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Laos: Imperial Delusions
When Joe Foley, a lifelong backpacker, decided to marry and settle, he chose Vang Vieng for its emerging traveller scene, an area that lures travellers for its deep caves eroded in fantastic limestone mountains, the kind that sprout from the plain suddenly and dramatically, like surreal carton cutouts in a giant set. At the back of his house he erected a couple of bamboo bungalows scattered in the garden to take in backpackers. He didn't need the money as such, but he wanted to remain in touch with his former self; he wanted to take backpackers into the mountains and inside the caves, and spend the evenings in his terrace, sipping beer and sharing traveller yarns. But he quickly became disenchanted with travellers' - he found their attitude towards the natives as aloof, insensitive, impatient, exploitative, and arrogant, especially their air of self-righteousness and higher knowledge. He hated, for example, the habit of many travellers who asked him personal questions about his Lao wife while she was around, discussing her in front of her but addressing him, as if she was incapable of understanding or speaking for herself.
One of Joe's laments was that travellers have to decide what they want - whether to travel cheaply, or to have comforts or luxuries. Many of his guests complained about the overcrowded and uncomfortable buses (in bus journeys in Laos you paid roughly US$0.50 for every six hours travel-time), and more directly, some asked him why he hadn't installed furniture and windows and hot water in his cabins - and how good it would be if he created complimentary brochures and maps and a little library. He shook his head at the thought. "I charge $3 a night for a bungalow with double bed, and these travellers try to haggle me down to $2 a night, and then they have the face to expect all these extras? Come on! If you want comfort, you can travel in Europe or North America and pay twenty times more. In the First World, if we get something cheaply, we accept something substandard without complaints, but here we want things cheaply, and we want them good." Typical imperialism: we want to keep the Third World a source of cheap resources and cheap labour, and cheap travel too, and then we deride them and reprimand them for low standards. Joe continued: "Travellers assume that the natives are there for their benefit, and they are not very polite or sensitive. Very often I would be eating at a restaurant with my wife and these travellers come in asking her for service. Just because she has a brown face, they assume she is there for their service."
Ouch - I was guilty of these things, and I had never thought about it like that, but now I could see that this was the subtle face of cultural imperialism. Like most travellers, who are by nature liberal, I am quick to denounce the imperial projects of our time, particularly the attempts by the West to institutionalise the emasculation and exploitation of the Third World by economic globalisation, and now the vicious take-over of Iraq. And like most travellers, I had been overlooking the paradox that my attitudes and rapport with the natives in Asia were subtly imperialist, and most of the time I felt that I knew better than the natives about what is good for them. This claim to higher knowledge is the driving force behind all imperialism, which has always been cast as the calling to civilise the savage natives. At its ugliest form we have the Christian missionaries, whose well-intended mission to indoctrinate the pagan savages in the righteous path of the superior and only (Christian) God has wreaked havoc among most Third World, non-Christian cultures. At its most insidious form we have Third World aid, which is almost always tied with the condition that the recipient country changes its way of doing things, adopting the ways of our superior civilisation.
A few days later we travelled from Vang Vieng to Savannahket, a town in the southern portion of Laos designed and built by the French during their colonial rule. The French have always been high-minded about the inclusive, civilising brand of their imperialism, but Savannahket is a ghastly tribute to the imperialistic delusion of better knowledge. It had been a well-intended plan, the town designed in a grid pattern, with wide roads, and the creation of a new town centre, a large rectangular square with a Catholic church at its head. The idea was to create a spacious square for the relocation of the bazaar from its then narrow and claustrophobic streets near the river. And wide, open, uncluttered roads for the future. The French also had an answer for the flimsy houses on stilts that the Lao people built: they taught the natives about their superior building ways, the kind of two-storey Baroque mansions you find in small towns in France.
But this grand project, this French idea of town planning now stands as a manifestation of cultural ignorance. As a structural concept enforced on the town, the town centre had always been alien and inauspicious for the natives, and, when the French left, the inhabitants and business starting moving out of the town square. Today the town square is squalid and rundown and miserable. The church's white-washed walls are tarnished with drizzles of black mildew, the roundabouts choked with unkempt grass, the streets muddied and potholed, and the Baroque buildings hemming the square skeletal and crumbling. The town centre is the scruffiest and most desolate part of town - and the bazaar can be found where it has always been, and where it had grown organically.
The two-storey brick houses (covered by stucco and painted a brilliant white) with slanted roofs of red slate that the French introduced are also now proving inferior to the indigenous design of raising buildings on stilts. In the stilt-based design the breeze moves freely through the stilts and rot only affects the stilts, which could be treated or replaced. But in the new French-style two-storey mansions, which are now the pride of the Lao who have made some money, the buildings trap heat, and humidity creeps through the floor and up the walls. They are buildings that make life uncomfortable and expensive, entailing regular maintenance and repainting, and the use of dehumidifiers and air-conditioners. We stayed in one of these buildings, which perhaps hadn't been given the bout of maintenance necessary for two years, and the smell of the crumbling, mouldy wall was intolerable. There is another thing: the traditional houses are raised as a protective measure against the severe once-in-a-generation floods, and we had witnessed this in northern Laos, where the floodwater moved freely through the stilts - it would have swept the French houses away.
Savannahket is now a sterile town, and the wide streets on their grid plan make that sterility more emphatic. Instead of openness, the wide and straight streets create a lifelessly grotesque atmosphere and a surreal desolation. Going on errands I often felt defeated and beaten down and kind of lost in these endless streets, and the useless, larger than life sprawl that they created. Indeed, Savannahket is a town without a soul, where the French-posing restaurants were terrible, the houses mouldy, the Ferris wheel muddied and cranky, the only club in town looking like something transplanted from a mid-western American town in the fifties'. In the evenings you hear some young men strumming their guitars and singing Western pop songs, but their voices have an intonation that is lost and sad, like incantations of the dead. Imperialism in Savannahket caused cultural void and historical amnesia, and decay.
© Victor Paul Borg
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