[Copyright Cedric Pulford, 2006. This article may not be reprinted or distributed other than for individual and personal use, either electronically or on hard copy, without permission from the publisher]

Colonialism is a favourite target of liberal critics, but once upon a time it was widely seen as the guarantor of development. CEDRIC PULFORD explains why the arguments are not all one way. This article is an extract from Casualty of Empire, published by Ituri in 2007.

THE thoughtful among Britain’s colonial administrators believed they were taking part in the development of the countries in their charge. The words of the colonial administrator Sir Harry Johnston, as expressed in A History and Description of the British Empire in Africa (undated but around 1910), can serve as the credo of generations of imperial civil servants.

“It is only by maintaining [Johnston wrote] a perfectly honest administration of these lands assigned – perhaps only temporarily – to our control, that we shall merit the distinguished position in which we have been placed by circumstances, and that without recourse to mere force we may be able to maintain ourselves as rulers in Africa, with the full consent and fraternal co-operation of the Negroes, negroids, and other backward coloured peoples, for whom we are doing what the Romans and the Normans did for us.”

It is easy today to mock the idea of Britain doing for Africa “what the Romans and the Normans did for us”. We may call it a mask for exploitation or, patronisingly, say that the administrators were themselves being exploited by imperialism and failed to realise it. The difficulties, however, may lie with us, not them.

Johnston – also a naturalist who was the first to identify the okapi – returned a few years later to the theme of the equality of races through progress. In 1920 he published The Backward Peoples and Our Relations with Them. (This includes a map of Africa shaded to show perceived degrees of backwardness!)

Interestingly, Johnston sees the definition of white and non-white as developmental rather than racial – in other words, white and non-white are synonyms for developed and undeveloped. Hence the Japanese are counted as white; the backward are only mostly coloured [original emphasis and terminology].

The closing words of Johnston’s book were cited approvingly by Roland Oliver in 1957 as “a passage which belongs in sentiment nearer to 1950 than to 1920”.*

*Sir Harry Johnston and the Scramble for Africa

“The Coloured man on the other hand must remember [Johnston wrote] that his lands cannot properly be developed without railways and without the White man’s capital; and the White man in Europe and North America is not going to risk his money where there is no security and where he runs the danger of losing his capital and the investment of his energy. Without the tapping of wealth in rock and soil and desert sand, the Coloured man will always remain poor and futile.

“But the White peoples must try to realize that the still Backward races, the still-decrepit nations, have travelled far in intellectuality since the middle of the nineteenth century, and that the continuance of an insulting policy towards them will join them some day in a vast league against Europe and America, which will set back the millennium and perhaps even ruin humanity in general. Nature will have conquered by setting one half of mankind against the other.”

In the early 21st century, the leading industrial nations still dictate the conditions of trade to the Majority World, so the continuing pertinence of Johnston’s words does not need underlining.

For westerners of the late nineteenth and much of the twentieth centuries it was a commonplace to say that nations evolve towards the highest forms of civilisation. Few dare to express it in that way today, but much of the difference is in language, not content.

Over the issue hangs the pall of social Darwinism, one understanding of which holds erroneously that some races are more primitive than others. Yet an evolutionary perspective, properly understood, is about technology and social institutions, not about human capacities. Against humanity’s hundreds of million years of evolution, to say that races differ in their inherent capacities is absurd.

The idea of development is predicated on evolution, and not just of an economic kind. Currently favoured concepts like good governance and civil society involve changes to political and social structures.

The separation of executive and judiciary, elected governments, individual titles in land and emancipation from religious superstition look like universal desires of humanity, not specifically western arrangements. A society that has these arrangements, ceteris paribus, can be called more civilised than one that does not.

Christianity has been a leading force in suppressing slavery in Africa, internal and external, yet is often condemned as an alien, imposed religion. Much of the angst would be avoided if we remember the view of the murdered Ugandan archbishop, Janani Luwum. He pointed out that Christianity was exported to Europe just as Europe later exported it to sub-Saharan Africa.

Modern scholars frequently abhore Christianity’s destruction of local customs. Many were based on superstitions surrounding appeasing the ancestors. This has become a most sensitive subject. To call attention to it is like throwing up on the carpet: not only impolite but also insulting. Nevertheless, the replacement of superstition with reason is part of the journey that modernising societies must make. Renaissance England started to put the power of relics behind it, and our own journey is not yet completed.

As late as 1963, Margery Perham, the then doyenne of British Africanists and the biographer of Lord Lugard, felt able to express this evolutionary perspective in unvarnished words when she described the European impact on African society.

In spite of the apparently settled conditions of the colonial years, “two acids were eating into the healthy cells of family and tribal life”. (The Colonial Reckoning) They were the western money economy and Christian education. These forces weakened old cultures before they could build new ones.

Through the money economy young men were drawn away from the village, and the cash they earned “bit into the authority of status”. Old men sat outside their huts in “otiose bewilderment” as the younger ones “broke off from the clustered group and became units floating hither and thither in the open restless currents of the fluctuating exchange economy”.

Christian education elevated the book-learned child above the illiterate parent. The child “would lose respect for the ancestors and perhaps regard the religious or magical powers of the chief and the medicine man as heathen superstition and polygamy as a sin”. The Christian schoolboy might find himself in “a mental no-man’s-land”.

Perham pointed out that most peoples of the world had been through this process of the atomisation of society, which she saw as the price of development. In Africa, however, the impact had been sudden and made from outside.

