Word: baksheesh
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Under the blazing morning sun a hodgepodge of military vehicles falls into sloppy formation on the dunes near the Mogadishu airport. Somali children sneak through shell holes in a wall to beg for food and baksheesh. Marines shoot souvenir snapshots of each other as the convoy slowly takes shape...
Salaries in Africa become living wages only by unofficial dealing -- by baksheesh, bribing, finagling, operating off the books, bartering, finding a thousand intricate routes around the occlusions of law and bureaucracy. A telephone-company repairman in Lagos earns $60 a month. Therefore, the only way one can get a phone repaired is to "offer him a little something" on the side; in one day the repairman can pocket his official pay. No tip, no repairs -- which may be why most phones in Lagos do not work...
...Hutchison enlisted in the small army of these diesel gypsies, sharing their home cooking and their raunchy exploits. Aside from engine trouble and the occasional stray bullet, his lively memoir records few acknowledgments of the 20th century. Ancient hostilities persist, and bribery remains endemic. Still, customs inspectors prefer modern baksheesh. At one checkpoint, the presentation of a girly magazine "got us all waved out of the compound without further hassle...
...clarity in Arabia, a purity that transformed the unhappy Englishman into a mystic desert hero. Other Englishmen and Americans, aloof, invulnerable, their servants laboring under steamer trunks and their gazes trained on cathedrals and Pyramids, traveled almost as a means of confirming their own moral superiority. They took their baksheesh back in the form of a deeper smugness. In such cases, travel did not broaden, but rather narrowed the mind...
...bribe is a bribe by any name-and the more euphemistic the name for it, the better. Baksheesh, currently in wide use in the Middle East, is a Persian word that is also found in Turkish and Arabic. It actually means a tip or gratuity given by a boss to his underling. The word was first used extensively to mean a bribe in connection with the money that a new sultan gave his troops. In most Spanish-speaking countries, el soborno means a payoff, but in Mexico payola is aptly described as the bite (la mordida...