The Colonial Gesture of Development

The Colonial Gesture of Development: The Interpersonal as a Promising Site for Rethinking
Aid to Africa
Author(s): Marcus D. Watson
Source: Africa Today, Vol. 59, No. 3 (Spring 2013), pp. 3-28
Published by: Indiana University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/africatoday.59.3.3 .
Accessed: 13/05/2014 20:42
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Indiana University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Africa Today.
http://www.jstor.org
This content downloaded from 195.78.109.84 on Tue, 13 May 2014 20:42:56 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Evidence for development’s
neocolonial nature may be
tangibly written directly
onto the body conduct of
aid workers.

The Colonial Gesture of Development:
The Interpersonal as a Promising Site
for Rethinking Aid to Africa
Marcus D. Watson
While some scholars uncover connections between African

development and colonialism in the transition from one set
of institutions to the next, others analyze their discourses
for similarities. My perspective builds on the second form
of argumentation, particularly in relation to its finding that
both colonial and development discourses assume a strict
division, hierarchy, and unidirectionality between “us” and
“them.” In my case study, focusing on the daily interactions
between Western aid workers and South African villagers, it
is clear that, for the aid workers, this self-over-them schema is
a modality of being, grounded in their body behavior. I argue,
therefore, that evidence of development as a form of neoco-
lonialism may be etched right into the “colonial bodies” of
many of today’s aid workers.
Kathy1 is an aid worker from Ireland working for an organization charged

with caring for individuals living with HIV-AIDS in rural areas of South
Africa’s Limpopo Province. In addition to working with other aid workers
from Ireland and Australia, she has hired four care-workers from the host
villages to help her carry out the organization’s mission. During a routine
morning, Kathy had picked up three of her village care-workers and was
stopping to pick up the fourth. This time, however, this fourth care-worker,
named Thabo, said “It’s so hot today” and insisted that Kathy and the others
join him under the shade of a tree to share a drink of water. In succession,
Thabo and the other village care-workers drank water from the cup and then
passed it to Kathy, whose face recoiled in disgust. Straightening out her face,
Kathy studied the rim of the cup for lip marks, found some, wiped the marks
off with her fingers, tilted the cup toward her mouth, and finally let one drop
of water fall into her mouth from the cup she would not let touch her lips. As
she later told me, Kathy saw herself as protecting her hygiene while partak-
ing in African cultural life. Her workmates saw things differently, captured
in the following criticism expressed to me two hours later by Thabo, out of
Kathy’s earshot: “You see: she has apartheid in the heart.”

Situations such as this one were what left an impression on me when
I went to South Africa to see if there was an interpersonal dimension of
development worth researching. Having been a Peace Corps volunteer in
this area of South Africa in the late 1990s, I expected to find the element of
cross-cultural miscommunication that is so central to the vignette above.
Two things surprised me, however. The first was the role the body played in
sabotaging relationships between aid workers and their hosts. In the scene
africa today 59(3)
above, for example, it was other people’s lip marks on the cup that disquieted
Kathy, just as it was Kathy’s look of disgust that led her coworkers to accuse
her of having apartheid in her heart. The second surprise relates to villag-
ers’ use of the word apartheid and other damning terms, such as immature,
aggressive, and stupid, to describe aid workers’ behavior. Villagers’ use of
these terms prompted me to engage the academic conversation about the
possibility of a relationship between development and colonialism. Many
4
scholars affirm such a relationship, but they tend to do so by invoking

abstract convergences, often around imperial interests and discursive simi-
The Colonial Gesture of Development
larities. My study of the interpersonal dimension of aid leads me to suggest

that evidence for development’s neocolonial nature may be tangibly written
directly onto the body conduct of aid workers.
Do today’s aid workers literally gesture in colonial ways? Is the body
that has learned to keep the other at a felt distance a colonial body? Is the
colonial body the primal link between development and colonialism? This
article responds to these questions and assesses the extent to which the
answers can be generalized by following six steps.
First, I review scholarly understandings of the connection between
colonialism and development. This connection is usually found in abstract
convergences, though statements about both historical eras being oriented
by the image of a self-over-other metaphysic begin to point toward the
kind of concrete experience highlighted in my study. Second, to provide
ethnographic, methodological, and theoretical background for my findings
on embodiment, I introduce my study of interpersonal relations between
Western aid workers (from highly industrialized or developed social areas)
and South African villagers. Third, I describe some representative interac-
tions that occur between aid workers and villagers. These interactions are
tense around a recurring dynamic: while villagers feel like themselves when
relations between self and other are interdependent, aid workers feel like
themselves when a distinction between self and other is secured. Further,
their inability to help each other feel like themselves is grounded tangibly
in their everyday body behaviors. The opening vignette illustrates this point.
Sharing water from the same cup was, for the villagers, a way of cultivating
closer relations based on trust; for Kathy, however, it was repugnant, signal-
ing a “lack of hygiene,” which was code for the intermingling of a self and
another without first establishing spheres of their own.
Fourth, I begin analyzing the embodied conflict between aid workers
and villagers with reference to the phenomenological notion of intercorpo-
reality, the idea that a self and another who are interacting are necessarily

interdependent and that this interdependence is not a romantic ideal but is
grounded in the way that their bodies move “together in a kind of dance”—
to invoke the work of Edward T. Hall ([1976] 1981:72), the anthropologist
widely considered to be the founder of the field of intercultural communica-
tion. Clearly, an aid worker like Kathy and villagers like Thabo are partici-
pating in the dance of intercorporeality, evidenced by how their gestures and
emotions play off each other while they interact. Just as clear, however, is
africa today 59(3)

that while villagers’ bodies have learned to appreciate the dance, aid workers’
bodies have been socialized to resist their participation in it. Aid workers’
feeling of discrete individuality is thus grounded in a kind of cultural body
behavior, which, like colonial ideology, distinguishes rigidly between self
and other. The article ends by, fifth, drawing out the significances of the
study and, sixth, exploring its limitations. Do today’s aid workers literally
gesture in colonial ways?
5
Marcus D. Watson
Development as Neocolonialism: A Literature Review
There are many reasons to criticize development, especially in sub-Saharan

