Nicolas Sarkozy (born 1955) was French President from 2007 to 2012.

Baffour Ankomah (2007): “Shame On You, Mr. Sarkozy”. In: New African Magazine, 30.10.2007.

This quote comes from a speech by Sarkozy at a university in Senegal which is named after the Senegalese historian Cheikh Anta Diop (1923-1986). Diop argued that Western history studies the world from a Eurocentric perspective. It also tremendously distorts the history of Africa. France was involved in colonial attacks on Senegal from the 17th century onwards and became a colonial power in 1891. In 1960, the country achieved independence. Senegalese commentators accused Sarkozy of using racist colonial language. Sarkozy’s successor, President Emmanuel Macron, has continued to use this colonial discourse. In 2017, he claimed that Africa had “civilizational problems”, including in part “because women have seven children.”

*Boniface Mabanza (2019): “The right to say No. Women organizing against extractivism in southern Africa.”

Aboriginal activist group from Queensland, Australia.

Damien Riggs (2004): “Benevolence and the Management of Stake: On Being ‘Good White People’.” Philament: An Online Journal of the Arts and Culture (Issue 4: August). The year (1970) is an approximation as the quote was used by various Aboriginal groups in different times and settings.

The idea of charity is present not only in what is referred to as development aid. In other areas too, certain groups are depicted as needy because they are apparently incapable of helping themselves. In Australia, the Aborigines are often portrayed as requiring assistance. At the same time, Aborigines play a prominent role in social struggles (e.g. in the environmental protection movement or in protests against uranium mines). However, there is often a lot of tension and paternalism within movements made up of both non-Aboriginals and Aboriginals. The Aboriginal activist Gary Foley wrote that he felt that he had to reinvent the wheel for every generation of non-Aborigines (Foley 1999), i.e. that he had to repeatedly teach white Australians to work together with them on an equal footing.

*Gary Foley (1999): Whiteness and Blackness in the Koori struggle for self-determination.
*Clare Land (2015): Decolonizing Solidarity. Dilemmas and Directions for Supporters of Indigenous Struggles. London: Zed Books.

Vandana Shiva (born in 1952) is an Indian physicist, intellectual and women’s and environmental rights activist. This anti-globalisation activist is the recipient of the Alternative Nobel Prize.

Vandana Shiva (1988): 1f.

Shiva is one of the most important representatives of ecofeminism. This current combines ecological issues with feminist analysis. It emerged during the course of the international environmental, peace and women’s movements in the 1970s. Ecofeminism assumes that there are connections between the patriarchal oppression of women and the exploitation of nature. Thus it is argued that women are hit particularly hard by environmental degradation. This is because they produce 60 to 80% of the food in what is predominantly a smallholder agriculture in the Global South (dw.com, 14.10.2019).

*Shiva, Vandana (1988): Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Development. London: Zed Books.
*Shiva, Vandana (2018): Stupidity of modern day civillization. Interview.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) was one of the most important German Enlightenment philosophers.

Source of the German original: Karl Bremer (1996): G.W.F. Hegel. Vorlesungen, Ausgewählte Nachschriften und Manuskripte (1822/1823). Bd. 12. Hamburg: Meiner, p. 98-100.

During the Enlightenment, the idea emerged that societies owed their ongoing development to reason. In order to achieve a higher level of development, it was considered necessary to control and subjugate nature, along with those people who were termed primitive peoples. According to G.F.W. Hegel, only white people possessed the “reason” necessary for progress, which is why they had to “humanise” the rest of the world. Africa was considered to be a continent without history in which people “did not develop”. Europeans justified colonial violence through the philosophical construction of their superiority.

*Rebekah Nicholson (2006): The Enlightenment and Its Effects on the Haitian
Revolution of 1789-1804.
*Eduardo Grüner (2008): “Haiti: a (forgotten) philosophical revolution.”

Frantz Fanon (1925-1961) was a psychiatrist, politician, writer and pioneer of anti-colonial movements who grew up in the French colony of Martinique. After fighting against fascist Germany as a soldier in the French army, he joined the Algerian liberation struggle against French colonial power in the 1950s.

Frantz Fanon (1963/2004: 53)

Fanon described “development” and “underdevelopment” as direct consequences of colonialism after the liberation of the colonies. He took the view that development aid was not “aid” but rather compensation for colonialism’s atrocities and exploitation.

*Frantz Fanon (1963/2004): The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press.

Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda (1494-1573) was a Spanish theologian, historian and philosopher.

Pius Onyemechi Adiele (2017): The Popes, the Catholic Church and the Transatlantic Enslavement of Black Africans 1418-1839. Hildesheim/Zürich & New York: Georg Olms Verlag, p. 159

De Sepúlveda, who had never been to the Americas himself, believed that the indigenous peoples of the Americas deserved the treatment they were receiving because their way of life was blasphemous. During the Valladolid debate (1550-1551), he represented the interests of Spanish settlers and landowners. In the debate, which pitted him against the Dominican priest Bartolomé de Las Casas, the question was whether the enslavement of the indigenous peoples of America could be justified. In the first hundred years of the occupation of America, the indigenous population decreased by approximately 95% (75 million) due to murder and disease (Federici 2014: 103f.).

