Rethinking and Unthinking Development

Perspectives on Inequality and Poverty in South Africa and Zimbabwe

Busani Mpofu, Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Busani Mpofu, Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781789201772
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Global Development Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Development has remained elusive in Africa. Through theoretical contributions and case studies focusing on Southern Africa's former white settler states, South Africa and Zimbabwe, this volume responds to the current need to rethink (and unthink) development in the region. The authors explore how Africa can adapt Western development models suited to its political, economic, social and cultural circumstances, while rejecting development practices and discourses based on exploitative capitalist and colonial tendencies. Beyond the legacies of colonialism, the volume also explores other factors impacting development, including regional politics, corruption, poor policies on empowerment and indigenization, and socio-economic and cultural barriers.

Part I

Theory, Concepts and Discourse

Chapter 1

Rethinking Development in the Age of Global Coloniality

Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni

Introduction

Development is simultaneously an ideology, a discourse and a practice. Genealogically speaking, development is part of Cartesian thought, Enlightenment reason and Euro-North American-centric modernity. It ranks alongside linear notions of social evolution, progress and emancipation. Its links with modernity can in particular be seen in the notions of ‘rapture’ and ‘difference’ (Bhambra 2007), which form part of the relegation of Africa and other areas outside Europe and North America to the categories of premodern and primitive. It is such thinking that provoked the need for rethinking development and indeed even unthinking it from a decolonial epistemic perspective. A decolonial epistemic perspective is by nature a historical analysis as it delves into genealogy of knowledge, power and being as it consistently unmasks and drills into how embedded these are matrices in coloniality.

Thus, the first section of this chapter introduces the concept of decolonial epistemic perspectives, which illuminates how development studies as a field of knowledge has been colonised and held hostage by global imperial designs, and highlights the need for its decolonisation. The second section discusses development challenges as an integral part of the African national project, highlighting how African political economies have remained hostage to invisible colonial matrices of power. The third section analyses the reality of neoliberal imperialism and its impact on current thinking about development issues. The final section grapples with how to transcend the global development impasse and outlines the complex contours of decolonial options that take us into the post-Euro-American hegemony.

The decolonial epistemic perspective, which embraces a world-systems approach, makes it possible to grapple with pertinent global imperial designs, and facilitates the laying of the foundations for a decolonisation of development studies as a field of study, which has remained deeply interpellated by its Euro-American modernist and ‘civilising mission’ genealogy. A combination of a world-systems approach and decolonial epistemic perspectives form an ideal entry point to interrogate claims of objectivist-universalist knowledges, challenges of decolonisation of Euro-American power structure, and problems of developmentalism (Grosfoguel and Cervantes-Rodriguez 2002: xi–xxx).

Decolonisation as a political, epistemological and economic liberatory project has remained an unfinished business, giving way to coloniality. Coloniality is an invisible power structure that sustains colonial relations of exploitation and domination long after the end of direct colonialism (Maldonado-Torres 2007: 240–70). Coloniality of power works as a crucial structuring process within global imperial designs, sustaining the superiority of the Global North and ensuring the perpetual subalternity of the Global South using colonial matrices of power (Mignolo 2007: 155–67).

Colonial matrices of power are a set of technologies of subjectivation that consist of four types. The first is control of economy, which manifests itself through dispossessions, land appropriations, the exploitation of labour, and control over African natural resources. The second is control of authority, which includes the maintenance of military superiority and monopolisation of the means of violence. The third is control of gender and sexuality, which involves the reimagination of ‘family’ in Western bourgeois terms and the introduction of Western-centric education, which displaces indigenous forms of knowledge. The last is control of subjectivity and knowledge, which includes epistemological colonisation and the rearticulation of African subjectivity as inferior and constituted by a series of ‘deficits’ and a catalogue of ‘lacks’ (Grosfoguel 2007: 214; Quijano 2007: 168–87).

In terms of the definition of development, the Bandung Conference of 1955 articulated development from the perspective of decolonisation, in which it is understood as a liberatory human aspiration to attain freedom from political, economic, ideological, epistemological and social domination that was installed by colonialism and coloniality (Mkandawire 2011: 7). In the Bandung version, development entailed overcoming those major obstacles to human happiness and the attainment of material welfare, civil and political liberties, social peace and human security, which can be named as colonialism and coloniality (Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2012, 2013).

