Developing Africa

Concepts and practices in twentieth-century colonialism

Joseph M. Hodge, Gerald Hödl, Martina Kopf

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780719091803
• eBook ISBN: 9781526110862
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book investigates development in British, French and Portuguese colonial Africa during the last decades of colonial rule. During this period, development became the central concept underpinning the relationship between metropolitan Europe and colonial Africa.Combining historiographical accounts with analyses from other academic viewpoints, this book investigates a range of contexts, from agriculture to mass media. With its focus on the conceptual side of development and its broad geographical scope, it offers new and unique perspectives. An extensive introduction contextualises the individual chapters and makes the book an up-to-date point of entry into the subject of colonial development, not only for a specialist readership, but also for students of history, development and postcolonial studies.Written by scholars from Africa, Europe and North America, Developing Africa is a uniquely international dialogue on this vital chapter of twentieth-century transnational history.

PART I

Meanings of development in twentieth-century colonialism

CHAPTER ONE

From dead end to new lease of life: development in South-Eastern Tanganyika from the late 1930s to the 1950s

Juhani Koponen

In this chapter I examine the changing ideas and practices of development in Tanganyika, especially its remote South-Eastern corners, from the late 1930s to the 1950s.1 The chapter shows the variety of meanings of development in colonial discourse and practice and spells out their implications for the history of the idea of development more broadly. The focus is on three development endeavours, very different in themselves: (1) the Groundnut Scheme, (2) the promotion and expansion of cashew nut as a cash crop, and (3) the post-war colonial development plans across the country and in the South-East. By exploring and comparing these three different approaches to development under colonialism, I argue that colonial development reached its limits and met a dead end in the hands of rising African nationalism, although the very same nationalism subsequently gave a new lease of life to development more generally.

Meanings of development and their colonial history

To set the scene for the discussion, two points must be made at the outset. The first concerns the meaning of development. A notion notorious for the multiplicity of its meanings, ‘development’ is used differently in differing languages and in the same languages in different periods. In our case in particular, the etymology and connotations of Swahili maendeleo and English ‘development’, and the latter’s European equivalents such as Entwicklung and développement, are rather different. Maendeleo means basically progress while ‘development’ has a much more activist ring: it also means doing things for something, often for progress but sometimes against it.2 Similarly there are important differences in the way ‘development’ was perceived and how it actually worked in the colonial period compared to the post-colonial era.

This argument eschews the quest for a ‘correct’ meaning of development in terms of its contents; something that I think is a chimera anyway. Instead, it takes its cue from Wittgenstein and traces the multifarious ways in which the word development is actually used in practice.3 By doing so, a benchmark can be established: in the combination of its different uses, development can be seen to have a core meaning, which turns out to have remained remarkably stable from the early colonial times till today. What can be called the modern notion of development has both empirical and normative reference points. It is used in three basic senses, referring to (1) normative goals, (2) an actual social process, and (3) intentional activity. That is, development denotes an intentional intervention, the process (or processes) triggered or affected by that intervention, and the goal of the intervention which also serves as its ideological justification. As I see it, the power of the notion of development derives from the fact that it embraces these very different uses under the same term and binds them together: it promises that the intentional development intervention will lead to a process which can be taken as development in the normative sense. It is the same notion of development which guides contemporary development efforts that also laid the basis for colonial exploitation. As exploitation obviously also could produce development in the normative sense, development was soon elevated to the goal of the very exploitation and brought in to justify it. Yet in spite of these crucial functions, under colonialism development remained one notion among many; only after independence did it acquire its present status of a foundational concept, shaping an entire discourse and the practices drawing on it.

The second point, following from the first, is that at the start of our inspection, the 1930s, development, understood in the sense sketched above, was by no means a new feature in British colonial ideology and practice. The claims that development entered colonialism only in its late stage notwithstanding,4 it is obvious that it had been around much longer, basically from the onset of colonialism.5 In Africa at least, development must be regarded as an unacknowledged condition of colonialism. In retrospect, colonialism has been judged as a system of exploitation, geared primarily to benefit the colonisers, and to me rightly so. But the point is that only development made colonial exploitation possible: rather than opposites they form a dialectical unity. In places like Tanganyika there was not much to be exploited before the exploitable resources were developed. European colonialism saw that its mission was to make the whole world exploitable, and development provided it with both the means and the justification to do so. This was perfectly clear to the historical agents concerned, but has been obscured in our post-war development discourse with its conflation of development with welfare and all other good things. As long as colonialism continued, there was no way to give up ‘development for exploitation’, but it alone was not enough to tackle the political challenges it faced when it matured.