Africa. As a whole, sub-Saharan Africa has achieved negligible growth by its
own and by global standards since the 1960s (Sundaram 2011), and what little
growth there has been is infamous for benefiting the few, often at the expense
of the many (Nyamnjoh 2000). Predictably, specific development indica-
tors, such as poverty, inequality, and employment, have fluctuated around a
low level or become worse over the same time period (Sundaram 2011). An
increase in foreign investment would seem to be the bright spot for sub-Saha-
ran Africa, but this point sours in light of the fact that investment is largely
aimed at resource industries, often run and managed by foreign companies
or a small class of African businessmen and women. Much of sub-Saharan
Africa’s economy continues the colonial legacy of being based on exporting
primary agricultural products and importing manufactured goods—a formula
for stunting the growth of a middle class (Ocampo and Parra 2006). While
South Africa specifically scores better on many of the measures mentioned
above, it is well documented that many of the economic disparities that
occur between sub-Saharan Africa and highly industrialized countries are
replayed on a smaller scale between black rural and township areas of South
Africa and urban centers and large-scale farming areas, populated largely by
whites (Khumalo 2011).
Scholars explain these kinds of development failings in various ways.
Development “insiders and sympathetic outsiders” (Ferguson 1990:9) see
the failings as technical issues, solvable with better knowledge, designs,
and plans. Antidevelopment and postdevelopment texts are much more
critical, agreeing to see development as “hopelessly flawed” (Rist 1997:238),
a “mask of love” (McKnight 1977, 1985), and “dangerous” (Kothari 2007).
Conclusions such as these are based on identifiable findings and arguments.
For example, development, in associating progress with market expansion,

abuses ecologies (Esteva 2010), fosters dependence (Moyo 2009), and dis-
respects cultures (Rahnema and Bawtree 1997). A strong thread in these
critical traditions is to see development as a “cast of mind” (Sachs 1992:1),
an “ideology” (Alvares 1992:90), and a “myth” (Latouche 1993; Rist 1997).
The upshot of these texts is that what has failed is the idea of develop-
ment. Contrary to what development theories have explicitly or implicitly
claimed, the argument goes, there is no such thing as infinite progress, more
africa today 59(3)
and less developed people, or one-way giving that is not supported by threats
(Groenemeyer 1992:52). Following naturally from this perspective is that
development is “the prolongation of the colonial yoke” (Esteva 2010:4), the
criticism to which I now turn.
The word colonialism has become a generalized signifier, meaning
something like “bad things white people did a long time ago.” When used in
this sense, it is academically useless. What I will do, then, is review the work
6
of several scholars who have grounded their arguments about the relation-
ships between development and colonialism in real ideologies and practices.
First, however, and at perhaps the most general level, it can be asserted that
colonization, which ended for most African states in the 1960s, and devel-
opment, which began arguably (Hödl and Kopf 2011:1) in the 1940s, when
President Truman used the word underdevelopment for the first time, are
historically and chronologically linked processes. Not only did development
follow colonialism in time, but strikingly similar power relations (Cornwall
2006) and arguably personnel relations (Kothari 2006) oriented both projects.
As foreign-affairs specialist John Rapley succinctly states, “Virtually every
third-world country began its modern history as a colony of one of the former
imperial powers of Europe or Asia” (2007:19). So there is a general basis for
comparing colonialism and development: they are not apples and oranges.
Therefore, when a scholar makes a claim such as “ ‘Development’ represents
a continuity of the work of their precursors, the missionaries and voluntary
organizations that cooperated in Europe’s colonization and control of Africa”
(Manji and O’Coill 2002:568), he or she is making a reasonable assertion.
Several scholarly arguments, when considered together, provide a
fuller understanding of how development relates to colonialism. Some
of them try to recapture their connection in history. Along these lines,
some scholars contend that, as colonization’s reliance on racializing and
dominating others became widely acknowledged, colonialism lost cred-
ibility, and development became its palatable alternative (Cornwall 2006;
Manji and O’Coill 2002). Other perspectives are more specific, saying that
the reason colonizers worked feverishly to save the colonial project in the
form of development was to protect their economic interests. As the colo-
nized across sub-Saharan Africa began agitating for independence, colonial
powers risked losing their footholds in the continent. Development helped
because it sounded better than “colonialism,” and it invited a buffer class
of Africans to enjoy the fruits of exploitation (Cooper 1997; Garland 1999;
Rapley 2007:20–21) while placating the masses with promises of welfare
(Bornstein 2005:97–117). Other scholarship pursues the relationship between

colonialism and development by identifying resonances between them.
Taken as discourses, for example, colonialism’s “civilized vs. primitive” and
development’s “helpers vs. helped” both assume a radical division between
“us” and “them,” a one-way form of helping, and the West as the model of
success (Kebede 2011; Zein-Elabdin 2011).
I give special attention to colonialism and development’s convergence
around the idea of there being a radical division between an us and a them
africa today 59(3)

because this assumption speaks most directly to the interpersonal relations
highlighted in my research. Important points have been made about subtle
differences between the forms of dividing us and them, such as develop-
ment’s version being less strict and more inclusive than colonialism’s
(Cooper 1997), but my focus is more on the images themselves and less on
their uses in practice. Further, since colonialism’s “civilized vs. primitive”
and development’s “helpers vs. helped” are well-known and perhaps even
7
commonsensical at this point, my approach is not to cite a long list of texts
that make references to these discourses. Rather, I offer two succinct quota-
Marcus D. Watson
tions, one describing colonial discourse and the other describing develop-
ment discourse, and thereafter analyze the two in terms of each other. The
resonances between these discourses, especially as the resonances relate to
imagining a strict division between “us” and “them,” will be clear. The first
passage is from Nelson Maldonado-Torres’ Against War, which invokes the
work of several postcolonial scholars to elaborate a sophisticated understand-
ing of colonial discourse; the second passage is from Majid Rahnema’s work
on participatory development.
As I use it here, colonialism does not refer so much to the

