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The grand hypocrisy

Africa is ‘a scar upon the conscience of the world.’[1] In Africa we see ‘an entire continent bursting into flames.’[2] No other continent is identified with destitution like Africa is. The way we in the minority world know Africa – how we relate to it, how we see and talk about Africa – serves to make these images a reality.

The pronouncements quoted above were made by Tony Blair and Bono. Such people’s stories of Africa are told with greater volume, frequency and impact than most others’. I argue that Africa is racialised and dehumanised by minority world discourses around Africa. Hence a moral separation is made between Africa and the rest of the world and, crucially, between Africa and Europe. This distinction justifies the grand hypocrisy that overpowers Africa with unfair trade rules while simultaneously promising, as Blair’s Commission for Africa did, that ‘[t]o do everything we can is not only a requirement, it is our duty.’[3]

In this essay I shall begin by setting out a framework by which the world is known, showing how Africa is deeply embedded within a centuries-old system of knowledge. I shall then examine the ‘stalled’ Doha round of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) negotiations and the ongoing review of the Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs) between the European Union (EU) and 77 former colonies in the Africa, Caribbean and Pacific group (ACP). I shall use these to demonstrate that, in the wake of the Year of Africa, a grand hypocrisy persists in the way the minority world relates to Africa.

There is a Dominant Representation of the world, that the world is dichotomised between the minority world, roughly the ‘global North’, and the majority world. This Representation is dominant in two ways: it is told by the most powerful political, media, literary, artistic, economic and social voices in the world: the minority world voices; and it is dominant because it constrains the way we know Africa and therefore the way we deal with it: power and knowledge are intimately conjoined.

I shall define two main characteristics of the Dominant Representation, and show how Africa is vividly rendered within it. This contributes to a metaphor of Africa, a meaning to the word beyond the geographical that justifies a pitiful approach to the continent, a prerogative to treat Africa and Africans as the minority world wishes: especially on trade issues, where there is so much at stake.

The first characteristic of the dichotomised representation is that the distinction is value-laden. Minority world discourses normatively evaluate the difference so that the minority world is characterised as an ideal to the majority world’s aspirant. Africa, identified racially, is rendered deep within this representation. Africa and Africans are characterised or ‘invented’ as primitive and inert, contrasting it with the enlightened, dynamic minority world.[4]

European anthropologists found European analogues for African political and legal systems, implying that European practices and institutions were the ideal, not yet attained by Africans: for example, where in 17th Century Gold Coast the prominent factor of production was labour, Dutch trader Pieter de Marees conceptualised the rulers as owners of the land.[5] In assuming the rectitude of all European frameworks – not just legal but all social frameworks – Europeans implied that they set the standards for the rest to emulate.[6]

The second characteristic of the Dominant Representation is this: the reified distinction between the two worlds homogenises the binaries, thereby suppressing difference within the worlds and similarities between them. When the two worlds are conceptually opposed, the minority world has ‘modernity’ while the majority world has ‘traditions’ or, pejoratively, ‘cultural barriers’.[7] The minority world is the standard against which the majority world is judged, so each is imagined as an abstracted ideal.

Any difference that is allowed in the Dominant Representation is constructed so as to reinforce the hierarchical opposition of North/South, often by imposing a gradation of subalterns. For example, Africa is divided in racial terms between the superior, ‘more European’ Arab North Africa and ‘Black Africa’ south of the Sahara. This racism feeds the view that Africa – sub-Saharan Africa – is ‘culturally homogeneous’: they are all African so they are all the same.[8]

Despite the fact that the slave trade did not reach all parts of Africa, the image of West Africa, where the first extensive European contacts were made, became the generalised image of Africa.[9] Before 1850 European incursions far inland were rare, so important dynamics of African politics – the Ethiopian revival, the West African jihads, for example – were missed, allowing the image of Africa as inert to be more easily maintained. Even at the beginning of the 19th Century, most Europeans generally only made contact with the coastal perimeter of Africa, projecting their inherited images onto the great unknown Heart of Darkness beyond, from which the slaves and goods were brought.[10]

Africa is seen as the archetype of backwardness and primitiveness as constructed by the Dominant Representation. Africa has been pressed to the deepest depth of the Dominant Representation, beneath further layers of particular representations so that ‘Africa’ has become a metaphor for helpless poverty. Just as the Dominant Representation has no necessary connection to reality, the word ‘Africa’ has come to have political significance beyond the continental landmass. In the gap between the word’s established and metaphorical meanings slips the meaning of ‘Africa’ as pitiful and needy of charity – and black.

