Once upon a time,
I settled in Cotonou, Benin. I heard and
experienced little of chaotic Nigeria and the oil fields, immediately to the
east. The blazing equatorial sun and the
humidity blowing in off the Gulf of Guinea intoxicated me much more. The heat was... remarkable… a fine British,
colonial, and aristocratic, sentimental saying.
In many
respects, I lived there as well as I do in Canada. I marched off to work for a Canadian
development organization and the staff (servants), stayed busily engaged at
home. Leftovers could spoil quickly, so we
cooked fresh every day. I, we,
colleagues, well, we picked up fresh papaya and pineapple in the market. Because some of us adhered to our vegetarian
ways, there was always the soaking of dried beans and the making of yoghurt
from milk powder. Furthermore,
vegetables, if they were to be eaten fresh, had to be rinsed in a chlorine
solution. Local gardens were watered
from shallow wells which, given the surface latrines throughout the city, meant
ghastly amoeba and bacteria sprinkled on all those nice tomatoes and lettuces. For lack of a machine, other significant
household chores included daily hand washing of clothes and, no vacuum, sweeping
and wiping for dust, dust, dust.
Narcotic as it
was, to be king in a fishbowl, I could still see, that something about it was
not The Wealth of Nations.
My home, built
for foreigners, had four plus extra rooms for… well… access perhaps to the
wrap-around porch? Me me and me. My neighbours, all 27 of them in their complex of blended family (ies), lived in the same floor
area of perhaps 1200 square feet. My
1200, mostly interior. Their 1200,
mostly exterior.
I had space, but
I was alone. Poor.
My neighbours
had space, but were not alone Wealthy.
They had
children playing, cooking, and courting, great wives commanding, uncles
tottering, college students studying on boards and bricks… all within the
parameter of their wall. Sometimes the
chaos spilled out of doors through the gate and onto the unpaved street. Interface with tinkerers, merchants, marketers,
vendors, sleuths, pickpockets, hawkers, shysters and more! All the world for sale on heads, on motos, on
carts, in hands, over shoulders, and in minds.
A neighbourhood, a market, in all true sense of the meaning, alive from
morning to midnight!
Oddly, Benin is
among the world's poorest countries with a per capita GNI $ 790 (per capita
final $ value) in 2012. We in Canada
enjoy around $39,000. Benin has little
ability to buffer local markets from the shake up of globalization.
We in Canada
have oil, gas, and potash. Some say we
have good government, too. Perhaps, I
think, the $ and the resources are behind this.
After all, what we also have are global mining and banking
companies. In Mali, in Mexico, in Congo
(DRC), in London (banks).
This is not Adam
Smith. There is no free market where
guns are behind recruitment of your children into the Lord’s army. Ours is no free market where our cell phones
are loaded up with coltan, mined in eastern Congo under the auspices of a rebel
army and the rape of women every day, managed by Rwanda and Paul Kagame, tolerated
if not financed by our governments, and our mining companies, and our banks, and
delivered at low cost to refiners, manufactured for our cell phones everywhere.
Just google up,
buddies…
mining Canada banks coltan cell phones
Coltan. You buy it, so do I do.
But it is not
The Wealth of Nations. No free market.
What was
Cotonou, Benin? Just at that time, on a
street, in nowheresville anywhere, I heard laughter in the street, close to the
watchful eye of a parent. I saw ‘you and
me’ in a once upon time world, buying and selling in a market. I saw you and me negotiating with people you
and I knew. Or did not know, the traders,
outsiders, people not in the market, but from a market economy…
Warily we trod
in that case.
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