presence of imperialism or colonial administration, but to a
modality of being as well as to power relations that sustain a
fundamental social and geopolitical divide between masters
and slaves. (Maldonado-Torres 2008:239)
When A considers it essential for B to be empowered, A

assumes not only that B has no power—or does not have the
right kind of power—but also that A has the secret formula of
a power [in]to which B has to be initiated. (Rahnema 1992:123)
The Maldonado-Torres statement is just another way of saying what

scholars such as Franz Fanon, Edward Said, and Gayatri Spivak have said of
colonialism: that its oppression and exploitation of others were justified by
essentializing a difference between these others and the colonizers, a “them”
and an “us.” Rahnema’s schema for development discourse may be thought
to be outdated, applying perhaps to early development theories but not to
today’s culturally sensitive ones. This is not true, however, for Rahnema is
finding the relation he describes between A and B to characterize the idea
and practice of participatory development, which has come to symbolize
a new, noncolonial way of finally “giving ‘the poor’ a voice and a choice”

(Cornwall 2006:62). What development discourse, even in its least contro-
versial form, and colonial discourse share is primarily the assumption of a
radical split between a self and another. A hierarchy is assumed to structure
their relationship, signaled by Maldonado-Torres’ generic terms masters and
slaves and captured in Rahnema’s assertion that A feels a need to empower B.
Finally, both discourses assume a unidirectional flow of influence and giving
from “master” to “slave,” which, if undermined, would recognize others as
africa today 59(3)
people who can also give, violating “the very meaning and purpose of the
logic of lordship and bondage” (Maldonado-Torres 2008:150).
Aid workers in my study assumed these very traits of subjectivity
imagined in both colonial and development discourses. They experienced
themselves as profoundly separate from the villagers—which meant, not
that they made no contact with their hosts, but that they did so after having
secured their desire for independence (Watson 2012). Aid workers experi-
8
enced themselves as hierarchically above their hosts, though this surely

happened with more subtlety and sensitivity than it had during the colonial
era. Aid workers resisted villagers’ invitations to participate in obligatory

exchanges of simple goods—which, for villagers, signaled the start of friend-
ship but, for the aid workers, looked like an attempt to buy their support.
One takeaway from my study was, thus, that the root subjectivity assumed
in colonial and development discourses was, as Maldonado-Torres stated, a
“modality of being” and an experience, not just a metaphysical abstraction.
A second takeaway, the focus of this article, was that aid workers’ experi-
ences of self were supported by their routine body behaviors. Is a body that
has learned to secure the feeling of a radical split between self and other a
colonial body? If some of today’s aid workers gesture in precisely these terms,
are they neocolonial subjects, despite what some may say to the contrary?
Following is an introduction to the study that inspired these questions.
The Research Study: A General Background
My findings and perspective were inspired by studying the everyday inter-

actions between aid workers from highly industrialized spaces and their
Tsonga- and Pedi-speaking hosts from rural areas of South Africa’s Limpopo
Province. Located in the far northeast of the country, Limpopo is the most
rural and poorest of South Africa’s nine provinces; its poverty is defined by the
male migrant labor system, traceable largely to the apartheid era (1948–1994).
The migrant labor system refers to the way apartheid manipulated economic
conditions such that Africans had to rely on both rural subsistence agriculture
and urban wage employment to support their families. In addition to disunit-
ing families by leaving women in rural areas and encouraging men to move
back and forth between rural and urban living (Collinson et al. 2006:634), the
migrant labor system has been linked to a high prevalence of HIV-AIDS (Lurie
et al. 1997), the interlinked problems of overpopulation, soil erosion, and food
insecurity (Demetre et al. 2011), and resource-deprived schools, coupled with

intermittent teachers’ strikes (Cohen 2010). In this context, rural Africans,
including Tsonga- and Pedi-speakers, are sustaining themselves through a
combination of government social grants, male migrant labor, female domes-
tic work, and home vegetable and fruit gardens. A handful of villagers receive
stipends for working alongside foreign aid workers.
It was members of these Tsonga- and Pedi-speaking communities
who would come to host, work with, and receive aid from diverse domestic
africa today 59(3)

and international aid agencies, including the three agencies participating
in this study. First, Tuvo Christian Church is an Afrikaner-run missionary
church, established for the purpose of spiritual enlightenment and business-
skills development of Pedi-speaking youth, sustained by donations from
the leading missionary’s home church in Cape Town. Second, Kurisanani, a
Roman Catholic nongovernmental organization run by Australian and Irish
nuns for the care of HIV-positive Tsonga- and Pedi-speaking individuals, is
9
well funded by Catholic Relief Services. Finally, the United States Peace
Corps has several projects in place, which position volunteers to improve
Marcus D. Watson
pedagogical and material conditions of grammar schools in Tsonga-speaking
areas. These projects differ in relation to national origin, aid sector, budget
wherewithal, and ethnic group targeted for their work, making convergences
among them interesting and significant. What they share is that they are
implicated in current neoliberal approaches to development, which argue
that development works best when its activists stand side by side with the
“needy” to empower them to help themselves. The grassroots character
of the projects puts aid workers and villagers into face-to-face contact on
a daily basis, which facilitates the study of interpersonal dimensions of
development.
Methodological Considerations
This research was grounded in two years of fieldwork (2005–2007) in rural

