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Where Your Old Textbooks Go (perhaps)
A recent post tracked the final destination of some old clothes you may have donated. Today we dip into the story behind where a few boxloads of old textbooks from the West have ended up.
The scene here in these photos is a very rural school about 5 kilometers south of Moshi, at the end of a road that, even by Tanzanian standards, is so bad that it physically hurts to drive on it. It didn’t help that we made the trip in a late 1970s-early 1980s era pickup truck with about 200,000 miles on it (or maybe 30,000 Tanzanian miles on it) and that seven of us were crammed in. At least Maria and I were in the backseat, not the bed of the truck with some others.
Driving was Josiah Mchome, a man I recently met here in Moshi. He’s a longtime teacher who now runs an NGO called e-watu . I’ve met with him a couple of times to talk about education in Tanzania . His organization pays the school fees for some extremely destitute families. In theory, public education is free in Tanzania; in practice it can cost up to a couple hundred dollars a year in “fees” tacked on by schools for everything from desks to textbooks to to food to uniforms to hiring extra teachers. In at least one school in town, the students even tend a fruit and vegetable garden — not to learn about biology but to grow food for the teachers. The national GDP per person is only $370; big surprise given these fees, which are highest in the early grades, how few make it through even primary school.
E-watu is also involved in some other projects such as teacher development. Here in this village in the Hai District, a rural constituency of about 190,000 spread over 66 villages and their surrounding areas, the group is building a science teaching resource center as well as its own school, which has already opened here as a kindergarten.
The Saturday event Mchome invited me to attend was a ceremony to distribute a shipment of donated textbooks from a few schools in Europe. Most schools here have at most a handful of old textbooks and workbooks to work from, but they don’t necessarily have any direct relationship to the curriculum — they are simply what’s available. And there are by no means enough to go around, so most are referenced only in the library by one student at a time. They’re also all in English, which is the language of instruction after sixth grade even though most teachers and students aren’t prepared for that (that story is for another day).
One might imagine that the best way to distribute the textbooks, especially considering there weren’t that many of them, would be simply to do some kind of quick needs analysis, maybe package them together in bundles of titles that would make sense to give to each school, and deliver them. But the main lesson of the day was actually a broader one about Tanzania itself, where ceremony, formality and procedure — and above all — political theater — are tightly bound up in the culture.
Mchome had been planning the event for weeks and barely slept the night before. Upon arrival, we were greeted by an extraordinarily well-behaved class of kindergartners who greeted Mchome with a rousing song and sat in perfect silence when he spoke with them. He has told me how much he loves teaching and smiled broadly and comfortably at the front of the class. He told me as we entered that his organization usually only pays some portion of the fees for the students it supports and asks extended family to pay what they can, in part to be involved in the process and persuade donors nobody is freeloading. But these particular students, he said, “come from the very poorest families. I ask them how much they and their family are able and willing to pay. They can pay absolutely nothing, maybe 4,000 TS (about $3 a year), which is not enough for their porridge.”
After a while, some other teachers and older students supported by w-watu began to arrive, one in a beat-up van, a few others by daladala (the comically overcrowded small buses that connect the villages). A minute-by-minute program was distributed, announcing the agenda that, somewhat to my alarm, lasting four hours (also somewhat alarmingly, it prominently announced me as a visiting journalist and guest of honor). I spoke with some of the teachers, who were polite and whose English was fairly good (though hard to imagine them teaching in it). A teacher named Elias Benedict, who teaches 14 to 18 year-olds, told me has between 60 and 70 students in each class. He has some teaching materials, he says, but utterly lacks any of the “apparatus of science” needed for the labs and demonstrations that bring the subject to life for his students. He was giving up part of his Saturday to travel here from a fairly distant countryside village to pick up a few books.
