Aid Thoughts

Digesting the difficult decisions of development

Archive for category History

A Human Thing

Sep 6

Posted by Ranil Dissanayake in Development, Governance, History | No Comments

Chris Blattman recently asked if Human Rights might be a morally dubious concept, following Adam Martin’s unearthing of an old interview with the libertarian economist F.A. Hayek. Hayek, who was making the argument that apartheid South Africa should have been left alone to run its own business as a ‘civilisation of a kind’, made the claim that intervention was being encouraged by the recent acceptance of human rights in America, just a few years prior to the video being recorded.

Leaving aside the irony of a libertarian regarding a situation in which 90% of humans had severely restricted liberty as unworthy of intervention, I really have to take issue with another point he makes: that human rights were a recent concept to the US when he was interviewed in the 1970s. Martin quotes:

I’m not sure whether it’s an invention of the present administration or whether it’s of an older date, but I suppose if you told an eighteen year old that human rights is a new discovery he wouldn’t believe it.  He would have thought the United States for 200 years has been committed to human rights, which of course would be absurd.

- An absurd statement itself, considering the contents of the Declaration of Independence. In the comments, Adam defends this statement, arguing that Hayek was referring to a new, modern conception of human rights:

… human rights are claims about how governments should act to produce particular patterns of outcomes

Adam contrasts this with the idea that classical human rights were statements about how individuals should treat each other. I’m dubious; a glance at the history of the ideas underlying statehood and rights suggests that the concept of rights was far more amorphous than this dichotomy would indicate, and spoke directly to the actions of the state as well as individuals. In fact the revolutions of America and France were specifically about the responsibilities of the state.

Human rights emerged as the basis of modern states (including the independent America) more than two centuries ago and their expansion from their original base began almost immediately – first incorporating new people and then new rights. The American and French Revolutions pioneered the ideas of ‘human rights’ as actionable concepts. The Declaration of Independence famously holds certain truths to be self-evident, notably that ‘all men are created equal’. France’s revolution was founded on the principles of liberté, egalité, fraternité – still the central elements of the French identity.

Nor were these the first time that universal rights had been invoked. The intellectual foundations for universal rights were laid by the very first Greek and Roman philosophers, and independently by Asian philosophers. These philosophers attempted to isolate the conditions for happiness, rightness and dignity that apply to all men: and thus laid the foundation for the idea of human rights as conditions that must be protected to allow the pursuit of these. As early as the third century BC, Mencius took these ideas further: he claimed that a ruler who tyrannises his subjects loses his divine right to rule and the people have the right to revolution – thus directly linking rights to the actions of states and leaders. The 1776 and 1789 revolutions made this explicit through the ideas they laid at the foundation of the new states they created.

What was amazing in the 1776 and 1789 revolutions was that they established as part of their basic justification the idea that Government had responsibilities and requirements that gave or denied it legitimacy, and that this was a truth that did not derive from exclusively from divine mandate (as with Kings who were either ‘chosen’ or descendent from Gods or the heavens) nor divine knowledge (i.e. from textual religion) – rather that these concepts were immutable, and derived from the condition of humanity. It was the failure to meet these responsibilities that motivated revolution.

The ideas of basic human rights established in these two revolutions have had an incredible enduring power. It is ahistorical to claim that the Sen-inspired approach to rights-based development is anything new. Rather, it’s a further modernization of a conceptual basis to the state that has existed for a great deal of time. The modification and expansion of rights is also not a new phenomenon. The original ideas were immediately passed into common currency and modified even in the few years following the revolutions. And these ideas have always been controversial and open to debate.

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Keeping it in the Family

Aug 7

Posted by Ranil Dissanayake in Development, Economics, History, Political Economy | No Comments

Michael Corleone condemns his brother to death.

'Never take sides with anyone against the Family again. Ever.'

One of the enduring questions of historical debate is why Western Europe and North America so outperformed the rest of the world economically in the 1800s. Though some (notably Andre Gunder Frank) have argued that the ‘advance of the West’ was really an illusion created by the decline of the rest, it is generally agreed that Western Europe and America had or developed a number of advantages that took their growth forward and retarded the growth of other regions – sometimes through luck, sometimes through natural endowment and often through a combination of the two.

One aspect of these advantages has interested me recently: financial services and the organization of business. It’s now widely accepted that better financial services was part of the reason why Western European companies in particular prospered in this period. The Dutch pioneered the Joint Stock Company to mitigate the risks of long mercantile voyages, and the Dutch East India Company was an early example of the separation of ownership and management. In Britain and then in the rest of Western Europe, regional banks came to prominence and provided the means by which firms could raise capital for expansion. This was generally accompanied by a changing of the structure of firm.