Limpopo, an ideal setting since, having served as a Peace Corps volunteer
here from 1997 to 1999, I was already familiar with the development scene,
rural life, Tsonga language, and specific people. Through this experience,
I elicited the participation of the Tsonga and Pedi speakers and found the
twenty-four aid workers and the three aid agencies to which they were con-
nected. Getting three different aid organizations to participate in the study
was important for any generalizations that might be drawn. For example,
had a “colonial body” been found only among the aid workers of a single
agency, such as the Peace Corps, the phenomenon could be tied too tightly
to the organizational background, culture, or training of that organization;
however, the fact that the same “colonial body” showed up across diverse
institutions and practitioners points to a phenomenon of broader scope and
significance. To become even better acquainted with rural Limpopo life, I
lived with a host family I had known since my days as a Peace Corps vol-
unteer, receiving a daily tutorial in the inner workings of family and friend-
ship life. From this home base, two research assistants from my host village

accompanied me by car to the development sites, where we recorded and
compared notes on the interactions between aid workers and their Tsonga-
and Pedi-speaking interlocutors.
Phenomenology helped us see the interactions between the aid work-
ers and their hosts in a holistic way. Phenomenology, which may be defined
as a scientific study of the senses, tries to rethink how human experiences
really happen. Instead of assuming, as Cartesian philosophy does, that
africa today 59(3)
human action begins with the conscious intentions of individual minds,

phenomenology traces the beginning of human action to senses, percep-
tions, and the body behaviors that occur between individuals. The notion
of intercorporeality crystalizes much of this perspective. Intercorporeality
(Csordas 2008; Weiss 1999) is the supposition that human beings are always
interrelated and that this interrelatedness is not a romantic ideal but an
empirical fact, grounded in the way bodies “move together in a kind of
10
dance” (Hall [1976] 1981:72) when people interact. That is, feeling oneself
and not another is “not a given property of existence” (Jackson 1998:11) but
depends on the two being in physical and emotional relation to each other
(Merleau-Ponty 1964:114–115). Using this understanding of the interpersonal
and human experience, my research assistants and I recorded not only what
aid workers and villagers said while interacting, but also the embodied and
emotional basis of their spoken words. What they said and what their bodies
said were often in conflict.
Theoretical Perspective
Phenomenology is intended to be a methodological perspective, telling us

where to look for the beginnings of human action and why to do so. In fact,
conjuring up a new theory of the self is widely considered to be doomed to
failure, because selfhood, starting in emotions, perceptions, and bodies, is too
elusive to be captured in abstractions. However, whether it was because of
my research design, the excellence of phenomenological concepts, or some
other factor, I found the notion of intercorporeality to be theoretically useful.
It was apparent that the body conduct of aid workers and villagers was not
just accidentally different, but that they were different in relation to the
same phenomenon: the “dance” of intercorporeality. Inasmuch as the emo-
tions and gestures of aid workers and villagers played off each other as they
interacted, no one escaped the phenomenon of body-to-body dependency, but
it was precisely body-to-body dependency that the bodies of the aid workers
and villagers had learned to evaluate differently. Implied here is that the
body, instead of being a jumble of biological parts and processes, is shaped
by culture to have agency or “tactile intelligence” (Charlesworth 2000) and
to be a primal site for existential experiences of good and bad (Slaby 2008).
The body learns to evaluate and recalibrate relations between self and other
according to value orientations of its culture of socialization.
Phenomenology-inclined thinkers hint at knowing that this is the
case. For instance, Michael Jackson says of intersubjectivity, which is akin

to the notion of intercorporeality, that “it resonates with the manner in
which many non-Western peoples tend to emphasize identity as ‘mutually
arising’—as relational and variable—rather than assign ontological primacy
to the individual persons or objects that are implicated in the intersubjective
nexus” (1998:7, original emphasis). On the basis of my research findings, I
extend this reasoning by suggesting that one of culture’s fundamental tasks
is to evaluate the fact of human relatedness and etch its evaluation directly
africa today 59(3)

into the nonverbal behaviors of the human body. That is, intercorporeality
is an empirical fact that the human body is led to affirm or negate. Secur-
ing one or the other evaluation of intercorporeal dependency takes agency,
intelligence, and intentionality, but this time it is the human body, not the
conscious mind, that is the source and inspiration. To illustrate once again
using the vignette given above: Kathy’s facial expression of disgust was not
haphazard, accidental, or even innocent; it was defending the line between
11
herself and others that she had learned to feel was elemental to her sense
of selfhood. Similarly, by sipping from the same cup in an unremarkable
Marcus D. Watson
manner, villagers’ bodies were closing distance between self and other,
thereby affirming the dance of intercorporeality.
It is the body that is culturally oriented to negate body-to-body depen-
dency and thereby to secure the experience of atomized subjectivity that is
colonial. I follow Maldonado-Torres’ view of what might be called a micro-
social colonialism, referring not to the “presence of imperialism or colonial
administration,” but to a “modality of being” (2008:239). The hidden agenda
of this colonialism, which Maldonado-Torres sees as one of many manifes-
tations of a modern “paradigm of violence and war” (2008:237), is to make
“invisible or insignificant the constitutive force of interhuman contact for
the formation of subjectivity” (2008:237). My study hastens to add that colo-
nialism’s hidden agenda has a body, which I will call a negating body. This
body is not a thing, but a process—not a given, but an artifact. To achieve its
end, which is to make feeling like a self-willed subject seem natural, it has
been equipped to employ specific “techniques of the body” (Mauss 1973) to
render invisible the intercorporeal ground of human-to-human contact. The
result is not zero contact with others, which “can never be accomplished in
totality” (Maldonado-Torres 2008:240), but a self that, in a sense, “becomes
allergic to the Other” (2008:237). Instead of becoming the self’s alter ego, the
other becomes its “sub-alter,” who, in that position, anchors the colonial
self’s “process of autonomy and self-assertion” (2008:238).
Findings: Examples of Embodied Tensions

