š1.) Following Moyo, in what way has aid affected Africa?

š2.) In your opinion, does aid negatively or positively affect Africa? 

š

3.) Beyond direct aid, in what other ways can the international community support developing nations? 

š4.) Describe Human Rights in Precolonial Africa and how have they evolved since?

oNLY 1 OF THEM

Extra information 

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Student examples:

2. In your opinion, does aid negatively or positively affect Africa?

In my opinion, aid negatively affects Africa. Despite the end of colonialism half a century earlier, developing countries still face problems that result in low economic growth. Though inequality is not a new occurrence, it has advanced in the ways it affects developing countries. It may have lifted about 1 billion people out of extreme poverty but worsened the quality of life. With developed countries establishing the rules, laws, organizations and investment, how are developing countries going to economically prosper? The trade rules imposed by rich countries make it much harder for poor countries to get out of poverty. Countries rich in resources such as gold, diamonds, oil, iron etc. are often exploited by Multinational corporations for profit. The governments of these developing countries usually lower the barriers for these multinational companies to bring in income therefore the people may work lower wages, long hours and in unstable condition.  Statistically the richest 2 percent have more wealth than half of the rest of the world. Prior to colonialism, rich countries were only about 3 times wealthier than poor countries, in the 1960s they were about 35 times and today they are 80 times wealthier. Rich countries often try to compensate by providing aid, about 130 billion dollars each year but on the other hand multinational corporations are taking about 900 billion dollars in revenue. In addition, poor countries are paying about 600 million dollars in debt on loans over and over again. “As a result of their reliance on loans and debt relief from bilateral donors and international financial institutions such as the World Bank and IMF over the past thirty years, many African governments have devoted themselves to satisfying the interests of the international donor community without reference to the needs of their own economies and people. Small wonder that they have failed to prosper.” (Moyo 2009) This actively demonstrates that the wealth gap is never getting smaller.  According to Moyo “the use of aid as a political weapon wielded by donor countries in their own interests.” An example of this is Nixon’s statement ‘Let us remember that the main purpose of aid is not to help other nations but to help ourselves.’  Developed countries often prioritize their governments national interest before humanitarian causes. Therefore, I believe the aid provided to African countries should have a larger developmental effect than it does now. 

Sources: 

Dambisa Moyo, Dead Aid: Why aid is not working and how there is another way for Africa (London, Penguin, 2009).

TheRulesOrg, director. Global Wealth Inequality – What You Never Knew You Never Knew (See Description for 2017 Updates). YouTube, YouTube, 3 Apr. 2013, www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWSxzjyMNpU&ab_channel=TheRulesOrg. 

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3.) Beyond direct aid, in what other ways can the international community support developing nations? 

The International community can help support developing nations in various ways other than direct aid. Another way that the international community can support developing nations at the moment is through COVID-19 resources and aid. The pandemic has been deeply affecting developing countries, and developed countries can support the underdeveloped in the medical field by sending their expert doctors to train the medical staff and help carry the operations. Experts from developed nations can now also help developing nations with COVID-19 vaccination procedures by teaching the developing countries doctors how to administer the doses, explaining the side effects, sharing experiences, as well as helping them gain access to the vaccine. Countries like Canada have bought enough vaccines to vaccinate all their population twice. Therefore, I believe that developed countries like Canada should consider donating their extra vaccines to countries that have not yet been able to gain access to it. Moreover, the WHO and the UN can help developing countries create research plans to create and develop affordable and equitable access to vaccines for developing countries. However, they will need the political leadership of powerful politicians, activists, and organizations all across the world to make sure this is an issue that needs attention from the powerful countries. According to UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres, only 10 countries account for 75% of all Covid-19 vaccination so far. More than 130 countries have not administered a single dose. Ultimately, it is in the interest of the international community to aid developing nations to acquire the COVID-19 vaccine because this is an issue that has affected every single person regardless of the country they live in, and unless the rest of the world is successful in combating the virus, new variants will continue to multiply and we will never be able to live in a COVID-19 free world. 

Sources: 

Birdsall, nancy. “How to Help Poor Countries.” Foreign Affairs, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2005-07-01/how-help-poor-countries.

Gay, Daniel. “International support for the least developed countries: A different way?” LDC Portal, https://www.un.org/ldcportal/international-support-for-the-least-developed-countries-a-different-way/.

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Africa and Human Rights

Lecture 12 Spring 2019 INR 4075

Dead Aid
How can we get aid to work in Africa?
Live Aid
Glamour Aid-–It is not a solution it is a problem.
Accountability to their citizenry, not their celebrity donors.
Aid has become an industry.
Justify their existence: NGOs,
10 percent and now up to 70 to 80 percent

DEAD AID
Foreseeable future, 5 year plan
Systematically reduce aid.
Capital markets can help fund themselves.
They should focus on ratings and pitch to international investors.
Bonds and raising capital that way
Beyond humanitarian problem—huge amounts of money are squandered.
300 million as late as 2006 to Mugabe—went to EU and the US (maintained diplomacy?)
Can delink aid models from corrupt leaders?

Killings in Boali
MISCA
2012 -Peace keeping missions in the CAR
12 people detained by AU Peace Keepers were found in an exhumed mass grave.
AU Peacekeepers murdered the people they had been sent there to protect.
Sentenced for war crimes. 3 years and are now free.

The Charter on Human and People’s Rights
Continent wide human rights instrument
Adopted in 1981
54 African Nations are members
Came into effect 21 October 1986
Head quarter in Banjul , Gambia
Civil and Political rights
Economic and Social
Collective and Develompent

African Commission on Human Rights
1986
Reviews reports
Investigates Violations
Reviews Communications from Individuals and NGOs
Challenges
Insufficient Visibility
Delays
Limited follow-up
Sporadic Compliance by State Parties

African Human Rights Court
1990s regional Human Rights Court
1998-–Protocol to the African Charter to Establish ACtHPR
2004 Entered into force
Jurisdiction and Access rules
Who has recognized this? 26 States have signed and ratified the protocol .
How does a case get to the court?
Cases are referred by the African Commission on Human and People’s Rights.

Follow-up Questions
1.) Following Moyo, in what way has aid affected Africa?
2.) In your opinion, does aid negatively or positively affect Africa? 
3.) Beyond direct aid, in what other ways can the international community support developing nations? 
4.) Describe Human Rights in Precolonial Africa and how have they evolved since?

(Excerpt from)

The Banjul Charter and the African Cultural Fingerprint:

An Evaluation of the Language of Duties

By

Makau wa Mutua

35 Va. J. Int’l L.

3

39

Winter,

1

995

(Notes omitted)

In the West, the language of rights primarily developed along the trajectory of claims against the state; entitle-

ments which imply the right to seek an individual remedy for a wrong. The African language of duty, however, of-
fers a different meaning for individual/state-society relations: while people had rights, they also bore duties. The
resolution of a claim was not necessarily directed at satisfying or remedying an individual wrong. It was an oppor-
tunity for society to contemplate the complex web of individual and community duties and rights to seek a balance
between the competing claims of the individual and society.

