Vol. 19 No. 5 · 6 March 1997
pages 20-21 | 2693 words
The Cruel Hoax of Development
Basil Davidson
- Fighting for the Rainforest: War, Youth and Resources in Sierra Leone by Paul Richards
James Currey/Heinemann, 182 pp, £35.00, November 1996, ISBN 0 85255 397 8
- A Claim to Land by the River: A Household in Senegal 1720-1994 by Adrain Adams and Jaabe So
Oxford, 300 pp, £50.00, October 1996, ISBN 0 19 820191 5
Those who wander in the great forests of the African tropics do not always manage, like Conrad’s storyteller, to make it home again, and the likelihood of their ending in terminal disaster has become greater than it used to be. Whether threatened populations in these forests and their neighbouring savannahs can still be sheltered from destruction, or even self-destruction, is pretty much an open question. Against this now customary pessimism, optimists, such as the authors of these books, argue that the long process of imperialist dispossession has begun to give way to another, contrary process and that Africa’s peoples are retaking possession of themselves.
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Letters
Vol. 19 No. 6 · 20 March 1997
From Aidan Campbell
Reading Basil Davidson’s review of Paul Richards’s Fighting for the Rainforest (LRB, 6 March) gave me the overwhelming impression of an older and wiser man settling accounts after a lifetime spent fruitlessly trying to change things for the better. Until The Black Man’s Burden (1992), Davidson’s books were full of fight and aspiration for Africa and Africans. In 1992, however, he served notice that independent Africa’s problems derived from its misguided attempt to modernise. Indeed, in this review, the prevailing sentiment seems to be that we have all been a bit too ambitious, and that the priority from now on should simply be ‘a people’s sense of safety and self-value’.
From this, it is easy to see what Davidson admires in Richards’s text, since it presents survival as the only feasible objective nowadays. But what a limited horizon this is compared to the inspirational vision Davidson used to encourage Africans to aim for. That said, it is a mistake to portray survivalism, as Davidson does, as an indigenous African custom. Richards himself is more careful. He sees a creolised amalgam of Western and African influences. Davidson ignores the fulsome praise in Fighting for the Rain Forest for the role model of Rambo, the archetypal survivalist film hero. As Richards sees it, survivalism is ‘thoughtful, streetwise, Post-Modern’.
Richards presents all the actors of the Sierra Leone conflict as either victims or survivors. For example, he asserts that the rebel movement in Sierra Leone is mainly run by some ‘disregarded’ intellectuals who are ‘victims’ of social exclusion. At the same time he views Sierra Leoneans as a whole as victims of those frustrated people who staff the rebel leadership. Nevertheless, they are basically decent and non-violent and morally responsible, which is what enables them to be survivors. It does not occur to him that, by peopling his account with victims or survivors, he is belittling African people. In my experience of Africa, most people – especially the young – want everything that modern society can provide, fast cars, access to the Internet etc. They know that as survivors merely concerned with safety they will never get the opportunity to live a decent life.
Aidan Campbell
London N17