in Development Situations
The theoretical use I am making of intercorporeality and colonialism is

based on close observation and participation in the kinds of development
encounters described in this section. I have organized the examples of devel-
opment encounters into five categories, according to the aid workers’ salient

body behaviors. These categories are hard handshake, steady eye contact,
withdrawal, decisive movement, and consumption. Such a classification
is intended to make it easier to follow the points being made. Whatever
nuance is sacrificed by “organizing up” will be recaptured in the detailed
discussions within each category. The nuances to look for are that each aid
worker exhibited a combination of the body behaviors being described but
also that no aid worker was the same. For example, the behavioral ethos of
africa today 59(3)
some was to be hard-bodied and assertive, whereas that of others was to be

softer and more distant. In either case, however, aid workers’ body conduct
converged around helping to underscore a stark separation between self and
other. Aid workers’ nonverbal individualism obtained when interacting
with each other but stood out more boldly when interacting with villagers,
whose body behavior encoded for a desire to establish two-way, mutually
dependent relations between self and other. An example of one of my own
12
experiences as a Peace Corps volunteer will serve as a measure of my critical

self-reflection: my body conduct was just like that of the aid workers who
participated in this study.
Hard Handshake
In Tsonga and Pedi cultures, particularly in their rural forms, a handshake

is usually gentle, with hands being unflexed. After handshaking or hugging,
the hands of interactants often fall to the side, where fingers may become
loosely intertwined while a conversation proceeds. This sort of handshaking
conveys a wish, however unconscious, to be open to an “other.” By contrast,
aid workers would thrust a hand into that of a villager or present it gently
but with a firm hand. The exit strategy was either to back out the hand
quickly or leave it clutched but still unwavering in its firmness. Sergeant, a
forty-year-old Afrikaner leader of Tuvo Christian Church, once shook hands
with one of his teenaged congregants, Teres. As Sergeant buckled Teres’
knuckles, Teres looked over at me as if in shock. I asked both of them about
handshaking shortly after this incident. Sergeant confessed the following:
“When I shake their [villagers’] hands, I do it strongly. I want to see if they’re
there.” “What do you mean, ‘if they’re there’,” I asked. He replied, “Life is
hard and you can’t be soft, especially if you’re a Christian. You have to show
people that you stand for something.” Teres saw things differently: “He’s
like a boxer—always strong.” “Why did you look at me when he [Sergeant]
shook your hand?” I queried. “He always does that [shakes hands hard] and
I always suffer,” Teres chuckled in response.
Steady Eye Contact
In Tsonga- and Pedi-speaking villages, eye contact is usually situational,

ebbing and flowing with the perceived significance of what is being said.
When talking among themselves and with villagers alike, aid workers stared
into the eyes of their hosts, violating local standards of sociability. Aid

workers’ usual form of gazing was to look steadfastly into others’ eyes while
blinking now and then. Offering bugged out and unblinking eyes were varia-
tions on the norm. Aid workers understood steady gazing as showing respect,
but a side effect was to keep others, including villagers, at a distance. Con-
sider the example of Jenny and my twenty-two-year-old research assistant,
Chobi. As planned, Chobi and I went to Miswereni Primary School, where
I would talk with the principal and Chobi would interview Jenny, a Peace
africa today 59(3)

Corps volunteer in her late twenties who was organizing teachers to paint a
world map on the outside wall of a shoebox-shaped, brick school building.
When we reconvened, Chobi complained about Jenny’s staring. Making his
eyes unblinking in a caricature of Jenny, Chobi said, “What’s wrong with
her? No matter what, this is what she’s doing.” What rattled villagers like
Chobi was a perceived gap between the ebbs and flows of the conversations
and the unflinching demeanor. For appearing transfixed and disconnected
13
from the social moment, Chobi called Jenny “stupid.”
Marcus D. Watson
Withdrawal
By withdrawal, I mean a sudden pulling back from something, as if threat-

ened. Everyone, including villagers, withdrew in certain circumstances. Vil-
lagers tended to pull back to show deference to a person considered to be of
higher status, as when a child or wife shifts away from a father or a husband
who is passing by. Aid workers’ withdrawing was, by contrast, not done in
recognition of social positionality but as a way of rejecting such conventions
and the social obligations they implied. As an example, Peter was a Peace
Corps volunteer in his mid-twenties who, with support of a joint English-
Afrikaans church in the town of Tzaneen, turned to Christian missionizing
in the area. I witnessed the following incident while at Peter’s mission sta-
tion. Basani, a teenaged domestic worker at the station, reached for the dirty
clothes Peter was holding. Her intention was to wash the clothes for him. In
response, Peter’s arms tightened around the clothes, his eyes narrowed as if
snipping himself away from Basani, and his torso and head swiveled leftward,
effectively keeping the laundry away from her. He was saying, “No, no, no,
don’t worry” to her all the while. While Peter and other aid workers justified
such refusing in terms of either wanting to be self-sufficient or nonexploit-
ative to hosts, the net effect was to secure a detachment between themselves
and their hosts, who frowned upon such separation.
Decisive Movement
In the rural settings, people’s body movements tend to be fluid and specifi-
cally supportive of others’ body movements, as in the example of intermin-
gling fingers, given above. Many aid workers, however, introduced a decisive
style of action that left an impression of being dismissive of others. Some
aid workers would dart squarely at passersby to greet them, as if “taking
control” of the obligatory greeting, which many of them said they felt was

