View the H-Africa Discussion Logs by month
View the Prior Message in H-Africa's April 2007 logs by: [date] [author] [thread] View the Next Message in H-Africa's April 2007 logs by: [date] [author] [thread] Visit the H-Africa home page.
<ebe_28@yahoo.com> I agree with the essential arguments of Wa Ngugi's summary, although I am yet to read his full piece. My only problem with it is that it proceeds from a problematic premise that concedes the terrain of philathrophy to Westerners, and does not question or problematize the notion of philathropic Western interventions in Africa itself. The discourse of Western philathropic gesture towards Africa is a contruct that needs to be unpacked and not simply denied or critized in empirical terms as if philathrophy itself is something that has ever informed any Western gestures toward Africa or another continent for that matter. My point here is that the notion of philathropy in international or bilateral relations is a contradiction in terms. Self-interest and, ocassionally, mutual interest are the constants of these relations--which puts a lie the concept of Western philathropy in Africa. If a construct is founded on intellectual falsehood ab initio, that is where most of the debunking should be done--on the theoretical level. The question to pose is: has Africa ever been the reciepient or beneficiary of Western philathropy? Do Western countries relate to African countries in the spirit of philanthropy? The answer to these questions is self-suggesting. Also, to add to Wa Ngugi's empirical critique, I believe it is important not only to invoke how Westerners benefit from unfair trade practices, which is sometimes their national prerogative and a matter of domestic political priorities, although this throws up all kinds of hypocrisies vis-a-vis Western preachments on free trade and the free market. It is also important to stress direct capital transfers like debt servicing, interest payments, penalties, etc., as well as the fact that the so-called foreign "aid" is not a freebie, to use an American slang, but a complex combination of soft loans that are often repaid. In this repect, the term "aid" is actually a misnormer that may have contributed to the wide acceptance of the philathropy paradigm. Sometimes, what is calculated in the self-serving aid statistics of Western countries is not actual, direct monetary transfer to African countries but cancelled debts. The implication of this is twofold. The first is that the African countries to whom this "aid" (which is actually cancelled debt) is extended are not actually given any money by the lending (not donor) Western countries. The second is that such "aid" gestures actually cost the lending Western countries little or nothing. After all, the loans being cancelled have, in all likelihood, been repaid many times over through interest, servicing, and penalty payments. Let us not launch our critics by conceding the ideological and intellectual terrain of debate. This is not just a semantic exercise. Most of my American students take these strategic semantic constructs at their literal meanings and I have to constantly educate them that aid, to use a popular example, does not often mean what it suggests.
|