Businesses had till this point been, by-and-large, enterprises that were run by families. The emergence of new forms of financing and capital made it easier to raise money and also made it easier to share risk, as the legal code governing how liability should be assigned to the ownership of a firm changed as different forms of financing became available and different types of company evolved to take advantage of financing which enabled them to exploit risky opportunities overseas.

At the time the East India Company was demonstrating the sheer size that could be achieved through the use of these new firm structures and through exploitation of financing (as well as war-like methods that were part of the ‘trading’ world at the time), almost all the successful Chinese companies were still keeping resources within the family. They were unable to access credit and unwilling to experiment with the new firm structures that expanded ownership and dispersed fiduciary risk to individual owners. Many historians now argue that the innovations in financing allowed the West to expand faster, while the changes in the structure of the firm and the accompanying legal code gave their private enterprises a massive advantage in expansion into new markets.

What I find particularly interesting about this is that the family-ownership pattern has persisted in much of Asia and Africa right to the present day, despite the massive expansion in financial services available. I’m not just talking about the small stalls and dukas which are run by families but major businesses, particularly in India, which are often owned by a patriarchal character, with senior posts in management distributed to sons, sons-in-law and other favoured family members. In South Asia and Africa family networks and even more broadly, ethnic or similar networks remain incredibly important for business. Go almost anywhere where there is an Asian business community – more often than not, you’ll find that there is a network of family run firms, and where they have links to each other, it’s common that they are from the same region or area.

Why has this structure of the firm persisted so long, despite legal and financial advances that should be encouraging larger, less risk-averse firms? The standard answer is ‘trust’. When family or strong ethnic ties bind the decision-makers in an enterprise, the argument goes, it is easier to persuade owners to part with new capital for the expansion of the firm, there are less likely to be financial disputes, theft, and liability can be enforced as it falls within a small circle – no shirking of responsibility is possible. Yet this doesn’t convince entirely. As the infrastructure surrounding firms improves, these issues are less and less binding. Financial institutions now provide far more opportunities for those with collateral, while insurance, commercial courts and dispute resolution all mitigate the risks that using family trust as a basis for commercial enterprises is supposed to leaven.

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Workers

Aug 2

Posted by Ranil Dissanayake in Development, History, Political Economy | 5 Comments

Emilio and Charlie knew something about work...

In a recent post I argued that development work paid too little attention to the prospects of unionism as a method of protecting the poor and mitigating inequality in a rapidly growing economy. I mentioned that there have been a number of successful union movements historically that have served this specific purpose. In the comments, Lee (of Roving Bandit fame) made the very valid point that a unionism movement may actually harm some of the poor if it blocks out ‘Outsiders’ to the movement and prevents them from accessing the benefits of organization. These outsiders are, of course, likely to be the unemployed seeking work.

This is of course possible. But a union can function in a number of ways. The most common in the developed world is as a set of insiders seeking to protect their material conditions by collectively bargaining with employers and preventing outsiders from undercutting their position. This is the kind of unionism, relying as it does on an insider-outsider distinction and the coercive ability of the union to exclude outsiders from even entering the realms of discourse, which Lee worries about.

In the developing world, a different kind of unionism can be seen. In many cases the politically loaded term ‘Union’ may not even be the best descriptor for what is observed. We could rather call them ‘workers cooperatives’. Their aims are different: not only to create a better division of an industries surplus between capitalists and labour, but to protect basic rights which are poorly understood and poorly protected. This kind of unionism isn’t as widely required among the workers in the developed west because the state takes this role for all citizens through legislation on health and safety and so on (the obvious exception being for illegal migrant labour, who are denied access to the state’s protection or are operating under the radar and hence opt not to appeal to it).

What these unions or cooperatives exist for has less to do with bargaining and more to do with ensuring that legal frameworks are provided and that workers understand what their rights are vis-à-vis employers. One relatively well known historical example concerned migrant labour which entered South Africa for mining work. Many workers were under the misapprehension that their presence in South Africa was illegal and therefore accepted conditions well below the statutory minimum until a movement built up to ensure that all workers were aware of their statutory status.