This metaphorical meaning of ‘Africa’ is the result of stories powerfully told by minority world voices. Africa has been painted, written, filmed as pitiful and without agency. The historical endurance of European dominance over Africa from the first colonies in the Canaries to colonialism and beyond has established patterns of empathy that expire at the (racially) imagined frontiers of the minority world.[11] Metaphorically furthest from this frontier is ‘Africa’. The relation between the minority world and Africa is therefore not based on recognition of unconscionable injustice, but on condescending pity. Africa is represented as naturally helpless rather than artificially disempowered. Consequently, the minority world can choose when and how to engage with Africa and this is naturalised by the sentimental deepening of ‘Africa’.

The historical record is telling in this regard: the papal bulls of Nicholas V (Dum Diversas and Romanus Pontifex) and Alexander VI (Inter Caetara) in the 15th Century divinely implored Christians to treat Muslims, pagans, and black people in general howsoever suited the spread of European Christianity across lands that were, anyway, Christian possessions.[12] No non-European source of rights was recognised so there was no moral problem for the Europeans in treating Africa as they wished. The Scramble for Africa of the late 19th Century also relied on the unanalysed assumption of ‘Africa’ that Europeans could treat Africa as they wished.[13] The widespread, rational, conscientious resistance by African communities was represented by the colonists as sporadic, reactionary outbursts at the threat to ‘African traditions’.[14] To paraphrase a present-day natural/powerful interventionist, these were merely the birth pangs of a new, modernised Africa with which Europeans, in their ‘knowledge’ (power), were bequeathing Africans.[15]

If trade is made to work for the poorest people in Africa, the effect could be phenomenal. If sub-Saharan Africa had a 1pc larger share of world exports, average income across the region would increase by one fifth, generating five times more income per capita than it gains from aid and debt relief. Trade generates the foreign exchange needed to sustain imports, can increase self-reliance, and provides an outlet for the productive potential of people in poverty.[16]

Yet when it comes to trade, the minority world, most notably the EU and United States, block any progress towards making trade work for people in poverty. I shall examine what this says about the Dominant Representation and the metaphor of ‘Africa’ in contemporary global politics.

The promises made to Africans in 2005, the Year of Africa, were overwhelmingly about aid and debt. By 2010 the G8 nations will spend $48bn per year on aid and debt cancellation for Highly Indebted Poor Countries has started, although even before the caveats this is not enough to make a great difference either to Africans or to rich countries’ financial states. From their position of power, manifest in the metaphor of Africa, minority world leaders can assuage pity with such shows of charity. However, charity maintains their position of power by naturalising it: giving aid reflects well on us. Charity ignores the history of exploitation and off-hand neglect that has contributed so significantly to such deep, broad poverty.[17] Charity obscures the demands of justice.

International trade is a matter of justice because it is governed by unfair rules, which perpetuate exploitation of the majority world by the minority. On trade justice there has been scant progress. In 2001 the Doha round of WTO talks was launched, with rich countries promising that these talks would put poverty reduction and development at their heart. Talks in December 2005 and into 2006 came to nothing, however, and Pascal Lamy, director general of the WTO, ‘suspended’ the round.

Recriminations resounded between the US and the EU; some campaigners cheered the collapse, saying the majority world was finally standing up against the minority; others feared for the fate of multilateralism. But one thing was clear: the power of these two mighty minority world entities was being reproduced, rather than being applied to make trade work for the poorest people in the world. The self-interest of those who had the power to defend it prevailed.

The EU and the US refused to cut agricultural subsidies and to open their markets to imports from the majority world producers, while demanding that countries in the majority world open up their markets to subsidised and over-produced minority world output. Majority world pleas that they be allowed to protect key industries from foreign competition and protect their markets from dumping were ignored. From their position of power, the minority world can call the majority world’s bluff. The people who die as a result are not here but ‘over there’. On trade, the minority world cannot get away with charity, but it can do nothing: the metaphor of Africa obscures the minority world’s responsibility for much of the majority world’s poverty, and so obscures the former’s responsibility to do something about it.

