POST HUMPTY DUMPTY
Eating the Heart of Darkness in the Light of Development
"Things Don't Come Back Together'
Despite our science, some things we still don’t know--for instance--the consequences upon the global ecology of out efforts at development. Other things we seem only slightly aware of--like a relativity of vision that prevents us from seeing that our own contradictions may not be another's abominations and that, after all, darkness and development may only be in the eye of the beholder.
A Malian development anthropologist asked me during an interview why the Africans should not want development--why should it be, like the bomb, the exclusive privilege of the First World--while we export to the Third World our 'eco-evils'.
After more than a century of research, we still have no clear idea of the influence of a thousand years of tradition and cultural history, or of the dramatic consequences of sudden acculturation, colonialism and political-economic dependency. We have just gotten over more than a decade of demotion of family planning in the world--undoubtedly to render the Third World more dependent and subordinate to the developed West than they already had been. In our optimism we believed that the malarial anopheles could be easily eradicated and witnessing the evolutionary resilience of nature against all our DDT, we have turned away from the problem though malaria remains the number one killer on earth. And now AIDS has become a new Pandora's box that we hesitate to open, partly because we know that its most immediate and perhaps most devastating impact will be upon homosexuals, minority women and members of the Third World. US pharmaceutical companies, who seek small profits in solving Third World diseases, would rather make more money keeping overfed Americans sedated on Vallium. Whose corruptions should we be most concerned about? As my Malian acquaintance said, if Africa's want to corrupt themselves with too much development, what right have Westerners to interfere?
We are left to find 'solutions' for problems which were historically of our won doing. After 'things fall apart' (1) all the King's horses and all the King's men can't put Black Africa back together again. Now we are persuading, manipulating, indeed, 'coercing' Africans to adopt a way of life, a value orientation, a style of thinking, and a world view, which is essentially alien to all that they had previously known.
We of the West were the ones who destroyed the foundations for their traditional way of life, and then it is we who expect them to fit within our global system, and when they do not live up to our standards, we cast them down as failures.
The African cultural tradition is ancient. The roots of African civilization are perhaps deeper than any other human civilization on earth. Indeed, Africa has been the original homeland and birthplace of the human species. Ways of life have had a long time to work themselves out there--and for that long, Africans have successfully survived. (2)
Several observations can be made about African culture--first, its local and regional environment is well embedded in its language, its values, its world views and its social relations; second, its orientation is inclined to be strongly 'homebound' and domesticated in contrast to that of peoples who have had a long history of nomadic movement, migration and resettlement, an orientation which is liable to be translated into a strong sense of territorialism and familial and tribal identity (3); third, African cultures have long relied upon old, established and elaborate traditional mechanisms of authority, solidarity, cultural transmission and integration and adaptation--mechanisms which, once lost or destroyed, could not be easily replaced.
These traditions had the effect of 'locating' and 'orienting' the individual within a stable world and satisfying way of life which was extremely functional, symbolically rich, spiritually rewarding--a way of life that was 'down to earth', close to nature, without much great contradiction if not without great hardship and suffering. (5) Institutions, social patterns, value patterns and psychological processes which depended upon these traditions were critically disabled when these traditions were broken down or undermined under western colonialism:
When we refer to the cultural and traditional fabric of the African way of life, a social material which was ripped and torn apart by colonialism we must understand that the African sense of self was not separate from a sense of African society and that, whatever culture we are referring to, it worked to 'increase' value regardless of suffering and hardship. (6)
In other words "You can take the slave out of Africa, but you can't take Africa our of the slave." The likelihood that these different forms of value were not congruent with the ethos and values of a western capitalistic or imperialistic orientation and were, and likely as not, contradictory with Western world view (7), rooted as they were in traditional conservatism and values of preservation, meant only conflict and compromise with modernization.
The introduction of an alien and radically different way of life created fundamental psycho-cultural contradictions in Africans which become manifest in many maladaptive attitudes, behaviors and social patterns of individuals and groups.