a waste of time. Other aid workers would break away from a conversation
by making a jerking movement, such as a quick bow, while saying some-
thing like, “Well, I’ll talk with you later.” Most common was the speed
walk. Valerie, for instance, is a forty-four-year-old Irish nun who runs one
of Kurisanani’s HIV-AIDS projects. One day, while walking from her car to
Kurisanani’s village office, she whizzed past Mulani, a Tsonga coworker,
also in her forties, who was trying to wave her down for a chat. Without
africa today 59(3)
slowing down, she said, “I’ll be with you in four and a half minutes,” to
which Mulani looked perplexed. Much later, she emerged from the office
and whizzed past Mulani again, saying, “Okay, talk to me.” Aid workers in
Valerie’s position understood themselves as being busy. What their bodies
had mastered, though, was how to draw a line, often literally in the form of
footsteps in the dirt, between themselves and villagers. When Mulani said
of this incident, “She [Valerie] doesn’t consider people,” she was expressing
14
in her own words what many villagers would say about some aid workers.
As a way of placing myself within the phenomenon in question as
well as to suggest that the phenomenon may apply equally well to academ-
ics and others who share the cultural habitus of aid workers, I now offer a
self-example. It qualifies most clearly as a case of “decisive movement.”
Like many aid workers, I felt uneasy about giving in to villagers’ expectation
to stop and greet passersby while walking from place to place. Rather than
showing my distaste by coldly ignoring passersby as they motioned for me to
stop, I would walk soldierly and fast. Without slowing down, I would reach
out to shake hands, smile, and exchange greetings in a hurried way. I would
often even spin out of the handshake and keep marching toward my destina-
tion without missing a step. Words exchanged, such as “I’m going to town,”
would become inaudible as the distance between us increased. Like the aid
workers, I was not conscious of doing this. It took a study of the interpersonal
dimension of development to raise my awareness. Also like aid workers, I did
not feel I was doing anything wrong. Just the opposite: I applauded myself
for accommodating villagers’ expectations while maintaining my sense of
comfort. Being so much like the aid workers, I did not escape the phenom-
enon in question: my soldier walk and rationalization helped spring me out
of the pressure to engage the “other” reciprocally.
Consumption
The dynamics of cross-cultural miscommunication being described here

manifested during episodes of eating and drinking together. The vignette
about Kathy and the water cup fits here. Another example involves John,
an Irish Catholic priest in his forties, who, as an outreach worker for a local
diocese, rather than part of the three major agencies mentioned above, helped
Pedi-speaking widows establish chicken-farming businesses. Realizing that
eating communally was, for villagers, a mark of friendship and trust, John
began accepting invitations from his Pedi-speaking male assistants to eat
with them. The dish they would eat was usually headlined by porridge

(Tsonga vuswa, Pedi bahove), a corn-based staple served in a moundlike
shape and eaten with the hands. His meal companions soon realized that
John would eat the porridge up to a point where they had not touched and
stop. Seto spoke for all the meal companions when he said, out of John’s
earshot, “He must think we’re sick or dirty.” Whereas villagers were expe-
riencing eating together as a mark of trust, John was imagining the meal to
be discretely sectioned off, with a piece for each person. Examples of con-
africa today 59(3)

sumption, such as John’s and Kathy’s, are particularly illuminating, for they
reveal how the hidden existential demands of the body can be governing
and destabilizing what appear to be innocent and even positive moments of
cross-cultural intimacy and affection.
Each of the twenty-four aid workers who participated in the study
displayed a combination of these and other body behaviors. What made the
body behaviors “one” is that each was masterful at the same thing, ensuring
15
a felt distance between self and other. The net effect was one of a line of aid
workers being face-to-face with villagers but without ever relating to them
Marcus D. Watson
in a reciprocal, two-way manner. By way of an American metaphor, the aid
workers delivered a collective stiff-arm to members of the targeted com-
munities, with the extended arm reaching out to touch the other but only
as a way of keeping the other at bay. Any of the other aid worker–villager
combinations could have been used to describe the interpersonal dynamic in
question. To show that the five examples used here—plus the sixth involving
Kathy and the water cup—are representative of the aid workers and villagers
whose names it would not have been practical to mention, I have framed
the examples by outlining variations of the body behavior under review. By
including an additional example of myself, I have hinted at what I cannot
explore in depth here: that there is a good chance that aid workers are far
from being alone when it comes to stiff-arming others. This is not to suggest
that villagers lacked agency, however: it is just that this article is interested
in seeing whether it is plausible to say that aid workers embody a colonial
form of gesturing.
The Colonial Bodies of Aid Workers: An Analysis
The first thing that may come to mind after looking at the scenarios above
is cross-cultural miscommunication, and there certainly is something war-
ranted about such a first thought. Tension, after all, is elemental to interac-
tions between the aid workers and Limpopo villagers, who represent different
cultural upbringings. In the analysis that follows, however, I show that there
is much more to it than just cross-cultural miscommunication. Indeed, the
idea of cross-cultural miscommunication will be shown to be epiphenom-
enal, an effect of specific dynamics, more intractable than the concept of
cross-cultural miscommunication would allow. Cross-cultural miscom-
munication leaves the impression of unfortunate missteps, which, with a
little extra thought and tinkering, can be solved. Thought is not the problem,

however, as aid workers and villagers actually shared much in the way of
ideology: Christianity is good, while traditional religion is bad; monogamy is
good, while polygamy is bad; safe sex is good, while unprotected sex is bad.
Indeed, in an era suffused with talk of postracialism, multiculturalism, and
free trade, controversy-free speech is to be expected. This is where a focus
on the interpersonal dimension of development, coupled with insights from
phenomenology, comes into play. Such a lens clearly shows that the problem
africa today 59(3)
starts in bodies.
To begin, there is no doubt that the behaviors of the aid workers and
villagers abided by the principle of intercorporeality, or the idea of body-
to-body dependency. This is most straightforward in situations involving
direct physical contact. When Sergeant and Teres shake hands, for example,
their hands, arms, and whole bodies move and shimmy because of each
other. The dance of intercorporeality takes place in other situations. The
16
sight of Peter invites Basani to reach out for his dirty clothes, prompting
Peter to swivel away from her. Valerie is not whizzing past no one but is
doing so at the sight of Mulani, who responds to Valerie’s speed-walking

