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Freelance writer, journalist and documentary filmmaker Larry Krotz (BA ’72) discussed the views people in the West hold of Africa, and their expectations of that country, at the weekly colloquium series, Canada and its Place in the World, Feb. 26 at Glendon.
The series is part of the new Master’s in Public & International Affairs (MPIA) Program within Glendon’s School of Public & International Affairs.
Krotz’s talk explored the themes of his recent book, The Uncertain Business of Doing Good: Outsiders in Africa, which examines the benefits as well as the pitfalls of outsiders going into Africa to help in situations that may be beyond their understanding or ability to improve.
Left: York Professor Michael Barutciski (left), host of the MPIA colloquium series, with Larry Krotz
The Uncertain Business of Doing Good is an account of Krotz’s travels to Angola in 1992, Kenya in 1997 and 2004, and Tanzania in 2002. Although each of these trips was a professional journey with a mandate to report on events of the moment, Krotz’s book begins more like a conversation than a treatise on the ethics of doing good.
“My book is a reflective memoir rather than a polemic and it is also more about us [in the Western world], than about Africa,” says Krotz.
During his talk, he addressed the prejudices held by people wanting to do good and their often limited view of the possible outcomes resulting from their help. Whether doing good happens in response to requests for aid or is offered voluntarily, the resulting relationships are always very complicated, he says. Asking for help while maintaining one’s dignity is as difficult for a country as it is for an individual. On the other hand, when help is offered unbidden, the assessment of the situation on which the needs are based could be unrealistic.
“We find it hard to ignore need. There is a moral instinct and a historical imperative at the core of what is best in us,” says Krotz. He pointed to different relationships between Africa and other societies, holding up China as an interesting example. The Chinese have a large presence in Africa, but unlike the Europeans, they have no colonial past, no missionizing, no moralizing and no prejudice. They are merely there to make the best deals possible for the natural resources they need so desperately.
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Many Western organizations operating in African countries have rules and expectations that don’t work, he says. Africa can be frustrating for serious outsiders, such as Canadians Stephen Lewis and Romeo Dallaire, who recognize the urgency of need for help. Among the many difficulties faced by several African countries is that their chief agricultural products – cotton and coffee – are kept out of Western markets as a result of protection laws.
“We perpetrate the notion that Africa is a victim and helpless, that chaos rules there,” said Krotz. “And while there is a kernel of truth in all these assumptions, lumping an entire continent into one undistinguished mass is a common mistake. We treat Africa as a child which needs to be managed, looked after, done to.”
A number of high-profile speakers have been a part of Canada and its Place in the World, the MPIA’s weekly colloquium series, including US Consul General John Nay, former federal Liberal cabinet ministers David Collenette and Pierre Pettigrew, Svetlana Ageeva of the Canadian Red Cross Society, Ambassadors James Bissett and Allan Gotlieb, and former deputy secreterary general of Amnesty International Vince Del Buono.
Submitted to YFile by Glendon communications officer Marika Kemeny