When you see a picture of an African man in the news, he is often carrying an automatic rifle. So the remarkable life story of my friend Richard Achi, a social worker in his mid-30s who guided me around during my recent trip to a Cote d’Ivoire on the edge of a brief civil war, may come as something of a surprise.
Most press accounts leave the entirely misleading impression that the brave Western reporter is alone in Africa, or scouring Baghdad by himself. In fact, nearly always the visiting journalist relies on a “fixer,” sometimes a local journalist, who is especially vital when there is violence. (Once in a while, certain American newspapers, to their credit, do let the local person share the byline.)
Richard Achi proved his worth within an hour of my arrival at the Abidjan airport. The police stopped our Peugeot 505 shared taxi at a roadblock, and minutely inspected every single item in my backpack while making the other passengers wait. Off to the side, I could see Richard quietly negotiating. “I gave them 2000 francs (about U.S. $4),” he said afterward. “And I persuaded them not to take any of your stuff.”
We spent the next week and a half in traveling around southeastern Cote d’Ivoire, as a disputed election moved the country closer to full-scale fighting. One of the sides, those supporting the corrupt and undemocratic former president Laurent Gbagbo, had violently attacked French expatriates in the past, so my American passport might not provide immunity. The remaining handful of Western journalists actually left the most conflicted areas later because it got too dangerous.
Richard used his cellphone every hour or so to call ahead, to establish which were the “hot” areas we should avoid. I speak French, but I still could not have understood much of what was going on around me. I looked around and saw “Africans,” (all of whom were perfectly friendly). Richard looked around and interpreted the complex ethnic and political differences that I could never have perceived, and we acted accordingly.
The informal roadblocks set up by the rival factions could be especially tricky. On my last day, we had to negotiate a dozen or more of them on our way to the airport, careful not to provoke the young men, who were as yet only armed with sticks and clubs.
What is vital to remember here, as the writer Graham Greene never stopped emphasizing about his own travels to dangerous zones, is that we visitors have “a round trip ticket.” I jumped on Air France flight #709 and I was gone. Richard Achi remains in Cote d’Ivoire, when in the weeks or months or years to come someone may still aggressively come up and ask him why he was guiding that foreigner around back in March 2011.
(There were lighter moments, such as when we got to see the rumor mill in production. One afternoon, as we motored peacefully in a crowded minivan between Aboisso and Ayame, a young man in front of us bellowed over his cellphone in the Agni language. The other passengers started to chuckle. “He’s lying,” Richard explained. “He’s saying it’s hot here; there are gunshots all around. He’s probably trying to impress a young woman.”)
But during our travels, we were never really in danger. That is because even in a country that did break out into civil war a few weeks later, the overwhelming majority of people were not violent. Most everyone did have strong and conflicting views about who had actually won the presidential election. But very few people were actually willing to assault their neighbors about it.
Television reports give the distorted impression that entire populations go crazy, like zombies in a horror film, burning and killing. In fact what usually seems to happen is that whether it is Cote d’Ivoire this year, or Sierra Leone and Liberia in the 1990s, bands of young men, manipulated by ruthless and grasping politicians, promote violence – which can be ferocious and vicious – while most people try to stay out of the way. Once the short war broke out in Cote d’Ivoire, for example, several thousand young men fought and some committed massacres, but one million refugees fled the fighting.
Richard Achi’s entire life is the antithesis of violence. Richard is medium height, sharp looking, and courteous. He is married, with a 2-year-old daughter, Jacqueline. He says one of the major influences in his life is his long commitment to the Boy Scout movement. (He gives the word a French pronunciation: ‘skoot.’) His Troop was connected with the local Catholic Church. He joined in his early teens, stayed active through his university days, and volunteered as an Assistant Scoutmaster until the political crisis interfered. “Scouting is at the heart of my outlook,” he says. “Scouting is how you teach a child to become an independent adult. You have the formal educational system on the one hand; on the other, you have Scouting, a school of life, where you show young men how to live in the community with others.”
