By ๐๐ซ. ๐๐๐ง๐ฌ๐๐ง๐ ๐๐๐๐ซ๐ข๐
(A Review Essay on Ian Smillie, Under Development: A Journey Without Maps (London: Practical Action Publishing, 2024), 274 pages.
At the beginning of this absorbing and insightful memoir, Ian Smillie says of โdevelopmentโ that it is โan imprecise and much abused word whose meaning will, I hope, become clear as the clouds unfold.โ But this is a retrospective judgment. Mr. Smillie was himself quite clear about its meaning when, just out of university, he started out some 55 years ago as a very young Canadian volunteer schoolteacher in rural Sierra Leone. This was in 1967. Sierra Leone had gained independence from Britain six years earlier. Its needs were immense. In Kono, the last of the frontiers of colonial penetration (opening up only after diamonds were discovered there in 1930, to be followed by a chaotic rush of speculators, heavy-footed colonial police, Lebanese smugglers, and illicit โ sometimes โ violent diggers.) The building of schools and other social services was scarcely considered. Mr. Smillie had offered himself, through Canadian University Service Overseas (CUSO), to teach at the first secondary school in Koidu town started a few years earlier by a 30-year-old Englishman named T.C. Bartlam. It was a heroic threadbare affair, but with the infusion of foreign volunteer teachers โ there were also a few from the Peace Corps, and only two Sierra Leoneans โ it thrived, producing bright students who later went on to become teachers (out of admiration for the volunteers) and other professionals.
Diffident, concerned only with teaching school and making himself at home far away from home, Mr. Smillie at this point did not think of himself as a development worker, still less as a development specialist or professional. But development work was exactly what he was doing. Development then had a limited and useful meaning. It was the decade of independence in Africa, and most of the emerging countries had few university graduates or trained professionals. The newly-built schools were dependent on foreign volunteer teachers, and the government, Mr. Smillie notes, was eager to expand such facilities as quickly as possible โ relying, of course, on those outsiders. CUSO was established in 1961, a year after President John F. Kennedy founded the Peace Corps, to respond to such needs. The great handicap to building new schools and opening new clinics and staffing agricultural extension services and even government departments, Mr. Smillie writes, was โthe simple lack of trained peopleโ. Development meant making available those trained personnel, funded by their overseas government. This was foreign aid, pure and simple. The success of that program can be measured a posteriori: none of these countries now need foreign teachers; indeed, the challenge is to provide jobs for the teachers they have trained. Those countries, however, had other pressing needs.
Mr. Smillie borrows the title of Graham Greeneโs classic travel book, Journey Without Maps (first published in 1936), to add to his bookโs main title, Under Development. But Greene, already a successful novelist at 31 when he undertook his Liberian trek, was far better prepared before he left London for West Africa in 1934. Officials of the Anti-Slavery Society had furnished him with the League of Nationsโ extensive report on Liberia, as well a damning report by the British Consul General on conditions in the country, including the brutal campaigns by the Liberian government against the Kru. Greene also did have maps, though they were more fanciful than Ptolemyโs: on one of them, American, the word โCannibalโ was boldly scrawled. He also had his pretty cousin and dozens of carriers and many cases of whisky in his company. Smillie, only 22, had only his McGill university degree, his experience as a boy scout, and a snake bite kit; though no teetotal, he didnโt even pack a single bottle of whisky in his luggage (which he laments.) Still, he had read the pioneering work of Barbara Ward, The Rich Nations and the Poor Nations, after hearing it praised by US President Lyndon Johnson. In it, Mr. Smillie learnt a lot about poverty and global inequality, and even more about the obligations of rich nations to help the poor out of their dereliction. But Ward told him nothing about Sierra Leone as a country. Mr. Bartlam the teacher at the Kono school, was more helpful, though Smillie realized this only later: โWe donโt have electricity or running water,โ he wrote to Smillie before he left Canada, โso if thatโs a problem donโt come.โ When he got the aerogram, Mr. Smillie thought that the situation would be only a passing inconvenience; in fact, this was an aspect of the underdevelopment he had to endure for his entire stay at Kono.
