The Tax Man

A Reflection on the Relative Wealth of Nations.

One day, the tax man came to Bourem Sidi Amar, in Northern Mali. He was accompanied by a couple of policemen and arrived in a beat-up Toyota Land Cruiser, He was wearing a khaki uniform. I think there was one desk in the village, belonging to our project Action Blé, so it was hauled out to a flat area of scrub just outside of town, and all the family heads from the village and surrounding smaller places were summoned. They sat on their haunches in a broad semi-circle, facing him under the wide open sky. He was also brought one of the few chairs, and on his desk was a stone-weighted stack of paper, lists of names of family heads, and their taxing history. These were the Songhai, settled farmers, with long local histories. I don’t know how, or even if, the Tuareg, who were much more nomadic, were accounted for or tapped.

All work stopped for the day, for those at the meeting, as each one came forward and had their private business aired in front of everyone else. No one left after they finished, because the spectacle of watching other people explain their financial condition was the most entertaining thing around. They were grilled about livestock, (a lot), and vehicles, (of which there were none in that village). Questions were raised about how many family members were in the household, and such. Once they had paid a few CFA’s, (West African Francs, used in 7 former French colonies, and tied to, and exchangeable with the French Franc), they were finished and could just observe.

Early on, one guy was getting the treatment. The tax man asked after “un âne”, a donkey, which was on his list. The guy said, “There is no donkey.” Several in the audience, clearly not his closest friends, stood up and said, “Yes there is! Yes there is! He has un âne!” There was some back and forth. Finally, the guy conceded this: “Well, there is a donkey. But it won’t let me catch it. And it won’t carry anything or let me ride it. So it is not a donkey.” The whole crowd bust out laughing.

If the taxman collected enough that day to pay his own salary and for the petrol needed to travel, I would be surprised.

It may seem strange that donkeys, which wandered free, were being taxed in northern Mali, but it was practically the only kind of property that anyone had. My father told me about the tax man visiting their farm in eastern Nebraska when he was a child, asking if there were any hunting dogs. My grandfather told the man, with a straight face, that no, there were not. All the while the dogs, shut up in a granary, were barking, yipping, snarling and banging against the granary door.

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Visitors to these West African countries remark on the lack of infrastructure. Some even condescendingly remark on how the French-built roads, (or English-built in former English colonies), have deteriorated since independence. This ignores why those roads were built by the colonizers, how economies of whole regions were changed to serve the interests of more powerful people elsewhere, and just how little money and capital there is in subsistence farming villages.

Roads and ports and railroads and milling facilities, were all built by European colonial powers to extract wealth from colonies. I guess I will toss in slave forts to that infrastructure list as well. I remember reading some 19th Century document about the French economic philosophies underlying colonial expansionism. One was called, I believe “le trouisme”. “Un trou” is a hole. “Le trouisme” meant to find a mineral resource, like gold or diamonds or phosphorous, (or nowadays rutile for titanium or cobalt for batteries), and leave a big hole. But there was another, more insidious practice, called “la traite des vaches”, milking the cows. People, and their energies, were harnessed in the service of the Europeans. The vast irrigated perimeters on the inland delta of the Niger River, which I passed through on my way north in Mali, were one example. They were built to serve as the breadbasket for France, growing grain purely for export. The infrastructure was developed by the French, and overseen by French colonists. Roads were built to extract that grain. The Bamako-Dakar railroad was built to send it to the coast. And the port was built to collect and send colonial wealth and resources onward, to where it belonged and could be put to better use.

Most of the French colonies claimed their independence for the first time in the 1960s. Those straight border lines you see on maps were drawn by colonial powers to serve their administrative purposes - often ignoring ethnicities, or how people thought of themselves and their homes. It is lazy thinking to assume that independence was just a handing over of the reins, and that people could go back to living as they had done before, or that the established colonial enterprises would then start benefiting local people.

The clearest illustration of this that I’ve seen, was done by a Canadian film crew, which was hired by my employer in Senegal - Church World Service - to make a film about our project in Keur Momar Sarr. It was called Roots of Hunger, Roots of Change. Trying to illustrate neocolonialism, the legacy economy left behind by the colonialists, the film makers hit on the perfect visual model.