with a perplexed look. It is the rising arm of a passerby that is starting to
wave me down for a greeting that jump starts my soldierly walk, which I
aim directly at the individual. Finally, it is when John sees the hands of his
meal companions encroaching upon his side of the plate that he pulls his
hand away and stops eating. As he stops eating and his meal companions
realize why, they hold in their resentment toward him until later, when
they gossip about him out of earshot. In short, inasmuch as the bodies of
the aid workers and villagers played off each other while interacting, aid
workers and villagers did not escape their intercorporeal dependency on
each other. Whatever specific words or feelings they expressed to each
other, they did indeed dance.
The dance performed by the aid workers and villagers was not random:
it was patterned and predictable. This was because, I argue, the bodies of
the aid workers and villagers have been socialized to evaluate body-to-body
dependency differently—which does not discount the diversity among aid
workers or among villagers. For instance, Teres, Basani, and Seto are Pedi-
speakers, whereas Chobi and Mulani are Tsonga-speakers. While Mulani is
professionally accomplished in the development sector, Teres and Basani
are high-school students, Chobi is a high-school graduate who cannot find
a job, and Seto has some college credits and is beginning to make a name
for himself in development circles. These differences, with others related to
marital status, spiritual orientation, and gender identity, are overdrawn if
they prevent acknowledging villagers’ common embodied logic, which was
to implicate self and other into relations of mutual dependency. In villag-
ers’ soft handshaking, situational eye contact, withdrawing in recognition
of social status, intermingling fingers, and swapping of saliva marks and
finger oils, there is an openness, almost an invitation, at the level of the
body to experience self and other as “mutually arising” (Jackson 1998:7).
Without this having to mean that all villagers got along at the level of

speech and perspective, villagers, at the basic level, embraced the dance of
intercorporeality as a first principle of interaction.
Aid workers evaluated body-to-body dependency negatively, with the
evidence etched right into their body conduct. Again, such a convergence at
the level of the body does not discount the diversity among them. The Peace
Corps volunteers, Jenny and Peter, are from the United States, while Sergeant
is from South Africa and Valerie and John are from Ireland. Being in their
africa today 59(3)

forties, Valerie and John are older than Jenny, who is in her late twenties, but
all three are involved in secular aid work related to HIV-AIDS, business, and
education, respectively. Sergeant’s work is avowedly religious, while Peter
parlayed his secular Peace Corps work into the kind of religious missionizing
central to Sergeant’s purpose. Their personalities were quite different, and
there is no guarantee they would have liked each other had they met, yet a
rush to highlight their diversity would hide their shared embodied practice.
17
Their bodies had come to master how to deny dependence on others, includ-
ing their hosts. In their stiffened handshakes and steadfast stares, as well as
Marcus D. Watson
in the ways they motioned in rejection of social obligations, bowed out of
conversations, and recoiled at the prospect of ingesting others’ saliva marks
and finger oils, aid workers’ bodies had learned to say no to the intercorporeal
dance to which they could not help but be a party. Their experience of the
world started in negating bodies.
This analysis is showing thus far that bodies, like the emotions that
animate them, are a “species of pleasures and pains” (Slaby 2008:433, origi-
nal emphasis); they are a “basis of our deep existential evaluations” (Slaby
2008:441) and involve “positive or negative affect” (Greenspan 2004). Thus,
in effect, while it has become usual and mostly welcomed to stress the utter
indeterminacy of social, cultural, and linguistic practices, the body is, in a
manner of speaking, a whole other world. While the world of human activi-
ties is swirling around in an intractable manner “up there,” the body is more
stable about its positions “down here.” Clearly, the position of aid workers’
bodily activities was a colonial one. Most obviously, their bodies worked to
cultivate a sharp division between self and other. Sergeant’s stiff handshake
muscled his and Teres’ bodies apart; Jenny’s gazing, like Sergeant’s handshak-
ing, pressed Chobi into a felt distance; Peter’s withdrawing beat back Basani
and her arms into their place; Valerie’s and my soldierly walk literally drew
a line of footsteps in the sand between ourselves and others; and John and
Kathy ate and drank their ways into feeling on one side of a line separating
them from their consumption companions. Ours was a body that fought
tooth and nail for the experience of self and other being profoundly distinct
prior to human engagement.
The colonial elements of a “hierarchy of self over other” and a “one-
way form of influence” are in play in the aid workers’ body dispositions. To
say that aid workers felt hierarchically above Limpopo villagers is not to say
that they consciously intended to feel this way. If anything, they were careful
to draw from postmodern discourses of cultural relativity and respect. For
them, however, to reinforce the experience of themselves as autonomous