At the airport in Accra, Ghana, on his way to Freetown, a group of the previous yearโs volunteers shouted at his batch, โYou will be sorry.โ โI was already sorry,โ Mr. Smillie writes, โbut not half as sorry as when we arrived at Legon Universityโฆand were given a dinner of fish bones in tabasco sauce, and with water of unknown and probably life-threatening provenance.โ Malarial mosquitos that night โreprised the Battle of Britain.โ When he got to Sierra Leone, he was taken by a small-gauge train from Freetown to Kenema, and then packed into an overcrowded โcomfort busโ โ doubtless so named because it lacked precisely that quality โ which took seven to eight hours to โtraverse 130 tortuous kilometres through thick jungle on a road that alternated between broken rocks and long stretches of laterite mud so deep the passengers had to disembark twice to push the bus out of it.โ
At this point, Mr. Smillie was convinced that he had embarked on a journey without maps, though, despite his adoration of Graham Greene, the writerโs Liberian travelogue was not one of the books he had packed in his knapsack. Churchill was his favourite then, hence his reference to the Battle of Britain; a quote from Churchill was a profound inspiration: โWhat is the use of living, if it be not to strive for noble causes and to make this muddled world a better place for those who will live in it after we are gone.โ The high-mindedness is not affected; I have known Mr. Smillie for 25 years and can testify to the purity of his commitment and dedication.
The need for development in Africa, Asia and Latin America, was clear: it was the need for good roads, decent housing, food, proper hygiene and sanitation, transportation and everything that supports modern standards of living: the lack of them was underdevelopment. African and Asian and Latin American states simply did not have the wherewithal to provide those things. Assisting them to do so was foreign aid โ helping those countries develop. Today, terms like โdevelopmentโ and โunderdevelopmentโ are being frowned upon in some quarters: there is a preference now for โhigh-incomeโ and โlow-incomeโ countries, though what these terms really mean is unclear. (There are countries in Africa with high GDP but are still underdeveloped.)
Memorable events happened while Mr. Smillie was in Sierra Leoneโs capital, Freetown: a coup, a countercoup, and the reestablishment of constitutional rule with the elevation of Siaka Stevens, who turned out to be the disaster that would destroy that democracy and reverse much of the gains the country had made. It is part of the charm and merit of Mr. Smillieโs account that, reflecting his lack of political perspective or consciousness as a youthful provincial schoolteacher, he writes about these events as distant and irrelevant rumours. Only after Mr. Smillieโs visit to Freetown and his mistaken arrest as a โmercenaryโ did he begin to understand the implications of the disturbances.
This experience, it turned out, was merely for practice: after Mr. Smillie was next posted to Nigeria, he encountered a full-blown civil war, following a bloody coup and ethnic massacres that was seen by many as an incipient genocide. But Nigeria is a much larger country; and posted to its northern half, with frequent visits to the west of the country โ both of them unaffected by the fighting โ Mr Smillieโs understanding of the great events happen slowly, almost by accretion based upon his involvement in relief activities and his direct contact with refugees fleeing the fighting and some of the leading players. In Ibadan, the largest city in western Nigeria, he meets with Colonel Olusegun Obasanjo, who would lead the Nigerian forces to victory over the secessionist Biafraโs, and with the writer Wole Soyinka, who got Mr. Smillie a cameo role in Kongiโs Harvest, his celebrated play that was made into a film by the pioneering African American filmmaker Ossie Davies.
His account of Nigeria suggests the development of some kind of political anxiety, centred around the role of emergency assistance or aid, and on larger issues involving foreign involvement in poor countries. The process is slow and understated, but discernible โ again, attesting to the integrity of Mr. Smillieโs faithful record. He describes the massive relief efforts mounted for Biafra and Western governments as โan act of profound follyโ that helped prolong the doomed Biafra war effort and may have contributed to the death of at least 180,000 people in that rebel country. Worse, it was based upon a completely false, even misleading, supposition, that the Nigerian forces fighting to subjugate Biafra were genocidal and meant to wipe out the Igbo people. At the height of that war, the famous British scholar Margery Perham, who had been an outspoken critic of the Nigerian military, voiced a similar sentiment in a broadcast to Biafra; but with the rebel state defended by such luminaries as Chinua Achebe and their eloquent, but profoundly roguish leader, Chukwuemeka Ojukwu, the obvious fact that Biafra could not be saved and that the wobbly Nigerian federation was anything but genocidal, was ignored by enthusiastic do-gooders.
