24

Edward Daniel Furniver, 50-something and battling to keep a developing paunch under control, had not intended to spend so long in Kuwisha. He had seen himself as no more than a well-intentioned stranger who was passing through, but to his surprise he had been in the country for more than four years.

If asked how it was that the son of a British diplomat, who had become a successful investment banker in the City of London, had ended up running a micro-lending bank in an African slum, he tended to reply: “Luck, pure luck, old boy!”

But if pressed, he would disclose that it had all begun with a failed marriage to a socially ambitious wife called Davina, who announced her intention to divorce him through a letter from her lawyer while she was on holiday in Antibes – with the lawyer, he later learnt. It triggered a bout of binge drinking and sober reflection, which culminated in early retirement and a decision to travel the world, beginning with Africa.

It was, he readily admitted, a somewhat irrational act of defiance, born of a perverse identification with a continent that had become synonymous with debt, disease and disaster.

And if pressed further, Furniver would say that he had succumbed to a temptation which afflicted many of those who were over 50 years old.

“It’s a dangerous stage, when you want to do good. And when you reach my age, it is jolly nearly irresistible. And in Africa, the temptation is overwhelming.”

To Furniver’s surprise, and often to his dismay, the continent had taken him into its warm, generous and hospitable embrace, an experience marked by serendipity, a series of happy coincidences, including the pleasure of unplanned reunions with old friends in unlikely circumstances and in bizarre places. But Furniver soon came to appreciate that for most of the continent’s people, life was fragile, cheap, dangerous and unpredictable.

After a few weeks in Lagos he flew to Cape Town, where he nearly succumbed to the opportunity to buy a share of a Sea Point restaurant; then he worked his way back north in stages: a few months in Johannesburg, the same in Gaberone, a spell in Lusaka, then on to Blantyre, and from Blantyre to Kuwisha.

There, in the slum of Kireba, he saw an opportunity to put into effect a plan he had been considering for years. He never forgot the day he had tagged on to a tour of the sprawling, lively shanty town, laid on by the then leader of the local street gang for a visiting British journalist.

Looking around as they trudged along muddy alleys he saw the residents working hard, in tough conditions, but with little hope of changing their world, for they had not the resources to do so. And without access to capital, they never would.

“Seemed as obvious as the sky was blue,” Furniver had said.

The answer, he argued, was micro-banking – lending small amounts of money to people too poor to obtain commercial bank credit. This, he felt convinced, was part of the elusive solution to Africa’s woes.

And so, with his stay now running into months, he decided that Kireba was as good a place as any to start putting these thoughts into practice. If the concept could work in a country drained by corruption and mismanagement, demoralised by failure, and let down by its leaders, it could work anywhere.

It did not take long for the Kireba People’s Co-operative Bank to become a great success. Despite its impressive name, it performed a simple function, with results that were as evident as green shoots in a desert.

The intricate scale models of bicycles, lorries and cars made out of wire by street boys, for example, needed nothing but skill, imagination and a pair of pliers to construct. A small advance, sufficient to buy pliers and a bundle of wire could turn an unruly adolescent into a self-sufficient worker who could earn enough from tourists eager for an authentic local artefact to repay the society’s low-interest loan in a few weeks.

Shoe-cleaners, watch repairers, tailors, vegetable vendors, coffin makers, hairdressers, corncob hawkers, model makers, curio sellers, all owed their start in commercial life to the bank’s small loan.

From a base of 500 members and capital of 500,000 ngwee, provided by an obscure international charity that was in fact funded by Furniver himself, the society had steadily grown. There were now nearly 3,000 members of whom 500 were borrowers.

It showed, Furniver believed, that it was possible to transform a community with a limited amount of capital, spent in ways that were decided by the people who would be affected. With a hand-operated pump and a few thousand feet of plastic piping, women could be released from the daily, backbreaking burden of carrying water. Provide a loan that was enough for the purchase of a locally made, fuel-efficient stove, and hundreds of trees could be saved.

Within a few weeks of his first visit to Kireba, Furniver had commissioned the building of what would be the slum’s first brick structure, with a modest flat above the office of the bank and the strong-room in which members could store their most valuable possessions.

It had not taken long to show that administration was straightforward and cheap, and that fears of the contrary were ill-founded. Put the details into a computer, and push a button every day, was all that was required – plus, of course, the peer pressure which often took a form that left Furniver uneasy.

In theory, it meant that the borrower’s friends would express their disapproval should the borrower default. They, too, wanted a loan, or possibly were recipients of a loan already. Would-be borrowers would have to wait longer for money to become available; and those who had loans would have to pay a higher rate of interest.

In polite society, mere disapproval would serve as peer pressure. In Kireba, as Furniver soon discovered, the term had a more robust interpretation, and was usually a euphemism for a sound hiding administered by the members of the local committee. It was an approach, he had to admit, that worked very well. The effect of the rare beatings was so profound that the society’s ratio of bad debts to loans outstanding was the envy of his commercial bank colleagues.

Furniver had no illusions: micro-lending would not change Africa overnight, but at least the lives of many could be transformed – and the people of Kireba would happily bear witness to that encouraging fact.