This view is not relativist. It does not advance or advocate the concept of apartheid in human rights or the no-
tion that each cultural tradition has generated its own distinctive and irreconcilable concept of human rights. It
proceeds from the position that, although cultural relativism in human rights as an anti-imperial device is admirable,
it is a misunderstanding inspired by cultural nationalism. What its proponents see as radically distinctive, irreconcil-
able traditions also possess ideals which are universal. Most critiques of cultural relativism, on the other hand, are
ethnocentric and symptomatic of the moral imperialism of the West. Both extremes only serve to detain the devel-
opment of a universal jurisprudence of human rights.

In reality, the construction and definition of human rights norms are dynamic and continuous processes. Hu-
man rights are not the monopoly or the sole prerogative of any one culture or people, although claims to that end are
not in short supply. In one culture, the individual may be venerated as the primary bearer of rights; while, in an-
other, individual rights may be more harmonized with the corporate body. Rather than assert the primacy of one
over the other, or argue that only one cultural expression and historical experience constitutes human rights, this
author views each experience as a contributor to the whole. The process of the construction of universal human
rights is analogous to the proverbial description of the elephant by blind men: each, based on his sense of feeling,
offers a differing account. However, all the accounts paint a complete picture when put together. As a dynamic
process, the creation of a valid conception of human rights must be universal. That is, the cultures and traditions of
the world must, in effect, compare notes, negotiate positions, and come to agreement over what constitutes human
rights. Even after agreement, the doors must remain open for further inquiry, reformulation, or revision.

II. Human Rights in Pre-colonial Africa:

Content and Context

This segment of the Article will explore the validity of both the argument made often by Africans, and the con-
troversy it engenders, that the concept of human rights was not alien to pre-colonial societies and that such notions
were the foundation of social and political society. Recent debates, which are primarily interpretive, have focused
attention on this divisive theme. They agree on basic behavioral, political, and social characteristics but disagree as
to their meaning. There are no easy answers for a number of reasons. In particular, methodological pitfalls exist for
any analysis that attempts to address the length and width of sub-Saharan Africa. The sheer size of the continent,
and the diversity of African peoples and their societies, defy easy categorization or generalization. Secondly, with
regard to human rights, there are very few extant sources of pre-colonial societies. The oral tradition common to
most of Africa had its own imprecision even before its interruption by the forces of colonialism.

Nevertheless, several broad themes are discernable from the past. It is now generally accepted that the African
pre-colonial past was neither idyllic nor free of the abuses of power and authority common to all human societies.
However, the despotic and far-reaching control of the individual by the omnipotent state, first perfected in Europe,
was unknown. n20 Instead, pre-colonial Africa consisted of two categories of societies: those with centralized au-
thority, administrative machinery, and standing judicial institutions, such as the Zulu and the Ashanti, and those
with more communal and less intrusive governmental paraphernalia, such as the Akamba and Kikuyu of Kenya.

1

But a feature common to almost all pre-colonial African societies was their ethnic, cultural, and linguistic homoge-
neity – a trait that gave them fundamental cohesion.

Had these political societies developed the concept of human rights? Proponents of the concept of human
rights in pre-colonial African societies are accused by their opponents of confusing human dignity with human
rights. This view holds that the “African concept of justice,” unlike human rights, “is rooted not in individual
claims against the state, but in the physical and psychic security of group membership.” While it is probably correct
to argue that African societies did not emphasize individual rights in the same way that European societies did, it is
not a correct presumption to claim that they did not know the conception of individual rights at all.

According to Ronald Cohen, a right is an entitlement:

At its most basic level, a human right is a safeguarded prerogative granted because a person is alive. This
means that any human being granted personhood has rights by virtue of species membership. And a right is a
claim to something (by the right-holder) that can be exercised and enforced under a set of grounds or justifica-
tions without interference from others. The subject of the right can be an individual or a group and the object is
that which is being laid claim to as a right.
(Ronald Cohen, Endless Teardrops: Prolegomena to the Study of Human Rights in Africa, in Human Rights
and Governance)

Moreover, a brief examination of the norms governing legal, political, and social structures in pre-colonial societies
demonstrates that the concept of rights, like that articulated by Cohen, informed the notion of justice and supported
a measure of individualism. Two societies which are representative of the two basic organizational paradigms
prevalent in pre-colonial Africa illustrate the point. The Akamba of east Africa were symptomatic of the less rigidly
organized societies, whereas the Akans of west Africa were characteristic of the more centralized state systems. In
Akan thought, the individual had both descriptive and normative characteristics. Both endowed the person with
individual rights as well as obligations. Similarly, the Akamba believed that “all members were born equal and
were supposed to be treated as such beyond sex and age.” n27 The belief prevailed in both societies that, as an
inherently valuable being, the individual was naturally endowed with certain basic rights.

Akan political society was organized according to the principle of kinships. A lineage of those who were de-
scended from the same ancestress formed the basic political unit. Adults in each lineage elected an elder. All line-
age heads, in turn, formed the town council which was chaired by a chief who, though chosen according to descent,
was in part elected. The chief, however, could not rule by fiat, because decisions of the council were taken by con-
sensus. Moreover, council decisions could be criticized publicly by constituents who found them unacceptable. As
Wiredu explains, there was no “doubt about the right of the people, including the elders, to dismiss a chief who tried
to be oppressive.”

Among the Akamba, individuals joined the elders council, the most senior rank in Akamba society, after dem-
onstrating commitment to the community and responsibility in personal matters. Maintaining a stable household,
which included a spouse or spouses and children, was a necessary precondition. The council was a public forum
which made decisions by consensus. Although the Akamba resented any social organization with a central author-
ity, the council’s services included the legislation of public norms and customs. These two examples demonstrate
that individuals in pre-colonial society had a right to political participation in determining by whom and through
what policies to be ruled.

Much of the discussion about whether pre-colonial societies knew of and enforced individual human rights has
taken place in the absence of considered studies of, and reference to, judicial processes in those societies. A pre-
liminary examination of both the Akan and Akamba societies strongly indicates individual-conscious systems of
justice. With respect to the Akamba, a party to a complaint appeared before the council of elders in the company of
his jury, a selection of individuals who enjoyed the party’s confidence. Unlike Western-style jurors, the Akamba did
not hand down a verdict, but advised the party on how to plead and what arguments to put forth to win the case.
They had to be steeped in Kamba law, customs, and traditions. The threat of the administration of kithitu, the
Kamba oath, which was believed to bring harm to those who lied, encouraged truthfulness. After presentations by
parties, the elders would render judgement or give counsel on the appropriate settlement. Each offense carried a
punishment: murder was compensated by the payment of over ten head of cattle; rapists were charged goats; as-
saults, depending on their seriousness, could cost over ten head of cattle; adultery was punishable by the payment of
at least a goat and bull; and an arsonist was required to build his victim a new house or replace the lost property.
Individual rights to cultivated land were also recognized and protected. These elaborate punishments present just
one indication of the seriousness with which Kamba society took individual rights to personal security, property,
marriage, and the dignity and integrity of the family.

