Available at
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LRB | Vol. 29 No. 5 dated 8 March 2007 | Jeremy Harding

It Migrates to Them
Jeremy Harding
Planet of Slums by Mike Davis · Verso, 228 pp, £15.99

Buda's Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb by Mike Davis · Verso, 228 pp, £12.99

If any of us has seen the places in the developing world that Mike Davis catalogues remorselessly in Planet of Slums, it was probably from an aeroplane. That doesn't always mean 35,000 feet, for as Davis points out, poorer people tend to colonise the marginal land of cities where air terminals were once built at a comfortable distance from prosperous centres of medium or high population density. Prosperity in the newer, informal urban environment – in Caracas or Lagos, say – is reckoned by incomparably different standards. Davis, the urban historian who also excels at apocalyptic geography, sketches the various ways in which its inhabitants can make ends meet. He also lists ways, based mostly on exploitation, in which they might even profit. In the end, the burgeoning pauper conurbations are as wretched as they look from the cabin window.

Everything comes back, in the end, to the simple principle that tout moun se moun – every person is indeed a person, every person is capable of thinking things through for themselves. Those who don’t accept this, when they look at the nègres of Haiti – and consciously or unconsciously, that’s what they see – they see people who are too poor, too crude, too uneducated, to think for themselves. They see people who need others to make their decisions for them. It’s a colonial mentality, in fact, and still very widespread among our political class. It’s also a projection: they project onto the people a sense of their own inadequacy, their own inequality in the eyes of the master.
- Jean-Bertrand Aristide