The traditional way of life and world view it was bound within made 'sense' because its traditions represented thousands of years of accumulated cultural wisdom and experience--in contrast very little of the 'modern' way of life makes the same kind of sense and to the African traditions, much of modernity might make no sense at all. Thus, Africans can be said to be struggling today under an alien set of standards, compelled to adopt an essentially alien way of life, to successfully raise their children in this way of life, and to simultaneously make that foreign way of life make sense in terms, feelings, relations and actions with which they are most familiar and competent. Under this handicap, if the results of their efforts should fall short of the mark, then who are we to blame them.
And because we have handicapped them, they have been the targets of racially legitimized victimization--they are the fools, the fall guys, the naïve and ignorant customers for every capitalist scheme and confidence trick imaginable. "We were simply cheated of this charity. (8) " The victims of our machinations, we blame them.
Symbolically, we may say that the Africans represent for us a form of deep seated, racially prejudiced 'misanthropy' that is rooted in the darkness of out own hearts--a fundamental hatred of humankind that focuses upon the most basic of differences. And if we reach deeply enough into our own hearts, we are liable to find the true source of this hatred in our own darkness, in our own greed and avarice, fear of failure and contempt for subjective, non-rational weakness.
The Black African is for us, then, the embodiment of our won Dionysian heart of darkness, the representative of all that we had to give up on the road to paradise, the living and breathing ambassador of our won deepest primitives. It is in light of these aspects of the African 'Other' that we need to cross examine and reevaluate the 'obstacles' to developmental modernization in Africa.
Furthermore we must frame our questions in terms of whether we are talking about capitalist development or human development, and we must realize that within the contradictions of our World System we may not be able to always have both at the same time. Part of the post modern critique of our System is that its pan-optic consequence for focusing upon and reinforcing the Metropolis is the rendering of the peripheral masses and docile and obedient and the gross unrealization and frustration of the latent human potential of these masses.
"We were simply cheated of this charity."
It was probably not until I helped a Rwandan friend of mine learn how to swim in a lake that I realized the great disparity of cultural experience which separated us. His desire to learn was sincere and intense, but his efforts to paddle, support himself and float in the water troubled and uncoordinated. Any my friend may have eventually learned to be a strong and steady swimmer, but he never gained that 'natural' facility and 'at homeness' with the water that comes with growing up swimming.
We might refer to a notion of relative 'cultural distance' which is the cumulative sum of the many kinds of differences which come between people. It is this basic 'cultural distance' which any project in human development in Africa must try to shorten, span and eventually overcome.
The Black Africans are left to reconstruct for themselves, from the ground up, a world that was torn down around them. This process of reconstruction is as ingrained as the daily habits, thoughts and feelings of the people. It is a process which begins at home, and gradually extends itself to ever widening spheres of social interaction. It is a process which will not happen overnight and which may take many generations.
In this regard, we may proclaim that education is the best answer, and that the 'lack of education' the best obstacle. But this answer needs qualification. We can export expertise but not competence. We can export knowledge but not understanding. We can export teaching but not learning. We can export family planning but not child development. Similar we can export food, but we can't export agricultural skill, productivity and the motivation to produce. We can export change, but not innovation. We can even export achievement but not success.
Of course, education begins in the womb, and ends in the tomb, and if we have a chronic pattern of mothers who neglect the nurturance or attention of their offspring, because they are too busy making more babies or caring for the other babies they have already made, then we are liable to have a generation of daughters who do not know how to mother because they were themselves unmothered, and who will raise another generation without a firm sense of motherhood implanted in their character.
And if we have a widespread pattern of mothers who would, if they could or knew how to better care for their children but who are too poor, too caught up in the struggle for existence, too ignorant or too uneducated to know the difference, then we are still liable to end up with a generation of infants whose only conception of parenthood is unstable, erratic, contradictory, confusing and cold.
And if we have a widespread pattern of poor or no schools, and an average level of attainment that doesn't even reach into high school then we will raise a generation of parents who may have learned how to love and take care of their children, but who, for lack of knowledge and skill, are basically shut off from participation in the larger world except in the most rudimentary roles.
And if we raise a generation of young adults who look at television, read newspapers, and see a broader world beyond their horizon, but do not have the competence to perform professionally in that world, then we are risking the creation of a generation who may be loving and capable parents, but who are destined to follow the narrow footsteps of their parents and who cannot reach beyond the most local of contexts.