*Tzvetan Todorov (1982): The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other. New York: Harper & Row.
*BBC (2013): Las Casas and Sepúlveda from Racism a History. Dokumentarfilm.
*Silvia Federici (2014): Caliban and the Witch. Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. New York: Autonomedia.

The Federal Centre for Political Education (Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, bpb) was founded in 1952 to make a German contribution to education in the service of democracy. It is part of the Federal Ministry of the Interior. The bpb creates and publishes materials, organises events and promotes other political education institutions.

Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung (2007): Afrika Verstehen Lernen. Bonn: Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, p. 148.

This quote is based on the colonial and racist argument that without Europeans, Africans would have no education or health systems, nor any form of infrastructure. Behind this lies the idea that Africa did not have complex social structures before colonisation. This logic also justifies “civilizing” colonial intervention from outside. By contrasting the supposedly positive with the negative, the bpb conceals the fact that colonial infrastructure was created primarily for the exploitation of resources.

*Walter Rodney (1972): How Europe underdeveloped Africa. London: Bogle-L’Ouverture Publications.
*Chimananda Ngozi Adichie (2011): Narratives of Europe. Stories that matter.
*David Harvey (2000): Cosmopolitanism and the Banality of Geographical Evils.

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) was the most famous German philosopher of the Enlightenment. He spent most of his life in Königsberg. He was central to the shaping of racial theory in the German-speaking world.

Immanuel Kant (1764): Physische Geographie 2. T. 1. Abs. § 3 (IX 195). Königsberg: Göbbels und Unzer. Translation by David Harvey (2000): p. 4.

Although universal human rights are commonly associated with the era of the Enlightenment, this was also the period in which racial theories emerged. The idea that all people were free and equal was a threat to those who benefited from inequality. So a parallel theory was needed in order to prove why some could not, after all, be fully equal (see above, Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment). Immanuel Kant attempted to construct a “race hierarchy” based on “reason”, “morality”, “maturity”, “the potential for being educated” and “laziness” as characteristics of otherness. He placed the white man at the centre of this ideology and made him the norm by which progress was measured. Kant’s devaluation of people of colour went so far that he wondered why certain regions of the world existed at all.

*Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze (ed. 2007): Race and the Enlightenment: A Reader. New Jersey: Wiley-Blackwell.
*Devin J. Vartija (2021): The Color of Equality Race and Common Humanity in Enlightenment Thought. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Harry S. Truman (1884-1972) was an American politician (Democratic Party) and President of the United States from 1945 to 1953.

Harry S. Truman (20.01.1949), Inaugural Address.

Truman’s speech is often cited as marking the beginning of development policy. However, the idea is older. As early as 1929, Great Britain passed the Colonial Development Act. Ideas of human and social development can be traced back via the Enlightenment to ancient Greece. The concept became particularly powerful politically after the Second World War, in the context of the Cold War and decolonisation. The USA also used both the promise of “development” and the degradation of “underdevelopment” for its geopolitical and foreign policy interests.

*Aram Ziai (2010): Zur Kritik des Entwicklungsdiskurses. In: APuZ – Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte 10.
*Arturo Escobar (1995): Encounterin Development. The Making and Unmaking of the Third World. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

The World Bank is a Washington D.C. (USA) based multinational development bank. Its original purpose was to finance the reconstruction of states destroyed by World War II. Today its core task is to promote the economic development of “less developed” member states through financial aid, advice and technical assistance.

Weltbank, (1998/99): World Development Report: Knowledge for Development, New York: Oxford University Press, p. 1f.

The World Bank evaluates the development status of countries according to the logic of Western capitalist economies. The assumption that only conformity with these standards can lead to progress in the Global South makes any recognition of non-Western values and world views impossible. From this prevailing development policy perspective, other ways of life and social forms are considered deficient. This is despite the fact the Western road to development – e.g. through the exploitation and destruction of people and nature – has not proven to be sustainable. Since its founding in 1946, the World Bank chairmen have all, with only two exceptions, been white, male US-Americans. Numerous social movements and NGOs in the Global North (attac) and South (Focus on the Global South) have been criticising and resisting World Bank policies for decades.

*Grace Blakeley (2020): The Great World Bank Robbery: An Interview with Walden Bello (Podcast). Tribune Magazine.

Walter Rodney (1942-1980) was a Marxist historian and politician from Guyana. Born into a working-class family, he studied in Guyana and Jamaica and taught in Hamburg and Tanzania, amongst other places. In 1980 he was killed in a bomb attack during the election campaign for the Working People’s Alliance. In 2015, a commission of inquiry found that the attack had been carried out by Guyanese government agencies.

