Free Radical

by Cable, Vincent

  I made other friends who introduced me to rural Kenya: Gilbert Ojwang, a Luo from South Nyanza, and John Ndero, a Kamba from eastern Kenya, both junior Treasury officials who, in return for a lift to their villages to see their families, were happy to offer me a few nights’ accommodation. Theirs was a Kenya far from the main roads and the tourist routes. Their wives toiled the year round on small shambas growing maize and beans, keeping a few chickens and hauling water and wood for long distances. Their husbands’ salaries paid for primary school fees and the odd luxury: toys or decent clothes. My modest Swahili and their modest English provided sufficient basic communication, but I missed many of the nuances. On one occasion I was offered a woman for company; whether this was a tradition or to accommodate the particular needs of Europeans wasn’t clear. The expression of relief on the young woman’s face when I insisted on declining her suggested that I did the right thing. On another occasion, one of Gilbert’s less savoury relatives stole my (somewhat battered) coat and after an extensive search in the village the article was tracked down to his hut. My expression of indifference to the loss was misinterpreted as an act of great clemency and generosity, for had the thief been turned over to the police the magistrates would have certainly sentenced him to several strokes of the cane as well as imprisonment in Kenya’s harsh, still colonial, penal system.

  In a succession of visits I began to get a feel for the rhythms, and profound boredom, of rural life, far removed from electricity, public transport or markets. The journeys, across the rolling and fertile Kisii hills or the valleys around Machakos, revealed a largely unknown and beautiful Kenya but also an alarming one, since every inch of land to the tops of hills was already intensely cultivated by tiny plots; any additional population could only be accommodated by ruinously uneconomic subdivision or by migration to the cities.

  Land hunger was the most explosive issue in Kenya, made worse by demographic pressures – Kenya had the world’s highest birth rate (4 per cent) – compounded by grotesque inequalities. Kenya had lanced the political boil through a largely successful land transfer programme, taking a million acres from Europeans to allocate to small farmers, mainly Kikuyu. But there were other desperately overcrowded parts of the country, and some vast European estates – like those of Lord Delamere in the Rift Valley – that remain untouched to this day.

  From other acquaintances – John Mwangale, a recently recruited Treasury graduate, an Abaluyha from Mount Elgon on the Ugandan border, and Mubia, who took me to his farm near Nyeri – I learned about a successful, commercially oriented dimension to African agriculture. Hundreds of thousands of small-scale African farmers were developing cash crops as well as maize: coffee; tea; pyrethrum (for insecticides); fruit and vegetables for urban markets; horticulture for export; and dairy cattle producing milk for rural cooperatives. In some parts there was modest prosperity, and everywhere an eagerness to learn more about improved agricultural techniques such as the use of fertilizers, the optimum use of shading and terracing, scarecrows (hitherto largely unknown), and plant disease control.

  I acquired abiding respect for the entrepreneurial skills of peasant farmers and a lifelong irritation with metropolitan, development theorists who opine that developing countries should stick to subsistence farming. I recall a particularly humbling long conversation with an illiterate farmer, a former Mau Mau detainee, who had a far clearer understanding of commodity futures markets and the impact of exchange-rate movements on agriculture than I had, and who expressed polite surprise that Cambridge economics graduates knew so little.

  One of the few things about which white and black would normally be expected to agree was how appalling the Asians were. Indeed, it was a common conversational ploy by many racist whites, who did not wish to be overheard criticizing the new black rulers, to vent their spleen on the Asians. The Great White Hunters, the bores of the dinner-party circuit, with their endless anecdotes about tracking lions through the bush (from the safety of a jeep) were particularly contemptuous of this urban minority, which had no obvious interest in the great outdoors, in marked contrast to the idealized heroic African warrior, the Masai. Stories about the Man-eaters of Tsavo which, a century before, had caught and eaten large numbers of Indian workers when they were building the railway from Mombasa, caused particular mirth. For their part, populist African politicians were turning up the heat on the Asians for a variety of alleged misdeeds: overcharging or rudeness by Asian shopkeepers (or dukawallahs); lack of loyalty to the new Kenya (few had taken out citizenship apart from the Ismailis, who did so, en masse, on advice from their leader, the Aga Khan); lack of social mixing and intermarriage; Diwali fireworks; even the offensive smell of Hindu cremations. The simple truth was that the discriminatory practices of colonial times – when Asians were forbidden from owning land or entering the upper reaches of public service – had confined the Asians to trading, clerical and artisan activities, where they were now directly in the path of upwardly mobile Africans.

