Reflections on Poverty in Africa

From Marcello Di Cinto's travelogue, "Harmattan: Wind Across West Africa"

"It's hard when poverty smiles as you. it's much easier when it scowls.

I remember a beggar girl in Cape Coast. She was lying in the shade on the side of Aboom Road. She was like a pile of sticks, her limbs fleshless and twisted into unnatural bends. She couldn't walk, she could scarcely lift her head, but she smiled at me and told me welcome. Laying there in a heap like something discarded and forgotten. And she was so happy to see me she somehow found the energy to smile. Her happiness was as impossible as the angles of her limbs. I think about her often, and I remember how hard it was to smile back at her, and how foolish I felt. She cannot begin to know that her smile hit me like a rock.

Nobody wants to hear stories like that. Everyone wants to hear that the weather is hot and the food is weird and I've learned to wipe my ass without toilet paper. It is easier not knowing about that girl in Cape Coast. I wonder if she is dead now. I wonder how many people remember her.

The truly poor in Africa are difficult to see because they blend in with the rubbish and filth that they live in. They are the moving shadows in the trash heaps, camouflaged in squalor. When you see them the horror is in realizing you are watching them decompose. Their living flesh is slowly being milled into earth, or taken away in tiny flakes by flies. Crawling naked through the trash heaps, they search for bits of food - some wilted lettuce or a banana peel with the little plug of fruit still in the center. They don't beg. I suppose they haven't the energy. Eventually they just disappear."

"On one of my first mornings in Niger, I sat at a taxi park waiting for a ride. I was in the shade with some of the other waiting passengers when a beggar approached me. He was a small naked boy, about three years old, and his left arm was severed from the elbow down. He walked up to me with his one hand extended hoping for a handout. Immediately, reflexively, I shook my head.

But he didn't go away. He stood, rubbing his cheek with his stump, and stared at me with a gaze that I couldn't interpret and cannot forget. He made me feel ashamed of myself. This child with dusty shadows on his bald head, a sticky nose and eyes far too old for him. And me with principles far too clean for this place, far too tidy for this dirty boy and his missing arm. he scolded me by rubbing that smooth stump on his rough cheek. In a moment all that I thought I knew, all my white-man's logic and convictions, all my absolutes, fell into the dust with a clatter only I could hear. And inside me something started to bleed.

Withered, I reached into my pocket and gave the boy some coins. he didn't thank me. He didn't even smile. I didn't deserve it. He walked away, turning back only once with that same punishing glare.

A man sitting next to me saw what had happened. He touched me on the shoulder and handed me a banana."