I was thinking about how annoyed I get whenever I read some journalistic account of some organization, i.e., One Acre, Africa 2000, etc. etc. that is doing so much good in some African village, blah, blah, blah. Because inevitably this do-gooding is always afflicted by two fatal flaws. The first is to treat the village as a meaningful unit, when in fact (as I found long ago in my dissertation work in Niger) villages are nodes in market networks, and the health of the former is only so good as the health of the latter. And in all the Africa I’ve ever worked in, which is actually a lot, the market networks arent healthy thanks to colonialism, neo-colonialism, and plenty of home grown corruption, not to mention the ever pernicious meddling of the multi-national donors. The other flaw is that these (inevitably) young do-gooders out there “helping” women in some village is complete myopia when it comes to the history of Africa in general and each place in particular. For these folks the history of Africa starts when they get off their airplane, but in fact both that which is physically and socially present AND that which has vanished (but is still present culturally) matters a lot in terms of what can possible happen next. But heaven forbid the contemporary do-gooders bother to read African history, still less learn a local language.