The remedy of human development must be that it work simultaneously upon all these levels in order to effect a 'cure'. This is the enormity and complexity of the problem, because changing or working at just any one level or even at a set of things, is liable by itself ineffectual. Such change, if coming from outside must be sudden, dramatic, and across the board, or not at all. It must be made to permanently stick to the people who are the targets of such development.
We must consider as well the long term consequences and patterning of a widespread, pervasive 'cultural inferiority' complex which tends to undermine cultural values, confidence, legitimacy and to create an self fulfilling, self defeating, vicious cycle of learned helplessness, dependency and inferiority. Such a cultural inferiority complex can be expected to arise among any colonized and conquered peoples who are subjected to the acculturative assimilation of the dominant culture and whose own indigenous cultural values are disregarded with contempt.
The chronic symptoms of such a cultural inferiority complex are the inherent undervaluing and underrating of the achievements, values, goals and customs of one's own culture, and the upholding of an alien and probably hypocritical set of standards for emulation in one's style of life. It leads to a pattern of 'codependency'--a seeking out of one's own kind among losers, of victimization and to a pattern of 'choking'--the habitual and even unconscious setting and failing at goals which were unrealistic in the first place.
Then we must ask, what 'level' of human development do we wish to attain. If we are talking about a pre-conventional or even a conventional morality, then we are not going to get much further past the narrow tribalisms and nepotisms which forestall development today. If we talk about shifting identities, loyalties, and commitments onto a broader, nationally defined base, we may not want to develop human potential very far past the conventional stage, but rather merely to transfer it onto new sets of subjective identities and objective relations, in the process redefining African identity.
"Africa is dying…it is clear that the economy of our continent is lying in ruins." (9)
Before designing a 'solution' based upon Social Engineering (10) or on 'Development' (11), we must ask an important first question as to the historical relativity of certain values. Not everyone has been born into a national tradition of political democracy--many people not only find such a tradition strange, but simply may not understand it. We who have inherited cultural orientation embedded in a common law tradition that was forged over many centuries on the British Isles, find the lack of democracy strange and alien to our own world view, and we sometimes have a difficult time understanding the asymmetries of power that are embedded within other traditions.
But if we look closely enough we will clearly see that even our own state society is, as all complex societies are, hierarchically stratified--and if we see an egalitarian state and ethos in the looking glass, it is a romantic mythoi that is deeply rooted in a time when self reliant, frontier communities carved out niches out of the wilderness against all odds, with backs always turned in defiance of a king or the civilization inevitably following from behind.
Within the political economic context of the World System, global stratification seems sometimes so strong that we must seriously ask if the notion of Homo Hierarchicus is a valid pan human universal (12)--wo/man the primate may need dominance and authority as the basis of stable socio-political organization. And if we consider the historical track record of most democracies, we can plainly see that they have never been perfect or complete.
So what justification do we have for wishing to hard sell democracy abroad to every nation who accepts our assistance Capitalist ethos sometimes comes into conflict with democratic ideas, and not infrequently we have promoted anti-democratic totalitarian regimes in the name of defending capital and defeating invidious communism. So even for us, it seems, democracy remains fairly relative manner, especially when it comes to 'The Big Tradeoff' between efficiency and equality. (13)
Suppose for a moment, that we discover deep in our own heart of darkness a sense of the possibility of sentience and suffering of others in the world, as well as the potential for their freedom from suffering, and we realize that another's suffering could equally well be our own possibility for being. Then we hook on that possibility, however slight, our meta-ethical justification for all of human rights, the enlightenment ethos of emancipation, education, social equality and justice, and then we reason that the best possible means to achieve these ends in life via the most democratic institutions possible, reinforced through social education.
Then our immediate goals seem most simple and straightforward--to awaken this sense of the possibility of suffering, sentience and freedom in as many people as we can.
