Posts Tagged ‘bhagwati’

Okay, this really annoys me:

[Debates about foreign aid] have largely been the province of Western intellectuals and economists, with Africans in the developing world being passive objects in the exercise — just as the 1980s debate over the United States’ Japan fixation, and the consequent Japan bashing, occurred among Americans while the Japanese themselves stood by silently. Yet now the African silence has been broken by Dambisa Moyo, a young Zambian-born economist with impeccable credentials. [Emphasis added.]

That’s the well-respected and influential development economist Jagdish Bhagwati writing in Foreign Affairs. The article is a review of Dambisa Moyo’s book from last year, Dead Aid, and does a fine job of covering the history of foreign aid, but that assumption, that Africans have been “passive objects” in the debates surrounding development, charity and foreign aid is absolutely absurd.

I don’t claim to be a great Africanist – my time on the continent is limited to a few months, but that alone is enough to know that Africans are not the narrow-minded, unaware objects of a debate carried out only in Western marble-lined hallways. From African intellectuals, of which there are many, to middle-class students, the Africans I know have nuanced, defensible views and opinions on the issues about which Professor Bhagwati gets paid to write and teach.

The views of these Africans didn’t just pop-up liked daisies when Ms. Moyo published her book; they’ve been there for decades. The problem, I fear, is that it took a Westernized, PR-savvy Zambian woman to shake the Bhagwatis and Sachs of the world into paying attention. It also couldn’t hurt that she’s very pretty, right?

If this seems like a small point, and, I dunno, maybe it is, consider it a good excuse to listen to the great Senegalese musician Youssou N’Dour and his song, Wake Up, which makes similar points.