This definition of development is opposed to what Thandika Mkandawire terms the ‘Truman version of developmentalism’, where development is interpreted as Euro-American missionary task of developing the Global South in general and Africa in particular (Mkandawire 2011: 7-8). In the Bandung Conference version of development, it is conceived as a rational human response to historical experiences and human needs, whereas in the Truman version, development falls neatly within global imperial designs articulated in terms of ‘civilising mission’ and ‘Westernisation’ of the non-Western world (Mehmet 1995). As will become clear in the course of this chapter, decolonising development studies entails rescuing it from the Truman version of developmentalism.

The enormity of the task of decolonising development studies cannot be fully realised in the absence of deployment of a well-thought-out theoretical framework capable of unmasking the beast of coloniality, which has been assuming different colours and wearing different masks in its endeavour to disguise itself. Therefore, I specifically deploy the concept of ‘coloniality of power’ as a major component of the world-systems approach and critical concept underpinning decolonial epistemic perspectives, which highlights the darker side of modernity that has resulted in the underdevelopment of Africa.

Development studies and development discourses are not free of the colonial matrices of power that underpin coloniality. Development studies continues to suffer from a crisis of ideas, which culminated in the development impasse of the 1980s. The recent economic crisis affecting global capitalism that has manifested itself as a financial crisis is a further indicator of troubled economic epistemologies that have implications on discourses and practices of development. As noted by James Ferguson, development is not neutral of power and cannot be understood outside of the current power dynamics. It is part of what he terms the anti-politics machine (Ferguson 1990). It cannot be reduced to simple real-life problems of hunger, water scarcity, disease, malnutrition and poverty, as if these were untouched and unshaped by broader questions of power, epistemology, representation and identity construction (Tripathy and Mohapatra 2011: 93–118).

The Case for Decolonising Development Studies

The exercise of decolonising development studies entails four tasks. The first is that of probing development’s relative amnesia about coloniality (Kapoor 2008: xv). The second is that of revealing its embeddedness in Enlightenment and modernity’s notions of scientific progress, civilising mission and universal economic prescriptions. The third is that of interrogation of development’s deep imbrications in Euro-American knowledge and global imperial designs. The last is that of critiquing the current neoliberal tendencies that masquerade as salvation for Africa (Kapoor 2008: xv).

The best approach to use in order to achieve the decolonisation of development studies is to deploy decolonial epistemic perspectives that reveal coloniality embedded in development discourse. Decolonial epistemic perspectives are predicated on the concepts of power, knowledge and being. Coloniality of power locates the discourse of development within the context of the politics of the constitution of a racially hierarchised, Euro-America-centric, Christian-centric, patriarchal, capitalist, heteronormative, hegemonic, asymmetrical and modern global power structure (Grosfoguel and Cervantes-Rodriguez 2002; Grosfoguel 2007). Within this structure, development exists as one of the technologies of subjectivation in the same league as ideas of modernity, progress, civilisation and modernisation.

Coloniality of knowledge enables an investigation into the epistemological foundations of development as a modernist form of apparatus that has been utilised to construct what became known as the ‘Third World’/‘developing world’ inhabited by people whose being was constituted by a series of ‘lacks’ and a catalogue of ‘deficits’ that justified various forms of external intervention in Africa, including the notorious structural adjustment programmes (SAPs) (Escobar 2012: viii). Coloniality of being extends the debates to the realm of the making of modern subjectivities and conceptions of humanism, where racial hierarchisation and classification of people according to race pushed Africans to the lowest rank of human ontology, where even their being human was doubted and where they existed as objects of development (Maldonado-Torres 2007).

The concepts of power, knowledge and being help to unmask coloniality as an underside of modernity, without necessarily rejecting the positive aspects of modernity. Through decolonial epistemic perspectives, we seek to discover the benefits of analysing development discourse from the perspective of ‘colonial difference’. Colonial difference is a reference to the spaces, borders and peripheries of empire that have suffered the negative consequences of modernity, such as the slave trade, imperialism, colonialism, apartheid and neocolonialism (Mignolo 2000: 49–88).

What distinguishes the decolonial epistemic perspective from dominant Euro-American-centric hegemonic neoliberal discourses is its locus of enunciation. Locus of enunciation here refers to the geographical spaces from which academics and intellectuals speak, their ideological orientations, subject positions (racial, gender and class identifications), and the historical processes and events that inform their knowledge claims (Grosfoguel 2007: 213). The decolonial epistemic perspective does not attempt to claim universality, neutrality and singular truthfulness. It is decidedly and deliberately situated in those epistemic sites such as Latin America, Asia, the Caribbean and Africa that experienced the negative consequences of modernity and that are facing development challenges. At the same time, it openly accepts its partiality, in the awareness that all forms of knowledge are partial.