Alongside this kind of unionism is another kind – the representation of a ‘captured’ population. The classic case here is of plantation labour descendent from migrants: these are workers who have historically formed a labour pool that is almost bonded, even after being freed. Bonded plantation labour of slave plantations were established across the globe: Zanzibar’s economy was in large part built on slave plantations, and Sri Lanka’s on bonded plantation labour. The case of Sri Lanka is particularly illuminating. Though the plantations were captured labour and virtually bonded through the lack of education and social mobility imposed on them, a number of union movements emerged, including the Ceylon Worker’s Congress. Under its original leadership, the CWC made enormous gains for all plantation workers – improved education, housing, healthcare and wages without apparently operating any penalizing system to punish either those who defected from the union or those who were members of other unions. Similar success stories are apparent in Southern India in particular.

Both of these models could be profitably applied to the African context. Such is the excess of unemployed (more accurately, underemployed) in Africa, that individuals are deeply reluctant to assert their rights to employers. Employers also use strategies to minimize the risk of this, particularly in rural areas, where employers often employ a calculated strategy of using day-workers, changing the individuals picked up regularly. Often, they target female heads of household, who are even less likely agitate, given their precarious financial situation. These areas need movements to educate individuals about their rights and the laws, but also need organizations to represent their voice collectively and therefore reduce the risk associated with individual agitation.

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On the Weakness of States

Jul 27

Posted by Ranil Dissanayake in Governance, History | 1 Comment

Did you ever see the original hulk TV show? They basically dusted Lou Ferrigno with green powder and asked him to growl. He was still more convincing that Edward Norton.

Weak or Strong?

It was not the case that old states were uniformly ‘weak,’ more that they husbanded their moral and physical authority for specific tasks… Where complex bundles of royal privileges and powers had come into existence, there was often a tendency for them to be broken up, becoming part of the patrimony of some other prince or noble. Kings and emperors often found it lucrative and convenient to ‘farm out’ their rights to the highest bidder…

In China… initially the emperors had been content to cede their power in one area in order to strengthen it elsewhere. In the longer run, however, the decay of these imperial functions gravely compromised the regime’s legitimacy. Recent work on the West African Asante [one of the great pre-colonial African kingdoms] has also shown that this aspiring centralized power was severely limited by local feudatories and lineage groups….

So Government in all of these great states was often something of a trick of the light. State power was powerful and purposive in defined areas, though constant vigilance was needed to stop it seeping away to magnates and local communities. Elsewhere it was patchy and contingent. Over large areas it was deliberately not exercised at all…In the monsoon areas of Asia where great kings vaunted their magnificence, warfare and tax gathering regularly came to a halt when the roads annually became impassable. The state could only deploy a small number of officials or exercise royal justice in particular cases. Everywhere, therefore, the panoply of state and imperial power rested in the longer term on the co-option and honouring of local elites or self-governing local communities.

Every time I open The Birth of the Modern World, I read a passage in which Chris Bayly exposes the complexity of historical reality and dangers of simplification. In this example, he looks at the period leading up to around 1800, in which states were beginning to take modern form. In examining the phenomenon of weak or strong states, Bayly emphasises that states are not static over space, time or function. As such, naming a state ‘weak’ or ‘strong’ may simply cloud the real story, that states choose to exercise power in some areas and not others, not always in the best long-term interest of the state itself and often simply in response to basic opportunity or aims that owe more to symbolic rather than rational ends. The Great Russian Empire existed primarily on paper, for example, with large swathes of land ungoverned – almost a textbook example of a ‘weak’ state. Yet when the state was called upon to exert its authority, it always found the means to, at least until 1917.

We talk a lot about weak states now, and even of ‘failed’ states. These are not new ideas nor new phenomena. When we think about modern failed states, we need to bear in mind that for most there are functions in which they are strong and there are areas in which they govern effectively; it’s from these that strategy on how to incorporate the rest of the nominally governed area must be generated. This may involve subjugation or devolution or both – states are about the exercise of moral and physical authority, which is not always pleasant to witness or be subject to. The process by which a patchily strong state becomes a uniformly strong state is rarely without severe conflict.

In the extreme cases, where ‘states’ govern a few square miles and little else, we are in uncharted territory. Historically, these have never succeeded, and gave way to successor states or anarchy. Our attempts to forestall this may be futile or we may find a way to build a new moral and physical authority to reinforce the state. Given that outside interference almost always involves an abdication of moral authority in the eyes of an insular or jingoistic public, it’s may be that only force can support these.

