Tom Young - Neither Devil Nor Child

HOW WESTERN ATTITUDES ARE HARMING AFRICA

TOM YOUNG

In the late 1990s, Mozambique was required by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank to privatise its state-owned banks. The process was notoriously corrupt and attracted attention because a well-known Mozambican journalist who was investigating it, as well as the head of the central banks supervision unit, were both murdered in mysterious circumstances. Shortly after these events, donors approved a debt-reduction scheme for the country. Since then, Mozambique has continued to receive very high volumes of foreign aid and to be held up as a success story. The World Bank representative in the capital city of Maputo said, Without a doubt, Mozambique is a success story, a success both in terms of growth but also as a model for other countries as to how to get the best possible out of donor interest. Then British Secretary of State for International Development, Hilary Benn, averred that, Mozambique sets an example across Africa and the Developing World. Not to be outdone, the IMF gave its 2014 Africa conference in Maputo the title Africa Rising: Building to the Future.

Despite these confident assertions, the fact is that Mozambique continues to be desperately poor, ranked 180th out of 188 states in 2014, and by the end of 2015 had not achieved any of the Millennium Development Goals. But a small section of the population, especially those connected to the ruling party, Frelimo, have done extraordinarily well. Its one-time president, Armando Guebuza, dubbed Mr Guebusiness, is probably the richest man in the country. Shortly after he stood down, Mozambique was forced to approach the IMF for emergency financial support, as it became clear that the government had secretly contracted more than $2 billion in new debt, breaching its agreements with donors as well as its own domestic laws. A considerable amount of this money is still unaccounted for.

The gap between rhetoric and reality could not be wider, and such situations often provoke angry reactions. But we need to look harder and ask how we got here. In pursuit of that I have started from two intuitions. The first is that ideas are important in politics. Such a view is widely derided on grounds of common sense both by those engaged in politics and those who study it. Politics, it is said, is all about the calculation of interests, hard-headedness, ruthlessness and pragmatism. (As an American president once asserted, Its the economy, stupid.) Doubting this does not mean we must subscribe to a wishy-washy idealism or the illusion that everybody is, or can be, selfless. But it does imply that there is much to be learnt from studying how attitudes and action are informed by ideas. The second intuition concerns the extraordinary range of activities that various agencies have pursued in Africa since independence. These agencies do much more than instruct African states to sell banks or not borrow money: they overthrow governments, they finance military forces, they provide large amounts of foreign aid, they try to change peoples values and practices, they even tell people what school textbooks to use. My second intuition is that all these activities, though they vary over time and are shared across many different kinds of bodies, are linked, and are part of a common effort that, for want of a better term, I call the Western Project.

A central argument of this book is that this project has a history. In 1898, Rudyard Kipling published a poem, The White Mans Burden, which, although it was intended to support the US invasion of the Philippines, provided a praise poem for imperial rule more generally. It calls on the white man to rule, for their own good, your new-caught, sullen peoples, / Half-devil and half-child. This poem is, of course, regarded today as the very pinnacle of racist awfulness; but stripped of its overtly racial language it voices assumptions and aspirations that have by no means disappeared though this suggestion would be hotly rejected by many of those involved in the Western Project.

These are controversial matters which prompt one final comment on my approach. The study of human affairs cannot produce the kinds of truth that are possible in mathematics, science or medicine. This does not mean that anything goes, because we must make our best efforts to consider evidence and argument in good faith. But it does mean that, having done those things, there are no areas of human activity and enquiry where there do not remain fundamental differences of understanding or belief. So in this book I have not hesitated to explain certain concepts (civil society, democracy, human rights) and to indicate where my arguments differ from those of others. Likewise, in the reading guide at the end of the book, I have indicated a variety of writings that show the range of disagreement about certain issues, as well as the writings that have shaped my own view. In human affairs we simply have to acknowledge that the boundary between explanation and advocacy is flexible. So the broader purpose of this book goes beyond explanation to argue that Kipling was indeed wrong, but so also are many of those currently engaged in foisting on Africa a project that is in many ways misconceived, and should be abandoned.

T HERE IS A STORY THAT THE West tells about Africa. It has been ethically persuasive, psychologically and politically powerful. Like all good stories it comes in different versions and appeals to different audiences. It can be made more or less complex and it links emotionally charged themes and images to wider ideas and agendas. Also, like all good stories, it contains elements of truth. But unlike a novel or a play, it is not simply a work of imagination. Social and political stories, the kinds of stories we tell to make sense of our interaction with others, are rarely based on fabrication; they are about selection and presentation and plausibility. So, unlike fiction, social and political stories have many authors. The mainstream Africa story has been produced by writers (academics, journalists, activists) and organisations (policy institutes, governments, international organisations). It has been popularised and publicised by politicians, lobby groups, political movements, even entertainers. It has found its way into university and school curricula, images, memorials, ceremonies and indeed fiction. All of those involved in producing it have seen themselves as presenting a truth. So the mainstream Africa story is not in any simple sense false, nor is it a myth, and for that reason it cannot be refuted. But that story does contain omissions and distortions, and unless they are challenged by other stories, they will have damaging consequences. The three main elements that make up this story are colonialism, race and slavery. These are, of course, very large topics, and my concern here is not with explaining their historical development but with clarifying the orthodoxy. The aim is to make sense of what they say, and what they leave out or gloss over, and to see how that fits into the overarching story or narrative. It will then be possible to understand the political effects of the story.

Colonialism is the most important element in the story for two main reasons. The first is that the colonial conquest of Africa was achieved, unlike most other parts of the world, remarkably quickly and completely. The second is that this conquest was justified by the idea of a civilising mission. Around 1800, European powers possessed little more than footholds in Africa and were almost entirely ignorant of the interior. Between about 1880 and 1910 there was a scramble for Africa which brought the whole continent, with the exceptions of Liberia and Ethiopia, under European rule. Britain and France took the lions share, but Portugal, Belgium and Germany all occupied considerable territories, while even Spain and Italy had a share. Remarkably, during this process, the colonial powers agreed to avoid conflict over these territories and publicly justified their occupation partly on the grounds that they were abolishing slavery and bringing progress to a backward region. Powerful states have often used lofty claims to dress up self-interested actions, but at the time, and indeed for some time afterwards, colonialism Many others, while they shared misgivings about the brutality and destructiveness of colonial conquest, reluctantly conceded that a complete absence of rule might leave populations vulnerable to abuse and exploitation by private interests, as had already occurred in the Congo. Until well after the scramble, almost no one in Europe was against colonial rule in Africa.