After many years, I spent days and weeks in the rural areas located in the western part of the former colony of Natal, namely in Estcourt, Laydmisth, Colenso, Emmaus and Bergville. What intrigued me most are the settlement patterns that were originally imposed by the former colonial administrators as far back as the 1800s. There are chieftains and neighbourhoods that dot the foothills of the Drakensberg, and alongside them are many farms, railways, roads and highways that were originally developed the serve the white economy.
The majority of the infrastructure for the white economy is mostly gone, and only pieces of concrete and rusted iron materials remain as evidence. The English and Afrikaans names like Estcourt, Loskop, Moorleigh, Winterton, Frere, Emmaus, Cheverly and Bergville continue to tell a bigger story that is buried by the rolling green valleys and hills. They are a constant reminder of the struggles fought by the natives to fend off the incursion by the European settlers. Also, the Europeans fought their battles against each other here. The capture site of Winston Churchill in Cheverly, located about 25 km outside Estcourt, stands like a flagpole to keep the memories of victors and others alive.
A few kilometres away, the Langalibalele Pass and mountainous former colony Basutoland tower over the green valleys. They, too, have thousands of stories to tell. It is a pity that the rich history of the place is not known to the local inhabitants, who have been brainwashed into believing that their presence is inferior and also depends on others. As a result, the entire place presents contrasts of poverty and wealth that exist side by side, like all of South Africa. High unemployment and social ills like alcohol abuse, crime, diseases and teenage pregnancy signify the daily struggles of individuals and households. Many people leave western Natal to search for opportunities in large urban areas like Durban, Gauteng and Cape Town, as they have always done in the past two hundred years.
With all doom and gloom, one aspect of village life that is least explored concerns how the people have always cared for the environment, notwithstanding the limited resources and ‘backwardness’.
Rural people always used mud and other natural materials like wood and grass to build houses, unlike in urban areas where concrete and steel are the primary materials for sprawling, congested settlements. They also collected cow dung and water to maintain their houses. The structures were never permanent to allow easy re-usability and relocation. Today, the buzzword is ‘renewable’ to denote care and awareness for the natural environment and millions of dollars are spent on meetings, technologies and so on to generate fake interest and commitment to preserving the environment.
Besides ridicule and mocking, rural communities have always been ahead of time in terms of how they lived side-by-side with the ecosystems. Be it in the western Natal or in the Sahara desert, thousands of miles away, the rural settlements presented what the developed world is now trying hard to emulate as it claims. The desert people live in non-permanent structures like tents and facilitate their so-called nomadic lifestyles, which do not harm the environment in any way.
However, the Western occupiers labelled their way of life as backward and uncivilised. The civilisation project was created to change their ways of living and cultures through overrated concepts called ‘modernisation’ and ‘development’. These terms are subjects of debate in the United Nations and other platforms, but no one really has definitions for them or proof that they work in the absence of an exploitative relationship.
Hundreds of UN and other agencies such as the UNDP, ILO, USAID, Greenpeace and FAO champion the development discourse all over Africa. Their contradictory stance is the complete opposite of the agenda of the early settlers, whose mission was to disrupt living patterns in the name of civilisation. The civilising mission and the development agenda are merely two sides of the same coin: they are not just superior or externally conceptualised but also do not have inputs from the people they purportedly seek to help. In the end, they are equally disruptive and imperial in character. Thus, it makes sense for some people to reject the Eurocentric ideas of development as fallacious.
According to the Oxford Dictionary, development refers to “a specified state of growth or advancement in ones’ self or something; a new and advanced product or idea; an event constituting a new stage in a changing situation”. Over time, scholarship has come up with several theories of development, namely development theory, modernisation theory, economic growth theory, dependency theory, growth pole theory, import substitution industrialisation (ISI) theory, etc. As with all else, Europe always positioned itself as a yardstick for development – which means that the whole world should aspire to wastage and unsustainable use of resources. Of the theories presented above, modernisation theory tends to overlap with the civilisation project.
It unashamedly declares that poor countries are underdeveloped due to their “archaic traditional social, political and economic structures”, and also places the western advanced industrial countries as the essential models for development. Moreover, it prescribes that these countries should abandon their traditional ways and adopt values that are more congenial to industrialisation.
With the exception of the decency theory, which was developed or perfected mainly in Latin America, the conceptualisation of what constitutes development originates from the Western world.
