Rags to wealth

 

In a small town, on the west coast of Africa, lived a young girl. Her mother was a doctor and her father was a local schoolteacher. As a result the district that she lived in was relatively well off. Every day, before she left for the clinic, the girl's mother would walk to the area pump and come back with the days gossip and four gallons of water. She heated this on an open fire and the young girl would wash before school. By the time her father had woken, a breakfast of flat millet cakes and hot herbal tea had been laid out on the rough wooden table and the sun would be lighting the room with the promise of another dry day. After eating the girl would leave for school with her father. It took an hour and a half to walk the five miles to the schoolhouse. The dusty mud track that served the community for a main road would be an almost impassable quagmire of sticky mud in the rainy months. But for now it was serviceable, and the new growth of fresh green plants that heralded the opening of spring made it almost pretty.

 

The road led down a small hill, past other wooden and corrugated iron shacks that were almost identical to the one the young girl lived in. In the stark sunlight of the warm day they seemed permanent, a safe and secure refuge from a busy world. But the girl knew that in a few weeks the dry season would have started and the frequent fires would flash through the community. Sometimes ten or more houses would be burnt, and she like many others would not consider it too bad to spend half a night dismantling the house to preserve it from this threat. The house would be rebuilt quickly when the fire had passed. If she was lucky she would not miss too much of the school day, an important fact as her mother and father were paying nearly a dollar a week to the company who ran the school, and they would not get a refund for those days she missed. The dollar represented a large chunk from the households budget and the school was expensive for them, this was despite the fact that the father received a discount from the school as part of his weekly payment. Many of the children living in the area did not go to school, spending each day helping with impossible tasks of cleaning and cooking or engaged in helping with the family work, which was often selling small trinkets to the rich tourists who flocked to the resorts near the township.

 

The road, having reached the bottom of the hill, led through the dense shambles of lean-too's, scrappy shacks and canvas shelters that made up the bulk of the townships 50,000 homes. The lane was narrow and the smell of sewage and rotting meat or vegetables was so strong that it was almost a taste. The girl hated this part of her journey. She hated the squalid one room homes and the squealing babies. She hated the dogs sniffing at every fouled piece of carcass, but most of all she hated the children of the slum. They would run from their doorways and tease her, calling her 'Missy Lady Stuck-up' or pretending to lower their heads as she passed by only to flick a quick lump of mud at her white dress, a dress her mother had washed carefully the night before, hanging it in the yard to dry for the morning. Her father would round on the children when they did this, letting forward a tirade of reproach. He was not really angry at the waifs that tormented his daughter, they sometimes went without food, to them a school was an impossible place. No, he was quietly angry at the company who owned the school, at the government who refused to tax the company. At such times his face would taughten and in his eyes was a slow deep fury, a barrier against the hopelessness.

 

The hospital, was so called because a doctor and two nurses worked in the six bedded room that made up its entire structure. The girls mother worked here, and on this morning she climbed the three steps that led to the porch quickly for she knew that she was a little late. Sure enough a queue of some fifty people, mainly woman and children, stood patiently by the gate. She sighed, casting a professional eye at the line, assessing her work for the day, before pushing open the door and stepping inside. In one corner was a sturdy metal cabinet that had once been an office filing system. It served to keep the drugs in. Since there was no electricity there were a great many medicines that could not be stocked, but the staff considered themselves luckier than some because at least they had a decent room which was clean and orderly. The hospital stood in a compound next to other 'service' buildings; a dentists, an advice centre and the headquarters of a charity. Next to these stood a money exchange, a property office, a company shop and, most incongruously, a beautiful church. The church was a minor miracle, it had green short turf around it and even boasted windows with coloured glass. A tightly manicured gravel path led to the large oak doors, the only oak in the county. Every day a bent and grey haired man would shuffle around the lawn with a hosepipe, making sure that, even if the township was burning up, the Lord's grass would be fresh and cool.

 

Ten yards from the dentists was a gate. Around the gate was barbed wire. It stood ten feet high and 20 broad, having a checkpoint and red and white barrier to guard the approach. Behind the gate was a square mile of factories, square, grey metal box's and concrete sheds, all surrounded by an impressive razor wire fence with video camera's on long poles every 200 yards The hospital had been built here because the guard at the gate carried an automatic weapon and provided a degree of security that was not available in the town. Seen from the air this ‘factory unit' would have been the epicentre of a concentric ring of poverty. A quiet haven of well dressed uniformed workers, young women in the main part, tarmac roads and electric lighting. Around it bustled the township, a melange of dust, noise and smell that served to distance the factory compound in more than physical terms, from the people outside its perimeter.

 

At nine o'clock precisely a convoy of large Japanese four wheeled drive vehicles churned their way at speed towards the gates. The halted briefly at the check point before disappearing in to compound, leaving a choking cloud of dust that slowly settled out, covering the waiting patients in a fine red layer. The convoy had come from the resort where the wealthy foreign workers staid. These drafts people, managers, and technicians, vital to the factories, were often on a one year tour of duty for their company so they did not speak the countries language, much less understand their culture. To the five passengers, sitting in the air-conditioned comfort of their padded seats, the township and its people were no more real than the pictures on the satellite TV sets back in their hotel. They loathed the place, its smell, its meanness, the sheer intransigence of the local people, the constant hassle of the beggars and street children. It was February, the last month before they would be flown back to Europe or America, back to their homes and their world. The town, its beautiful coasts, its dry sun-baked hills could, as far as they were concerned, go to hell. It probably was already, certainly if the message pasted on a large wooden billboard by the church was anything to go by. 'You are all sinners' it said.