  I felt particular discomfort at the anti-Asian mood building up in Kenya, which reached a climax with the exodus of 1968. Not only was there my relationship with Olympia, but some of my closest associates in the government, with whom I could have an easy conversation uninhibited by considerations of status or political sensitivity, were Asian: Nizar Jetha, an economist who asked the right awkward questions about tax policy; two very able statisticians, Parmeet Singh and Surjit Heyer; and the Treasury’s sharpest financial mind, Ramesh Gheewala, who should have risen to the top on ability but had already reached his glass ceiling. Through them and others I was invited to numerous weddings and community events. I came to appreciate that the ‘Asian community’ was a largely meaningless racial construct, since it encompassed several religions and language groups with as much in common as ‘European’ Finns and Bosnians. Even within fairly homogeneous groups like the Hindu Gujaratis there were self-contained caste groups like the Patels, Shahs and Loharias. To the Kenyan Asians, however, I owed not just a happy marriage and family but probably my life. When I was stricken with a rapidly spreading infection of unknown origin, Olympia whisked me into the ‘Asian’ hospital, where I was, I think, the only European. After being put on the critical list for several days and pumped full of every antibiotic known to man, I stabilized and then recovered, mainly thanks to Dr Yusuf Eraj and his colleagues.

  In other ways, too, I pieced together fragments of the complex society in which I lived. A Tanzanian friend, Nioni, who worked for the shortly to be defunct East African Railways, introduced me to the nightclub scene and the Congolese dance music which was, and I think still is, much preferred to the crude, plonking rhythms of most Western pop. I helped for a while as a producer of plays in a township called Jerusalem. Much of Nairobi’s African working class disappeared at night to those mockeries of the Promised Land – another was called Jericho. They were mean, minimalist, crime-ridden, badly lit and distant from the city, the vision of some colonial town planner whose skills were transposed to or from Rhodesia or South Africa. The idea evidently was that Africans should be close enough to the city to be able to commute to work but far enough away not to cause trouble or overcrowd the commercial centre.

  In Jerusalem, a group of youngsters had formed a theatre club performing African drama in English and, when a Peace Corps volunteer left, I was drafted in to help. My production skills were as rudimentary as their acting and the first night of our first big production was plunged into disaster when the leading man was picked up by the police an hour before the start. I let the cast down by resigning in the face of this and other obstacles. But I received a brief but vivid education in the lives of young people trying to educate themselves against formidable odds.

  The same Peace Corps volunteer also encouraged me to continue his work with mentally ill children in Mathare. Mathare is now the site of one of the biggest shanty towns in Africa, but it was then in the early stages of growth and better known for the hospital. The stinking, caged, disturbed children,
to whom I read and talked, survived, if little more: the underclass of an under-class. The wretchedness of their condition contrasted jarringly with the estate nearby: Muthaiga, home of the super-rich and the country’s leading golf club.