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In Akan society, the principle of innocent-until-proven-guilty was deeply embedded in social consciousness.
According to Wiredu, “it was an absolute principle of Akan justice that no human being could be punished without
trial.” The Akans, like the Akamba, also recognized a wide range of individual rights: murder, assault, and theft
were punished as violations of the person.

For those who deny the recognition of human rights in pre-colonial societies, it must come as a strange irony
that the human rights corpus shares with pre-colonial Africa the importance of personal security rights. The right to
life, for example, was so valued that the power over life and death was reserved for a few elders and was exercised
“only after elaborate judicial procedure, with appeals from one court to another, and often only in cases of murder
and manslaughter.” This respect for human life was not an aberration. Fernyhough notes that much of Africa is
characterized by a “preoccupation with law, customary and written, and with legal procedure.” He adds that the
Amhara of Ethiopia, for example, have historically relished litigation and the lengthy cross-examination of wit-
nesses. Whether a society was highly centralized or not, “there existed elaborate rules of procedure intended to pro-
tect the accused and provide fair trials.” The protection of individual rights was of preeminent importance to pre-
colonial societies.

Many of the Akamba and Akan socio-political norms and structures were common to other pre-colonial ethno-
political entities or cultural-nations. This Article refers to these shared basic values as the index of the African cul-
tural fingerprint, that is, a set of institutional and normative values governing the relationship between individuals,
the society, and nature. To be sure, the fingerprint belongs to Africa although it is also human and, thus, aspects of
it reveal universal characteristics. In the search for the definition of the continent, for what sets it apart from Asia
and Europe or the Americas, some writers have labelled the cultural and social patterns distinctive to the continent
as the “African personality.” Leopold Sedar Senghor, for one, called it negritude or “the manner of self-expression
of the black character, the black world, black civilization,” while Aime Cesaire described it simply as “recognition
of the fact of being black, and the acceptance of that fact, of our destiny of black, of our history and our culture.”
Julius Nyerere named it ujamaa, the Kiswahili term for African socialism. The principles and ideals common to all
these conceptions are, according to the author’s own observations of various African societies, respect for, and pro-
tection of, the individual and individuality within the family and the greater socio-political unit; deference to age
because a long life is generally wise and knowledgeable; commitment and responsibility to other individuals, fam-
ily, and community; solidarity with fellow human beings, especially in times of need; tolerance for difference in
political views and personal ability; reciprocity in labor issues and for generosity; and consultation in matters of
governance. As aptly put by Cohen,

many African cultures value the group – one should never die alone, live alone, remain outside social net-
works unless one is a pariah, insane, or the carrier of a feared contagious disease. Corporate kinship in which
individuals are responsible for the behavior of their group members is a widespread tradition. But in addition,
the individual person and his or her dignity and autonomy are carefully protected in African traditions, as are
individual rights to land, individual competition for public office, and personal success.

…

This conception, that of the individual as a moral being endowed with rights but also bounded by duties, proac-
tively uniting his needs with the needs of others, was the quintessence of the formulation of rights in pre-colonial
societies. It radically differs from the liberal conception of the individual as the state’s primary antagonist. More-
over, it provides those concerned with the universal conception of human rights with a basis for imagining another
dialectic: the harmonization of duties and rights. …

Many of those who dismiss the relevance of the African conception of man by pejoratively referring to it as a
“peasant” and “pre-industrial” notion fail to recognize that all major cultures and traditions – the Chinese, European,
African, and the Arab, to mention a few – have a basic character distinctive to them. While it is true that no culture
is static, and that normative cultural values are forever evolving, it is naive to think that a worldview can be eroded
in a matter of decades, even centuries. Why should the concession be made that the individualist rights perspective
is “superior” to more community-oriented notion? As Cobbah has noted, “in the same way that people in other cul-
tures are brought up to assert their independence from their community, the average African’s worldview is one that
places the individual within his community.” This African worldview, he writes, “is for all intents and purposes as
valid as the European theories of individualism and the social contract.” Any concept of human rights with preten-
sions of universality cannot avoid mediating between these two seemingly contradictory notions.

IV. Prospects and Problems for the

Duty/Rights Conception

The idea of combining individual rights and duties in a human rights document is not completely without
precedent. No less a document than the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) blazed the trail in this

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regard when it provided, in a rare departure from its individualist focus, that “everyone has the duties to the com-
munity in which alone the free and full development of his personality is possible.” However, the African Charter
is the first human rights document to articulate the concept in any meaningful way. It is assumed, with undue haste,
by human rights advocates and scholars that the inclusion of duties in the African Charter is nothing but “an invita-
tion to the imposition of unlimited restrictions on the enjoyment of rights.” This view is simplistic because it is not
based on a careful assessment of the difficulties experienced by African countries in their miserable attempts to
mimic wholesale Western notions of government and the role of the state. Such critics are transfixed by the allure of
models of democracy prevalent in the industrial democracies of the West, models which promise an opportunity for
the redemption of a troubled continent.

Unfortunately, such a view is shortsighted. Perhaps at no other time in the history of the continent have Afri-
cans needed each other more than they do today. Although there is halting progress towards democratization in
some African countries, the continent is generally on a fast track to political and economic collapse. Now in the
fourth decade of post-colonialism, African states have largely failed to forge viable, free, and prosperous countries.
The persistence of this problem highlights the dismal failures of the post-colonial states on several accounts. The
new African states have failed to inspire loyalty in the citizenry; to produce a political class with integrity and a
national interest; to inculcate in the military, the police, and the security forces their proper roles in society; to build
a nation from different linguistic and cultural groups; and to fashion economically viable policies. These realities
are driving a dagger into the heart of the continent. There are many causes of the problem, and, while it is beyond
the scope of this Article to address them all, it will discuss one: namely, the human rights dimensions of the rela-
tionship between the individual, the community, and the state.

Colonialism profoundly transformed and mangled the political landscape of the continent through the imposi-
tion of the modern state. Each pre-colonial African “nation,” and there were thousands of them to be sure, had sev-
eral characteristics: one ethnic community inhabited a “common territory; its members shared a tradition, real or
fictitious, of common descent; and they were held together by a common language and a common culture.” Few
African nations were also states in the modern or European sense, although they were certainly political societies. In
contrast, the states created by European imperialists, comprising the overwhelming majority of the continent, ordi-
narily contained more than one nation:

Each one of the new states contains more than one nation. In their border areas, many new states contain parts
of nations because of the European-inspired borders cut across existing national territories.

