The White Man’s Burden Today

The White Man’s Burden Today: Good Governance and Corruption


The presentation of White Man’s Burden and the figure of Oystein Tveter along with the presence of such a distinguished audience honors and symbolizes two key propositions that Oystein and his associates at Networkers, John Jones, and at the Karibu Foundation, Eilert Rostrup and Cecilia Neustadt enshrine.

The first is the upholding right of the people from the South to speak directly, truth to power. This may sound radical, in fact it is radical, but it should not be. Particularly among so many of us --because the first duty of concerned citizens, and intellectuals in particular, is to defend unequivocally the rights of everyone to develop and to express ideas. An essentially liberal democratic proposition, the proposition of a democratic process. The right to say something different.

The second has more to do with content, and the contribution of content of those ideas to global democracy and particularly justice. The ideas in themselves may be thought radical , coming from the global South, many from the left, voices of people deeply engaged in the democratic struggle. And if those ideas are not engaged, what will suffer it democracy itself. When you begin to destroy such thoughts, you undermine your own capacity to think, and your own potential contribution to global justice.


Now until last month, as I began thinking about the topic, I thought it would be difficult to explain the idea why many of us in the South have been denied that right to think alternatively, to contest the standard assumption that the North, in spasms of compassion, can somehow speak for the South, indeed that it is its moral duty or burden to do so. How was I going to convince you to explain that the anti-intellectual, racist, imperialist, missionary, interventionist, patronizing and contemptuous notion and practice of the White Man’s Burden is still alive and well in the 21st century?

Fortunately, last month I had a great deal of assistance in what appeared to be a hopeless proposition. None other than Pope Ratzinger came to my support Pope Benedict XVI told Latin American bishops in Brazil that American Indians had been "silently longing" to become Christians 500 years ago. There is outrage among indigenous people across the continent reacted angrily to Pope Benedict's comments that their predecessors had willingly converted to Christianity. How can history be ignored in such a way, including the writings of Bishop Bartolome de las Casas who witnessed and condemned the barbarity. One Amazon Indian leader said the Pope's remarks had been arrogant and disrespectful. The comments had even been criticised by the Catholic Church's Indian advocacy group in Brazil, which described the Pope's statement as wrong and indefensible. Recalling that John Paul II had censured the conquest.[1] Maybe the new Pope was inspired by Kipling?

It is important to recall that when Rudyard Kipling wrote his famous poem it was meant as about the “responsibilities of empire” that was directed not at London but at Washington and its new-found imperial responsibilities in the Philippines. By the way, U.S. troops at war with the Filipinos boasted in a popular marching song that they would “civilize them with the Krag” (referring to the Norwegian-designed gun with which the U.S. forces were outfitted).

Now unlike the Pope, President Bush probably has never heard of Kipling but the sense of duty is the same when it comes to Iraq.[2]

……

Colonized people, still feel the wounds of history, colonialism, including massacres and genocides. Yet the descendants of the colonizers prefer to ignore (and hence repeat). What changes are the names : Crusades, evangelization, British white man’s burden, US manifest destiny, (manifested only to themselves), French mision civilisatrize (western civilization, what a wonderful idea, said Gandhi) in the 19th century, commonwealth and free trade, (where the wealth is far from common and trade far from fair), humanitarian intervention, (a new mission for the military), development assistance by donors (who in fact are more lenders or creditors than donors). This helps understand why one of the first steps taken by the new government of Evo Morales in Bolivia was to reconsider what the “donors” were doing, saying we have had more than 500 years of such assistance that did little or nothing for the indigenous majority.

Many people would assume that the purpose of this book centers on the so-called “third world” but that is not the case. As Susan George has pointed out, “it is much easier to study the poor who cannot protect themselves from scrutiny and have little choice in the matter. Conversely, the richer and more powerful a government, an institution or a social class is, the greater will be its capacity to avoid being analyzed and to hide information it does not want to be made public or discussed. Along with secrecy and opacity comes a similar ability to deceive, to use lies and to manufacture ideology masquerading as truth”. This is the great trap of the White Man’s Burden to push us to look at the “burden”, the South, and not on the White Man. The book is more about the North than the South. It is about what the neoconservatives today refer to as regime change.