  These well-intentioned, if largely ineffective, gestures on my part contrasted with a more self-indulgent side to my lifestyle. Encouraged by Terry Libby, who had flown at university, I decided that I wanted to learn to fly. Nairobi’s wonderful climate made it a perfect place to learn. Most of my savings went on flying lessons. I proved to be stunningly incompetent. I discovered that my rather disorganized and intuitive cleverness was a handicap, not a help, when it came to mastering the complex but essential routines necessary for pilot and passenger safety. I failed the pilot’s licence exam three times and succeeded at only the fourth attempt, something of a record at the local flying club. The second failure was spectacular, when I did not take appropriate action to correct a spin and the plane narrowly avoided the control tower, followed by a simulated emergency landing in a field which I managed to make real. The examiner, a Rhodesian former Battle of Britain pilot, emerged from the experience shaking with fright. Eventually I scraped through and enjoyed solo flying in the breathtakingly beautiful landscape around Mounts Kenya and Kilimanjaro and over the Rift Valley. My carelessness almost proved my undoing, however, most notably after taking off from a landing strip on the slopes of Mount Kenya, when I forgot to adjust the choke and the engine started to die. As I drifted down into a forest some latent instinct for self-preservation saved me, feet from the trees. My nerve and my money ran out at about the same time and I gave up flying. I had, however, the malicious satisfaction of seeing my instructor, whose stories about my lessons entertained the club bar for months, barred from flying for crash-landing while drunk.

  My personal debt to Kenya was immense. But, despite occasional visits with Olympia and our children to see their cousins in Nairobi, the country became a rapidly receding memory. When I returned again with Rachel, four decades later, I tried to recapture some of the past, and largely failed. Olympia’s old home had disappeared under a property development; the house in the forest had gone, overgrown; Savosnik had stayed in Kenya but had died; Pamela I could not trace (but have done since); the once impressive finance ministry, designed to shock and awe more junior departments, was now dwarfed by skyscrapers. My brother-in-law was the only link with the past, with his family, and he had defied the pessimists, becoming one of the country’s leading lawyers, a successful businessman and, now, a leading political figure too. I stopped searching and enjoyed the experience afresh, even marvelling at the animals in the game parks I had once affected to despise.

  Chapter 6

  Red Clydeside

  To Glasgow I owe six good years: the beginning of family life with Olympia and two young children; some academic credentials; and a thorough education in the university of political life.

  Why Glasgow? I faced a rich choice of economics faculty posts in Sussex, Cambridge and Glasgow. This was less a tribute to my abilities than a reflection of the fact that this was a golden age for university academics, with rapid expansion of job opportunities along with high prestige and relatively undemanding workloads. We decided on Glasgow on the basis of a warmly welcoming handwritten airmail to Kenya from the head of faculty, promising a lecturing post for me and an opportunity for Olympia to do postgraduate research.

  The Glasgow to which we came had a grim reputation for poor housing, poverty, industrial decline, sectarian division and violent, alcohol-fuelled gangland crime. The reputation was a caricature of a much more complex reality which included much fine architecture, a rich cultural life, and a highly regarded university (in fact, two), the apex of an education system that, in many respects, produced better results than its English equivalent. But at that stage no one was seriously seeking to project the strengths and virtues of Glasgow, and most Glaswegians expressed their pride in the city through black humour and parody of the kind perfected by Billy Connolly.

  My only previous acquaintance with the university had been the Debating Union, where a Cambridge colleague and I, as guest speakers, had been made to look slow-witted by the quick repartee of Glasgow student politicians, who had recently included the likes of John Smith, Donald Dewar and Menzies Campbell.

  The university itself was not, like most others in England and Scotland, a mix of students from across the country but was overwhelmingly made up of local young people who had just completed their Highers (taken a year before English A levels) before embarking on a four-year degree. The students were, perhaps, as a consequence more conformist, less rebellious and more work-oriented than elsewhere, aware that they were on a conveyor belt to the Scottish professions.

  The faculty in which I researched and taught had an ancient pedigree. Adam Smith was, arguably, the university’s most famous son, together with his friend David Hume, and the continued relevance of his economic analysis after 250 years was reflected in the undergraduate courses. There were some birds of passage, like myself and Gus O’Donnell, later the UK’s top civil servant. But the staff was mostly, somewhat uneasily, divided into two distinct groups. A group of Scots dominated the running of the faculty and the university, most of them formidably able but somewhat narrowly focused and conservative. Then there was a range of more exotic characters who brought variety and new ideas. Alec Nove was one of the world’s leading authorities on the Soviet economy and he anticipated many of the issues that came to the surface under Gorbachev’s perestroika. Ljubo Sirc, with whom I taught international economics, had come to Glasgow after a period in jail, under sentence of death, in Yugoslavia, where his views had clashed with those of communist fellow partisans. He analysed, and accurately predicted the failure of, the planned economies of eastern Europe – even the ‘middle way’ kind, as in Yugoslavia – and the eventual triumph of liberal economics. Radha Sinha did pioneering work on the comparative development of India, China and Japan. Our head of department, the Ulsterman Tom Wilson, had a gentle way of deflating the fashionable follies of government intervention. With a few exceptions, the department’s leading figures reflected the underlying economic philosophy of Adam Smith, whose bicentenary was celebrated when I was in Glasgow.