The overarching objective of the decolonial epistemic perspective is to unveil epistemic silences hidden within Euro-American epistemology as well as the deceit and hypocrisy that conceal epistemicides. It challenges what Aime Cesaire termed ‘the fundamental European lie’, which articulated colonisation as a vehicle for civilisation (1955: 84). In short, a decolonial perspective is meant not only to change the content of intellectual and academic conversations on development, but also the terms of this conversation so as to engage with the crucial issues of epistemology, being and power that maintain the present asymmetrical global relations.

Coloniality of power is at the core of the present global power structure, where ideas of development fall neatly within a genealogy of discourses that presented Africans as people whose being was constituted by negations and lacks: lacking writing, lacking history, lacking civilisation, lacking development, lacking democracy and lacking human rights (Grosfoguel 2007: 213). At the same time, the human population has been undergoing social classification according to invented racial categories of inferior/superior, primitive/civilised, rational/irrational, traditional/modern and developed/underdeveloped (Quijano 2000).

The agenda of decolonising development studies entails revealing what development meant within the context of colonialism (and now coloniality). How was (and is) it defined? In the first place, understood from the perspective of empire as the locus of enunciation, imperialism and colonialism were grand ‘civilising missions’. Europeans were agents of development and Africans were the objects of development (Mehmet 1995).

Within colonial discourses, development meant opening up the African continent for economic exploitation and the permanent relocation of white settlers. Development also meant defeating African resistance (read as the pacification of barbarous tribes resisting modernity) to pave the way for the construction of colonial states. Development meant the designation of land as the private property of white settlers in those areas that fell victim to settler colonialism, like South Africa, Algeria, Zimbabwe and Kenya (Magubane 1996). Development meant the rearrangement of African agrarian systems to make sure they produced the cash crops needed in Europe and America.

Development meant the dispossession of Africans, forcing them off the land and transforming them into peasants, workers and domestic servants. At the same time, acquired land was quickly transformed into plantations and farms owned by victorious white settlers. In other words, development in the colonial context meant pushing Africans out of their modes of life and production, and into the evolving capitalist system, where they participated mainly as sources of cheap labour. Mbembe argued that ‘in implementing its projects, the colonial state did not hesitate to resort to brute force in dealing with natives, to destroy the forms of social organisation that previously existed, or even to co-opt these forms in the service of ends other than those to which they had been directed’ (2000: 8).

Within the colonial context, development meant the transformation of African society according to the needs, demands and imperatives of colonial regimes. Frederick Cooper noted that colonialism never provided a strong national economy to benefit African people because the colonial economies were ‘externally oriented and the state’s economic power remained concentrated at the gate between inside and outside’ (Cooper 2002: 5). It was Cooper who described the colonial state as a ‘gatekeeper state’ that was not embedded in the society over which it presided, that stood astride the intersection of colonial territory and the outside world, and that drew revenue from imposing duties on goods and taxing Africans (Cooper 2002).

Socially, colonial development entailed the reorganisation and classification of the colonial population according to race. Mahmood Mamdani (1996) described the colonial states as bifurcated social formations inhabited by ‘subjects’ and ‘citizens’. In order to prevent the coalescence of colonised peoples into nations, colonialists used cartography, censuses and the law to classify and categorise the population. Political and legal identities were enforced via the issuing of identity cards. Through its technologies of governance, colonialism transformed fluid and accommodative precolonial cultural identities into rigid, impermeable, singular, nonconsensual and exclusionary political identities.

Within this, ‘races’ were acknowledged as having a common future as citizens, whereas tribes, as subjects, were to be excluded from this common future. Further, colonial governments denied the African people the space to coalesce into a majority identity by splitting them into different and competing tribes and minorities (Mamdani 2007). One good example of this is the establishment of Bantustans by the apartheid regime in South Africa that enabled the exclusion of black people from belonging to South Africa.

Politically, colonial governance assumed the character of a hybrid military/civilian model where violence was a norm of governance. Paramilitary authoritarianism was a core component of colonial governance, with disciplining of the ‘natives’ being the order of the day. Mbembe has argued that ‘the colonial state model was, in theory as in practice, the exact opposite of the liberal model of discussion or deliberation’ (2000: 6). Three forms of violence underpinned colonial governance: ‘foundational violence’, which authorised the right of conquest and had an ‘instituting function’ of creating Africans as its targets; ‘legitimating violence’, which was u...