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- Convenors:
-
Jonathan Jackson
(University of Cologne)
Mads Petry Yding (University of Oxford)
Send message to Convenors
- Chairs:
-
Jonathan Jackson
(University of Cologne)
Mads Petry Yding (University of Oxford)
- Discussants:
-
Maxmillian Chuhila
(University of Dar Es Salaam )
David Anderson (University of Warwick)
- Format:
- Panel
- Streams:
- History (x) Futures (y)
- Location:
- Philosophikum, S63
- Sessions:
- Thursday 1 June, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Berlin
Short Abstract:
This panel takes up the idea of 'past futuresʼ to explore how historians might approach a historiography of 'future makingʼ in the context of development histories, and in ways that offer new perspectives on the past, insights into the present, and lessons for the future.
Long Abstract:
Studies of 'futuresʼ often begin from the present. But historian Reinhart Koselleck rightly connected notions of 'a chronological past, a lived present that was once an anticipated future, and expectations of the future - such that any given present is at the same time a "former" future.ʼ This panel takes up this idea of 'formerʼ or 'past futuresʼ to explore how historians might approach a historiography of 'future makingʼ in the context of development histories, and in ways that offer new perspectives on the past, insights into the present, and lessons for the future. Through this lens, development planning in Africa is viewed as a principal form of 'future makingʼ in its design for alternative futures expressed through plans and possibilities, potential and promise. Throughout the 20th century - from the colonial civilising mission to structural adjustment programs - the outside push to 'developʼ African societies resulted in a profusion of visions. However, these were largely futures imposed from above and, as such, development schemes and projects occupy a deeply contested terrain where local practices frequently collided with colonial and post-colonial management regimes, imposed schemes and development initiatives, thus spurring local adaptation, resilience, and conflict. This panel presents new findings and discusses novel historical methodologies as it takes up cases of 'future-makingʼ from Africa, to consider themes such as natural resource extraction and governance, health policies and provisions, notions of secessionism and independent futures, and plans to implement large-scale infrastructures with far-reaching ramifications for local populations, livelihoods, and environments.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 1 June, 2023, -Paper short abstract:
What's the best way to view visions of the future from the past? Are development plans merely a form of ‘future making’ for which ‘the present is by definition insufficient’ while the futures proposed are endlessly deferred? Is the notion of 'past futures' a useful methodological approach?
Paper long abstract:
If visions of the future can be discerned from the present, how might they be viewed in the past? These ‘past futures’ may also be evaluated for their potential in terms of possibility, probability, and preferability—except the key point, of course, is that their outcomes are largely known with the passage of time. This is most apparent when a particular vision is expected to materialise within a set period of time, such as through innumerable ‘X-Year Plans’ for economic and social development. As a form of ‘future making’ these—to borrow from art critic John Berger—are a form of publicity for which ‘the present is by definition insufficient’ and its rhetoric ‘speaks in the future tense and yet the achievement of this future is endlessly deferred.’ How, then, might historians write histories of development framed by ‘futures’ thinking? As Ged Martin has noted, ‘the inconvenient problem that the future is unknowable does not excuse historians from exploring the influence of perceived or imagined past futures upon the shaping of the decisions that constitute the building blocks of history.’ But to what extent is this a useful approach? What are the challenges and limitations? What, too, are the opportunities and potential for this new lens through which to view the past? This paper seeks to develop a discussion on these themes and reflect on the methodological, conceptual, and practical applications of viewing ‘development’ as a ‘future making’ practice.
Paper short abstract:
This paper deals with the development schemes involving oil palm in Dahomey/Bénin in the 1960s and 1970s, with a particular focus on the social outcomes originally envisioned by the plans and the real transformations they actually brought about.
Paper long abstract:
Oil palm development in newly-independent Dahomey foresaw the creation of standardized huge plantations along with high-capacity oil mills. The plantations were forcedly created by the state on a given perimeter, and run by so-called compulsory cooperatives, made of former landowners and of external workers. Not only did the cooperatives change the existing property regime and forms of labour, but also the peasants’ life and the landscape around them.
The first section of my paper accounts for the various prescriptions that Dahomean and European sociologists suggested, highlighting how they were similarly aimed at creating “new peasants”. The second one delves into the concrete social outcomes of the schemes. The social dimension of the projects (involving education and health) was only partially realized due to “donors’” resistance. Furthermore, apposite courses for women were launched, mostly aimed at getting them used to take care of their homes. Nonetheless, women themselves were able to influence the project, attending only the courses they preferred, such as those on agricultural production. Similarly, the cooperatives, although being aimed at contrasting certain dynamics of Dahomean rural context like farmers’ proletarianization, eventually reinforced them.
