Tropes

Tropes aren’t clichés. Tropes are phrases used in ways different from literal for a rhetorical purpose. What I’m concerned with here is clichés and people sure do love them a cliché:

 “Carrots improve your eyesight”

“Math is hard”

“Everything grows in Uganda”

“Ugandans don’t keep time”

“Foreign aid creates a dependency culture”

Sometimes indulging in cliché when the circumstances require insight is harmless laziness. The worst thing that happens if someone actually comes to believe that carrots have a positive influence on eyesight is they turn a pretty orange tinge. Other times it’s not so clear what the repercussions are; does bitching about mathematics being difficult do anything but discourage you and those around you?

Bear with my judgmental ass while I posit a theory about why it is that people do indulge: it makes them appear savvier than they really are. The rhetorical purpose of “Everything grows in Uganda” is to say to the reader/listener that one has traveled Uganda and sampled its bounty. I heard this repeated so many times while I was still in training by volunteers who hadn’t gone past the grounds of the training center. The irony is that once you do actually travel in Uganda you realize that there are like 10 things that grow here and 7 of them are a species of banana. 

I also humbly submit that the love apportioned a cliché is directly related to its ugliness. This serves to cast the pontificator as discriminating and keen; the best kinds of savvy. Yea right. So often I hear “Ugandans don’t keep time” (how often do you say it?). This screams “I’ve worked closely with Ugandans since the beginning of time and they’re just not up to the standards of my super duper precise Swiss-made cesium synchronized watch”.

Alright now I’m just being mean. I’ll stop.

By the way who cares if they in fact don’t keep time! You do realize that this is essentially an agrarian society right? Something like 80% of the population participates in low intensity subsistence agriculture. They rise by the sun, work the field until they’re hungry, break for lunch, and then continue working until past dusk to get as much use out of daylight as possible. No atomic clocks necessary. This is also why they eat, by our standards, a late dinner (to exploit as much daylight as possible). “My students / coworkers don’t work the land so I expect them to keep time”. Well they’re at most the second generation who doesn’t so cut them some slack; it’s a deeply entrenched cultural meme. And they probably do actually work the land, on weekends and during vacation. Quite appropriately, I think, clocks are an absolutely unnecessary concept for some Ugandans and still merely symbolic for the rest. I’d even say getting a watch is a waste of money that would be better spent on food or something. So why are we harping on it? Like with most things Uganda has adopted from the West they’ve missed the point with this as well and we shouldn’t perpetuate the conflation! Germany, for example, didn’t grow to be a paragon of time keeping for the sake of making lots of watches but because they had a burgeoning industrial economy that necessitated strict adherence to schedule. When Ugandans needs to keep time they will. Until then they’re just being pretentious and we’re being smug.

Anyway my school keeps time perfectly well and I’m sure you can point to many instances where your institution does too. Sure sometimes a few students saunter into class after the bell (or hubcap as it may be) rings and sometimes teachers run late but that happens in America too. And yea it’s true people were consistently showing up 20 minutes late to my five o’clock review session. But don’t you see that’s keeping time just 20 minutes staggered! I started coming in at 5:20. So let’s not exaggerate the phenomenon (or at least qualify ourselves when we bring it up).

As conscientious people we should be circumspect and hold ourselves accountable. It’s this irresponsibility that I’m raging against here. Unqualified repetition of these catchphrases is pernicious. If you haven’t rigorously researched something and there’s potential for harm then don’t fucking repeat it. If the only evidence you have for the claim that “Foreign aid creates a dependency culture” is your blithe reading of ‘Dead Aid’ or some other conservative tract then you need to do more research¹. In general popular (or unpopular) nonfiction is a terrible place to get information from because it’s not critically reviewed. The plaudits on the inside of the dust jacket don’t count. I’m not saying all knowledge claims need to be corroborated by peer-reviewed research (e.g. I don’t care if you do a literature review about carrots) but this one does. The reason is that you’re, cavalierly, playing with ideas that inform how an entire nation functions. The amount of research should be commensurate with the gravity of the claim.

I haven’t done the research and this is my explicit warning that I haven’t but I have an opinion:

There are lots of people going hungry here, some starving, and not for lack of will to hoe dirt all day, carefully sow seeds, and reap a harvest. Something like 20% of the population has stunted growth. For example, giving them money for better seeds, pesticides, or even equipment won’t convince them they’re dependent on you for those things; it’ll enable them to eat. I’m addressing this cliché with the most invective because I usually get it thrown at me for giving money to beggars. Firstly it’s my god damn money and secondly it’s very easy to tell the difference between a professional beggar and an authentic one (hint: one is emaciated and consistently unwashed and the other is not). Is the authentic one starving and soiling himself/herself for fun? They’re probably doing it just to prove the cliché true, to rub it in my foreign-aid-giving face right? There’s a beggar in Mbale who has no arms and no legs. Please tell me what it is he’s capable of doing for himself that I’m robbing him the opportunity of discovering?

The point is that as an American blanket generalizations shouldn’t be in your repertoire. Aren’t we here to share culture with Uganda? Don’t we supposedly prize diversity? If we do but simultaneously generalize then we must have some serious psychological dissonance going on. Whether you realize it or not the two sentiments are antithetical. Nor should you blindly eat up whatever’s on the intellectual plate in front of you.  

1. http://blogs.cgdev.org/globaldevelopment/2009/03/dambisa-moyo-discovers-key-to-ending-poverty.php . Yes I just went to Wikipedia.