I don’t think we were critical of NGOs per se — they are, after all, a rather heterogeneous collection of organisations: trade unions as well as private corporations are also ‘non-governmental organisations’. What we were principally referring to was the role of NGOs in so-called ‘development’ – that is, development NGOs, in particular in Africa. We examined their objective roles in the context of the emerging struggles for independence, the gains of independence governments, the rise of neoliberalism and the eventual collusion of development NGOs in the neoliberal agenda. In the colonial period, missionaries played a central role in the provision of social welfare as charity as well as in sweetening the bitter pill of colonialism. They were an integral part of colonial rule, providing services to native populations that the state would not, and serving to dominate the mental universe of the colonised, “the control, through culture, of how people perceived themselves and their relationship to the world,” as Ngugi wa Thiong’o put it[i]. In this paper we showed the parallels with the modernised (or perhaps moderniser) missionaries, that is the development NGOs. Under neoliberalism, the state privatised the commons (the commons that were fought for during the struggle for independence for which much blood and life was lost) — land, water, energy, communications, transport, healthcare, education etc. So services which we formerly had a right to were once again something we had to beg for from the so-called charitable organisations. In that sense we argued that the development NGOs were adopting the missionary position. It was the development NGOs, heavily funded by the aid agencies, that moved in to privatise social welfare, to provide the sweetener for neoliberalism, to occupy the mental universe by telling the neo-colonised that development, not emancipation, was what they needed, that the key task was ‘fighting poverty’ not fighting the looting that was the principle feature of neoliberalism. And in so doing, they play the vital service to capital of depoliticising poverty. For them the problem is ‘poverty’, not the political and economic processes that results in mass pauperisation. They perfom this role much as the missionaries of the past did: by eliminating any reference to history. People are just poor. There is no question of explaining how they became poor. It is the ‘native condition’. In the past the native was uncivilised. Today, they are judged to be under-developed. -Firoze Manji
Posted on: Thu, 21 Aug 2014 01:45:20 +0000