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More on Romer’s Great Folly

Jun 14

Posted by Ranil Dissanayake in Development, Economics, Governance, History, Political Economy | 7 Comments

"You too can have this city, if you just purchase a simple, easily applied set of rules. Retails at $49.99"

Reader Adam alerted me to a piece in The Atlantic on Charter Cities. Long-time readers will know I’m profoundly critical of Paul Romer’s ahistorical, acultural thinking on the idea, which reveals a basic lack of understanding about how cities, migration and laws actually arise and work.

The article is full of badly reasoned logic, too. It says that Romer has been criticized for his Charter Cities idea, but then defends him by saying that he came up with New Growth Theory. So what? Clever people have stupid ideas sometimes, and people who are expert in one field might turn out to be ordinary or worse in another.

A lot else in the piece, some of which comes direct from the mouth of Romer worries me. Here are a few quotes, the first of which Adam pointed out in his e-mail:

“In a sense, Britain inadvertently, through its actions in Hong Kong, did more to reduce world poverty than all the aid programs that we’ve undertaken in the last century,” Romer observes drily.

This is the closest that Romer comes out advocating colonialism outright. Never mind that my earlier criticism pointed out some of the hundreds of holes in his story about how Hong Kong came to be so successful, Romer is decided: Britain made Hong Kong successful by importing new rules. The fact that Hong Kong’s legal code took something close to half a century to evolve, and a further 20 years to be enforced correctly, is completely ignored. I know – my family are all lawyers, and some have been key players in the evolution of that legal code and witnesses to the creation of a police force and institutional structure to enforce it.

“Anything that involves land can be manipulated by people who want to rise up against a leader,” [Romer] began. “You have to find a place where there’s a strong enough leader with enough legitimacy to do this knowing that he’s going to get attacked. It narrows the options quite a bit. But we shouldn’t give up without trying a few more places.” In short, a disappointment with one client is no excuse for failing to pitch other ones. Any entrepreneur knows that.

So, in other words, the only kind of places where a Charter City might actually work are where the Government is strong, has a legitimate leader, and able to resist opposition. Sounds like the kind of Government that least needs a foreign power to come in and govern a city for them.

When you listen carefully, you realize that much of what Romer is saying should not be controversial. A few development economists argue that geography is destiny, but most share Romer’s conviction that decent rules are paramount.

Another worrying statement. The problem is not that economists think that rules are important. The problem is that they are not independent entities. They do not exist in a vacuum, apart from the culture, history, geography, and so on they relate to. Romer’s approach is wrong not because he thinks rules are important or that countries should invite rich Governments to enforce them, but because Romer thinks he already knows the rules, and that they can be imported anywhere. That’s not how it works. In a recent post I pointed out how different rich countries are from each other. That’s partly because their rules, evolved over hundreds of years in some cases, are specific to each of their own contexts. Romer doesn’t see this. He just sees the rules of today, and imagines that they can be peeled off a society and pulled over a new one, like a one size fits all t-shirt.

Finally, one of the old clichés:

But when African teenagers do their homework under streetlights, isn’t Romer right to think the unthinkable?

Romer is right to think outside of accepted conventions, of course. But when his ideas are so misshapen, so at odds with the reality of the world, no amount of poverty in the world justifies their continued advancement.

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What Does Development Look Like?

May 28

Posted by Ranil Dissanayake in Development, Economics, History | 7 Comments

Hong Kong

Not everywhere will look like this

Apologies for my long silence. I was at home in Hong Kong on holiday attempting to eat a hole in the restaurant industry and drain the islands of tea. Going between the places where I work and Hong Kong is always an extreme contrast – the physical dissimilarities are jarring enough, an emblem of the extremes of material wealth that Hong Kong and, say, Zanzibar represent; but beyond this, the conceptions of what constitutes a working economy and society are different as well.

But these differences aren’t just between ‘developed’ and ‘not developed’ countries – one gets the same feeling moving between Hong Kong and London. It’s a reminder of the fact that development looks different in different places. Of course, there are characteristics that unite developed countries: higher average incomes, longer life expectancies, better education, less poverty and better prospects for employment. But the way in which these places function are different.

In England, and most of Europe, working hours are relatively short, incomes protected by legislation and unionism and living standards safeguarded by a social safety net provided or supported by the State. In specific enclaves of the economy, there is frenzied activity: the City of London (dominated by financial and legal services) operates on long hours, high volumes of transactions and isn’t the most stable of employers. But for the most part, England seems a more sedate place with a pretty good work/life balance.