  The great strength of the Glasgow – indeed, of the wider Scottish – tradition of economics (called, quite properly, political economy) was that it firmly anchored economics in philosophical ideas. There was little encouragement for those, whose influence was growing elsewhere, who wished to turn the subject into a branch of mathematics or were slaves to reductive models. There was a genuine sense of outrage that Smith’s ideas were being used out of context and for crude ideological positioning by people who failed to connect the market economics of the ‘invisible hand’ in The Wealth of Nations with his scepticism about the motives of businessmen, not least their endless quest to subvert the market. In his earlier book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith had extolled ‘benevolence’, ‘sympathy’ and ‘compassion’ as central moral principles.

  In truth, I did not make a major contribution to the academic life of the university beyond my quota of teaching and finishing a PhD (on economic development and regional integration in Latin America), as did Olympia. And though Olympia and I had a tight circle of university friends and lived close to the university, we increasingly gravitated towards town rather than gown. In Olympia’s case this was because she felt obliged, despite the conflicting claims of a baby and a thesis, to help contain our overdraft by teaching. She was recruited to teach history in a Catholic secondary, St Pius’s, in Drumchapel, one of the three massive post-war council housing schemes built on the periphery of the city as homes for those displaced by slum clearance in the inner city. By the late 1960s the full awfulness of these schemes was beginning to become apparent: shoddy construction and damp; lack of decent public transport; lack of leisure activities, beyond the pubs; and the recreation of many of the social ills that were thought to have been banished by sl
um clearance.

  Olympia’s Catholic education and African teaching experience did not fully prepare her for the challenges of St Pius’s. The Catholicism taught was uncompromising. Faith was instilled, not discussed. Olympia’s attempts to introduce into the classroom a balanced historical assessment of Oliver Cromwell, let alone the atheists Robespierre and Lenin, produced an apoplectic reaction from the head. She also came to appreciate that in Glasgow religion is part of a strong tribal identity, and the pupils were clearly puzzled by their teacher’s ignorance of some of the fundamentals, like the difference between Celtic and Rangers. Perhaps for this reason, or the head’s wicked sense of humour, her duties were extended to include refereeing school football matches. I believe that the stories of this rather beautiful Indian lady running around a muddy pitch in a sari and high-heeled shoes entered into Drumchapel folklore. Olympia could cope with all of this. What she could not cope with was the resentful, and sometimes aggressive, philistinism of the pupils. Unlike her African girls, who treated every second of teaching time as an opportunity and a privilege, many of the boys and girls of Drumchapel resented school and regarded it as irrelevant. She did her best to encourage the more academic pupils, but found that those she encouraged would be persecuted as a consequence. On one occasion she discovered that a particularly promising pupil was being regularly upended in a toilet bowl. Despite the insistence of our friends that comprehensive education was working well, and that Scotland had developed a superior variant of it, Olympia’s experience told her otherwise.

  My own introduction to learning outside the groves of academe was altogether more satisfying, starting with WEA evening classes and progressing to be one of the first generation of Open University tutors. The OU was an absolute joy, with brilliantly crafted, multidisciplinary coursework and eager, questioning adult pupils who had been given, and seized, a second chance and were determined not to lose it. I have been a strong supporter of adult education ever since and believe it is scandalous and foolish that so much priority is given to force-feeding reluctant teenagers at school and university rather than adults who want to learn or relearn but, without help, lack the analytical tools.