Book Review: Race Against Time by Stephen Lewis

I've struggled to articulate my thoughts on Race Against Time, Stephen Lewis's discussion of the United Nations' Millennium Development Goals. The book is too important for me to not do it justice. It is a book that everyone should read, that everyone should be frustrated and angered by. It's a book that reminds you of the great gaping chasms between the world we live in and the worlds others live in and the world we want to live in. Every time I sit down to write about this, my words don't seem like enough, or else it seems like I am repeating and rehashing the things that I said before.

Let me start with this: Race Against Time is a devastating and uplifting book. It's a quick read, conversational, and its pleas to the wealthy world are eloquent and righteously angry. People should read this book. It matters.

Now, the context. Every year, the CBC, Canada's public broadcaster, airs the Massey Lectures. In this series of lectures, some issue or idea is examined in detail by a distinguished lecturer. In 2005, Stephen Lewis joined such Massey Lecture alumni as Martin Luther King, Jr, Northrop Frye and Doris Lessing. His series of lectures, collected in Race Against Time, took place and were aired in November 2005. (The first in the series can be heard in Real Audio here.)

In the lectures, Lewis — UN special envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa, former Ontario MPP, diplomat, feminist, member of the Order of Canada — examines the UN's Millennium Development Goals, eight multinationally agreed upon goals designed to improve millions of lives by the year 2015. They include reducing poverty and hunger by half; providing universal primary education; increasing gender equality; significantly decreasing maternal and early childhood mortality; and halting, then reversing, the spread of AIDS and malaria.

Lewis is not optimistic about the world's ability to achieve these goals. And he is angry. Angry at the inaction of the United Nations, and at the broken promises of wealthy countries, particularly Canada.

Yet we are the only G8 country with successive and continuing budgetary surpluses. And our minister of finance, as a member of Blair's Commission on Africa, endorsed the target of 0.7 percent [of GDP to foreign aid] by 2015. It was the central recommendation of the commission report. How do you sign the report and then repudiate it upon your return to Canada? It's perverse; it lacks integrity.

And:

The prime minister says that there's nothing worse in internationalism than to make promises that are not kept: that's the real immorality, he argues. With respect, he's wrong. The real immorality is for one of the most wealthy and privileged countries in the world to fail to respond adequately to the life and death struggle of hundreds of millions of impoverished people.

As a reader, the sense of Lewis as a man of just outrage is overwhelming. His frustration always seems sincere; it percolates up, every sentence like lava from a sleeping volcano, hot with the threat of explosion. Again and again, he expresses his astonishment at what he has seen in Africa. He talks about a trip with Graça Machel, where she was the first to talk to two teenaged girls about their periods, and about villages where there are whole generations gone, and about visiting an income-generating project in Nambia:

I...was greeted by the sight of four young men making miniature papier mâché coffins for infants: tiny, light, plain. As they affixed silver aluminum foil handles to the coffins, they looked at me and said, with an admixture of pride and pain, "We can't keep up with the demand."

Yet, there is a tug-of-war within Lewis that asserts itself in the book, a battle between his anger and his recognition that he cannot be effective if he doesn't play the game. International diplomacy is not a simple. It is not direct. It is not enough to have moral rightness on your side, not if you don't want to be shut out of the process altogether. I felt strong tugs of empathy as Lewis discussed his frustration with the system and with himself:

When I visited Swaziland, I met at length with the king in private, and attempted to persuade him, with a combination of subtlety and argument, that the world was increasingly impatient, his people were decimated, and his behaviour was unacceptable. Then we held a press conference together and I held my tongue.

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Article Author: Bonnie

Bonnie writes about books every Thursday at Fourth-Rate Reader, about everything else at Signifying Nothing, and sometimes she resorts to pictures. She lives in Toronto.

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