If Perham were writing today she would no doubt express herself more circumspectly. Relativism has become the ruling paradigm. It holds that societies differ in their social and political arrangements but none is “higher” or “lower” than others. Thus the culture and language of the Yamomami in the Amazon rain forest are neither worse nor better than those of urban Sweden.

Of course, relativism is attractive in many ways, encouraging us to help to save weaker cultures from a one-size-fits-all, western approach. Yet it remains as much a paradigm as evolutionism. Neither offers a full explanation of the facts on the ground.

Progress under colonialism, when the evolutionary paradigm ruled, was not as disinterested as some contend. Development was leisurely and often half-hearted. There was a strong emphasis on plantation crops and extractive industries to provide food and raw materials for the home country, locking the colonies into continuing dependency.

Relativism, on the other hand, is to some extent contradicted by the general idea of development, not to mention specifics like the United Nations Human Development Index. Under the relativist paradigm, African countries have built up
unpayable debts and created corrupt indigenous elites. It provides no grounds for thinking that without colonialism countries would have become some sort of demi-paradise.

Liberia, Ethiopia and Thailand are among the few countries around the Majority World that escaped colonialism. What they also have in common is that none is among the most advanced countries in its respective region either economically or socially. In fact, they compare unfavourably with their formerly colonised neighbours.

Nor is the present hold of relativism as total as may be supposed. David Rieff, one of the few modern US writers able to transcend his nation’s fixation with colonialism, points out in A Bed for the Night the similarity between the European imperialism in the nineteenth century and the West’s developmentalism in the 21st century.

Forget the neo-colonialism of globalisation: Rieff’s subject is far more counter-intuitive. The great development and relief agencies are seen as the successors of Victorian missionary societies, driven by many of the same impulses.

He writes of the earlier period: “(F)or Europeans of the time, not only was there no moral incompatability between the antislavery project and the imperial enterprise, but the latter was seen widely as the guarantor of the former.”

He adds: “Particularly striking is the similarity in the way the invocation of a higher moral norm led, in practice, to an alliance between activists intent on relieving suffering and great powers in the era of late-nineteenth-century imperialism, and to twentieth-century humanitarian interventionism.

“… And at least some contemporary humanitarians have not shied away from making the connection between their efforts and Western values almost as explicitly as their nineteenth-century forebears would have done.”

American private relief agencies generally espouse the same policy goals as the US government – globalisation, free markets, democratic openings and human rights. Most mainline US humanitarian agencies have taken co-operation with government for granted.

“The deepest level of explanation for this is to be found in the abiding Wilsonianism* of the American policy establishment, of which the American humanitarian leadership has always been a member in good standing.”

* Woodrow Wilson, internationalist US president who was the driving force behind the creation on the League of Nations after the First World War

Most European humanitarian groups, too, are in bed with officialdom. Of the world’s great relief agencies, Rieff sees the French group Medicins Sans Frontieres as the least involved with governments. The price of this is to be taken as the perpetual “naysayer”.

The organisation went through a civil war on the issue. Bernard Kouchner, one of its founders, broke with MSF after he failed in his insistence that humanitarianism should be at the service of governments.

The underlying issue is whether aid agencies are colluding with a modern form of western imperialism or promoting the spread of universal values.

This book shares Rieff’s concern when an aid agency becomes an arm of government. It also believes that the values the agencies espouse, for all that these may be compromised by a too-close association with government, are in the main universal, not specifically western.

Present-day Africa is an impossible challenge for cultural relativists. They cannot recapture the optimism that prevailed in the 1960s and 1970s, when independence was young and that blissful dawn was alive with prospects.

Practically without exception, African countries have slid into “Big Man” rule and the patronage politics that go with it. Uganda is no exception: President Yoweri Museveni, the ruler who cleaned up the country after the misrule of Obote and Amin, in 2005 amended the constitution to allow himself to serve a third term.

Big Man rule, with its echoes of the pre-colonial era, is deeply troublesome for relativists. If they do not care to defend it now, why should they allow themselves to defend it in historical times when it was the universal mode of government?

A special headache for relativists is when the colonised take the part of the colonisers. The Ugandan-born Dr John Sentamu, who as Archbishop of York is the second-ranking bishop in the Church of England, is nobody’s dupe.

He told Sarah Sands of the (London) Daily Mail in an interview (November 2006): “While the empire was there, the British thought they were doing some good in the world. For me, the vision was what made the missionaries go out, made the empire what it was: the sense of education, better roads, infrastructure, the separation of the executive from the legislature.

“All these fantastic values which, as someone who was a recipient of them, I can look back on and say: what a vision!”

Evolutionism in its Victorian form became discredited because of its assumption that western society had “arrived” in the same way that human beings were the crowning achievement of biological evolution. Just as there is no reason to suppose that humanity has reached its evolutionary end-point, so the modern West has a distance to travel.

A glance at the West‘s selfish individualism, rampant consumerism, corporate giantism and spiritual barrenness suggests that we are heading into an evolutionary dead-end. Traditional African characteristics like joy of life, sense of family, sense of community, welcome for strangers, fortitude, and fatalism (acceptance of unavoidable circumstances) are traits that the rest of us can envy.

Nor will it do to say that these are characteristics of simpler societies that will be lost in the development process. African societies are not simple; in many ways they are more complex than western ones. More importantly, if these are desirable traits, which this book argues they are, evolution will drive them forward in all societies.

© Cedric Pulford, 2006

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