The tragedy of Bangladesh, to which Mr. Smillieโs new much richer employer, Cooperation for American Relief Everywhere, CARE, posted him to manage a housing construction project, proved even more daunting. This was in 1972. The country, desperately poor and unwieldy, had recently emerged from a brutal civil war which secured its independence but devastated it, killing around one million. Here, unlike West Africa, โhunger was omnipresent, and homeless, wraith-like adults and children crowded the sidewalkโฆand people died because kerosine had been added to cooking oil and sugar had been cut with urea.โ CAREโs Delta Housing Project was based on upon a seductive idea: with $6.4 million at hand, it aimed to construct 15,000 solid houses towards which the recipient would provide the labour and a small down payment, and would continue to make small monthly payments over a 10-year period which would go to a co-op that would then provide loans for agriculture and fishing equipment, so that the project could โform the basis of a revolving loan for productive purposes.โ The technology, Mr. Smillie writes, โwas appropriate and the concept was brilliantโ โ a variation on this idea, which later captures Mr. Smillieโs interest in Ghana and elsewhere, was โintermediate technologyโ. But Bangladesh was a nation of 75 million people, over 90% of whom lived in poor dwellings; and building 15,000 cyclone-resistant housing for the lucky few who had never lived in anything but shacks, and who could barely afford to make the small monthly payments, was a grand risible idea. The housing project was a flop, an immense waste of resources, leading Mr. Smillie to reflect upon the โhubris, and the unfailing ability of outsiders to think that their disconnected idea, their special unique invention, their special philosophy will somehow make a positive rather than negative difference.โ
No doubt it was on account of the failure that Mr. Smillie developed a strong admiration for the work of the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee, BRAC, an indigenous undertaking established by Fazle Hasan Abed, who emerges from these pages as the only true hero of development innovation. BRAC began by building, and running, small rural schools in Bangladesh, and has now developed into a huge international NGO with branches in East Africa, Liberia and Sierra Leone. Its micro-lending project alone in Bangladesh, Mr. Smillie writes, โtops a billion dollars a yearโ, and it lends half a billion in other developing countries. The work of BRAC has drawn Mr. Smillie to Bangladesh again and again, and, at the suggestion of Mr. Abed, who became a friend, he wrote an admiring book on it: his deeply thoughtful and appreciative tribute to Mr. Abed in this book is a testament of his enduring respect for the pioneering Bangladeshi.
In the course of duty, so to speak, on a plane to Toronto from one of his work trips Mr. Smillie finds love โ a Jamaican woman who worked for the Commonwealth โ and shortly after got married. Mr. Smillie becomes a father; the marriage lasted for a decade. His account of this relationship, particularly his time spent with his son and grandchildren, are the most moving, and the only sentimental parts, of this memoir: it is a yearning after the domesticity that an interesting peripatetic life never allowed Mr. Smillie to endure for long. The book is dedicated to his son and grandchildren: they are, he tells us, the reason why he wrote it.
Mr. Smillieโs work took him almost everywhere in the developing world, to Pakistan, Kenya, Ghana, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Guyana, the Caribbean, often on short-term assignments. This was partly the result of marital life, which also gave him the time to reflect, in books, on various aspects of development he saw critical to breaking the poverty trap in those countries. The Land of Lost Content: A History of CUSO (1985) was a study of his first employer, CUSO. A year later, he published No Condition Permanent: Pump Priming Ghanaโs Industrial Revolution (1986), which grew out of Mr. Smillieโs interest in intermediate technology, a sentiment that developed from the ideas of Fritz Schumacher, an economist and philosopher. It became an influential force in the 1960s following the establishment of the Intermediate Technology Development Group (ITDG), now called Practical Action (the publisher of this book) in Britain. Mr. Smillie had become convinced that without a capacity for light engineering and productive enterprise, development would remain illusory. He revisited the issue five years later in Mastering the Machine; Poverty, Aid and Technology, published in 1991.
