Then he says The people in this part of the world have
got to understand
Shortly after this, he says You
know, I'm going to fly out of here in a minute, but I want you to know
that I'm not going to forget what I've seen and again refers to
his constituents as good folks of this part of the world.
It is almost as if he is in a different country consoling its citizenry.
He himself is so detached about what is happening in the very country
he leads that he refers to it as this part of the world.
As far as I know, no one in the mainstream media picked this up, they
too are reporting on that part of the world.
Believing that humor is the best medicine, in the same speech he also
makes a rather tasteless joke: I believe the town where I used
to come [to] from Houston, Texas, to enjoy myself, occasionally too
much, will be that very same town, that it will be a better place to
come to. Now, this is a President who up to this point has not
visited New Orleans, a disaster area that is being acknowledged as probably
the worst in recent U.S. history, yet, speaking to an evacuated, wounded
and dying constituency, he refers to their drowned city that was their
whole life as his old party ground. All in all President Bush gives
the kind of speech a visiting leader would make during a hurriedly prepared
press conference after being caught unawares by a natural disaster.
It captures his inability to empathize, to really be one with the victims.
The Myth and the Third World
An American dying
in a natural disaster will look like a human being dying in any natural
disaster and not necessarily like an African. A homeless American looks
like any homeless human being and not always like an African. And a
natural disaster should not be seen as somebody elses natural
disaster but as one that afflicts all humanity. We are of a common humanity.
It is the myth that only other nations torture that led to Abu Ghraib.
It is the myth that only other countries have political prisoners that
keeps political activists like Mumia Abu Jamal and Leonard Peltier in
American jails for fighting American marginalization. It is the belief
t! hat only other countries exile those that oppose their policies that
has led to the bounty on Assata Shakur exiled in Cuba for fighting
for African American rights being raised to one million dollars.
And it is the myth that only other countries ignore and exploit their
poor that led to the disaster in New Orleans.
But there are ways
in which America is like the Third World. Privatization,
which in Third World Countries becomes structural adjustment
programs, has been happening in the United States since the Reagan years
of small government, through the Clinton years that saw a full assault
on Welfare and affirmative action originally designed to buoy the marginalized,
and through the Bush years that have been rewarding the rich while taking
away from the poor through Federal and Supreme Court nominations that
support big business and reduce the power of labor unions, among other
things. These have been the years of blaming the victim
while preying on them. They are poor because they are lazy !
enter the welfare queen. While the mainstream United States
was busy trying to convince itself that poverty and racism were things
of the past or happened only to other nations, the marginalized were
becoming even more vulnerable. Most of the victims in New Orleans are
black and poor race and class - an inversion of Frantz Fanons
one is rich because he/she is white and one is white because he/she
is rich to read one is poor because he/she is black and one is black
because he/she is poor. Just like in the Third World in
times of natural disasters and wars, it is the most victimized in New
Orleans that are doing most of the dying.
Contradictions
The reasons why
the poor couldnt leave the city are quite easy to understand.
They couldnt afford it. They simply did not have cars or money
for transportation, are jobless, or live pay-check to pay-check and
couldnt have had any money saved up for relocation. Where poor
people owned houses to which they had mortgaged their lives, where their
homes had become the marker of their humanity and achievement, staying
put and essentially fighting for their lives was the only option.
Like the genocide
in Rwanda in 1994, or the ongoing genocide in Darfur, this particular
disaster had been telegraphed we all knew it was going to happen,
and more political and economic will, including a more comprehensive
effort to evacuate the city of New Orleans, could have minimized human
suffering. What makes it even worse is that the millions being pledged
now by private citizens and corporations and the 10.5 billion initially
pledged by the government could have saved New Orleans ten times over
through improvement of infrastructure. Because of the federal governments
push for privatization which translates into public services being slas!
hed or sold to private companies, perhaps the government simply no longer
has structures in place to handle disasters. This could explain why
Bush ended his speech with If you want to help, if you're listening
to this broadcast, contribute cash to the Salvation Army and the Red
Cross. Each death in New Orleans was preventable. But money is
not made in prevention but in reconstruction. Soon, like in Iraq, the
big contracts for reconstruction will be on their way some corporations
will make a killing. Let the bidding begin.
Also, it is with
a sense of irony that one reads of corporations like Wal-Mart contributing
millions of dollars to the relief efforts. Yet were their employees
in New Orleans working in better conditions and with better pay, some
of those who couldnt afford to evacuate would have been able to
do so. These corporations are responsible for the loss of jobs through
outside contracting to sweatshops in Third World countries
where in turn occasional fires break out leading to hundreds of deaths.
In Third World countries, they no longer pay government
taxes in the tax free trade zones, leading to further des! truction
of already fragile and poor economies. Where these corporations have
remained in the United States as retailers and manufacturers, they have
seen to wages being cut. They are rabidly against unions and essentially
use the community the same way colonial companies used colonized communities
for cheap labor, extraction of raw materials and of course as
buyers of products whose production is finished elsewhere.
Thus coupled with
a government that has engineered its own version of structural adjustment
to maximize profit, and corporations that economically and politically
colonize a community, the vulnerability which in real terms is
the result of victimization seen in New Orleans is not a surprise.
Rather, it is the culmination of well planned and orchestrated policies
that consolidate wealth in the hands of a few at the expense of the
poor. Globalization is not resulting in a world that becomes better
as it gets smaller, but rather in a world where poverty becomes more
prevalent and more apparent. This globalization of poverty makes New
Orleans a village ! in everybodys backyard. Instead of outsourcing
disaster to an unnamed Third World it seems to me that citizens
of the United States should be placing the responsibility for the preventable
deaths and suffering in New Orleans on their government and corporate
board rooms.
Mukoma Wa Ngugi is the author of Conversing with Africa: Politics
of Change and the forthcoming, Looking at America: Politics of Change.