Richard spent much of his youth in Bouake, a medium-sized city in the center of the country. “Every Easter Vacation, or around Christmas and New Year’s, our Scout Troop would go on hiking and camping trips in the countryside,” he says. “Part of the Scout Promise is to serve others. So during our campouts we would clean the village church, or help the local women to fetch water.” He adds: “Scouting promotes patience, love, and especially humility. It was important for us, for example, to carry buckets of water, to show that we are no better than the rural people who have to do it every day.”
In the Scout movement, Richard discovered his calling – working with boys in early adolescence. “These are critical years,” he says. “It is then that they can start to fall into bad company, when they are exposed to drugs, alcohol, tobacco – and sex.”
Richard’s years at the University of Cote d’Ivoire were hard, because he had little money. He had to leave the university branch at Bouake in 2002, due to the political crisis, and transfer to Abidjan. During his first semesters, there was no room for him in the dormitory, so he slept on a friend’s floor. To earn money, he worked as a tutor, and then taught high school, but the $70 a month salary was not enough. Despite his grueling schedule, he still had time to win election to a student organization.
After a few years, he ran into the grim reality in most third world countries; unemployment is stratospheric, even – in some cases especially – among the educated. He explains: “Once a year, the government gives an exam, and 40,000 sit for it. But only 300 government posts are available.”
Nearly a decade later, very few of his friends from university have found suitable jobs with their diplomas. In Abidjan’s Cocody neighborhood we met up with his friend Andre, who, like Richard, is a graduate in history. I told them that when unemployment in the United States is over 10 per cent, it is a crisis. They laughed sadly. “Here, it is the reverse,” they said. “We would be happy if formal employment passed 10 per cent.”
The college graduates and near-graduates cannot afford to sit around all day. Many of them survive by “marketing” – they use the English word – which means walking all over town all day trying to sell “gadgets,” items such as can openers, or toys, making a few francs on each transaction. “Of course you are ashamed; you become depressed,” Richard says. “You run into guys that you went to primary school with who tease you for wasting time and money going to the university when you only ended up in the same place they are.”
At first, Richard Achi was lucky. He got a job with UNICEF educating young adolescents about AIDs. (The incidence in Cote d’Ivoire is over 7 per cent among adults 15-49 – not as high as in southern Africa, but still dangerous.) But then his contract ended, and he was out in the street again.
He had noticed that children with handicaps were increasingly forgotten as the economic and political crisis bit more deeply. “Also, kids were getting hurt due to the fighting in the north, so there were more of them,” he explained.
So Richard Achi asked an international organization for start-up funding, and established his own small school for 30 or so handicapped children, in the relatively safe southeastern zone of Cote d’Ivoire. The kids live at the school, and Richard and two older mamans (“mothers”) look after them. The children all call Richard “tonton,” or uncle.
In fact, the school could not function if the children themselves, who range in age from 6 or 7 on up to 18, did not do most of the cleaning and cooking themselves. They are quite a sight: polite, serious and grown-up beyond their years; you can see in their eyes how much they adore Richard Achi. “I don’t believe in hitting kids, even though it is still the custom here in Cote d’Ivoire among some people,” he says. “Sometimes you must punish a child, but all you really have to do is ask them to go off to the side, and think quietly about what they have done wrong and how they have hurt other people.”
Unfortunately, the international agency that had been funding the school was poorly managed, and the crisis made things even worse. Richard has not been paid for nearly a year. He keeps the school going by doing odd jobs on the side, and with donations of food and clothing.
When I look at my daily newspapers and TV news programs, I normally do not see African men like Richard Achi portrayed there. I could read the novels of V.S. Naipaul that are set in Africa and not meet anyone like him there, either. Yet my experience over many years of visiting the continent, including stretches of living there, leaves no doubt that although Richard is exemplary, he is far from unique. If anything, most Africans in their day to day lives are more like him than they are like the greedy and brutal cliques that cling to political power – and that make life miserable for everyone else.
After I got back to New York, I used Western Union to send Richard Achi another donation to help his school. Here is part of the e-mail message he sent me in response: “Thank you from the deepness of my heart. Your donation will be put to good use. You can’t imagine how much the money is a breath of air for us. May God give you the reward that you deserve.”