Throughout the years, the Third World has been pushing to be like the Western world, in look and form. The dependency theory only details why the Third World is excluded from the exclusive club and also yearns for sameness like the ideas it seeks to oppose. Newly developed economies of the Middle East, for example, have totally destroyed the beauty and tranquillity of the desert in gallant efforts to ‘modernise’. Every country wants economic growth, industrialisation, technological advancement and so on, but it is unclear where all these resources will come from.
Hence, the anarchic north versus south political and economic relations, i.e., for development to occur, there must be exploiters and exploitees.
In essence, modernisation breeds a new form of imperialism. For countries to modernise and industrialise, they need to expand to gain raw materials to use in their factories. Furthermore, the takeover of new territories, which are always located in the Third World, comes with the modernisation process carried out by the colonial states. For this reason, Nigerian academic Stephen Chijioke Nwinya contends that “it is arguably impossible for the non-western world to modernise without westernising.” The presence of the West in the lives of non-western societies around the world resulted in poverty, hunger and underdevelopment. How can the West then be looked at as a solution to the problems it created?
Today, Europe and its outposts in the developed world tell others about the sustainable use of resources and carbon reductions. This could be interpreted as an admission that the modernisation (westernisation) of the world has dismally failed. However, the West does not want to take responsibility for the large-scale destruction of the world’s natural resources and cultures over the years while it embarked on its much-lauded ‘industrial revolution’ or development. The honouring of demands for reparations following the slave trade and the spread of capitalism should precede such things as the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
It is grossly unfair to compel the Third World to the SDGs and climate agenda’s Paris Agreement on Climate Change because it did not and continues not to destroy the world. Instead, the rural communities are deprived of livelihood to cater for the developed centres. Water is taken from the Central Drakensberg (i.e., Basutoland, Vrystaat and Natal), for example, to feed modernised Gauteng. People are left to drink brown water with cattle. Their natural environment exists in name only after many years of exploitation and abuse.
Rural people should be left alone and protected from local and global profit chasers who are more than keen to turn people’s lives upside down. There are many unreported Xolobenis in South Africa and across the world. From the Amazon to the Niger Delta, the forceful harvesting of resources comes with the massive destruction of the environment. Nobody really cares as long as the discomfort of others yields gains for them.
Sustainable development is the greatest farce in our life as long as it does not deal with issues of the past, present and future. Even the so-called postmodernism and metamodernism are not equipped to adequately articulate the subaltern conditions in the world because the story continues to be narrated by the hunters. Until the lion learns how to write, every story will glorify the hunter.
An organisation such as Greenpeace has its headquarters in Surinameplein 118 in Amsterdam and yet still claims to speak for the marginalised peoples on issues of environmental protection.
But for whose gain or advantage?
There is nothing like due diligence by companies, but it is a scam to continue to steal and pillage resources from the world’s underclasses, who have always been seen as without human rights and souls. The Western countries are now desperately using their power and influence to wean other countries off the resource-guzzling mode that they have championed for many years. At worst, they show no desire to slow down the demand with their unilateral decision to revert to coal to address their common energy crisis proves that their purported concern for the environment is just vulgarised lip service.
Call it SDGs, Just Transition, Rule of Law, Economic Reform (Austerity), Climate Change, Foreign Direct Investment, or any other fancy name, the reality is that the developed world is trying hard to retain the exploiter-exploitee relationship that made it the champion of the past centuries. Institutions such as the UN, Brettonwood duo (IMF and World Bank) and a plethora of NGOs like Amnesty International, Greenpeace, Oxfam, etc. act as Good Samaritans), and sustain this paternalistic relationship. The multi-layered oppression of underclasses begins within the states where they reside all the way to the international level.
Peasant revolt. Like Samir Amin’s delinking disconnect, I maintain that the Third World needs to disconnect from “the capitalist world system in order to leave all those values given by capitalism” and to be prepared to take the bullet. The fact that African leaders, among others, still get summoned to Washington, Beijing, Brussels and London should be a concern. They deliver subaltern communities to the imperial powers whose interest is exploitation, harm and abuse.
Whatever the dominant economic development or political idea, either FDI or climate change, the intention has always been about unsettling the rural peoples and exploitation of their natural habitat. Peasants of the world must revolt and reject everything.
Siya yi banga le economy!