Hong Kong is different. That frenzied economic activity that characterizes the City is everywhere, driven by rampant consumerism. People work insane hours, and not just the bankers and lawyers. Many of my friends there own or manage companies – they work long hours, but most of their staff do as well. Many are paid for a standard eight hour working day, but without the inducement of over-time pay or extra leave choose to stay in the office well beyond this most days to push the company’s business just a little bit further. They know their jobs are not well protected, and depend on the strength of that individual company – any edge they can provide helps safeguard their livelihood. This attitude carries over to the retail sector as well: walking down a busy street in Causeway Bay or Wan Chai and you can buy shoes, movies, stationery or handbags at midnight or later.

This isn’t an unreservedly good thing: while it’s great to be in a vibrant place that doesn’t shut down, a common complaint about Hong Kong is the poor work/life balance. People are compelled to work extremely long hours partly because the Government takes a minimalist approach to social protection and the fact that job security isn’t great, responding closely to economic conditions. Life in England isn’t completely different, but it’s at a different point in the scale of uncertainty, work/life balance and commercialism.

These observations matter for development. We take for granted that there is a vision of ‘development’ or ‘developedness’ that poor countries are striving to, but how accurate is this? There are many different paths that can be taken to the same aims of better incomes, life expectancy, health and education. These paths will lead to a different kind of economy and society, with different advantages and drawbacks. Yet, it doesn’t appear that development policy, certainly not from the donor side, takes into account the myriad approaches to development. From the developing country side, the mania for strategies, visions and plans, while well intentioned, seeks to hit specific targets rather than laying out a conception of what kind of society and economy is desired.

If we accept that developed countries have used different methods to get where they are, and that they have created economies, state structures and societies that have different sets of advantages and disadvantages, there is a case to be made that development policy should focus on individual countries. Specifically, perhaps we should be looking at how the population, state, geography etc. might best develop as a functioning economic and social structure, rather than focusing on the outcomes and outputs that these structures are supposed to achieve to merit the tag ‘developed’.

These are just thoughts. There are good reasons why we focus on incomes, health and such – these are the real experiences of people. But perhaps, in keeping with the modern obsession for measurement, we’re focusing on the wrong end of the development process.

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Motivation, Leadership and Ideology

Mar 16

Posted by Ranil Dissanayake in Development, Economics, History | 4 Comments

‘Motivation, Lea-der-ship, I-de-ol-ogy – these are a few of my favourite things’

‘Motivation, Lea-der-ship, I-de-ol-ogy – these are a few of my favourite things’

A lot of modern economic theory aims to provide a theoretical platform from which we can start to understand complex phenomena. Most economists recognise that a platform is still only that, and that there is a lot more to the world than it provides. This is a method that has crept into other social sciences, like sociology and political science, too; with the same caveats.

The approach has merit: it is useful for us to look for patterns in how things work, even if differences between experiences outweigh similarities. However, it can also bias the choice of the factors we analyse towards those with the most uniform properties, suitable for this kind of theorisation (the obvious counterpoint, that all research methods have biases, is true: this is why it is important to draw on research from multiple disciplines). I saw an example of this in a very interesting book I’m reading at the moment: When Things Fell Apart, by Robert H. Bates, a political scientist.

Bates is looking at state failure and conflict in late-20th Century Africa, noting an increase in incidence of civil war and predatory state behaviour. He puts forward a basic resource-based theory: essentially, state predation emerges when the discounted returns from predation on the society and seizing or stealing resource are higher than the discounted returns from taxation revenue. The theory predicts that as the time horizon of the political leaders reduces, so their tendency to predate on society should increase; similarly, if possible tax revenues fall, they will again tend towards becoming predatory.

Obviously, Bates would recognise that this is not the whole story, but his argument is that this is the basic starting point for understanding civil war. His approach is useful: resources are crucial to understand in conflict, though their role can be different in different circumstances. Yet the method can obscure understanding of other issues. To give a minor example, he writes:

I argue that ethnic diversity does not cause violence; rather, ethnicity and violence are joint products of state failure.

This kind of statement bothers me; it betrays far too rigid a conception of the world. Ethnicity is not ‘caused’ by state failure. Ethnic identities exist everywhere. Hong Kong has a dominant ethnic identity of Han Chinese, and many minority ethnic identities. I would be extremely dubious of anyone who claimed Hong Kong was a failed state. Further, in the African context, we could argue that the statement is turned upside down. It may well be far more useful to say ‘unified identity is the product of state success’. The history of African state-formation suggests that examples like Tanzania where national identity supersedes ethnic identity in many contexts are rare, because pre-existing ethnic identities were welded into states, and these identities have continued to evolve over time. On this particular point, this is just nitpicking. His analysis of ethnicity does not undermine his central argument. But I would argue that ethnicity (and identity more generally) is one of the concepts that model-based analyses struggle with, which is not to say that no models using ethnicity are worthwhile. Some other concepts I’d group in this ‘troublesome’ category for economics are leadership, ideology and motivation.

