From bandit colonialism to the modern triage society: Towards a moral and cognitive reconstruction of knowledge and citizenship

Abstract

This article argues that the transition from bandit colonialism through the intricate systems of the modern triage society that is wired for Western cultural compliance requires more than just critique, or a prayer for the meek to inherit the earth. It requires a decisive consensus that the meek do not inherit the earth by their meekness alone – they need defences of the mind and conceptual categories around which they can organise their thoughts and actions. Turning the previously colonised into participants in a new moral and cognitive venture against oppression requires more than just periodic elections – significant though electoral processes are. Addressing the atrophy of human capabilities that has characterised human development in the context of both bandit colonialism and the modern triage society demands the development of a plurality of insights, of critical traditions, and a deepening of the tools for diagnosis and hence the quality of prognosis. It may, in certain instances, demand a cognitive indifference to the Western model and a robust engagement with the methods of science and in particular their impact on sustainable livelihood when acting in consort with economics. But most of all it calls for a vigorous engagement with conceptual categories and the theoretical and cultural underpinnings from which they have descended, with the clear intention of their dismantling.     

Book Reviews/Comptes rendus

This article examines a major instance of United States' (US) involvement in Zaïre during the 1970s and 1980s. The paper looks at an under-studied rural development scheme, known as the North Shaba Project/Projet du Nord Shaba (PNS), which was funded by USAID from 1976 to 1986.The PNS increased maize exports from northern Shaba (Katanga) to central and southern cities in the province and aimed to curtail workers’ discontent by providing cheap food for them. Its quantitative successes and “bottom-up” rhetoric led USAID officials to call the PNS an “obscured revolution”. Unlike its colonial precedents and its post-colonial contemporaries, the project attempted to integrate village farmers’ expertise in order to drive production and provide an opportunity to change existing patterns of “top-down” development. Yet, although anthropologists facilitated some significant intercultural exchanges, the project did not wholly rely on local farming techniques. Instead, the PNS's major outcome was to briefly address the Zaïrian regime's neglect of agricultural production, thus helping it survive despite the financial pressures it was under during the 1970s and the 1980s.     

“Elusive natives”: escaping colonial control in the Leverville oil palm concession,Belgian Congo, 1923–1941

Throughout the inter-war period, in the Belgian Congo's largest oil palm concession, thousands of colonised workers and their families managed to escape administrative surveillance and authority through schemes of dissimulation and elusiveness. The shared nature of sovereignty imposed on this territory, distributed between private and public agents, along with a sparse territorial occupation, left extended areas unsupervised by Western actors and indirect rulers. In these remote places, palm-fruit cutters, with the blessing of their employers, could settle without having to answer to authority. After exposing the specific policies enforced in the concession, this paper highlights how natives were able to maximise their autonomy regarding both the production imperatives imposed upon them and their obligations to the public authorities. The last part details the administration's consecutive failures in its endeavours to tackle workers’ elusiveness. The conclusion challenges the notion of “resistance” as an appropriate concept to recover the fruit cutters’ adaptation to the imperatives of colonial rule and large-scale manual labour within the rainforest.     

The colony of the colonized: the Duchy of Courland's Tobago colony and contemporary Latvian national identity

This paper examines the legacy of the Duchy of Courland's overseas colony of Tobago as it relates to present-day Latvian national identity using the ethno-symbolist approach of Anthony D. Smith and comparative cases. As Latvia is a small nation that has been an independent nation-state for only two short periods, national legitimacy and pride pose particular problems for Latvians. To this end, Latvian historians have worked to reinterpret the Baltic German-dominated Duchy of Courland as a positive period of Latvian national history and have sought to emphasize ethnic Latvian involvement in the Duchy's colonial endeavors, especially on the island of Tobago. Their efforts have then filtered into the general Latvian consciousness through books, film, plays, and place names. Since Latvia's independence from the USSR, the former colony of Tobago has gained renewed importance for Latvians who are experiencing a widely perceived notion of postcolonialism. This paper concludes that the appropriated colony of Tobago will continue to rise in importance as a component of Latvian national identity.     

Netherlands East Indies: The Large Colonial Surplus of Indonesia, 1878‐1939

Surprisingly few previous contributions to estimates of Indonesia's colonial surplus have been made, all of them using the export surplus method. Having defined the colonial surplus, the export surplus method is rejected here as unnecessary and misleading. The Indies balance of payments data are used critically for the first time. Adding missing items and further analysing an odd but very big private item much larger estimates of the colonial surplus are produced. A comparison with the colonial surplus of British India is made. In all, the new colonial surplus for the Netherlands East Indies is estimated at almost 24 billion guilders, approximately US$10 billion or some US$156 billion in today's terms. Those figures are considered large indeed.     

‘Colonizin’ in reverse

Abstract

This is a revised version of a paper presented on 22 June 2006 by Kenneth Parker at The English Academy of Southern Africa, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, on the occasion of the presentation of a Gold Medal to Professor Colin Gardner for distinguished service to English. The paper takes a tongue-in-cheek look at ‘Britishness’ and conforming to British standards – including what the British saw as the ‘way forward for the English language’. It shows how the erstwhile ‘colonized’, and more particularly their British-born descendants, have been doing some ‘colonizin’ of their own.     

主体民族主义与国族构建的悖论——以色列民族政策思想之评析

以色列是一个以犹太、阿拉伯两大族类为主体的多民族国家。国家的犹太属性、内部殖民主义和分而治之是以色列处理与国内阿拉伯人民族关系的基本思想。以色列的民族政策造成阿拉伯人在社会生活的各个方面遭受挤压、歧视,成为经济落后、政治孤立的少数族类,与主流社会十分疏远。这一现实与以色列理应将全体国民纳入其民族国家构建范畴,以塑造统一的政治文化共同体和国族认同的民族构建产生了直接的悖论,并且从根本上制约着国家的稳定、健康与和谐发展。