The ‘suspension’ of the Doha round meant attention now turned to regional and bilateral trade agreements like EPAs. According to WTO rules, bilateral trade agreements must require liberalisation of an average of 90pc of trade. (Although EPAs are negotiated between the EU and ACP groups, they apply between two countries and are therefore bilateral.) If the EU liberalised 100pc of its trade with ACP states, therefore, 80pc of ACP trade would have to be liberalised. Thus farmers and producers in many of the world’s poorest countries would be forced into unfair competition with heavily subsidised EU producers; regional integration – an important stage in development – would be undermined; and ACP countries would lose substantial revenue. For the Republic of Congo, the estimated tariff revenue loss as a result of EPAs would be roughly equivalent to the government’s total expenditure on education.[18]

The EU admits the necessity for ‘asymmetric and flexible EPA arrangements and the preferential market access for ACP countries, in line with development needs and WTO requirements.’[19] The crucial WTO requirement is that unilateral preferences for ACP countries are permitted until December 2007, under a waiver in the Cotonou Agreement, the sequel to the Lomé Conventions. ACP countries do not have the research or negotiating capacity to examine the EPAs as presented by the EU and to ensure they suit each country’s developmental needs in this timeframe. However, the power of the EU is such that it can push for the new arrangements to begin in January 2008. If EPAs were to be fixed according to European designs, ACP countries would lose numerous essential tools of sustainable development and their industries would be pinned to low, unstable commodity prices while whole manufacturing sectors could be lost.[20]

The hypocrisy lies between the progress from the Year of Africa and the intransigence over trade. Blair’s Commission for Africa often went to some lengths to dispel the idea of ‘African exceptionalism’. The UK Department for International Development has deliberately highlighted poverty outside Africa, aware of the dominant representations of Africa; Lord Triesman, Minister for Africa, at an Oxford Union debate recently demonstrated a critical evaluation of European relations with Africa rather than accepting our involvement. He also said, ‘[T]he hardest task remains trade and let’s be honest – that is because of protectionism in the wealthy world’. Responsibility is accepted and power accepted. Cheap promises are made. But until the rules that govern trade are made to work for justice, in the hollowness of those promises will echo the death knells of millions.

References

[1] Tony Blair is here quoted from his speech at the Labour Party Conference in 2001.

[2] Bono, Foreword to The End of Poverty: how we can make it happen in our lifetime, by J Sachs, (London, 2005), p. xvi.

[3] The Commission for Africa, Our Common Interest, ‘The Argument’, available at www.commissionforAfrica.org/English/report/ viewed 13/5/06, p. 66.

[4] S Feierman, ‘Africa in History: the end of universal narratives’, in After Colonialism: Imperial histories and postcolonial displacements, ed. G Prakash, (Chichester, 1995), pp. 42-3.

[5] Thornton, Africa and the Africans,. p. 77.  See also pp. 76 and 82; and J Herbst, States and Power in Africa: Comparative lessons in Authority and Control, (Chichester, 2000).

[6] CW Mills, The Racial Contract, p. 30.

[7] E Crewe and E Harrison, Whose Development? An ethnography of aid, (London, 1998), p. 133.

[8] KA Appiah, In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture, (Oxford, 1992), p. 24.

[9] Curtin, The Image of Africa, p. vi.

[10] Ajayi, ‘Africa at the beginning of the nineteenth century’, pp. 8-9.

[11] Mills, The Racial Contract, p. 95.

[12] Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa, p. 45.

[13] Freund, The Making of Contemporary Africa, pp. 80-90; Uzoigwe, ‘European partition and conquest of Africa’, pp. 14-18.

[14] T Ranger, ‘African Initiatives and Resistance in the face of partition and conquest’, in UNESCO General History of Africa VII: Africa under colonial domination 1880-1935, ed. A Adu Boahen, (London, 1990).

[15] US Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice described the violence in Palestine, Lebanon, and Iraq as ‘The birth pangs of a new Middle East’.  Donald Rumsfeld said ‘Stuff happens’.  Quoted in ‘Lost in the Middle East’, The Economist, 12/8/06, p. 9.

[16] K  Watkins and P Fowler, Rigged Rules and Double Standards: trade, globalisation, and the fight against poverty, (Oxford, 2002), p. 48.

[17] M Lockwood, The State They’re In: Poverty and politics in Africa and the agenda for international action, (Offprint, 2005).

[18] ‘Unequal partners: how EU-ACP Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs) could harm the development prospects of many of the world’s poorest countries’, Oxfam Briefing Note, September 2006, www.oxfam.org.uk

[19] Press Release, 7938/1/06 Rev 1 (en) (Presse 94), The Council of the European Union, p. 22, available from http://ue.eu.int/Newsroom

[20] Sustainability Impact Assessment of Trade Negotiations of the EU-ACP Economic Partnership Agreement, Mid-Term Report Working Draft, 1 October 2003, www.sia-gcc.org/acp/download/summarised_mid-term_report_final_doc_light.pdf