In British colonial ideology, an ingenious attempt to make sense of and accommodate the competing policy demands to which development was offered as an answer was made in the guise of the dual mandate. Colonies could be seen as ‘undeveloped estates’ as Joseph Chamberlain did in his famous speech back in 1895. But the British Treasury was always afraid that starting to develop the faraway possessions would require expenditure which would doom the colonies to become a drain on the imperial finances. In addition, there were always influential colonial officials on the ground, who were afraid that development would upset the forces which kept the African societies stable and wanted to preserve and consolidate rather than undermine them. Under the conflicting pressures, the dual mandate provided what came nearest to an official doctrine. As articulated by Lord Lugard in 1922, the colonial power was placed in a trusteeship position in two respects: towards the Africans; and towards the ‘rest of mankind’, meaning Europeans. Colonialism thus had to work for the African advancement while at the same time developing the material resources of Africa so that everyone could enjoy them.6 This idea, expressed in slightly different formulations, also guided British colonialism in Tanganyika from the start to the end.

The shift in the meanings of development took place within the dual mandate. In earlier colonialism, it was the development of resources that figured most prominently. The basic claim underlying this, originating from the time of colonisation, was that the local people were incapable of developing the resources of their countries. Thus the colonialists took, on behalf of humankind, not only the right but the duty to take over and initiate ‘development’. This was a pervasive lamentation in late pre-colonial and early colonial literature, not only in Britain but elsewhere, and provided a major pillar for the justification of the colonial conquest.7 The other half of the dual mandate, the idea of colonialism working for the advancement of Africans, was gaining strength as colonialism progressed, but it too had been expressed right from the beginning. At first it was a demand of humanitarians but soon the idea had been taken over by more far-sighted colonialists. Ove time, it became an increasingly political demand – first from outside and then from inside the colony. ‘The advancement of the African’ became a major prop in legitimising colonialism. The British made the point by adding the term ‘welfare’ to development in the Colonial Development and Welfare Acts of 1940 and 1945.

With these acts, His Majesty’s government gave up what was then called ‘good government’ according to which the colonies had to aim at balanced budgets to be financially self-sufficient and endorsed the necessity to transfer resources on a grant basis to the colonies. Again, the recognition of the need for imperial assistance was not new. The early colonial railways had mostly been built by loans guaranteed by the imperial government. Some grant assistance had even been given under the first Colonial Development Act of 1929, although in trifling sums and with the view of getting orders from the colonies to stimulate the flagging British economy and relieve the rising unemployment back in Britain.8 What was new was that development was now elevated to official policy by attempting to systematise the scattered efforts and backing them up by more substantial resources. Although funding in practice was considered and granted on a project basis, the projects had to be collated into more comprehensive plans before they could be applied for. Although it never totally materialised, the sums committed under the Colonial Development and Welfare Acts seemed to come very close to the modern international aid target of 0.7 per cent of the donor GDP.9

‘Welfare’ was added to development in the title of the 1940 and 1945 Acts to make development politically more attractive and get rid of the view that it was about the exploitation of resources only. As put by Sir Henry Moore, assistant colonial secretary, ‘if it is just going to be mainly “development” on the old lines, it will look merely as if we are going to exploit the Colonies in order to get money to pay for the war!’ Including welfare in the title, another official remarked, was ‘to add to [Britain’s] moral prestige’ and ‘make a big thing out of it’ politically.10

In the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures and tables
• General editor’s introduction
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• PART I—Meanings of development in twentieth-century colonialism
• PART II—Economic and rural development
• PART III—Social development and welfare
• PART IV—Discourse-analytical and literary perspectives on colonial development
• Epilogue: taking stock, looking ahead
• Bibliography
• Index