 

Sinners or not the people in the queue for the hospital were probably too occupied with screaming babies, children and the, by now, roasting sun, to offer a prayer at the church. A large billboard by the roadside showed youths in T-shirts, smiling and drinking Coke. 'Coke adds life repeated the slogan' in words two feet high. The queue of coughing people had shifted slowly to take advantage of its shade, as one by one they went in to the building. The doctor sat them on a small table and asked about their illness before checking pulse, breathing, lungs, tongue. Time after time the symptoms that presented themselves were the same. She had seen too many of these cases. Over the five years that she had worked in the surgery she had watched them multiply. Tiredness, dizzy, coughs that would not go away; skin infections, bowel infections, wasting away, lack of appetite and constant pain. AIDS, stupid AIDS. Caught by people because they could not protect themselves, had no means of even fighting back against this killer disease. The church priest had said it was 'God’s wrath' and the town councils said any man who wears a condom will father only monsters or be left childless and damned for all eternity. Not that condoms were available, there were none, probably, in the whole township: certainly not the case in the plush western resort by the bayside.

 

The young woman doctor shook here head sadly, she had no drugs to help and her advice could only be harsh and cruel. Abstain from sexual activity and ask your husband to come in to the surgery. They never did, the men, it would have been social suicide. Probably actual suicide, dragging the whole family to ruin, as anyone with AIDS was immediately barred from the shabby employment agencies that sub-contracted out the factory work. These businesses, parasitic on the already low wages paid by the manufacturer, were the lifeblood and the chains of the community. Almost outside the reach of the law they dictated who lived and who died, who suffered and who starved. It was impossible to voice an opinion, or say a word against the company or conditions, at the first hint of sedation from any worker and that worker and their family would never be hired in any factory job. Instead they would be consigned to hawking or at worst scavenging from the town dump, an intolerably horrible festering hole in the ground some five miles inland from the factories. Here amongst toxic chemicals and industrial wastes was the accumulated garbage of 200,000 people, one western style resort and a large military airbase. Rumours were rife that people had been made rich by finding a gold ring or a serviceable electrical item. But the fact was that some 70 families slowly starved to death amid the over-picked mounds of filth.

 

Almost surprisingly the factory made high class computer screens for IBM and Apple. Convoys of lorries would arrive during the night, shaking the roads and the houses as they passed them. Raw materials, precious items of technology and high tech parts for the machines made their way from the busy port to the factory. They would leave before dawn carrying the computer monitors, carefully shrouded in their polystyrene and cardboard cocoons. These were loaded into containers and put into the holds of the immense cargo vessels that lined the concrete quayside. They were bound for America, Australia or Europe, and with them went the wealth and lives of the town.

 

Take your pick, from clothes to car parts, from food to kitchen utensils it is the way that we live. As you read these words this is the norm not the unusual. And this town, was no different from other communities based around the new multinational factories. The doctor and the schoolteacher knew this as well as did any of the towns citizens, from the policeman on the street corner to the hawker of sweetbreads. They were not stupid, but there was no way out. No way to break the cycle of poverty, and the daily scramble to provide food and housing left no time for the luxury of resistance. Even the word 'Union' was feared. There were townships that had organised and mobilised for better pay, shorter hours and decent houses, but the factory had simply closed its doors, the multinational contracting its work with another factory, perhaps in China or Thailand. The factory owners, the employment agencies, the shopkeepers and the workers suddenly left without jobs, businesses or money. This had happened once to the township, once long ago in the 1980's, and for a while the town had been a virtual ghost town, its roads packed with the hand carts and household items of desperate refugees, walking back to the countryside or the interior or on to another shanty town. Hundreds had died and it was years before the government of country could entice another multinational with tax breaks and generous land deals or free rent. It had cost the country millions and now a small army of police, plainclothes detectives, company inspectors and industrial department agents conducted an endless war to stamp out the hotheads. It was a costly mistake that the government, a democracy, had vowed would never happen again. Unwritten laws of what could be said, what could be done and most of all about where people could meet were ruthlessly enforced under the banner of fair-trade. No-one in their right mind wanted the unions, nobody wanted the trouble makers or the hot-heads, least of all the people who queued in the dawn light to see who would work that day and who would be turned away. There was usually no need to go beyond the law to enforce the working conditions. A word to the employment agency or to the shopkeeper's guild or to the landlords, who owned the majority of the shacks and hovels, was usually enough. On occasion there had been physical abuse and even murders. A lawyer was shot in the head, his body slumped under a tree on the edge of the town. He had been trying to set up a workers drop in centre for legal advice. But these were the exceptions and actions that the government did not condone or want. A word was as powerful. The result for the unfortunate worker and his family was almost as sure a death sentence as a bullet.

 

The screens left Africa for the American East Coast. Here they were unloaded and brought together with the computers and the parts, printers, scanners and paraphernalia of the High Tech world. In a huge warehouse, blazoned with the IBM logo they were repackaged and loaded onto articulated lorries to travel the length and breadth of America's retail outlets.