But we would soon have an important set of decisions top make--if we define human rights, equality, justice and democracy in a universal sense, then where and how shall we draw the boundaries in our institutionalization of these qualities. Shall it be the tribe or the nation. Shall we seek to foster a national ideology and consciousness within which we promote such ideals and yet exclude the rest of the human race from participation in them? And then how shall we respond when the full ramifications of these ideals comes back home again, when, for instance, the education of one's own child must be compromised for the sake of the education of another's child. Shall we abandon these ideals altogether, or can we compromise them or once we've started down the road, see them to the very end.
If we are going to start building democracy in Africa, or elsewhere, from the ground up, after tearing down all that came before, then we must not make of being a poor peasant a political economic plague or a disease of capitalism. We must seek to restore a sense of dignity and pride in those who have been the worst victims of out progress. We must restore to them their face, their voice, their choice--and give them the respect and freedom they deserve.
1. Chinua Achebe Things That Fall Apart (New York: Random House Inc. 1959)
2. Robert B. Mabele, William M. Lyakurwa, Beno J. Ndulu and Samuel M. Wangwe "The Economic Development of Tanzania" in Scientific American Sept. 1980: 182-190
3. "First of all, economic patterns of behavior which appear to be obstructive to the modern exchange economy have played positive roles in sustaining life and accomplishing social, political and other purposes in traditional society. One of the frequent targets of criticism is the extended family networks which cover many more individuals than ate normally included in the family unit in Western society. They are cited as impediments both to innovation and to the accumulation of capital on the part of talented, upwardly mobile members of contemporary African society. Operation of the extended family means that the economic success of the individual innovator often brings forth more claimants on his wealth in modern society, rather than permitting the individual to accumulate capital. Some critics have labeled the system 'family parasitism'. Yet in most traditional societies the extended family served as the vital unit not only in production but in providing social security for the very young, the elderly and the unfortunate. Membership was not a 'free lunch' in as much as social pressures imposed by other family members made everyone a contributor to the success of the corporate enterprise. No slackers were permitted. And in societies that lacked the formal structures of political organization, family heads and lineages doubled as economic, social and political units." J. Gus Liebenow African Politics: Crises and Challenges (Bloomington and Indianapolis, Id.: Indiana Univ. Press 1986: 155-6)
5. "…The net result is a form of life that, far from being 'primitive' in the sense the word generally implies, is full, rich, lacking nothing valued by western civilization except perhaps in terms of material comfort which, as every field worker knows, is a highly relative matter. Even medical skills, which on the surface might seem crude compared with those of the modern west, are by no means as 'backward' as we have thought and are frequently more in balance with the overall needs of the society than our own." (Colin Turnball Man in Africa (Garden City, New York: Doubleday 1977: 8)
6. Dorothy Lee Valuing the Self (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall Inc. 1976)
7. Eleanor Smith Bowen Return to Laughter (Garden City, New York: Doubleday and Co. Inc. 1964)
8. "…Many people have now told us how foolish we were to trust the Spanish businessman. So many came after the golpe de libertad but so many quickly left after taking loans and not repaying them." Madre Josefina, as cited in Robert Klitgaard Tropical Gangsters (USA; Basic Books Inc. 1990: 105)
9. Edem Kodjo, Secretary General of the Organization of African Unity 1978 in David Lamb The Africans (New York: Random House 1983: vx)
10. Aldous Huxley Brave New World Revisited (New York & Evanston: Harper & Row Publishers 1958)
11. Ted Trainer Developed in Death: Rethinking Third World Development (London: The Merlin Press Ltd. 1989)
12. Louis Dumont Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and Its Implications (Chicago and London: Univ. of Chicago Press 1966)
13. "Such is the double standard of a capitalist democracy, professing and pursuing an egalitarian political and social system and simultaneously generating gaping disparities in economic well being. This mixture of equality sometimes smacks of inconsistency and even insincerity…To the extent that the system succeeds, it generated an efficient economy. But that pursuit of efficiency necessarily creates inequalities. And hence society faces a tradeoff between equality and efficiency." Arthur M. Okun Equality and Efficiency: The Big Tradeoff (Washington DC.: The Brookings Institution 1975:1)
Blanket Copyright, Hugh M. Lewis, © 2005. Use of this text governed by fair use policy--permission to make copies of this text is granted for purposes of research and non-profit instruction only.
Last Updated: 03/07/05