The new state contained a population from many cultural groups coerced to live together. It did not reflect a
“nation,” a people with the consciousness of a common destiny and shared history and culture. The colonialists
were concerned with the exploitation of Africa’s human and natural resources, and not with the maintenance of
the integrity of African societies. For purposes of this expediency, grouping many nations in one territory was
the only feasible administrative option. To compound the problem, the new rulers employed divide-and-
conquer strategies, pitting nations against each other, further polarizing inter-ethnic tensions and creating a cli-
mate of mutual fear, suspicion, and hatred. In many cases, the Europeans would openly favor one group or
cluster of nations over others, a practice that only served to intensify tensions. For example, in Rwanda, a coun-
try rife with some of the worst inter-communal violence since decolonization, the Belgians heightened Hutu-
Tutsi rivalry through preferential treatment toward the Tutsi.

Although, before the arrival of the Belgians, the Tutsi minority ruled over the Hutu majority and the Twa in a
feudal-client relationship, the colonial state “transformed communal relations and sharpened ethnic tensions by
ruling through a narrow Tutsi royalty. The access to resources and power that the Tutsi collaborators enjoyed
under the colonial state irreversibly polarized Hutu-Tutsi relations.” (Makau wa Mutua, U.N. Must Make
Rwanda a Priority, Oakland Tribune, May 25, 1994, at A13)

Ironically, colonialism, though a divisive factor, created a sense of brotherhood or unity among different Afri-
can nations within the same colonial state, because they saw themselves as common victims of an alien, racist, and
oppressive structure. Nevertheless, as the fissures of the modern African state amply demonstrate, the unity born
out of anti-colonialism has not sufficed to create an enduring identity of nationhood in the context of the post-
colonial state. Since in the pre-colonial era the primary allegiances were centered on lineage and the community,
n98 one of the most difficult challenges facing the post-colonial political class was the creation of new nations. This
challenge, referred to as “creating a national consciousness … was misleading,” as there was “no nation to become
conscious of; the nation had to be created concurrently with a consciousness.”

This difficult social and political transformation from self-governing ethno-cultural units to the multi-lingual,
multi-cultural modern state – the disconnection between the two Africas: one pre-colonial, the other post-colonial –
lies at the root of the current crisis. The post-colonial state has not altered the imposed European forms of social and
political organization even though there is mounting evidence that they have failed to work in Africa. Part of the

4

problem lies in the domination of the continent’s political and social processes by Eurocentric norms and values. As
correctly put by Hansen:

African leaders have adopted and continued to use political forms and precedents that grew from, and were or-
ganically related to, the European experience. Formal declarations of independence from direct European rule
do not mean actual independence from European conceptual dominance. African leaders and peoples have
gone through tremendous political changes in the past hundred years. These profound changes have included
the transformation of African societies and polities. They are still composed of indigenous African units, such
as the lineage, village, tribe, and chieftainship, but they have been transformed around European units, such as
the colony, district, political party, and state.

This serious and uniquely African crisis lacks the benefit of any historical guide or formula for its resolution.
While acknowledging that it is impossible to recapture and re-institute pre-colonial forms of social and political
organization, this Article nonetheless asserts that Africa must partially look inward, to its pre-colonial past, for pos-
sible solutions. Certain ideals in pre-colonial African philosophy, particularly the conception of humanity, and the
interface of rights and duties in a communal context as provided for in the African Charter, should form part of that
process of reconstruction. The European domination of Africa has wrought social changes which have disabled old
institutions by complicating social and political processes. Pre-colonial and post-colonial societies now differ fun-
damentally. In particular, there are differences of scale; states now have large and varied populations. Moreover,
states possess enormous instruments of control and coercion, and their tasks are now without number. While this is
true, Africa cannot move forward by completely abandoning its past.

The duty/rights conception of the African Charter could provide a new basis for individual identification with
compatriots, the community, and the state. It could forge and instill a national consciousness and act as the glue to
reunite individuals and different nations within the modern state, and at the same time set the proper limits of con-
duct by state officials. The motivation and purpose behind the concept of duty in pre-colonial societies was to
strengthen community ties and social cohesiveness, creating a shared fate and common destiny. This is the con-
sciousness that the impersonal modern state has been unable to foster. It has failed to shift loyalties from the line-
age and the community to the modern state, with its mixture of different nations.

The series of explicit duties spelled out in articles 27 through 29 of the African Charter could be read as in-
tended to recreate the bonds of the pre-colonial era among individuals and between individuals and the state. They
represent a rejection of the individual “who is utterly free and utterly irresponsible and opposed to society”. In a
proper reflection of the nuanced nature of societal obligations in the pre-colonial era, the African Charter explicitly
provides for two types of duties: direct and indirect. A direct duty is contained, for example, in article 29(4) of the
Charter which requires the individual to “preserve and strengthen social and national solidarity, particularly when
the latter is threatened.” There is nothing inherently sinister about this provision; it merely repeats a duty formerly
imposed on members of pre-colonial communities. If anything, there exists a heightened need today, more than at
any other time in recent history, to fortify communal relations and defend national solidarity. The threat of the col-
lapse of the post-colonial state, as has been the case in Liberia, Somalia, and Rwanda, is only too real. Political el-
ites as well as the common citizenry, each in equal measure, bear the primary responsibility for avoiding societal
collapse and its devastating consequences.

The African Charter provides an example of an indirect duty in article 27(2), which states that “the rights and
freedoms of each individual shall be exercised with due regard to the rights of others, collective security, morality
and common interest.” This duty is in fact a limitation on the enjoyment of certain individual rights. It merely rec-
ognizes the practical reality that in African societies, as elsewhere in the world, individual rights are not absolute.
Individuals are asked to reflect on how the exercise of their rights in certain circumstances might adversely affect
other individuals or the community. The duty is based on the presumption that the full development of the individ-
ual is only possible where individuals care about how their actions would impact on others. By rejecting the egotis-
tical individual whose only concern is fulfilling self, article 27(2) raises the level of care owed to neighbors and the
community.

Duties are also grouped according to whether they are owed to individuals or to larger units such as the family,
society, or the state. Parents, for example, are owed a duty of respect and maintenance by their children. Crippling
economic problems do not allow African states to contemplate some of the programs of the welfare state. The care
of the aged and needy falls squarely on family and community members. This requirement – a necessity today – has
its roots in the past: it was unthinkable to abandon a parent or relative in need. The family guilty of such an omis-
sion would be held in disgrace and contempt pending the intervention of lineage or clan members. Such problems
explain why the family is considered sacred and why it would be simply impracticable and suicidal for Africans to
adopt wholesale the individualist conception of rights. Duty to the family is emphasized elsewhere in the Charter

5

because of its crucial and indispensable economic utility. Economic difficulties and the dislocations created by the
transformation of rural life by the cash economy make the homestead a place of refuge.