In the last section I will argue that the projects were abandoned in the late 1970s not because of what happened at the grassroots, but because Beninese palm oil exports could not be maintained without reducing the profits of the parastatal company running the cooperatives. The farmers adopted different strategies to abandon the cooperatives: life outside the future planned by development schemes was better.
Paper short abstract:
The enduring heritage of Portuguese authoritarian colonialism mixed with a pseudo Marxist-Leninist socialism has culminated into a rural development model marked by an outdated colonial nostalgia that has guided future trajectories, with foreign assistance and interests providing an outsized role.
Paper long abstract:
The state-led colonial governing model of the Estado Novo led by Portuguese strongman António de Oliveira Salazar relied upon a delicate balance of native forced labor, an uncomfortable dependence on foreign capital, and the social control of natives and colonizers alike. With time, pressure, and persistence, this combination seemed to bear considerable fruit. Yet, Salazar's vision of deepening this Colonial Pact into the future couldn't foresee the groundswell of profound forces (Renouvin) bubbling up among his colonial subjects. The same brutal forces that built up Angola's extraverted economy eventually brought the colonial project down.
Upon independence, many of the same strategies guiding the rural political economy were largely reintroduced by Angola's new socialist rulers. This attempt at building a future rural economy based on a lost past would quickly encounter structural incoherencies, deepening already existing inequalities as the country was held together in piecemeal fashion through decades of intermittent war (1960-2002). Following the civil war, new opportunities arose and colonial development strategies were repackaged anew, again assisted by foreign interests.
This text explores ideas about the past and "past futures" regarding the strategies to establish both control and dominance over the Angolan countryside. We hope to demonstrate how important continuities exist in the rural development policies between the Portuguese colonial period and Angola's nationalist leaders, accentuating the incoherencies currently guiding rural development policy.
Paper short abstract:
This paper analyses the role of ‘science for development’ in future-making discourses from Belgian colonial institute INEAC through archival research and oral history interviews, focusing on the differences in those discourses when they are targeting the ‘developer’ versus the ‘to-be-developed’.
Paper long abstract:
Agriculture was a fundamental building block in a lot of colonial development ideas. Developing and modernising agriculture was expected to feed growing industrial centres, to build robust export and internal market economies, and to transform rural Africans. The Institut national pour l’Etude agronomique du Congo Belge (INEAC) was founded to carry out the scientific research that would enable all of these outcomes. As such, INEAC is a good case study for looking at the role of science in future-making development schemes and discourses. INEAC had to sell their potential to both the Belgian colonial government and to the Congolese farmers. In this paper I want to tease out how their ‘promised futures’ varied between these audiences through archival research and interviews with Congolese in Yangambi, where the central INEAC research station was established. I will analyse how they presented ‘science for development’ to the colonial rulers and colonised subjects, where they differed in focus and approach, and why. What did they promise as their contribution to the colonial ‘mission’ and how did they present their methods to get there? How did they communicate about science and the futures it would make accessible to the Congolese they helped ‘train’ in various agricultural settlement schemes? Further, to what extent did they present science as a professional future in itself to their Congolese employees, who were involved in everything from field labour to lab and collection work? This last issue became central in the transition to independence.
Paper short abstract:
Maternal health care has been a focal point in determining a country's Primary Health Care situation. This paper analyses how the Tanzanian government planned maternal health immediately after independence.
Paper long abstract:
Maternal Health and Policy Planning in Post-Colonial Tanzania, 1961-1967.
For Tanzania, the period immediately after independence was that of intense planning. This period became important to the country’s future-making process. The first president and the leader of TANU, Nyerere, promised to provide to the people what was “denied” by the colonialist. He promised to fight three enemies; poverty, ignorance and disease. Health, therefore, became an important aspect of the Tanzanian development agenda. On the one hand, planning health was characterised by the euphoria of self-determination but on the other hand, it was a rugged terrain relying heavily on colonial legacies, full of trials, errors and fears especially because the country had only a few doctors at independence and the health infrastructure was also in bad shape. In 1967, Tanzania adopted Ujamaa which became the yardstick of planning in Tanzania. This paper seeks to analyse maternal health and policy planning in Tanzania immediately after independence, the role of TANU, before the official adoption of Ujamaa in Tanzania in general and Kilombero District in particular.
Keywords: TANU, Ujamaa, Maternal Health, policy, planning.
