In a 2006 op-ed, Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie wrote:
“If I were not African, I wonder whether it would be clear to me that Africa is a place where the people do not need limp gifts of fish but sturdy fishing rods and fair access to the pond. I wonder whether I would realize that while African nations have a failure of leadership, they also have dynamic people with agency and voices.”
Throughout our seminar, we have often talked about the West’s image of Africa. Beginning our course with Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad and The White Man’s Burden by Rudyard Kipling, we observed the tendency of foreigners aiming to “save” or “develop” Africa.
The coastline of Zanzibar
We cannot talk about development without using the word “agency.” To have agency means to be free to choose what you want to make of your life. Agency refers to the capacity of individuals to act independently and to make their own free choices. Are we making history or is history making us? Are we shaping the world or are we being shaped by the world? Development is not something you simply give to people. People must learn development, and develop on their own terms in their own ways. You can can give people the means to develop, but ultimately people need to develop on their own. In vague terms, development is “promoting advance.” Development is about taking your destiny in your own hands; it is the opposite of exploitation, oppression, and dependency.
A church in the historic town of Bagamoyo
Unfortunately, many countries in Africa have long been deprived of their agency and therefore development. Slavery was detrimental to Africa’s development as it robbed Africa of its useful labor force. And with colonialism, Europe assumed the moral authority to civilize those that were not modern. However colonialism did not lead to development, precisely because colonial powers never intended to transfer agency or have Africans in control. After independence in 1961, Tanzania also struggled to secure agency and development as the socialist government was authoritarian and highly centralized, controlling the media, establishing a single-party system, etc. And finally, with neoliberalization beginning in the 1980s, African countries were forced to accept conditions stipulated by Western powers, the IMF, and the World Bank. And today, aid is attached with many conditionalities and African resources are often controlled by multinational companies or local elites, not the African people. Going forward, I think agency is essential for development. As makers of their own destiny, Tanzanians are more than capable of taking their country in their own hands.
Group picture on the safari