Once Upon a Time – My Cell Phone, My Coltan, My Market (Economy)

 Once upon a time, I settled in Cotonou, Benin.  I heard and experienced little of chaotic Nigeria and the oil fields, immediately to the east.  The blazing equatorial sun and the humidity blowing in off the Gulf of Guinea intoxicated me much more.  The heat was... remarkable… a fine British, colonial, and aristocratic, sentimental saying.

In many respects, I lived there as well as I do in Canada.  I marched off to work for a Canadian development organization and the staff (servants), stayed busily engaged at home.  Leftovers could spoil quickly, so we cooked fresh every day.  I, we, colleagues, well, we picked up fresh papaya and pineapple in the market.  Because some of us adhered to our vegetarian ways, there was always the soaking of dried beans and the making of yoghurt from milk powder.  Furthermore, vegetables, if they were to be eaten fresh, had to be rinsed in a chlorine solution.  Local gardens were watered from shallow wells which, given the surface latrines throughout the city, meant ghastly amoeba and bacteria sprinkled on all those nice tomatoes and lettuces.   For lack of a machine, other significant household chores included daily hand washing of clothes and, no vacuum, sweeping and wiping for dust, dust, dust.

Narcotic as it was, to be king in a fishbowl, I could still see, that something about it was not The Wealth of Nations.

My home, built for foreigners, had four plus extra rooms for… well… access perhaps to the wrap-around porch?  Me me and me.  My neighbours, all  27 of them in their complex of  blended family (ies), lived in the same floor area of perhaps 1200 square feet.  My 1200, mostly interior.  Their 1200, mostly exterior.

I had space, but I was alone.  Poor.

My neighbours had space, but were not alone  Wealthy.

They had children playing, cooking, and courting, great wives commanding, uncles tottering, college students studying on boards and bricks… all within the parameter of their wall.  Sometimes the chaos spilled out of doors through the gate and onto the unpaved street.  Interface with tinkerers, merchants, marketers, vendors, sleuths, pickpockets, hawkers, shysters and more!  All the world for sale on heads, on motos, on carts, in hands, over shoulders, and in minds.  A neighbourhood, a market, in all true sense of the meaning, alive from morning to midnight!

Oddly, Benin is among the world's poorest countries with a per capita GNI $ 790 (per capita final $ value) in 2012.  We in Canada enjoy around $39,000.  Benin has little ability to buffer local markets from the shake up of globalization.

We in Canada have oil, gas, and potash.  Some say we have good government, too.  Perhaps, I think, the $ and the resources are behind this.  After all, what we also have are global mining and banking companies.  In Mali, in Mexico, in Congo (DRC), in London (banks).

This is not Adam Smith.  There is no free market where guns are behind recruitment of your children into the Lord’s army.  Ours is no free market where our cell phones are loaded up with coltan, mined in eastern Congo under the auspices of a rebel army and the rape of women every day, managed by Rwanda and Paul Kagame, tolerated if not financed by our governments, and our mining companies, and our banks, and delivered at low cost to refiners, manufactured for our cell phones everywhere.

Just google up, buddies…

mining Canada banks coltan cell phones

Coltan.  You buy it, so do I do.

But it is not The Wealth of Nations.  No free market.

What was Cotonou, Benin?  Just at that time, on a street, in nowheresville anywhere, I heard laughter in the street, close to the watchful eye of a parent.  I saw ‘you and me’ in a once upon time world, buying and selling in a market.  I saw you and me negotiating with people you and I knew.  Or did not know, the traders, outsiders, people not in the market, but from a market economy…

Warily we trod in that case.

Development, Rafale Jets, Drones, + Power = Diaspora

We development professionals who have focussed our activities on less or non-industrialized nations play an integral role in the diaspora of industrial society.  That role reflects two, critical conditions.  The first is that the development industry is a primary administrative component of that diaspora.  The second condition is that neither we nor the society are intrinsic to any nation or people.  That is, we are mobile, prepared to live in any place under the auspices of the same development industry.  And industrial society has no allegiance to place.  Today, in varying proportions, one will always find both development professionals and industrial society, anywhere.