And therefore it is also about the history of the North in the South, including the ideological concoctions that accompanied that history of Western and then Northern economic global domination. William Tabb explains how “Trade was rarely initiated, as the economists’ model would have it, out of free consent for mutual advantage between core and periphery. In the early stages of imperialism—of plunder and piracy—this was self-evident and overseas expansion required a very different rationale”.

An effort was necessary at the level of ideological reformation to appeal to idealism and declare a very different logic for capitalism. Such a view involved appeals to the white man’s burden and the mission to civilize the savages, which are consonant with contemporary claims to be spreading democracy. Such justifications seemed reasonable to the extent the citizens of the imperialist power accepted a nationalism that flattered them as the leaders of humankind with the responsibility to help those who sit in darkness, as Mark Twain sarcastically put it.
Today Economists play the role of priests that accompany the neoliberal conquistadores, preaching the virtues and universal benefits of free trade, the “internationalist’s” manifest destiny,” and the idealists the generous impulse of spreading their near perfect social and political arrangements to the rest of the world”—economic expansion and the military conquest for the good of others”.[3] But imperialist then, and still imperialist today.
That history is not unkown of course to responsible and responsive scholar/activists in the North, such as John Jones or Susan George. In their work they have documented how, under the name of “structural adjustment”, the World Bank and the IMF have been imposing the economic governance model for a generation in nearly 100 countries. If we measure their success or failure using human criteria--nutrition, school enrolments, employment and so on--the results have been disastrous. We have nearly thirty years worth of statistics and case studies showing that neo-liberal models lead to greater inequality and lower growth. We know that “IMF riots” as they are known locally, have taken place in dozens of countries, causing death and destruction because people protest against the damage done to their livelihoods. Does the available evidence then cause the economists to change their doctrine? No: the response is invariably that failures are the government’s fault, the product of bad governance and local corruption, not that of the policy designers. The country has simply not practiced structural adjustment policies and good governance long enough or hard enough.[4]

Minds in the South are also subject to conquest. Stephen Biko once said that the greatest weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed. Cultural imperialism shows that imperialism doesn't work alone. When a power or a conquering force goes into an area, it then brings in its own holy men and its own standards and its own cultural styles in life to impose on the people, to the extent that it serves the colonizing power. And behind cultural imperialism is ethnocentrism, the presumption that we are, after all, a superior culture to you, and so we’ll come in and we’ll show you how you really should be living. We hear some of this in the present Iraq war. There's a presumption that this 5,000-year-old civilization, the one that invented writing and all sorts of other things, needs the guidance of the Bush White House in learning what democracy is about.

Iraq is the worse example, the most blatant of the white man’s burden but there are more subtle flagships heard about are good governance and anti-corruption. This is the newest version of the old two-fold rationalization for the way in which global wealth gets distributed, the rich getting richer and the poor poorer on the one hand, and on the other the imperative of denying that reality saying that if only “those people” adopt such and such recipes, then development and economic growth will bring wealth and happiness to the poorer countries… And as has been the case throughout history there will be those in our own countries that defend and profit from the civilizing notion. It continues to be a religion, only now the religion takes the form of the neoliberal capitalist economics—and it is equally fundamentalist.

The small problem however is that the model does not work. Maybe just as well because if it did we would be envisioning the globalization of the consumer model that is already killing the earth. But it is difficult for the doctor –in this case the Minister of Health is the World Bank where the so called donors deposit their money and any pretense of creativity—to admit that the disease has anything to do with the recipes. Far from it, it is those people and governments of the South that refuse to take the medicine seriously. So the people that brought you the problems now appear on the scene with manuals to fix the problem. If structural adjustment and free market have failed, look not to the interventionist model, but to the need to undertake even further intervention, this time on the side of political policy, which goes by the name of good governance—as the Bank and donors put it: “getting the national institutions rights”, under the guidance of the Bank of course, to make the country even friendlier to investment capital.

