Africa
Why Norwegians care about Africans
Published 25 September 2006
"Perhaps the problem here in Norway," the blonde newspaper editor rose to her feet to declare, "is that the only way we know how to interact with Africa is by caring." She had a point. Fretting about Africa, I discovered this past week, is something the Norwegians do supremely well. The very fact that the motley crew she'd been invited to join, which included poets from Malawi, reggae artists from Jamaica, writers from Nigeria and journalists from Kenya, was gathered in Stavanger in the first place was a tribute to the nation's intense concern. How many other remote oil towns, after all, bother to hold a week-long festival of African literature?
It seemed a supremely inappropriate place for such a gathering. Dubbed the Houston of Europe, Stavanger was once a sleepy settlement that survived off its canning industry. Today, it is flush with oil money, the population has doubled and high-rise buildings tower over the traditional white clapboard houses. Ships the size of multi-storey shopping plazas float off its quays and its bars teem with short-haired oilmen with Scottish and American accents. Here in Britain we have a sense that, with the drying up of North Sea gas, the good times are over. With most of Norway's waters still uncharted and oil prices heading ever higher, Norwegians know they have only just begun.
Guilty awareness of a windfall brought about by luck rather than virtue seems to fuel some of Norway's earnest concern about Africa's poor. It's as though the nation cannot quite believe its luck and is anxiously putting its pennies in the church plate to ward off some terrible retribution that must surely attend such good fortune.
"There are two ways the world can see us. We can be rich and generous, or rich and looking down on the rest of the world," Erik Solheim, Norway's minister of international development, warned his audience on the first day of the festival. If Norway chose the latter path, he said, it risked being regarded with "anger and revulsion" by those less fortunate. Hence the 0.93 per cent of Norway's gross national income that goes on overseas aid - one of the highest per-capita levels in the world. The United States, in comparison, donates a measly 0.22 per cent. Britain comes in at 0.48 per cent.
But there's more than a fear of Nemesis at play here. Stavanger sits smack in the middle of Norway's Protestant Bible Belt. In the 19th century, missionaries streamed out from this part of the country to Africa; Madagascar was a favourite. That drive to save the world's benighted shifted easily into a belief in the efficacy of aid. When I suggested during a talk on the media that journalists working in Africa should start treating the Oxfams, Médecins Sans Frontières and Unicefs of this world with the same wariness they reserved for multinationals or government spokesmen, I saw shocked eyebrows shoot up across the room.
One of the titles of the talks - "How hospitable are we really?" - made me chuckle. What, I pondered, would be the equivalent if it were being staged in a British version of Stavanger, less generous, more fearful of immigrants, more defensive? "How swamped are we really?" perhaps.
Hospitality, as it happens, is hardly something one could fault the Norwegians for. The city of Stavanger's writer-in-residence, Chenjerai Hove, found refuge here after fleeing Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe. Jack Mapanje, a Malawian poet, made a point of thanking local activists for pressurising the authorities into releasing him from jail. And a vaguely familiar face flitting around the festival turned out to be Isioma Daniel, the Nigerian journalist whose glib reference to the Prophet Muhammad, in a 2002 article on the Miss World pageant, triggered rioting in her home country that left 200 dead and a fatwa on her head. Norway granted her asylum.
It was heart-warming to register how Norwegian protection and patronage had changed these individuals' lives. But as the days went by I began to register the truth of one Norwegian academic's remark that giving can also be something of a self-indulgence, more about the donor's feel-good factor than any practical impact on the receiver. Looking around at the opening ceremony, I noticed there was barely a black face in the crowd. "Africans don't go to African festivals," shrugged Chris Abani, a Nigerian/ British writer of ferocious talent. "They don't need to - they live the experience every day."
So it proved. Stavanger, which is also a university town, has a sizeable community of African immigrants. In the course of the week, walking the cobbled streets, I spotted passers-by who were unmistakably Eritreans and Ethiopians, Kenyans and Nigerians. Naively, I assumed they were waiting for the readings, lectures and performances to start. Not a bit of it. As the festival invitees went through their paces indoors it was possible, gazing through the windows, to spot Stavanger's Africans soaking up the last rays of autumn sun over a companionable coffee, walking to lectures or striding off to work, oblivious to the festival that was dedicated to their problems and challenges.
That's Africans for you. Too busy getting on with life to care who's caring about them.
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