Maria and I scanned through the stacks of books the donors had sent. Many were British (which is good because Tanzania follows the British curriculum) but they were very old; one trigonometry workbook dated to 1963. Very few were textbooks as we would think of them but paperback exercise books ranging from elematry to advance — titles like “Modern Albegra“ and “Understanding Science Workbook“ and “Write Right.” In some cases there were 15 or 20 or maybe more copies of the same book, but in many instances there was just one. Some were straightforward math and science books that looked somewhat useful if culturally flummoxing to Tanzanian students (like the science book with the chapter on North Sea oil) but many of the titles were almost laughable. “Famous Women from Nefertiti to Thatcher” and “Cooking” (really? The British think exporting their cooking expertise to Africa is some sort of gift?) and “Soils of North Yorkshire.” Others were undeniably educational but of questionable utility at the top of the list of a high-needs country (like a children’s introduction to Brazil).
Writing about higher education, I’ve done a number of stories about the soaring price of textbooks (mostly at the college level) and the economic oddities of the industry that have caused the increases and so annoyed students and even legislators. It’s not uncommon for college textbooks to cost over $100 these days. Partly it’s the problem of the third-party payer who is insulated from the costs and thus not market sensitive (the professor usually chooses the textbook but the student pays for it). Partly it’s the Internet-fueled explosion of the second-hand book market, which cuts deeply into the market for new titles and gives publishers just one year of sales to recoup their costs. And partly it’s the greed-fueled habit of publishers to update titles every few years with unnecessary bells and whistles in order to squeeze out more revenue — a practice that seems more legitimate in subjects like biology or political science that constantly evolve but doesn’t cut much muster in topics like algebra or classics that haven’t changed much for the last thousand years, let alone three.
I mention these factors for the following reason: none of them are conducive to a steady stream of useful books heading to places like Africa. The economics of the school publishing market are entirely driven by practices and policies in Europe and the United States (more precisely, in Texas, where textbook policies dictate those of the whole country ). As long as the market for used textbooks in the West is so lucrative, nobody will send valuable ones here. (Nor, unlike the dumping of used clothes here I wrote about previously, is there any issue of assuaging guilt over that fact with the consolation that we are helping nurture domestic industry; I assure you there is no indigenous Tanzanian textbook industry ready to explode onto the scene but for a wave of cheap imports).Fuya Godwin Kimbita, the member of Parliament who attended and whom Mchome had told me had a deep and abiding commitment to improving education arrived after flying in from Dar Es Salaam for the morning. He was greeted by students loudly singing the national anthem. Then there were a number of speeches, ceremonies, etc., alternating between Swahili and English. The students sat quietly at the back, even as the sun moved to the point where the small tent was no longer protecting them from the sun (try to imagine 50 American teen-agers, forced to come into school for an interminable ceremony on a Saturday, sitting quietly in broiling sun. Yeah, I thought so). When they finally served lunch, the adults went first; only when they were finished and had been offered seconds were the students allowed to come up and take the leftovers (this is common practice here)
Mchome went to a great deal of trouble to thank the donors for their gifts. “They are not rich,” he said. “They have only a little more than ourselves.” He told the students and teachers they have an obligation to the donors to use them wisely and he didn’t want to find them sitting in closets (another thing that seems to happen with donated goods here, at least at hospitals). He introduced Kimbita, taking pains to say “even though there is an election coming soon” Kimbita was not here because of politics but out of commitment — a statement that certainly sounded credible given the small crowd and the fact that only a handful were adults (there was one local news reporter in attendance as well).
“These books are not on the syllabuses,” Kimbita acknowledged to the group. “But at least they will encourage students in the habit of reading.” He admitted the government was “struggling” with education but told students it was working on the many problems, training teachers and building schools. “Your brothers and sisters are going to have a lot of new teachers, a lot of laboratories,” he told them.
Later, as the teachers collected some books they wanted, I spoke with Kimbita for a few minutes. I told him how extraordinarily impressed I was with the behavior of the students and said they were a great resource for Tanzania to build upon. He said visiting American teachers were always similarly impressed and I said I’m sure the two countries had much to teach one another. He hopes, by 2013, that every one of the 66 villages in the district would have no fewer than 10 students enrolled in higher learning. It sounds like an extraordinarily modest goal but it’s in fact a challenging one (we’re talking then, about 660 students, out of a population of 190,000 enrolled in university). The current average, he said, is about 7, but that masks large differences. At some schools serving Massai communities, it’s closer to 2 now. He was well-versed on the issues and agreed to meet with me again when he returns to Moshi in a few weeks (in the meantime, he is heading to South Africa. As the only professional architect sitting in the TZ parliament, he heas the committee redesigning the parliamentary debating chamber, and a delegation is leaving to do research…. Again, formality, ceremony, pomp…. All big things here).