Intermediate technology was most extensively tried in India, drawing the ire of the dyspeptic VS Naipaul, who in 1976 described it as a cult centering around the bullock cart: โThe bullock cart is not to be eliminated; after 3,000 or more backward years Indian intermediate technology will now improve the bullock cart.โ Naipaul believed that the idea, flowing from romantic doubts of people in the developed world about the industrialization which they continued to cherish and rely on, was meant to perpetuate Indian backwardness: โShouldnโt intermediate technology be concentrating on that harmless little engine capable of the short journeys bullock carts usually make?โ
In Mr. Smillieโs more knowledgeable and sympathetic account, which focuses on the Suame Magazine in Kumasi, Ghana, the idea is far more attractive, though the result was none the happier. Suame Magazine, then and now, is one of the biggest open-air informal industrial areas in the world, with around 40,00 workers (when I visited there in 2006 while living in Ghana, I was told that employees there numbered over 150,000, but this might have been exaggeration due to local vanity). Mr. Smillie gives considerable space to Suame Magazine, laying out its foundational idea, driven by John Powell, a young British mechanical engineer, carefully. By the early 1980s, the Ghanaian economy had collapsed: it was no longer able to import spare parts and simple tools. Dr. Powell set to work with his team, to produce glue, dehydration equipment for cattle feed, bread-making equipment, a broad loom for weavers โ all an aspect of intermediate technology. The effort was rudimentary. A large part of the undertaking at Suame was vehicle repairs; there was no manufacturing. โThere were two basic problems,โ Mr. Smillie writes. โThe first was about machines. Although there were lathe operators in Suame, there were no milling machines. This halted the project before it started.โ Dr. Powell was undaunted. He โidentified four stages of technology in moving from a culture of repair to one of making things. The first and most basic stage is characterised by the use of hand tools designed without reliance on scientific principle. In the fourth, scientifically designed automatic machinery is not only in use, it can be locally developed or adapted. Although much of Africa was in stage one, governments, donors and multinational investors focused on jumping straight to four.โ Predictably, the result of Dr. Powellโs experiment was โa parody of stage fourโ. Nothing was developed indigenously; and at Suame, iron casting, which is the primary basis of manufacturing, was unknown until it was developed much later โ perhaps the most significant outcome of Mr. Powellโs effort, though this โwas almost a backyard technology in Asiaโ.
I do not know why I kept thinking about Jonathan Swiftโs โAcademy of Projectors,โ whose objective is to change the direction of all โarts, sciences, languages and mechanicsโ at Munodi in Gulliverโs Travels, as I read about Dr. Powellโs determination to fast-track the industrial revolution at Suame. It must be because he reminded so much of the foreign professor at the Swiftโs academy who boasted of โimproving speculative knowledge, by practical and mechanical operations.โ Everyone, Gulliver muses, โknew how laborious the usual method is of attaining to arts and sciences; whereas, by his contrivance, the most ignorant person, at a reasonable charge, and with a little bodily labour, might write books in philosophy, poetry, politics, laws, mathematics, and theology, without the least assistance from genius or study.โ
Towards the end of the book, Mr. Smillie, now a grizzled veteran, returns to Sierra Leone. It was not a happy moment. A brutal bush war, starting in 1991, had devastated the country; Kono, the diamond-rich district that provided Mr. Smillieโs first home in Africa, had become the epicentre of the conflict by the time Mr. Smillie visited in 1995; the school Mr. Bartlam built had been destroyed. The issue was no longer โdevelopmentโ; it was ending the war. Working with others โ including this writer โ Mr. Smillie embarked upon an inquiry to understand the forces driving the war. Predatory diamond hunters and gunrunners were identified as the extremely destructive forces; a foreign dictator, President Charles Taylor of Liberia, was the magnet drawing them in and reaping the spoils. Mr. Smillieโs effort contributed massively to two important developments, which helped end the war and eased the peacebuilding process: sanctions on Taylorโs Liberia and the creation of the Kimberley Process. The United Nations intervened with massive force, helping to disarm thousands of combatants and extending the writ of state once terrorised by the Revolutionary United Front rebels. The UN and Sierra Leone created a special war crimes court to try those bearing the greatest responsibility for the war and its atrocities, including Mr. Taylor, who was tried and convicted. Mr. Smillie had made an effective opening case in the court against Taylor, a triumphant moment โ and Sierra Leoneโs president, Ahmad Tejan Kabbah, wrote him and his colleagues at the forefront of the campaign against conflict diamonds recognizing their โcrucial role…in Sierra Leoneโs traumatic peace process.โ A US Senator and two congressmen nominated Partnership Africa Canada, through which Mr. Smillie coordinated the campaign, and Global Witness, a British NGO which had first raised the issue of conflict diamonds, for the Nobel Peace Prize, a triumphant bookend to a grueling campaign.
No one can argue, Mr. Smillie has written elsewhere โ in response to veteran foreign aid sceptic William Easterly โ that poverty โisnโt a staging ground for all manner of trouble with broad international implications: health pandemics, environmental degradation, refugees. And in societies where people are hungry, someโangry young men mostlyโare prone to join groups fighting against perceived oppressors.โ He then mentioned as an example the lesson from the fate of โthe Bourbons and the Romanovsโฆ as they toppled into their graves.โ A more accurate historical reference would have been a more recent one, the one Mr. Smillie is most familiar with: Sierra Leone.