Paper short abstract:
This paper is a historical investigation of the changing visions for combatting drought in the Turkana area. It tracks how outside developers from colonial officers to 21st-century NGOs have envisioned the Turkana landscape in relation to the fight against recurring droughts and occasional famine.
Paper long abstract:
The arid ‘margins’ of the African states have been subject to a plethora of visions, planning interventions, explanations, and mythmaking, since the earliest colonial occupation. Whether seen as frontiers of possibilities for national governments and eager international developers, or ignored as desolate regions devoid of potential for economic development, these areas represent excellent cases for historical studies of future-making in the intersections between development aspirations, environment, and natural resources management.
The arid climate of the Turkana area and the nomadic production strategies of its inhabitants spurred a range of visions for the future of the Turkana environment and the fate of its inhabitants. Drought and famine were central to outside developers, and the vast majority of 'futures' centered around water, ecology, and livestock production. This paper is a historical investigation of the changing visions for combatting drought in the Turkana area. It tracks how outside developers from colonial officers to 21st-century NGOs have envisioned the Turkana landscape in relation to the fight against recurring droughts and occasional famine. The paper focus on distinct visions for environmental and water management and the changes and continuities in management ideas from early 20th century to the early 21st century. The paper will draw out how the fundamental colonial assumptions about Turkana ecosystems has continued into our present era, but also how management visions, aspirations, and techniques have evolved over these foundations. Making visible how the development apparatus continuously draw on familiar ecological tropes and proposed solution in its future-making in Africa’s arid ‘margins’.
Paper short abstract:
Drawing on the concept of frontier as a temporal marker, this paper illuminates local population’s diverse and complex temporalities related to new large-scale infrastructures vis-à-vis the state’s hegemonic linear temporal framing of infrastructure development as future making in northern Kenya.
Paper long abstract:
The boom in large-scale infrastructure projects - roads, pipelines and airports- in northern Kenya and other ‘peripheral areas’, has spawned academic literature premised on an ‘economies of anticipation’ thesis. This paper moves a step further from such analyses of ‘anticipation’ to focus on the grounded material realities, namely the social and political lives of these infrastructural projects. In so doing, it responds to two fundamental questions: How is the local population engaging with these new infrastructures? What kind of temporal politics related to development are the infrastructures enabling and revealing? Drawing on the case study of the newly tarmacked Isiolo-Moyale highway, I explore the integration of the road into various development discourses both in the past, present and envisioned futures. In particular I look at the road as a foundational reference for two types of frontiers: the past frontier-with the connotations of disconnection from the political and economic center- as well as a ‘new frontier’ for development. Taking these two forms of frontiers as temporal markers predicated on the literal and metaphorical figure of the road, I illuminate the local population’s diverse and complex temporalities related to large-scale infrastructures vis-à-vis the state’s hegemonic linear temporal framing of infrastructure development as future making. The article is based on archival research as well as participant observation and interviews in the northern Kenya town of Marsabit, an important historical administrative centre of the Kenya-Ethiopia frontier and a key node in the new regional large-scale infrastructure projects.
Paper short abstract:
Between histories of environment, technology and development, this paper explores the future-making dimensions of an Italian satellite project in cold war-era Kenya, offering a preliminary assessment of the role (and exclusion) of Kenyan scientists in the production of environmental knowledge.
Paper long abstract:
In April 1967, the cold war space race underway, Italy claimed to be the third country (after the USSR and the USA) to successfully launch a man-made satellite into orbit. Italian engineers did so from Kenyan waters, using a former oil platform in the Indian Ocean, near Malindi, following an agreement between the two states in 1964, just months after Kenya celebrated flag independence. Sparsely populated, equatorial ‘wasteland’ with clear Eastern horizons assumed new commercial and scientific value in the satellite age, while the remote sensing data that satellites produced was intended to have broad ‘developmental’ applications, from agricultural planning and weather forecasting to mineral detection. Fifty years later, on the same site, the Kenyan Space Agency was established.
This paper presents preliminary methodological and theoretical considerations for writing a history of the Kenyan-Italian San Marco space project, based, at this stage, mainly on Italian archives. I will focus on the promises of futurity contained within the apolitical terminology of ‘shared scientific knowledge’ in the agreement, which manifested as commitments to train Kenyan citizens to produce and interpret environmental mapping data. In doing so, I emphasise the ambivalence of satellite technologies in the Anthropocene and explore the African foundations of environmentalism. How did African states relate to the ‘colonisation’ of outer space? How should we understand the presence of Italian engineers and infrastructures on the Swahili coast? How far did the respatialisation of the area around the space station play out in the production and ownership of environmental knowledge?