NN40, May 2008
Education for Sustainable Development? Or The Sustainability of Education Investment? A Special Issue
Engendering Sustainable Development through a Synthesis of Struggles for Cultural Liberty
By Chambi Chachage, independent researcher and policy analyst, Dar es Salaam
Email: chambi78@yahoo.comNB: This article is based on a paper entitled ?Engendering Sustainable Development through Struggles for Cultural Liberty? that was presented at the International Conference on African Culture and Development (ICACD) held in Kumasi, Ghana (21-26 April, 2008).
?Culture is the Essence and Spirit of any Nation? ? Mwalimu Julius K. Nyerere
Since 1960, the year of African independence, the ?post-colonial? states in Africa have generally projected themselves as ?developmental states?. However, with the possible exceptions of ten countries, their development initiatives have proved to be unsustainable. Interestingly, in the early 1990s, after nearly half a century of its developmentalist intervention in our post-colony, the ?international community? rediscovered the cultural factor in ?African development?. Culture became increasingly recognized as an integral factor - ?the missing link? - in the sustainable progress of Africa. Nevertheless, this recognition hasn?t deterred the global development agenda from its persistent focus on economic and political prescriptions over and above our culture(s).
This economic-deterministic and technocratic neo-liberal agenda is being spearheaded by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development World. In essence it is an outgrowth of the Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) that severely retarded our social development in the so-called lost decade of the 1980s. The SAPs have attempted to rehabilitate themselves by metamorphosing into Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs) that have culminated in a number of ?nationally-owned? policy/institutional reforms. In the case of my country, Tanzania, these highly donor-funded reforms fall under the framework of its National Strategy for Growth and Reduction of Poverty (NSGRP).
These initiatives centre on growth as the panacea for ?pro-poor? development. Employing Rostow?s Eurocentric discourse, policy pundits often attribute the lack of rapid growth in Africa to (African) ?cultural constraints to development?. As a result, a number of policy recommendations call for a ?change of mindset? among Africans. However, these policy prescriptions fail to comprehend the dialectics of cultural resistance and cultural accommodation.
Cultural forms, as Ernest Wamba dia Wamba (1991) observes, are forms of consciousness. They have their internal logic. In a situation of domination, he further observes, they tend to be divided into cultural forms of accommodation and those of resistance. When domination prevails, he concludes, the paradigm of cultural transfer dominates the lifestyles. He is cautious enough to remind us that this transfer includes variants such as technological transfer. To that list we can be specific enough to add transfer of development doctrines and policy prescriptions.
In doubly conscious post-colonial Africa there is a serious imbalance between the articulations of these two cultural forms. This was not so in the twilight of colonial Africa when nationalistic elites led the masses irrespective of their multicultural heritage to struggles for independence. Cultural transfer in this case of colonial domination involved using the ?colonial master?s cultural tools? such as education, religion, laws and language to struggle for collective self-determination. However, after independence the elites started to use these tools in the name of development to suppress sub/multicultural initiatives of the masses. As a result cultural forms articulated by ruling elites became primarily out of harmony with those articulated by the people.
Thus when ruling elites and their Euro-American donors-cum-development partners talk about our lack of ownership of the development agenda and a need to change our mindset they are ironically referring to the masses? nagging counter-articulation of cultural accommodation and cultural resistance. In other words, the masses have their own cultural ways of accommodating and/or resisting certain elements of the development agenda vis-à-vis the state and its global allies. To them cultural transfer is not an issue as long as it suits their own development agendas.
Indeed Africa has many examples of cultural transfer. Local industries, such as those for weaving and pottery, are full of innovations ?borrowed? from Euro-America. Even cultural groups, such as the Khoisan and Maasai that are stereotypically epitomized as cultural constraints to development, accommodate in as much as they resist. To them culture as resistance is a form of memory against effacement by cultural imperialism since, under such a threat, culture ?is a way of fighting against extinction and obliteration? (Edward Said in Barsamian & Said 1993: 160).
It should be a constant reminder that the typical post-colonial African state was graced with a unique blessing of starting its career as a social/cultural movement which, due to its nationalistic nature, embraced various African sub-nationalities/subcultures. Hence it was, and I still believe it is still, uniquely poised to forge a national culture that has a place for all its subcultures to co-exist within what Bell hooks (1994) calls a culture of communalism and mutuality or/and use what Ngugi wa Thiong?o (1993) refers to as the wealth of our collective cultures expressed in the particularities of our languages and cultures to create a space for a hundred flowers to bloom.
This elusive ideal can relatively be achieved if culture is mainstreamed, as a fairly balanced synthesis of cultural resistance and cultural accommodation, into national policy processes and institutional frameworks that foster enabling environments for the citizenry?s pursuit of cultural liberty. Otherwise skewed cultural struggles within highly multicultural African nation-states will continue unabated at the expense of sustainable development not least because of statist imposition of a national culture that is based on unity in uniformity instead of unity in diversity.
References
Barsamian, David & Said, Edward W. (2003). Culture and Resistance: Conversation with Edward W. Said. London, UK: Pluto Press.
hooks, Bell (1994). Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representation. London, UK: Routledge.
Ngugi wa Thiong?o (1993). Moving the Centre: The Struggle for Cultural Freedoms. London, UK: James Currey.
Wamba Dia Wamba, Ernest (1991). Some Remarks on Culture, Development and Revolution in Africa. Journal of Historical Sociology. 4 (3): 219-235
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