But does aid actually work to reduce or eliminate poverty and to facilitate development? Mr. Smillieโs reflection on this issue in the chapter entitled โThe Obsessive Measurement Disorderโ is the best case for foreign assistance I have read; it should be circulated widely. He had earlier referred to the work of Barbara Ward, who in the 1960s had called for a New Marshall Plan and rejecting โpatchy developmentโ assistance as insufficient for sustained growth. Ward suggested that rich countries devote one percent of their national income to assist poor countries, noting that if they persisted in โtheir parochial self-interest,โ the world was heading โnot simply towards great disappointments, but towards disaster and tragedy as well.โ A similar case was made more forcefully by a World Bank report authored by former Canadian Prime Minister Lester Pearson, Partners in Development, published in 1969. The report emphasized funding for universal primary education, support for health sectors and nutrition, importance of increased global food production, and deplored the debt burden on poor countries. It advocated trade liberalization, which โimplies a willingness on the part of the industrialised countries to make the structural adjustments which will enable them to absorb an increasing range of manufactures and semi-manufactures from developing countries.โ However, Smillie lamented, โthe polar oppositeโ was what came to pass: โa requirement that developing countries open their economies to the manufacturesโ of the rich industrialised world, โwhile swallowing medicine that weakened their abilities to invest in the education, health, infrastructure, and research required for competition in the global economy.โ The response to underdevelopment, he writes, โis not one thingโ: it should include aid, foreign direct investment, trade, access to markets good government. (Mr. Smillie has elsewhere agreeably dismissed as โdiatribeโ and โill-conceived rantโ Dambisa Moyoโs Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa (2009), whose leggy answer to poverty โat every turn was free market enterpriseโtrade, foreign investment, microfinance,โ as though none of this has been tried before.)
Mr. Smillie notes that most of the money earmarked by the rich world for development does not leave those countries: for example, money for refugee resettlement in the West, a sizable chunk, is listed as foreign aid. None of the major economies has come close to meeting Barbara Wardโs recommendation to devote one percent of their national income to assist poor countries. So, in response to the question โdoes aid work,โ Mr. Smillie writes, โa partial answer has to be: how would anyone know? There has been so little of it, and so much has been confused with other things that any serious attribution is impossible.โ Nor is the headline grabbing issue of remittances of much help: of $501 billion recorded as remittances in 2019, he writes, only 4.3% went to least developed countries. Remittances are no substitute for aid, because they often merely function as long-distance welfare payment to family members for their upkeep: they do not build clinics and schools.
I am writing this in the wake of the announcement by the Trump administration that it was axing USAID (United States Agency for International Development), a giant in the international assistance and development effort. Elon Musk, his multibillionaire hatchet man, then gleefully announced the cutting off of several million dollars in vital assistance to Liberia, one of the worldโs poorest countries โ singled out, his fans added, because most Americans would not place it on a map. No matter that Liberia in its modern form was created by Americans, or that degrading USAID spells an accelerated death sentence for millions of poor people and the rapid spread of HIV Aids. In retirement, Mr. Smillie must view this development more in sadness than in anger โ particularly as Mr. Trump has also vowed to end the sovereignty of his beloved Canada, a throwback to ideas of a different century.
๐๐ซ. ๐๐๐ง๐ฌ๐๐ง๐ ๐๐๐๐ซ๐ข๐ ๐ข๐ฌ ๐๐ข๐๐ซ๐ซ๐ ๐๐๐จ๐ง๐โ๐ฌ ๐๐ฆ๐๐๐ฌ๐ฌ๐๐๐จ๐ซ ๐ญ๐จ ๐๐ฐ๐ข๐ญ๐ณ๐๐ซ๐ฅ๐๐ง๐ ๐๐ง๐ ๐๐๐ซ๐ฆ๐๐ง๐๐ง๐ญ ๐๐๐ฉ๐ซ๐๐ฌ๐๐ง๐ญ๐๐ญ๐ข๐ฏ๐ ๐ญ๐จ ๐ญ๐ก๐ ๐๐ ๐๐๐๐ข๐๐ ๐ข๐ง ๐๐๐ง๐๐ฏ๐.