In flea markets in Dakar, you could find old faded postcards from the early 1900s. Often these showed steam ships, or beautiful french colonial housing and administrative buildings. Perhaps they featured some Europeans in their finest, illustrating how civilization had been brought to Africa. Other common themes were topless African women, or griots, or portraits of African leaders or devils. Some of the formal portraits are surprisingly similar to photographs taken of American Indians around the same time. One common postcard scene, taken in the ports of Dakar or St. Louis, was a panorama of huge long pyramids of stacked 50-kilo burlap sacks containing arachide - peanuts - lining the quays. They remind me of photographs of the mountains of buffalo skulls awaiting shipment, taken in the American wild west. There are hundreds of these antique peanut postcard scenes.

The cards showed workers streaming up and down the pile, busy as ants, first off-loading the sacks from ground transport and then loading the cool old pacquet-boats - steam ships. Those peanuts were headed to France where they would be turned into cooking oil to feed the French, but also to be exported and sold to their other colonies, around the world. The Canadian film crew I was working with, would take a still of those sepia postcards, and then fade them into color footage of exactly the same sight, but filmed in the present day, 80 years later, long after independence. Stevedores still loaded the ships by hand from the same giant stacked pyramids. Farmers, who ate very little peanut oil, spent their days growing peanuts for others. The prices they received were at the mercy of world markets, and often they lost money growing them. What they bought with the cash they did receive was cheap, but serviceable Chinese household goods, or kerosene, for their lamps. If they had more, they bought livestock.

Keur Momar Sarr, in northern Senegal, sat on the Lac des Guiers, one of the few fresh water lakes in the Sahel. Outside of town there was a treatment plant, pumping station and pipeline built to send treated, potable drinking water 300 kilometers south to bustling Dakar, the Capital, with it’s million people. The village itself relied on unfiltered lake water, or salty water from a deep bore hole, meant for livestock. Women would mostly use the bore hole water for laundry.

The Dakar pipeline was about 5’ in diameter and it ran through the sand and scrub populated by herding people and their goats, cattle or camels. It ran through dry villages where people drank the green, pea soup water hauled up from shallow wells with buckets made from old inner tubes. People living nearby could hear the water running in that pipeline. You could put your hand on the pipe and feel it vibrating with cool, clear running water. Eventually, someone with a herd to water, and no water, punched a hole into the pipeline. After the first time, this became more common, and the result each time was a million people in Dakar going without water for a few days while the pipeline was repaired. Eventually, the government recognized that the cheapest and least disruptive solution was to provide water along the length of the pipeline, and taps were put in for villages and livestock.

I bring this up in a story about taxation, because it illustrates something that people born within wealthy countries don’t realize. Our needs are mostly taken care of by our wealth, the taxes almost invisibly levied on it, and the government services graciously supplied. People in the U.S. take a lot for granted. I’ve read that the entire budget for the country of Senegal, when I was there, was about $700 Million. From this, education, the military, health services, civil service, roads, ports, natural resources, all infrastructure, everything for 5 million people, was funded. Even that amount was not generated solely by the economy. There were projects like the one I was involved with, which paid the salaries of civil service staff seconded to us by their agencies. We provided the funds for governmental services like forestry and health in the project’s foot print. But school kids were not even provided with pencils, through government revenue. Let alone iPads.

I moved from Senegal in 1984 to a farm 10 miles south of Topeka, Kansas. I had 5 hydrants and household water on that farm, all of which provided clear, potable water, just for me, my garden, and my dog. I paid a ridiculously small water bill each month. A year or two after I moved there, the Auburn/Washburn School District voted on a bond proposal (I think it failed the first try) to build a new school. As I recall, the proposed bonding authority was for $34,000,000. Any project that size would have been a major governmental undertaking in Senegal. Front page news.

A difference we have, from villages where per capita incomes might not reach $100 a year, is they don’t take things for granted. They know where everything comes from, and rely on themselves to cope with setbacks. I recall one windy, dusty day with the Canadian film crew, and one asked me how I could deal with seeing so much poverty day-in and day-out. I responded that I thought people were doing okay. Poverty had never seemed to be a problem that people could not deal with. They had their self-assurance, dignity and community. West Africa is anything but a sad place, though he did not have the eyes yet, to see that.

A recent U.S. president referred to poorer countries as “shit-hole countries”. They are not. The people are proud, dignified and solid. But that is not to say there aren’t any holes. There are some big ones. There are even new ones being dug to satisfy the demands of a green world economy. If shit is a generic term for something distasteful that we help to create but don’t want to think about, well…..there’s your shit.