Some duties are owed by the individual to the state. These are not distinctive to African states; many of them
are standard obligations that any modern state places on its citizens. In the African context, however, these obliga-
tions have a basis in the past, and many seem relevant because of the fragility and the domination of Africa by ex-
ternal agents. Such duties are rights that the community or the state, defined as all persons within it, holds against
the individual. They include the duties to “preserve and strengthen social and national solidarity;” not to “compro-
mise the security of the State;” to serve the “national community by placing his physical and intellectual abilities at
its service;” to “pay taxes imposed by law in the interest of the society;” and to “preserve and strengthen the na-
tional independence and the territorial integrity of his country and to contribute to its defence in accordance with the
law.”

The duties that require the individual to strengthen and defend national independence, security, and the territo-
rial integrity of the state are inspired by the continent’s history of domination and occupation by outside powers
over the centuries. The duties represent an extension of the principle of self-determination, used in the external
sense, as a shield against foreign occupation. Even in countries where this history is lacking, the right of the state to
be defended by its citizens can trump certain individual rights, such as the draft of younger people for a war effort.
Likewise, the duty to place one’s intellectual abilities at the service of the state is a legitimate state interest, for the
“brain drain” has robbed Africa of massive intellect. In recognition of the need for the strength of diversity, rather
than its power to divide, the Charter asks individuals to promote African unity, an especially critical role given arbi-
trary balkanization by the colonial powers and the ethnic animosities fostered within and between the imposed
states.

In addition to the duties placed on the state to secure for the people within its borders economic, social, and
cultural rights, the Charter also requires the state to protect the family, which it terms “the natural unit and basis of
society” and the “custodian of morals and traditional values.” There is an enormous potential for advocates of
equality rights to be concerned that these provisions could be used to support the patriarchy and other repressive
practices of pre-colonial social ordering. It is now generally accepted that one of the strikes against the pre-colonial
regime was its strict separation of gender roles and, in many cases, the limitation on, or exclusion of, women from
political participation. The discriminatory treatment of women on the basis of gender in marriage, property owner-
ship, and inheritance, and the disproportionately heavy labor and reproduction burdens were violations of their
rights.

However, these are not the practices that the Charter condones when it requires states to assist families as the
“custodians of morals and traditional values.” Such an interpretation would be a cynical misreading of the Charter.
The reference is to those traditional values which enhanced the dignity of the individual and emphasized the dig-
nity of motherhood and the importance of the female as the central link in the reproductive chain; women were
highly valued as equals in the process of the regeneration of life. The Charter guarantees, unambiguously and with-
out equivocation, the equal rights of women in its gender equality provision by requiring states to “eliminate every
discrimination against women” and to protect women’s rights in international human rights instruments. Read in
conjunction with other provisions, the Charter leaves no room for discriminatory treatment against women.

The articulation of the duty conception in the Charter has been subjected to severe criticism. Some of the criti-
cism, however, has confused the African conception of duty with the socialist or Marxist understanding. Such con-
fusion is unfortunate. In socialist ideology, states – not individuals – are subjects of international law. Thus the state
assumes obligations under international law, through the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights
(ICCPR) for example, to provide human rights. Under socialism, the state secures economic, cultural, and social
benefits for the individual. Hence, the state, as the guardian of public interest, retains primacy in the event of con-
flict with the individual. Human rights, therefore, are conditioned on the interest of the state and the goals of
communist development. There is an organic unity between rights and duties to the state. In this collectivist con-
ception, duties are only owed to the state. In contrast, in the pre-colonial era, and in the African Charter, duties are
primarily owed to the family – nuclear and extended – and to the community, not to the state. In effect, the primacy
attached to the family in the Charter places the family above the state, which is not the case under communism. In
pre-colonial Africa, unlike the former Soviet Union or Eastern Europe, duties owed to the family or community
were rarely misused or manipulated to derogate from human rights obligations.

The most damaging criticism of the language of duties in Africa sees them as “little more than the formulation,
entrenchment, and legitimation of state rights and privileges against individuals and peoples.” However, critics
who question the value of including duties in the Charter point only to the theoretical danger that states might capi-
talize on the duty concept to violate other guaranteed rights. The fear is frequently expressed that emphasis on
duties may lead to the “trumping” of individual rights if the two are in opposition. It is argued that:

6

If the state has a collective right and obligation to develop the society, economy, and polity (Article 29), then as an
instrument it can be used to defend coercive state actions against both individuals and constituent groups to achieve
state policies rationalized as social and economic improvement.

While the human rights records of African states are distressingly appalling, facts do not indicate that the zeal
to promote certain economic and political programs is the root cause of human rights abuses. The regime of Daniel
arap Moi in Kenya, for example, has not engaged in the widespread suppression of civil and political rights because
of adherence to policies it deems in the national interest; instead, abuses have been triggered by an insecure and
narrow political class which will stop at nothing, including political murder, to retain power. Similarly, Mobutu
Sese Seko of Zaire has run the country into the ground because he cannot contemplate relinquishing power. Alien-
ated and corrupt elites, quite often devoid of a national consciousness, plunder the state and brutalize society to
maintain their personal privileges and retain power. The use of the state to implement particular state policies is
almost never the reason, although such a rationale is frequently used as the pretext. Okoth-Ogendo persuasively
argues that the attack on the duty conception is not meritorious because the “state is the villain against which human
rights law is the effective weapon” and towards which “individuals should not be called upon to discharge any du-
ties.” Valid criticism would question the “precise boundaries, content, and conditions of compliance” contemplated
by the Charter. It should be the duty of the African Commission in its jurisprudence to clarify which, if any, of
these duties are moral or legal obligations, and what the scope of their application ought to be. The Commission
could lead the way in suggesting how some of the duties – on the individual as well as the state – might be imple-
mented. The concept of national service, for example, could utilize traditional notions in addressing famine, public
works, and community self-help projects. The care of parents and the needy could be formalized in family/state
burden-sharing. The Commission should also indicate how, and in what forum, the state would respond to the
breach of individual duties. It might suggest the establishment of community arbitration centers to work out certain
types of disputes. As suggested by Umozurike, a former chairman to the Commission, state responsibility for these
duties implies a “minimum obligation to inculcate the underlying principles and ideals in their subjects.”

The duty/rights formulation is also inextricably tied to the concept, articulated in the African Charter, of peo-
ples’ rights. Although a long discussion about the concept itself and the controversy it has attracted will not be made
here, this Article will outline its necessity to the duty conception. Like the duty concept, the idea of peoples’ rights
is embodied in the African philosophy which sees men and women primarily as social beings embraced in the body
of the community. It was pointed out during the drafting of the African Charter that individual rights could only be
justified in the context of the rights of the community; consequently the drafters made room in the Charter for peo-
ples’ rights.

