Development 8

If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.

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.

Aboriginal activist group from Queensland, Australia.

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.

1970