In only very few cases is development set up in opposition to industrial society and its predecessors - mercantilism, colonialism, imperialism.  Even fewer development professionals would turn down a conference somewhere just because getting to the conference entailed a ride on a jet airplane.  There are few practising Luddites, deep ecologists, or communal idealists among us.

By and large, this absence of radicals in our crowd is due to the fact that development, by virtue of its historical context, shares a conjugal bed with technology.  Technology, in its somewhat idolized form today, is virtually synonymous with industrialization.  In turn, industrialization depends on the exploitation of resources and, to date, a consequent degradation of the natural environment.  And the process of exploitation depends, essentially, on the functions of a market economy in which wealth disparity is a standard feature.

We accept the contradictions.

Of course, within the development circle there are various types of apologists arguing among themselves, sometimes politely, sometimes not, about development's nature and role.  Some say all’s well with the world and development can only make things better.  Others say that the world is being torn apart and only development can act as a moderating influence.  Irregardless of these small philosophical differences, all development activities subsist on one universal assumption - that human sufferance can be, if not ought to be, cared for through non-partisan institutions.  This means : your suffering is not mine, but I will care for you.

With this assumption, all development professionals remain attached to and dependent on an idea of development, resting comfortably under development's wing, a development which safely justifies studies, programmes, projects, meetings, air-conditioned four wheel drive vehicles, God, and more.

But what of the vast majority of people who, rather than doing development, are having the development done to them?  Why not if it means a paycheck as a hired driver?  Why not if it means project funds are transferred to you and your friends as a partner organization?  Why not if it means a new storage shed or grain grinding machine in the village?

In my immediate experience, any pay cheque is good.

But few people are such beneficiaries.  The money rarely lands in a torn and dusty pocket.  And the jobs, the partners, and the funds come and go.

Walk through the streets of many of the world's cities and try to count the hawkers of petty goods.  Spend a rainy month walking through the fields of any country where tillage is primarily accomplished by hand labour and try to count the number of men, women, and children.  After counting for a while, a feeling appears that the development apologists' development has, not universal, but very limited insurance coverage.

Drop me an AK 47, I am just 12 years old, but I could use one… or two… for my friend.

Needless to say, we development professionals are included in the development discourse insurance coverage.  We have our health care.  We have our plane tickets home.  We have Rafale jets.  We have UAV drones.  Punishment for interfering with due process.

Not that this kind of disparity between the haves and the have nots, between the beneficiaries of ideology and its subjects, is so uncommon.  To have a little military on your backside up.  Little has changed in humanity's substance despite all our development.

So, chuck development out the window?  There is no particular reason to do so.  Disparity in human society is present as much as is love, or war, or friendship, or the wielding of power.  The task is simply to understand development for what it is.

We development professionals are a diaspora, the missionaries of industrial technology and free-market economy.  We promise a bright future.  We deliver gifts - money, buildings, gizmos - proving that what we say is true.  We instill faith in the flock.

And we wield power.

I have no doubt in this.

Gender in Development - Abridged

Gender in Development may be a natural union of two huge cultural forces (one being western feminism and the other industrialism), strange bedfellows, led into the mission field by a moral conviction similar to the zeal of evangelists of other eras, and, at another level, equally oblivious to their own covert, passionate needs for power, for destruction, and for the paradoxical rewards of futility and sacrifice.

An evolution of definition of Gender in Development:

1)         a language in which the sexual connotations of nouns or pronouns and the syntactic use thereof is going through a period of change, either as a natural course of events or as the result of deliberate action

2)         a language which is expanding, improving, or proceeding through some natural cycle, and possibly all simultaneously, with respect to its syntactic use of sex in nouns and pronouns

3)         a language suddenly enlightened to its sexual syntax

4)         possibly, a deliberate construction of language with special reference to sexual syntax

5)         the occurring existence of sex as in female/male; the act of sex occurring; something is actively being sexed, that is created or defined, by an external agent; or something is actively having sex done to it by an external agent

6)         expanding sex, possibly numerically, possibly in size; improved sex, as in a better model or a better action; sex proceeding through some evolution

7)         sex is coming to exist, is existing, or has been existing, either as an object or action

8)         bio-engineering of sex; the construction of sexual edifices

9)         socio-engineering of sex; power; politics

10)       welcome the masses (José Ortega y Gasset) to their brave new world

11)       someone is (the masses are) getting fucked.