The concept was not new in a human rights document. For example, Common Article 1 of the two basic inter-
national human rights covenants makes peoples the subject of rights, a departure from Western notions that human
rights only attach to individuals. There is recognition of the fact that individual rights cannot be realized unless
groups hold collective rights. As clearly noted by Sohn:

One of the main characteristics of humanity is that human beings are social creatures. Consequently, most indi-
viduals belong to various units, groups, and communities; they are simultaneously members of such units as a
family, religious community, social club, trade union, professional association, racial group, people, nation, and
state. It is not surprising, therefore, that international law not only recognizes inalienable rights of individuals,
but also recognizes certain collective rights that are exercised jointly by individuals grouped into larger com-
munities, including peoples and nations. These rights are still human rights; the effective exercise of collective
rights is a precondition to the exercise of other rights, political or economic or both. If a community is not free,
most of its members are also deprived of many important rights.

The African Charter distinguishes human rights from peoples’ or collective rights, but sees them in coopera-
tion, not competition or conflict. The Charter’s preambular paragraph notes this relationship and recognizes “on the
one hand, that fundamental human rights stem from the attributes of human beings, which justifies their national
and international protection and on the other hand, that the reality and respect for peoples rights should necessarily
guarantee human rights.” This unambiguous statement, notes van Boven, is conclusive proof of the Charter’s view:
human rights are inalienable and intrinsic to man individuals and are not in conflict with peoples’ rights, which they
complement. n149 The exercise of sovereignty rights by a “people” or “peoples” as contemplated by the Charter is
a necessary precondition for the enjoyment of individual rights. This dialectic between individual and peoples’
rights is one of the bases for the Charter’s imposition of duties on individuals. Solidarity between the individual and
the greater society safeguards collective rights, without which individual rights would be unattainable.

V. Conclusions

Today Africa is at a cross-roads. Since colonization, when Europe restructured its political map, Africa has lunged
from one crisis to another. Whether it was famine consuming millions, Idi Amin dispatching political opponents

7

8

and innocents with impunity, senseless coups by soldiers who could barely read, the recent Rwandese carnage or
ethnic tensions turned deadly, or corrupt political elites, the list of abominations is simply unbearable. The failure of
the post-colonial state is so pervasive that it has become the rule, not the exception. Needless to say, there are nu-
merous causes for this crisis, perhaps the most important of which is the disfiguration of the continent’s political
identity by the imposition of European forms and values of government and society. Narrow political elites who
barely comprehend the Western notions they eagerly mimic – and who have lost the anchor in their past – remain in
power, but without a rudder. This crisis of cultural identity is Africa’s most serious enemy. But with the end of
colonization and the cold war – the two driving reasons for past European and American interest in Africa – Africans
should re-examine the assumptions underlying the role and purpose of the state and its organization.

This Article is not intended to dismiss concerns about the potential for the misuse of the duty/rights conception
by political elites to achieve narrow, personal ends. However, any notions are subject to abuse by power-hungry
elites. There is no basis for concluding that the duty/rights conception is unique in this respect. While it is true that
the pre-colonial context in which the conception originally worked was small in scale and relatively uncomplicated,
the argument made here is not about magnitudes. Instead, the ideals that can be distilled from the past are the cen-
tral thrust of this argument. Is it possible to introduce in the modern African state grassroots democracy, deepening
it in neighborhood communities and villages in the tradition of the pre-colonial council of elders? Can the family
reclaim its status as the basic organizational political unit in this re-democratization process? Is it possible to create
a state of laws – where elected officials are bound by checks and balances – as in the days of the old where chiefs
were held accountable, at times through destooling? Can the state and the family devise a “social security” system
in which the burden of caring for the aged and the needy can be shared? Is it possible to require individuals to take
responsibility for their actions in matters relating to sexuality, community security, and self-help projects in the
construction of community schools and health centers, utilizing concepts such as harambee, the Kenyan slogan for
pulling together? Child care and rearing, including lighter forms of discipline such as a reprimand, for example,
have always been community affairs in Africa. Could community-based programs be devised and encouraged to
promote the “village-raising” of children? These are the typical questions that the new formulation of human rights
must ask in the context of recreating the African state to legitimize human rights on the continent.

This Article represents a preliminary attempt to begin rethinking Africa’s pre-colonial articulation of human
rights and propose how some of the ideals imbedded in the past could be woven into conceptions of man, society,
and the state in a way that would make the human rights corpus more relevant to Africa today. Senghor stressed the
need for an Afro-centric document which would “assimilate without being assimilated,” but also cautioned against a
charter for the “African Man” only: he emphasized that “mankind is one and indivisible and the basic needs of man
are similar everywhere.” Part of the reason for the failure of the post-colonial state to respect human rights lies in
the seemingly alien character of that corpus. The African Charter’s duty/rights conception is an excellent point of
departure in the reconstruction of a new ethos and the restoration of confidence in the continent’s cultural identity. It
reintroduces values that Africa needs most at this time: commitment, solidarity, respect, and responsibility. More-
over, it also represents a recognition of another reality. Individual rights are collective in their dimension. “Their
recognition, their mode of exercise and their means of protection” is a collective process requiring the intervention
of other individuals, groups, and communities. The past, as the Africans of the old used to say, is part of the living.
It ought to be used to construct a better tomorrow.

SAGE
Los Angeles,
London,
New Delhi,
Singapore,
Washington DC

John Hilary is the executive director of War on Want.

Race & Class
Copyright © 2010 Institute of Race Relations, Vol. 52(2): 79–84
10.1177/0306396810377010 http://rac.sagepub.com

Africa: Dead Aid and the
return of neoliberalism
JOHN HILARY

Abstract: Dambisa Moyo’s 2009 book Dead Aid sought to revive the neoliberal
prescriptions for Africa’s development that were promoted by the World Bank
and the International Monetary Fund during the 1980s and 1990s. This article
argues that implementing such prescriptions would repeat the catastrophic errors
of Africa’s two ‘lost decades’ and that the real alternative to aid dependency lies
not in the free market but in development that is genuinely accountable to local
communities.

Keywords: Dambisa Moyo, International Monetary Fund, neocolonialism, World
Bank

One of the more controversial publishing events of 2009 was the appearance of
Dambisa Moyo’s book Dead Aid.1 Subtitled ‘Why aid is not working and how
there is another way for Africa’, the book rekindled the debate on economic
development in the poorest countries of the global South. Moyo herself has been
heralded as a prophet for the twenty-first century, being included in Time maga-
zine’s hundred most influential people and even breaking into Oprah Winfrey’s
top twenty power list. Yet is she right?

