Firewall - By Henning Mankell & Ebba Segerberg Page 0,85

breakfast.

He pulled the sheet back over his body. His nose started to itch and he knew he was about to sneeze. He hated to sneeze. He hated his allergies. They were a weakness he despised. The sneezing could come at any time. Sometimes they interrupted him in the middle of a lecture and made it impossible for him to continue. Other times he broke out in hives. Or else his eyes kept filling with tears. He pulled the sheet all the way up and over his mouth. This time he won. The need to sneeze died away. He thought about all the years that had gone by and all that had occurred which had led to his lying in a bed in Luanda, capital of Angola.

Thirty years ago he had been a young man working at the World Bank in Washington, DC. He had been convinced that the bank had the potential to do good in the world, or at the very least shift the balance of justice in the Third World's favour. The World Bank had been founded to provide the huge loans needed in the poverty-stricken parts of the world and which exceeded the capacity of individual nations and banks to provide. Many of his friends at the University of California had told him that he was wrong, that no reasonable solutions to the economic inequality of the world were addressed at the World Bank, but he had maintained his beliefs. At heart he was no less radical than they. He too marched in the anti-war demonstrations. But he had never believed in the potential of civil disobedience to reshape the world. Nor did he believe in the small and squabbling socialist organisations. He had come to the conclusion that the world had to be changed from within existing social structures. If you were going to try to shift the balance of power, you had to stay close to its source.

He had, however, a secret. It was what had made him leave Columbia and go to university in California. He had been in Vietnam for one year, and he had liked it. He had been stationed close to An Khe most of the time, along the important route west from Qui Nhon. He knew he killed many soldiers during that year and that he had never felt remorse over this. While his buddies had turned to drugs for solace, he had maintained a disciplined approach to his work. He knew he was going to survive the war, that he would not be one of the bodies sent home in a plastic bag. And it was then, during the stifling nights patrolling the jungle, that he had arrived at his conviction that you had to stay close to the source of power in order to affect it. Now, as he lay in the damp heat of the Angolan nights, he sometimes experienced the feeling that he was back in the jungle. He knew he had been right.

He had understood that there was going to be an opening at the executive level in Angola and he had immediately learned Portuguese. His career climb had been meteoric. His bosses had seen his potential, although there were others with more experience who applied for the same post. He had been appointed to a desirable post with little or no discussion.

That was his first contact with Africa, with a poor and shattered country. His time in Vietnam didn't count, he had been an unwelcome intruder. Here he was welcome. At first he spent his time listening, seeing and learning. He had marvelled at the joy and dignity that flourished amid the hardship.

It had taken him almost two years to see that what the bank was doing was wrong. Instead of helping the country to gain true independence and enable the rebuilding of the war-torn land, the bank merely served to protect the very rich. He noted that the people around him treated him with deference to his high rank. Behind the radical rhetoric there was only corruption, weakness and greed. There were others – independent intellectuals and the occasional politician – who saw what he saw, but they were not in positions of power. No-one listened to them.

At last he could stand it no longer. He tried to explain to his superiors that the strategies of the bank were misdirected, but he received no response, despite time and time again making transatlantic flights to persuade the staff at the top in the head