Colonialism and Neo-Colonialism

My good friend Jim Taylor, who writes a broadly left-leaning (NDP/Green/United Church) newspaper column in B.C., writes:

“If the world’s newer nations are to ‘grow up’ -- despite any negative connotations of that description -- we need to offer more than just debt relief. We need to be willing to send mentors -- the brightest and best of our youth, our managers, our doctors, our technologists -- to go and work with their people, in their conditions, in their society. Not to hold them down, but to help them up.”


Jim feels this would be better than just throwing money at the problem. And perhaps it would.

But I have my doubts.

If a lack of trained expertise is indeed the problem, the first thing we might consider is to stop stripping the Third World of their best-educated people with our immigration policies. It makes no sense to take, as we now do, all their doctors and managers, then send Canadians at public expense to replace them.

And, having often been one, I am skeptical about “foreign experts” in any case. It is not so easy for a foreigner to understand how things work, and why, in an unfamiliar culture. I think of bulls and displays of fine porcelain. Several folks I met back in Alberta had done this kind of thing in the Third World: going and showing the locals how to better do things they had been doing for a thousand years.

Is this likely to work? Aren’t the locals going to understand local conditions better than the newcomers? Are they going to share the same objectives? What does a typical Canadian really know, say, about tropical subsistence agriculture, or how community decisions are made in Sulawesi? More than a typical Sulawesian?

Unless you assume that Canadians are intrinsically racially superior beings, it defies common sense.

And heck, isn't this exactly what Kurtz was supposedly doing in the upper reaches of the Congo? Isn't this exactly the old colonial enterprise?

One guy had invented a new process for turning the soil. It was a mobile chicken coop; the chickens would naturally claw and hack away at the soil, and once it was fully chopped up, the coop was moved on to the next section. The other guy had a little solar oven for drying crops with the sun’s rays. No need for power. Both were still, years later, terribly proud of their contributions.

Their ideas were clever, in a Mother-Earth-News-article sort of way. But were they really useful? I doubt it. I suspect the chicken coop idea was practical only if you could afford to have your land fallow for months at a time while the chickens worked it over. And had some efficient way to remove all the chicken droppings, which would burn the crops.

And the solar oven might have dried faster than the sun's rays alone, but so what? Was there any financial benefit to the farmer in drying his peppers a day sooner? Enough to pay for the new equipment?

Just, I sadly suspect, a case of upper-class North Americans indulging their control fantasies with the illusion of making a big difference to world poverty. And having a good lark after college or in early retirement at taxpayer expense.

Mister Kurtz, he dead.