Walter Rodney (1973/1983): 344

In his book, Rodney analysed the social and economic history of Africa from the 14th century to the end of the colonial era. In the 15th century, Europe and Africa were still at the same level. He argued that from then on, through enslavement, imperialist domination, colonisation and general exploitation, Africa became dependent on the West. In his view, this explained Africa’s impoverishment and misery after the end of the colonial era.

Walter Rodney (1973, from reprint 1983): How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Bogle-L’Ouverture Publications, Dar-Es-Salaam: London and Tanzanian Publishing House, p. 344

Abel Alier (born in 1933) was Vice President of Sudan from 1971 to 1982.

Vincent Tucker (1999): 11

This quote from the former Sudanese Vice President clearly articulates the violence that is often inherent in major development projects. The sentence was a response to the Dinka and Nuer peoples’ opposition to the Jonglei Canal Project which threatened their entire way of life. Construction was started in 1974 by Egypt and Sudan, but the giant canal was never completed. The damage that it would likely have produced included droughts and groundwater pollution in South Sudan (sudantribune.com, 26.05.2007).

Vincent Tucker (1999): The Myth of Development. A Critique of a Eurocentric Discourse. In: Ronaldo Munck / Denis O’Hearn (Hrsg.): Critical Development Theory. Contributions to a New Paradigm. London: Zed Books, S. 1-26.

Thomas More (1478-1535) was an English lawyer and politician who was executed for high treason. In 1935 he was made a saint.

Thomas Morus (1516): Utopia.

From the end of the 15th century, many small holder tenant farmers, who practised subsistence farming (self-sufficiency), were driven off the land by large landowners. According to Silvia Federici (2014: 68), this land privatisation in Europe began at the same time as colonial expansion into the Americas, with which it was connected. In England, large landowners needed land for their sheep in order to be able to supply the textile manufacturers in Flanders / Belgium with more wool (the price of which had risen sharply). The consequences were rural exodus and impoverishment.

*Silvia Federici (2014): Caliban and the Witch. Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. New York: Autonomedia.

Theodore W. Schultz (1902-1998) was chairman of the University of Chicago Economics Department. He was awarded the Nobel Price for economics in 1979.

Juan Gabriel Valdés (1995): Pinochet‘s Economists: The Chicago School in Chile. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 89

From the 1950s onwards, in the Global South in particular, theories circulated that diverged sharply from Western development ideals. Representatives included the economist Raúl Prebisch (Argentina) and the sociologist Walden Bello (Philippines). They were called “pink-red” economists or dependency theorists. Pink-red denoted an orientation that was left, but not communist (“red”). Many had relationships with heads of state such as Salvador Allende (Chile) and Mohammad Mosaddegh (Iran). Because they questioned the general validity of the Western capitalist system, the West tried to change their minds or silence them, which it also attempted through development aid or education (e.g. of Chilean economists at the University of Chicago). Allende was assasinated and Mosaddegh overthrown with the help of Western intelligence agencies.

*Naomi Klein (2007): The Shock Doctrine. The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Toronto: Knopf Canada.

Dirk-Ekkehard Niebel (born in 1963) is a former German politician (FDP). He was Minister for Economic Cooperation and Development from 2009 to 2013. He has been working as a consultant for the weapons and automotive supplier Rheinmetall since 2015.

FAZ (Manfred Schäfers, 20.11.2009): Entwicklungshilfe muss sich nicht überflüssig machen.

According to Niebel, his ministry was not a “world social agency” (Herter 2010). An example: In 2001, the Kaweri coffee plantation opened in Uganda with investments from the German company Neumann (NKG). The NKG demanded that the land be uninhabited. Residents should be resettled with compensation. Resettlement was left to the Ugandan government, which forcibly displaced 2,000 people. When the expellees started a campaign against this with the NGO FIAN, Niebel took a protective stance in front of the German company in 2013: “The Kaweri plantation is the largest German investment in Uganda and has the attention and goodwill of the German government” (Die Zeit, August 13th, 2013). 2013). At the end of 2019, the Ugandan state offered the displaced persons compensation (FIAN, February 17, 2020).

*FIAN International (2019): Human Rights violations in the context of Kaweri  coffee Plantation/Neumann Kaffee Gruppe in Mubende/Uganda.

Frankie Boyle (born in 1972) is a Scottish comedian.

Frankie Boyle (2015): Britain’s criminally stupid attitudes to race and immigration are beyond parody.

The quote is from a discussion about anti-migration policies in Great Britain. Boyle claims that poverty and migration have to be associated with the colonial past and exploitation by the British Empire. He also parodies British development aid: “Thanks for the gold, guys, thanks for the diamonds. We did a fundraiser and got you fishing rods.”

Timo Kiesel / Carolin Philipp (2011): white charity. Blackness and whiteness on charity add posters..