Aid programmes need chink of cultural light
Ignorance of the local culture increases the likelihood that aid will do harm, even as it attempts to do good
Arriving in Luanda, Angola, as a trainee aid worker, in 2000, the country seemed to me to be empty of culture. Luanda, the capital, was dominated by tower blocks unfinished since the Portuguese left, which seemed an apt metaphor for the state of the country: abandoned, derelict, corrupted.
The towns of the interior were unimaginably worse, destroyed by the sieges that had marked the civil war in the 1990s and ringed with improvised ...