The MP departed to catch his flight, the teachers packed up the books they wanted and munched on food, and Mchome continued speaking into the early afternoon. I caught Maria’s eyes fluttering sleepily behind her sunglasses. Then an odd event happened which I would never have understood but Maria picked up enough broken Swahili to convey it to me. A woman reported her purse was missing. The crime was actually a clever one — presumably somebody had slipped it into one of the boxes, which were now tied up and sealed to be taken away. Mchome addressed the group at some length, asking the perpetrator to step forward and threatening calmly to have all the boxes opened. But then the topic drifted back to education and his thoughts on the problem of language instruction. The event by now had evolved into a kind of educators’ conference, with the students still quietly sitting at the back. We couldn’t tell if the purse issue had been resolved or not. Mchome invited suggestions from the teachers on how to improve teaching and how his organization might be able to help. One man got up and jumped into a passionate diatribe, alternating between Swahili and broken English, and pointing to me, and asking (politely) why the media always reported bad things about Africa despite the country’s many accomplishments, noting a Tanzanian woman who has reached an esteemed office in the U.N. Eventually he seemed to get back to education, but closed with a fiery prayer apparently calling on God to strike the perpetrator of the stolen purse with a sense of overwhelming guilt and cause him or her to step forward. Several young teachers made some remarks about teaching and commitment that I didn’t fully understand but sounded heartfelt. Mchome gave some more words, sincere if somewhat narcissistic, about his vision for education in Tanzania, liberally quoting “Mwalimu” (Great Teacher) Jules Nyerere, the revered founder of the nation.
Oddly, the purse kept coming up from time to time but nothing ever came of it, and the boxes were never opened. Eventually, the teachers loaded them into vans (with quite a few uncliamed books left over that will be distributed to other schools, who will get stuck with the likes of “Soils of North Yorkshire“) and began to depart. We crammed back into Mchome’s truck and headed off on the bumpy road back into town. He pronounced the day a success and worth the effort, despite getting just four hours of sleep the night before; I didn’t bring up the purse. He left off the other passengers at Moshi’s chaotic bus station and kindly took us all the way back to our home, before turning around and making the journey once again, for the fifth time today, to supervise the cleanup.
There were lessons here I hesitate yet to firmly declare, but certainly one concerned (again) the extraordinary behavior of the school children, and mostly the Tanzanian penchant for political theater (something, in our own way, to which Americans are hardly immune). Kimbita struck me in our brief meeting as a decent and sincere man, but why had he spent several hundred dollars of (presumably) government money to fly from Dar to attend an event attended by a few dozen people to distribute textbooks valued at a fraction of that? Rather than sitting through a 4-hour ceremony many kilometers from home, might not the underpaid teachers have benefited more from a day off, perhaps checking a list of the titles they were interested in and having them delivered? Of course, cultural rituals matter, so it’s entirely possible these various “costs” are worth it some broader context I’m not yet grasping. But if so, I’m definitely not grasping it.
The day was interesting and enjoyable, but it was hard not to see it as a kind of metaphor for Western aid overall. A medium-sized shipment of our leftovers arrives in some disorganized boxes. The materials are only those for which there is no possible second-hand market and thus of limited (though real) use. There is little investigation by the donors as to what parts of what they have sent would be useful (and the economic of this particular industry in the West have increased the likelihood it would not be useful). The distribution is handled appreciatively, but in a context of substantial political theater and somewhat haphazardly, with teachers simply combing through the piles to pick up a few titles they thought would be useful additions to their libraries (again, these textbooks will all end up in libraries, not for individual students).
And, of course, something is stolen.
P.S. I’m not sure if I’ve succeeded in my effort to include hotlinks in my posts, particularly those such as this one that are published as photo captions. In case they didn’t work above, here are the sights for e-watu, a report on textbook prices, and the Times article on Texas and textbooks:
http://www.uspirg.org/higher-education/affordable-textbooks
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/14/magazine/14texbooks-t.html?pagewanted=1&hp
