I
Robert Chambers (1983: 10-12) dubbed as development tourism the scurrying of rural development practitioners in, about, and out of the countryside in “fact-finding” trips, much in the fashion of a very interested sight-seer. Trips are undertaken, questions asked, observations made, all defining that touristic gradient between the traveler’s “first impressions” and the consultant’s preliminary conclusions.
André Gide unwittingly provides us an excellent instance of consequences. To read the journal he kept when he served as a special envoy in 1925-26 to the French Colonial Ministry in the Congo is to see the travel diarist anachronistically as consultant, dispensing advice to field administrators and others on how affairs should be run across tracts of Africa. Gide’s companion on the tour had occasion to use a local interpreter to find out why a group of children were being mistreated. A local (“first class”) guard, who had overheard the translation, promptly threw the interpreter into prison. When they learned of this, Gide and his companion made strong inquiries and protestations, locally and to the acting French administrator, M. Martin.
Finally, after two days of effort:
The whole thing is now perfectly clear. In the absence of the sergeant, who left ten days ago to accompany the administrator, the “first class” guard had abused his powers, practised forcible recruiting . . . . We gave a full account of everything to Martin and put in such a way that it will be hardly possible for him not to intervene. It is inadmissible that he should protect and encourage such abuses, if only by shutting his eyes to them. If nothing reprehensible had been going on, the guard would not have taken such precautions to conceal it. (1962: 152)
So the tale ends, minus however the most important piece of information: What happened to the interpreter once Gide and his party left? So too similar questions are asked of rural development consultants and advisors who, at the end of their contracts, have walked away from their interventions.
II
Officially produced plans and project proposals also read like travel brochures, advertising this or that rural haven to be had, somewhere or sometime. The only place where crop yields double, where the rate of return is 50% plus, and where a project operates as planned is on paper, in the original proposal. As Reg Green (1983) long ago put it about a once-famous Lagos Plan, it “is rather like a travel guide which sketches the destinations in fairly understandable (and attractive) terms, indicates a few of the intermediate resting places and road signs but, far from providing a highway map, does not even tell us how to get out of town”.
Like the diarist, the development tourist is caught up in the hunt and peck of the datum that best sums up what’s going on. They search for the journalist’s opening vignette and for the statistic that “says it all”. Allegory displaces analysis, as the eroded hillock symbolizes government indifference to desertification. For our travelers, this is less a place for making a personal future than an entrepot to be inventoried, a moment to be recorded, where a visit is always enough to see the writing on the wall.
III
So what?
The lesson I’ve taken away from development tourism–and from the other work of Robert Chambers–is that we must look at these “problems” differently and indeed we are able to do that. The legend on the development tourist’s map has been about as useful in describing what is on the ground as were the 1960s potboilers of Ruark and Monsarrat in describing the far more complex Kenya and Botswana, even then and now ahead.
Sources.
Robert Chambers (1983). Rural Development: Putting the First Last. London. Longman.
André Gide (1962). Travels in the Congo. Berkeley, CA: California University Press.
Reg Greene (1983). Paper presented at the Conference on Development Options for Africa in the 1980’s and Beyond, organized by the Society for International Development, Kenya Chapter, Nairobi. (March 1983).
Nicholas Monsarrat (1968). Richer Than All His Tribe. London: Cassell.
Robert Ruark (1962). Uhuru, A Novel of Africa Today [sic]. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.
WHEN COMPLEX IS AS SIMPLE AS IT GETS 