Dead Aid raises a number of critical issues which challenge the comfortable
orthodoxy of overseas development assistance. The book follows in the foot-
steps of Teresa Hayter’s 1971 classic Aid as Imperialism, which exposed the use of
aid as a political weapon wielded by donor countries in their own interests. US

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80 Race & Class 52(2)

presidents had made no secret of this, as in Nixon’s much quoted admission:
‘Let us remember that the main purpose of aid is not to help other nations but to
help ourselves.’ Yet Hayter took the story a stage further by revealing the imma-
nent ideological bias of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF)
at a time when those institutions were still promoted as being ‘above’ the politics
of the cold war. Hayter’s employer, the London-based Overseas Development
Institute, refused to publish her research.2

Moyo recognises the problems of aid dependency. Yet she is unable to situate
the issue within the politics of neocolonialism as understood by African writers,
such as Yash Tandon in his recent essay Ending Aid Dependence, or the African
critics cited in Jonathan Glennie’s The Trouble With Aid.3 Unsurprisingly, there-
fore, Moyo’s policy prescriptions fall far short of what is needed to set the peo-
ples of Africa on a development path free from western domination and control.
For this, Africa would need a radical politics and economics very different from
that envisaged in Dead Aid.

Conditionalities and dependency

The most harmful aspect of aid dependency has been donors’ use of conditionali-
ties to impose their own political and economic ideologies on recipient countries.
Conditions attached to aid in this way have undermined democracy in many
countries, preventing governments from introducing development policies
appropriate to their national situations. As a result of their reliance on loans and
debt relief from bilateral donors and international financial institutions such as
the World Bank and IMF over the past thirty years, many African governments
have devoted themselves to satisfying the interests of the international donor
community without reference to the needs of their own economies and people.
Small wonder that they have failed to prosper.4

In response to widespread criticism of the effect of their conditionalities, the
World Bank and IMF declared at the start of the millennium that they would be
reducing the number of structural conditions in their lending. They also commit-
ted themselves to respecting national ownership of development policies by
drawing any remaining conditionalities from national development plans instead
of imposing them from their own ideological blueprints. Yet the World Bank and
IMF have signally failed to honour these commitments. Internal evaluations and
external studies alike have found that neither the IMF nor the World Bank has
reduced the number of structural conditions as they were supposed to have done,
and that both institutions continue to impose economic policy conditions in
highly sensitive areas without reference to the will of the peoples concerned.5

As well as undermining democracy, the aid conditionalities imposed by the
World Bank and IMF are widely held to have been responsible for the two ‘lost
decades’ of the 1980s and 1990s, in which per capita income levels fell dramati-
cally in countries across Africa. Aid-dependent countries were required to imple-
ment the Washington consensus through free market reforms such as trade

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John Hilary: Africa and Dead Aid 81

liberalisation and privatisation of state-owned enterprises and utilities, despite
the acknowledged damage these policies could cause to their economies and,
especially, to vulnerable sectors of their populations.

War on Want’s recent report Trading Away Our Jobs details the huge losses in
employment and industrial capacity seen across Africa as a result of the trade
liberalisations imposed by the World Bank and IMF. Far from stimulating
growth and development, three in four of the African countries that underwent
such economic restructuring experienced a decline in per capita incomes during
the 1980s.6 UN studies of the world’s poorest nations have shown that those
countries which opened their economies most during the 1990s experienced
significant increases in poverty. Conversely, those countries which managed
their economies more closely in line with national circumstances succeeded in
reducing poverty levels.7

Even the IMF has now admitted that it made serious mistakes in promoting
trade liberalisation in developing countries. An internal evaluation from 2009
concluded that the IMF’s ‘aggressive’ trade conditionality during the 1980s and
1990s ‘went beyond staff’s technical competence’, while the institution’s reliance
on neoliberal dogma, without reference to the specific national circumstances of
each economy, was ‘an insufficient basis for a constructive trade policy dialogue
between country authorities and the IMF’. In the infamous case of the IMF
forcing the government of Ghana to overturn a parliamentary decision to raise
import tariffs on poultry, the internal evaluation found that IMF staff lacked
the necessary background knowledge of the sector and failed to appreciate the
true merits of the case.8

In sharp contrast to almost every other commentator, Moyo does not see the
imposition of these conditionalities as problematic. In her opinion, the condi-
tionalities imposed on African countries by the World Bank and IMF during the
1980s and 1990s ‘made sense’.9 Instead, she locates the problem in the failure of
the governments in the recipient countries of Africa to implement the conditions
expected of them: ‘the point here is that conditionalities were blatantly ignored’.

This also happens to be the standard defence given by the World Bank and IMF
themselves: that if only African nations had been more assiduous in following the
blueprints outlined for them by the international financial institutions, they would
have seen better results. In addition to its spectacular arrogance, the defence does
not square with the facts. Many African countries did indeed undertake the most
far-reaching privatisation and free market experiments, which have resulted in
their economies now being far more liberalised than others. According to the
World Bank’s own trade restrictiveness index, Africa is now more open to agricul-
tural trade than any other region in the world, including Europe and North
America. More worryingly still, Africa is also more open to manufacturing trade
than the countries of South Asia, Latin America and the Middle East. This exposes
its domestic industries to the threat of unequal competition from multinational
companies seeking new markets in which to operate and risks blocking African
countries from climbing the ladder of economic development.10

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82 Race & Class 52(2)

Free market fundamentalism

The central problem of Moyo’s book is reflected in her suggestion for how Africa
can liberate itself from dependency on foreign aid. Moyo claims that only the
free market can offer Africa a sure path to development and enjoins all African
leaders to embark on a crash course of neoliberal economics remarkably similar
to that proposed by the World Bank and IMF in the 1980s and 1990s.

For example, Moyo recommends that African countries embark on a series of
reforms to attract more foreign direct investment as an ‘engine for economic
growth’. The usual list of supposed benefits is provided: foreign investment will
‘create more jobs, assist in the transfer of new technology, help stimulate the
formation of … capital markets, improve management expertise, and aid indig-
enous firms to open up to the international markets’. Yet this wholly fails to
register the problems associated with past foreign investment into Africa, both
in terms of its negative impacts on local peoples and economies, its ‘crowding
out’ of domestic industries and its long-term damage to countries’ overall bal-
ance of payments.11 Similarly, Moyo’s uncritical celebration of Chinese invest-
ment in Africa fails to examine whether it is contributing to local development
or whether it is just another example of African resources being appropriated to
meet another country’s needs.