Then comes the second mantra which again tends to blame the victim for the crime. The trouble with those people is that their leaders, their cultures, their race is corrupt. And it is their corruption which keeps them poor and incapable of development. So never mind history, the net flows of resources from South to North, the decimation of the indigenous peoples of the so-called Americas, the slave trade, the plunder at the hands of European monarchs that are replaced by transnational corporations. Changing theory reflect changing tactics. So now we learn that it is the “the rent seeking, corrupt, and heavy-handed local rulers were now seen as extortionists. In the new stage of globalized neoliberalism they were a handicap to foreign investors who wanted to avoid paying tribute for licenses. So transnational capital demanded a local state that would protect property rights as defined by foreign firms”.[5] That is what good governance is all about and why the World Bank is the purported expert on this issue, Wolfowitz notwithstanding.

So the modern white man’s burden is to go forth and help the natives and savages from killing each other and impoverishing their own peoples.

What is purposedly ignored here, by both Northern and Southern elites, is that the histories of the South have multiple examples of struggles for democracy, which means independence, and includes of course striking against corrupt and malgoverning elites. If one looks at the attainment of national independence in Africa, the talk of the diplomatic circles was that the venal elites were really incapable of ruling themselves. But that was not true, what was inherited in most cases was a colonial state, a colonized nation, where corruption and bad governance were at the heart of the colonialism. The flags might have changed as did the color of the people in formal power, but the essence of the economic systems, now denominated globalization, remains.

For example, How easy and self serving to blame the situation in Zimbabwe on corruption and malgovernance, as the West is prone to do. Why not listen instead to the March 30 Pastoral letter of the Catholic bishops of Zimbabwe, : “The present crisis in our country has its roots deep in colonial society. Despite the rhetoric of a glorious socialist revolution brought about by the armed struggle, the colonial structures and institutions of pre-independent Zimbabwe continue to persist in our society. None of the unjust and oppressive security laws of the Rhodesian State have been repealed; in fact, they have been reinforced by even more repressive legislation, the Public Order and Security Act and the Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act, in particular. It almost appears as though someone sat down with the Declaration of Human Rights and deliberately scrubbed out each in turn Why was this done? Because soon after Independence, the power and wealth of the tiny white Rhodesian elite was appropriated by an equally exclusive black elite, some of whom have governed the country for the past 27 years through political patronage. Black Zimbabweans today fight for the same basic rights they fought for during the liberation struggle”.[6]

Mukoma Ngogi explains the false moral compulsion behind the white man’s burden, reminding us that Africans does not need Western philantropy In addition to providing the raw materials, labor and markets for finished products, Africa also cleanses the consciousness of Africanist scholars, evangelists and missionaries, the rock and roll musicians who want to save Africa through orphan adoption, and philantropists with Mother Teresa complexes. But at the top of the pack—Western politicians—Occupy Iraq and Afghanistan, but don’t forget to rescue the African from the clutches of the war lords, [janjaweed,] poverty, corruption and disease. Africa has become the continent where the guilt-ridden come to score quick moral points. And we let them”.[7]

From colonialism to neocolonialism—progress some would say, but if one witnesses the dimensions by which resource extraction has grown, along with marginalization and exclusion of people, and add to that the hypocrisy of benevolent intentions, then things are getting worse not better.

Why can’t the develop world simply admit that it pursues its own national corporate interests, and seeks to structure the world in its own image? That, as in the conquest of the Americas, that ideology or religion marched in with the armies. That privatization by and for the powerful, the theft of the commons, began centuries ago. Jesus was from the South and had a powerful message of liberation, but he too was privatized and given a skin change, becoming Roman, or German, or English, or North American, is now being presented to us once again, robbing people of what is most precious, the cultural right to believe and shape their faith.

Many of you know the story told by Archbishop Tutu of how when the white man…. A new bible is now being sold to us, but hopefully the story will not repeat itself, this time not only with land, but with public enterprises, water, the commons….

