Donnez-moi francs

It does not happen very often here, but sometimes when I am walking around the city someone passing me will say, “donnez-moi francs.” Give me francs (currency). More often, when sitting outside at a restaurant someone will walk up to the tables, open a bag and try to sell small trinkets or souvenirs. It makes sense. Here is a wealthy (by any local standard) foreigner, spending money just to be here in Brazzaville, why not ask for some? If you have goods to sell, sell them where the people with money are sitting.

As a researcher on a limited budget, here for a limited time, my own sense of my lack of wealth confronts the reality that here, at this time and in this place, I have an amazing amount of money on hand for someone who is not rich. The fact that it is already budgeted and accounted for – so much for transportation, so much for food, etc. – does not change the fact that at any given moment in my pocket is more money than in the pocket of the person asking for money. It does not change the fact that in this country almost everyone is struggling. There are few jobs, and even fewer that pay well. Or, as my taxi driver put it, “The country is rich but the people are poor.”

Congo has what are often called “abundant natural resources”: oil, minerals, land that can grow just about anything. None of that natural wealth, or the money that comes from extracting it, however, seems to reach the people. The reasons for this are not complicated or unique to Congo: the few at the top of the governmental pyramid profit, they provide a certain amount of patronage to the next level down, and then…the money is gone.

Foreigners who arrive with their research plans, or their advocacy plans, or their business plans are just another resource. This fact prompts me to reflect on the ethics of doing research under such conditions. The situation appears at both the micro-level of individual interactions, “donnez-moi francs,” and at the macro-level of interactions with government bureaucracy, where the request is essentially the same, if phrased somewhat differently.

The impulse to give is strong. I am very conscious that I am the bearer of enormous privilege, and that just being here, walking around, marks me as such. On the other hand, I have a research budget to maintain, and uses for the money already planned. It is not, in that sense, “my” money. Should this project develop, and receive grant funding for the long term, I will undoubtedly also have to confront the other end of the spectrum of giving at the bureaucratic level. And I cannot, on any level, support any one individual, or provide enough to solve anything but the immediate problem of today’s hunger. So, I give sometimes, and I weigh the balance, and I wonder if I am doing the right thing.