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Geldof, cognitive dissonance and the Paris Declaration

Mar 16

Posted by Matt in Africa, Aid, Governance, History | 4 Comments

Bob Geldof reacts to the BBC’s report that millions of dollars from the 84-85 Ethiopian famine relief were diverted to buy weapons:

“Produce me one shred of evidence and I promise you I will professionally investigate it, I will professionally report it, and if there is any money missing I will sue the Ethiopian government for that money back and I will spend it on aid.

Discuss.

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Learning from a Different Angle

Mar 6

Posted by Ranil Dissanayake in Development, Economics, History, Research | 2 Comments

Want to learn about state building? Watch Deadwood.

Want to learn about state building? Watch Deadwood.

Development takes in economic change, political change, social and cultural change and technical innovation – all of which interact. This makes trying to understand development a multidisciplinary enterprise, and there are a huge range of sources and approaches to development that we can learn from. Many of them are not even strictly about ‘development’. My brother-in-law teaches history at Cambridge, and when he wants to help his students capture the sense of hope, occasion and fear that propelled so many young people into the Quit India campaign, it’s not to a history he points them, but to RK Narayan’s Waiting for the Mahatma.

In this spirit, I’ve listed a very personal suggestion of resources that may contribute to a richer understanding of development – things that I’ve learnt a great deal from. I’ve left out some of the usual suspects, simply because I wanted to focus on those that deserve a wider audience and a greater influence on what we do: A work of history, a memoir of a journey, a legal-economy book, a political polemic and a TV series. I’ve left out innumerable great books, and I’m sure readers can suggest many more: I’d be really interested to see what others have learnt from.

The Birth of the Modern World – Chris Bayly

This is a huge, ambitious and brilliant work of history, looking at the links between the various parts of the world in the period 1780 to 1914. The focus of this book is not on development at all, but on ‘modernity’, that phenomenon which swept through much of the world in the period covered. Modernity was a sense that societies were engaged in a step-change away from what went before them, but it was also a real set of changes: to the nature of the state, to the economy, to cultural practices, to social organizations and to ways of seeing the world.

In many ways, looking at modernity is more helpful for those of us working in development than our traditional, narrower focus. Bayly shows how the cultural and social changes that characterized the period under study in turn influenced and were influenced by the development of the state and of the economy. He looks at the British Industrial Revolution, the first truly modern economic development tale, and uses Jan de Vries’ idea of an ‘industrious revolution’ together with a host of information about transmission of styles, fashions and acquisitiveness across class and country and demonstrates how the economic transformations that characterized the fastest growing economies were influenced by factors well beyond politics, economy and trade, though these of course were central too.

His scope extends well beyond these economic changes and much of the book looks at the emergence of different forms of thought, religion and state as well as economy and culture. You may not come away with a policy recommendation, but it’s inconceivable you won’t understand more about the world today after reading this.

North of South – Shiva Naipaul

In the mid-1970s Shiva Naipaul, the younger brother of VS, decided to take the money earned from his first two books and spend a few months traveling through Kenya and Tanzania. He wrote North of South based on these experiences – not a travel book; certainly not a book about development; not even a piece of journalism.

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Update on Kapuscinski

Mar 2

Posted by Ranil Dissanayake in Africa, History, Worst practices | 1 Comment

A polish journalist, Artur Domoslawski, has written a book claiming that Ryszard Kapuscinski wrote a form of fiction rather than journalism, in pursuit of a ‘higher form of truth.’

The Guardian writes about the book:

… a new book claims that the legendary Polish journalist, who died three years ago aged 74, repeatedly crossed the boundary between reportage and fiction-writing – or, to put it less politely, made stuff up…

[Domoslawski] added: “Kapuscinski was experimenting in journalism. He wasn’t aware he had crossed the line between journalism and literature. I still think his books are wonderful and precious. But ultimately, they belong to fiction.”

I probably won’t be picking up the biography: I doubt it adds more to John Ryle’s critique that I mentioned a couple of weeks back. Still, this is a good warning for those inclined to quote The Shadow of the Sun as fact.

Read more here.

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