Ngogi adds that our own elites share the blame because they have been conditioned to requesting the white man to intervene. “We have reached a dangerous psychological state and internalized beggar mentality to a point where we see Western aid of part and parcel of our national budgets. Our elite leaders, just like Bush and Blair, find more value in white skin than in black skin, more value in white lives than in black lives, and have more faith in Western solutions than in Pan African solutions”.[8]





The tide may be turning. No doubt that behind the white man’s burden stood the white man’s power and capital. Developing nations until recently, bled by the external debt, had to seek capital from the North and adopts, or at least pay lip service, to the recipe book. As globalized resistance to neo-liberalism continued to grow in the past decade, social movements and civil society started to discover the region as an arena of struggle and as a staging point for alternatives.

Latin America is unrecognisable: individual countries and the region as a whole are adopting more autonomous positions vis-à-vis the dominant powers and, in some cases, defying dominant economic thinking. The political landscape is a mix of overtly anti-imperialist governments, such as Venezuela, Cuba, Bolivia and Ecuador, and centre-left governments with a nationalist orientation such as Brazil, Uruguay and Argentina. Pro-US and pro neo-liberal governments are now a minority, not least because of the extraordinary rise of radical social movements demanding a change from the devastating neo-liberal policies of the past two decades.

There is a new horizon represented by the Bolivarian Alternative of the Americas, the South American Community of Nations, the plans to set up a Bank of the South before the end of the year, new intra Latin American and Caribbean cooperation contents and process, funded chiefly by Venezuela. The entire rules of the game are changing, as 5 Lat Am countries have paid their debts with the IMF, putting it into crisis, and many no longer feel automatically obliged to run their economies by the rules set out by the World Bank, the WTO and the so called international development community.


Increasingly, calls for reclaiming the region to advance genuine people’s cooperation have been made. The convening of people’s summits to parallel official meetings of regional associations and to provide a venue for movements to discuss issues of regional import is widely practiced. It hopes to facilitate the building of alternatives through South-South, intra-regional and inter-regional solidarity between peoples organizations, as well as relations with and between their governments, and to pose counter-challenges to effect fundamental changes in the currently dominant global economic system and build people’s alternatives. The People’s Dialogue links initially social movements and civil society groups from the South, the tricontinental or the old Third World. We are dedicated, in the ISGN network, to integrating movements from the South, and the North eventually. But first we need to finish constructing our South identity.



With the support of the Karibu Foundation, the International South Group Network is promoting alternative globalization through the promotion of free and open software.

The concept of 'free' does not only mean free in the monetary sense but also the lack of boundaries to modification, change and development according to the needs of the community. Good governance would have us all using Microsoft and religously obeying patents. Open software is linked to every movement for social and economic justice, and with every movement for the control of resources and reclaiming the commons. FOSS deals with the access and control of information and the tools of information. Information is the backbone for the fight for rights, for the distribution of messages, for the globalisation of struggles. If we do not have the control over the tools and means of communication, information is always at risk of being hijacked and manipulated. FLOSS is a means to take back control over information and the tools of information which are the basis for asserting our rights.


Developing a strategy of counter-power or counter-hegemony need not mean lapsing back into the old hierarchical and centralized modes of organizing characteristic of the old left. Such a strategy can, in fact, be best advanced through the multilevel and horizontal networking that the movements and organizations represented in the WSF have excelled in advancing their particular struggles. Articulating their struggles in action will mean forging a common strategy while drawing strength from and respecting diversity.



Yet the global justice movement does has an alternative vision of democratic governance and society could be, a society of solidarity and cooperation based on tolerance and diversity and there are many small but significant signs that this world could be constructed. The World Social Forums are a sign of our resistance and optimism. The dozens of international coalitions working on issues such as trade, drugs, water, privatisation and debt, shows the movement's capacity to create new ways of organising. The successes of these campaigns show that it is also possible to change public opinion and policy. The overwhelming response to the 2004 tsunami shows that solidarity is not a forgotten ideal. The anti-war movement shows that 'ordinary' citizens have far more integrity and common sense that their political leaders and the United Nations. Wikipedia and the free software movement show that real things can be produced outside the logic of profit, with the ancient ideas of gift and counter-gift as the basis for economic cooperation. All these are expressions of the potential of a global movement which is able to act both locally and globally, surpassing the limitations of national identity and politics, ideologies and hierarchical structures, surpassing even the logic of profit and ownership.