Moyo also promotes the further integration of African economies into the
global market through an expansion in foreign trade. Again, her enthusiasm
prevents her from recognising the problems facing African countries where loss
of industrial capacity has rendered them wholly uncompetitive on international
markets. Many of the foremost cheerleaders for export orientation have been
forced to reconsider their theories in light of this real world experience. Former
World Bank research director Paul Collier has now admitted, in his much-hyped
book The Bottom Billion, that Africa will not be able to rely on international markets
to trade its way out of poverty: ‘Don’t count on trade to help the bottom billion.
Based on present trends, it seems more likely to lock yet more of the bottom-
billion countries into the natural resource trap than to save them through export
diversification.’12

This admission marks an important corrective to the glib suggestion that poor
countries should just trade their way out of poverty. African countries have
already tried this route via the ‘outwards turn’ of export orientation in the 1980s
and 1990s and they already enjoy unparalleled trading preferences under the
USA’s African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) and the EU’s ‘Everything
But Arms’ initiative – both of which Moyo covers in her book. Despite these
preferences, Africa has seen its already small share of global exports plummet
by a further 70 per cent in recent years.13

Finally, Moyo suggests that African states wean themselves off the conces-
sional lending of the World Bank and IMF and turn instead to borrowing on
international capital markets at rates of interest which are over ten times
higher. While she concedes that this will cause significant financial hardship to
future generations crushed by unsustainable levels of debt, she holds out the

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John Hilary: Africa and Dead Aid 83

consolation that African countries should at least see their credit ratings improve
over time as a result.

Voice and representation

As a result of the economic crisis which has rolled across the world over the past
two years, few serious commentators now share Moyo’s belief in free market
capitalism. The good news is that this may offer Africa a genuine ‘opportunity
for change’, according to the latest report on the world’s least developed coun-
tries, published by the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD).
The crisis has at last ‘exposed the myth of self-regulating markets’, notes
UNCTAD. Turning away from trade liberalisation, monetarism and other articles
of the neoliberal faith, the world’s poorest countries would do better to embrace
the concept of the ‘developmental state’, just as the successful economies of East
Asia did in their day.14

Moyo’s faith in the free market, despite its evident failings in Africa, raises the
broader question of voice and representation. As the book’s foreword and its sup-
porters remind us, Moyo is one of the few black African women economists to
have captured international attention for her views. As such, we are advised that
the programme for change she espouses has a particular claim to authenticity.

The claim is open to question. Moyo was born and raised in Zambia’s
capital Lusaka but her faith in neoliberal economics has been formed during
periods working at the World Bank, Oxford and Harvard Universities, and
then during eight years at the infamous investment bank Goldman Sachs. Her
nomination for Time magazine’s list of the hundred most influential people
came from none other than Paul Wolfowitz, former World Bank president
(until his departure under a cloud of scandal) and one-time joint architect of
the US invasion of Iraq.
The issue of representation and democratic authenticity is one which engages
all of us who work in partnership with civil society groups in Africa and
elsewhere. War on Want works with social movements, trade unions, workers’
associations, landless people’s movements, peasant movements and resis-
tance groups across the world in an attempt to support genuinely democratic
forces for progressive change. We expend considerable time and effort ensur-
ing that our contacts are situated within and accountable to the movements
they represent.
None of these groups are under the illusion that Moyo’s free market fundamen-
talism will bring them the change they need. Instead, they hold to a vision of the
future which guarantees them freedom not only from aid dependency but also
from the dictatorship of capital. Neocolonialism is as present in the politics of
the free market as it is in the aid conditionalities of the World Bank and IMF. As
David Harvey puts it in The New Imperialism: ‘Free trade and open capital mar-
kets have become primary means through which to advantage the monopoly
powers based in the advanced capitalist countries that already dominate trade,
production, services, and finance within the capitalist world.’15

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84 Race & Class 52(2)

Africa was forced to embrace the neoliberal economics of the Washington
consensus and suffered two ‘lost decades’ of development as a result. Moyo’s
blueprint for Africa would plunge the continent back into the dark days of the
1980s and 1990s, fulfilling George Santayana’s dictum that, ‘Those who can-
not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.’ For all Moyo’s celebrity
status, Dead Aid should not convince the people of Africa to make the same
mistake twice.

References
1 Dambisa Moyo, Dead Aid: Why aid is not working and how there is another way for Africa (London,

Penguin, 2009).
2 It was eventually published as a Pelican paperback: Teresa Hayter, Aid as Imperialism

(Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1971). President J. F. Kennedy was equally candid over the pur-
pose of US aid, describing it as ‘a method by which the United States maintains a position of
influence and control around the world and sustains a good many countries which would defi-
nitely collapse or pass into the Communist bloc’. See also Graham Hancock, Lords of Poverty:
the freewheeling lifestyles, power, prestige and corruption of the multibillion dollar aid business
(London, Mandarin Books, 1991).

3 Yash Tandon, Ending Aid Dependence (Cape Town, Dakar and Nairobi, Fahamu Books, 2008);
Jonathan Glennie, The Trouble With Aid: why less could mean more for Africa (London, Zed Books,
2008).

4 SAPRIN, Structural Adjustment: the policy roots of economic crisis, poverty and inequality (London,
Zed Books, 2004); Arun Kundnani, The End of Tolerance: racism in 21st century Britain (London,
Pluto Press, 2007); Tandon, Ending Aid Dependence, op. cit.

5 IMF Independent Evaluation Office, Structural Conditionality in IMF-Supported Programs
(Washington, DC, International Monetary Fund, 2008); Nuria Molina and Javier Pereira,
Critical Conditions: the IMF maintains its grip on low-income countries (Brussels, Eurodad, 2008);
Untying the Knots: how the World Bank is failing to deliver real change on conditionality (Brussels,
Eurodad, 2007).

6 Graham Hobbs and David Tucker, Trading Away Our Jobs: how free trade threatens employment
around the world (London, War on Want, 2009).

7 John Hilary, ‘Trade liberalization, poverty and the WTO: assessing the realities’, in Homi
Katrak and Roger Strange, eds, The WTO and Developing Countries (London, Palgrave
Macmillan, 2004), pp. 38–62.

8 IMF Independent Evaluation Office, IMF Involvement in International Trade Policy Issues
(Washington, DC, International Monetary Fund, 2009); IMF Involvement in Trade Policy Issues in
Low-Income Countries: seven case studies (Washington, DC, International Monetary Fund, 2009),
section E.

9 Moyo, Dead Aid, op. cit., p. 39.
10 Ha-Joon Chang, Kicking Away the Ladder: development strategy in historical perspective (London,

Anthem Press, 2002).
11 David Woodward, The Next Crisis? Direct and equity investment in developing countries (London,

Zed Books, 2001); Tandon, op. cit.
12 Paul Collier, The Bottom Billion: why the poorest countries are failing and what can be done about it

(Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2008).
13 See also Robert Calderisi, The Trouble With Africa: why foreign aid isn’t working (London, Yale

University Press, 2006).
14 UNCTAD, The State and Development Governance: the least developed countries report 2009 (Geneva

and New York, UNCTAD, 2009).
15 David Harvey, The New Imperialism (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2003).

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