BOOK TWO – Politics, Pedantics, and Poetry

 Development = Hope, False Doctrines, Climate Change, and Nihilism

            Development is like hope, a sentiment based on false doctrines, in particular those which promise a better future, which in turn somehow justify the suffering we experience today.  The purveyors of this hope offer all the evidence necessary to prove that we as a species have been on some kind of linear path that leads from bad to good.  This kind of thinking not only justifies the eradication of cultures, languages, and peoples for the past century in the name of development, but also allows us to deny the import of climate change.  Effectively, development, like hope, allows us to live in denial and equals nihilism.

            False doctrines pack irrational meaning into words and concepts while successfully having us continue to believe in them.  Development, in this case, is a word used by people to compress too many ideas into too little space.  This results in not very much at all having been said.  There was a guy called Michel Foucault who talked about all this talking around an idea and called all this talking discourse.  In reading Foucault, you might get the idea that understanding discourse was pretty important.  For example, if you understood the development discourse, then you could have your own discourse about that discourse, all to make sense of both discourses in the first place.

You can see that so much talking goes on about an idea, like development, that not really anything at all is being talked about.  Some of us call these people talking heads.  You see them on television a lot.  If you work for a development organization like CARE or NOVIB or the United Nations Development Program, you also get to see them in important meetings held between very important people who are trying to save humans from themselves.

Development implies progress, control, and order.  In society, to say the obvious, control and order are about hierarchy.  No surprise about this.  There is always at least a little bit of hierarchy in our social lives.  Usually a lot.  Hierarchy, often enough, justifies itself by providing a canon (a set of truths that we accept without critique).  The development canon is that development does and will alleviate poverty.  Development will have us all living better lives in the future.

The hierarchy and the canon are precisely why a bell should be going off anytime you hear this word, development.  Control, order, and hierarchy are those little creatures with which democratic folk continuously struggle.  The struggle is not to eradicate their presence in society, just to keep them at a healthy minimum.  An uncriticized truth is antithetical to what most of us consider an ideal of the human condition: rational thought.

Development is a kind of plastic word, meaning that it can be twisted to mean anything, which in turn can make it mostly meaningless.  Here are some examples.  Humans develop, buildings are developed, film can be developing, breasts develop, and there are developers, developments, and situations developing.  It all sounds good, progressive.  Except that developments are often negative, destroying land or implying political tension, cancer develops.  From a carbon emissions point of view, human development is a rather nasty turn of events.  But just use the word development, or its root, in any sentence, and you can sound knowledgeable and important.  Without having really said what you mean.

Which means that anyone using the word development may be a bit of an obfuscator.  A wizard, if you like.  A sorcerer, perhaps.  A priest (ess).  Nay say politician or bureaucrat?  invariably someone on the higher end of some hierarchical pyramid. These people say things that are quite impressive, but we rarely know what they really mean.  A development obfuscator will be attached to an institution.  Could be a municipality or a public domain organization like the United Nations.  Could be a non-profit organization, government funded or private, that provides some service to poor people.  For example, a new model for non-profit organizations is to cooperate with a mining business while the mining company does what mining companies do.  All of them are purveyors of a service or good, in the name of development.  You, or some other unwitting soul, consume it.

 It is like talking about prayer and any religion.  There are many types of religions around.  And even more subsidiaries.  But only one word, prayer.  Now, what am I supposed to do?  Kneel?  Prostrate myself?  Contemplate?  Hope for the best?  Really, I am supposed to suspend any questions about prayer, accept the discourse (official method of having a discussion), and get on with the show of believing the canon (gospel truth).  But actually trying to understand what prayer really is?  Forget it.

A little exercise that I play for myself when I do not understand the meaning of a word, that I use or see used a lot, is to drop the word from my vocabulary.

The end result is that development, like Nietzsche’s god, is dead.