The 20th century has shown the limitations of both the state and the market as guarantors of justice and peace: the third challenge for the global justice movement is to create, through intellectual work and practice, the emancipatory paradigm for the 21st century. It will not be written in a single political manifesto or in an academic journal (the days of truth being handed down from above are over) but it will evolve from praxis, reflecting the diversity and pluralism of the multiple real and virtual worlds in which we live. Without over-estimating the benefits or difficulties of horizontality or consensus, we have the elements to break with the 'old politics' of hierarchy and centralisation, and to build a 'new' politics of inclusiveness, consensus and diversity. These values and practices are the seeds of a radical new democracy.

The academic profession is challenged to be responsive and responsible. Each of these concerns calls for a defiant spirit of truthfulness that may entail some adverse consequences. There are concerted campaigns afoot within the society to purge university ranks of radical voices and to intimidate still further the rest of the academic community.[9]

“We know from history that we have helped; that we can continue to help to put certain issues on the agenda, encourage debate and sometimes move crucial questions towards resolution. We have more and more allies. I know dozens of academics using their skills in the service of social movements in the larger society: some of them are in this room and I embrace them. Thank you for your contribution to the understanding our burden in the South, and for taking part in our liberation and empowerment, which is also your liberation and your empowerment.
[1] Millions of tribal Indians died as a result of European colonization backed by the Church since Columbus landed in the Americas in 1492, through slaughter, disease or enslavement. Many Indians today struggle for survival, stripped of their traditional ways of life and excluded from society. "It's arrogant and disrespectful to consider our cultural heritage secondary to theirs," said Jecinaldo Satere Mawe, chief coordinator of the Amazon Indian group Coiab. Several Indian groups sent a letter to the Pope last week asking for his support in defending their ancestral lands and culture. They said the Indians had suffered a "process of genocide" since the first European colonizers had arrived. “Brazil's Indians offended by Pope comments.” Reuters, May 14, 2007

[2] Editors, “Kipling, the ‘White Man’s Burden’, and U.S. Imperialism, Monthly Review, Vol. 55, No. 6, (November, 2003). Kipling’s “White Man’s Burden,” subtitled “The United States and the Philippine Islands,” was published in McClure’s Magazine in February 1899.* It was written when the debate over ratification of the Treaty of Paris was still taking place, and while the anti-imperialist movement in the United States was loudly decrying the plan to annex the Philippines. Kipling urged the United States, with special reference to the Philippines, to join Britain in the pursuit of the racial responsibilities of empire:
Your new-caught sullen peoples, Half devil and half child.
Many in the United States, including President McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt, welcomed Kipling’s rousing call for the United States to engage in “savage wars,” beginning in the Philippines. Senator Albert J. Beveridge of Indiana declared: “God has not been preparing the English-speaking and Teutonic peoples for a thousand years for nothing but vain and idle self-contemplation and self-admiration....He has made us adept in government that we may administer government among savage and senile peoples.” In the end more than 126,000 officers and men were sent to the Philippines to put down the Filipino resistance during a war that lasted officially from 1899 to 1902 but actually continued much longer, with sporadic resistance for most of a decade. U.S. troops logged 2,800 engagements with the Filipino resistance. At least a quarter of a million Filipinos, most of them civilians, were killed along with 4,200 U.S. soldiers (more than ten times the number of U.S. fatalities in the Spanish-American War).*

[3] William K. Tabb, “Imperialism: In Tribute to Harry Magdoff,” Monthly Review, Vol. 58, No. 10, (March, 2007),
[4] Susan George, Acceptance Speech, Honorary Doctorate, UNED, Madrid, 25 April 2007, www.tni.org
[5] William K. Tabb, “Imperialism: In Tribute to Harry Magdoff,” Monthly Review, Vol. 58, No. 10, (March, 2007),
[6] Zimbabwe Catholic Bishops' Conference, 'God Hears The Cry Of The Oppressed' , March 30, 2007
[7] Mukoma Ngogi, “Africa does not need more western philanthropy”, Z Net, April 21, 2007,
[8] Ibid.
[9] Richard Falk, “Responsible scholarship in ‘dark times’, Academics as scholars, teachers and public intellectuals,” Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research, April 30, 2007