subjects, it was necessary not only to objectify villagers into the appearance
of being wholly separate others, but to cover up and render invisible the real
connectedness between themselves and the villagers. Since their connected-
ness, like the connectedness between any interacting individuals, was occur-
ring basically at the level of the body, they had to see to it that the inter in
intercorporeality was what was specifically silenced. In this way, villagers
came to be experienced not just as others but as “sub-others” (Maldonado-
africa today 59(3)
Torres 2008:238), whose “ ‘less than human’ [selves] functioned as the anchor
of a process of autonomy and self-assertion” (2008:238) for the aid workers.
The process of sub-othering villagers did not occur through osmosis or even a
turn of mind: it was powered by aid workers’ negating bodies, which labored,
moment by moment, to underwrite an isolated experience of self as the base
from which social interaction would then take place.
The colonial element of a unidirectional flow of influence was intrin-
18
sic to the negating bodies of the aid workers. Consider the stiff handshake,
shooting out to take control of another’s hand. In the case where the other’s
hand shoots back with the same force, the most that will happen is for the
two to stalemate in a sort of middle space between them, stopping a true
return influence in its tracks. The same applies for the aid workers’ gazing,
which says, in essence, “I’m here looking at you. What are you going to do
about it?” The embodied intention of gazing is to pierce in one direction,
allowing, at most, a return gaze that can push only to a halfway point before
being stalled by the initial gaze. Aid workers’ other salient body gestures,
such as withdrawing, making sharp movements, and unsure sharing, replay
the same dynamic as the hard handshakes and steadfast stares. In the case of
those who participated in the study, the one-way body trajectory of the aid
workers stood out in their relations with villagers, most of whom did not
reciprocate the one-way form of “dancing.” It was as if aid workers could
reach out and touch villagers, but villagers were stopped from touching
aid workers back. If the colonizing subject “resists opening himself to the
Other and entering into a logic of ordinary ethical intersubjective contact”
(Maldonado-Torres 2008:150), it appears to be its body that is ground zero
for resisting such two-way contact.
Points of Nuance
Now that the phenomenon of the colonial body has been sketched in
general terms, I offer several points of nuance related to today’s scholarly
concerns with issues of process, determinism, and essentialism. First, aid
workers’ colonial bodies were processes, not things. Aid workers were not
stick figures sliding around rural Limpopo always already positioned with
unforgiving hands or bugged-out eyes. This posturing became exaggerated
in interpersonal situations that threatened their perceived need for personal
space. Thus, Peter’s body did not feel a need to pull back his laundry from
me, for I was not calling for a relationship of obligatory relatedness with him.
The threat came, rather, from Basani. Peter’s body sensed her encroachment

and recalibrated the perception of great distance between them, which Peter
needed to feel good. Similarly, John did not feel disquieted when he and I
ate together, because we shared an implicit understanding that the plate and
food in front of him were for him just as those in front of me were for me.
It was the fingers of his meal companions that were crossing a line, which
John experienced as sacrosanct, between self and other that raised his ire. Aid
workers’ bodies were not always colonial but “went colonial” in situations
africa today 59(3)

of existential insecurity.
Seeing how colonial gesturing comes to a head in the course of human
interaction is just one way of recovering the processual quality of the body
conduct. Another is to consider the kinds of social practices that would
seem to lead to divergent ways of perceiving self–other contact. On the
one hand, in rural Limpopo socialization practices, it is not uncommon to
see caregivers tongue-feeding infants prechewed food, holding them eighty
19
percent of the time, picking them up as soon as they cry, and sleeping in the
same bed with them until late childhood. Later in life, villagers participate
Marcus D. Watson
in friendships that, instead of being based on free-choice individualism, are
grounded in an obligation to exchange material goods (Rogers 2010), such as
tobacco for men and garden vegetables for women. Even this small sampling
of rural Limpopo practices suggests how villagers’ gesturing would end up
warming up to human relatedness while feeling alienated by strident dis-
plays of autonomy. On the other hand, aid workers spoke during interviews
of growing up “containerized” (Richman, Miller, and Solomon 1988) within
cribs, playpens, and their own rooms, and of being encouraged by parents to
rely on themselves or God instead of on others. It is conceivable how these
independence-building practices would begin to shape the aid workers’ body
conduct in support of the colonial qualities of self–other division, hierarchy,
and unidirectionality, even before language acquisition.
Second, focusing in on what bodies were doing in development rela-
tionships should not be mistaken for saying that bodies were determining
everything about these relationships. Aid workers’ colonial bodies did not
determine the words they uttered but only oriented their words in the
service of guarding their discrete sense of self. Aid workers made choices,
often against the grain of their embodied desire for such autonomous self-
hood. It was just that their colonial bodies managed to keep infusing their
logic into these decisions, reshaping them to do the bidding of the felt
need for self and other to be separate. John’s effort at eating communally,
for instance, was a conscious choice he made in the hopes of winning the
trust of his hosts; it was clear, however, that his embodied discomfort with
self–other dependency accompanied him to the meal, where he projected
this discomfort directly into the porridge. Similarly, it was an act of will
on my part to go and greet passersby instead of passing them by, as I would
have preferred to do; however, while the decision produced a scene that
looks like an uncontroversial greeting between two people, the appearance
breaks down when the specific dynamics of the greeting are considered.
By marching forcefully at the passerby and spinning away from him in an

instant, I was, without being aware of it, safeguarding my embodied need
to feel “unto myself.”
Finally, as different as the body conduct was for the aid workers and
villagers, the difference was not absolute, though, in the limited space of
this article, I can only make a modest attempt to show how this was the
case. Many empirical studies testify to there being radically different ways
of experiencing self–other relationships. From these studies, terms such
africa today 59(3)
as egocentric and sociocentric selves (Ratner 2000), undomesticated and

domesticated agency (Nyamnjoh 2001), and individualism and collectivism
(Hofstede 1980) have been elaborated. The problem with such terms is not
that they completely misrepresent human experience, which they do not,
but that they tend to essentialize differences between the differences. What
a study of the microsocial components of development has positioned me to
do is see differences between aid workers and villagers as arising from their
20
mutual complicity in body-to-body dependency. To say that aid workers’

embodied individualism and villagers’ embodied collectivism are an effect of
different cultural evaluations of intercorporeality is to say that their apparent

difference arises from a more original similarity. What the specific psycho-
social variables are that lead to different evaluations of intercorporeality are
key questions, which further research will need to clarify.
Still, observing how the aid workers’ and villagers’ experiences of
self and other emerged from the common reference point of body-to-body
dependency has at least one other important implication for discussions of
essentializing. The difference between aid workers’ colonial bodies and what
Maldonado-Torres might call villagers’ “de-colonial” (2008:6–7) bodies was
not a difference between nonconnecting bodies versus connecting bodies.
Since intercorporeality establishes interdependence as the ground of human
experience, the disconnecting fought for by colonial bodies, like the colo-
nial “modality of being” in general (2008:239), “can never be accomplished
in its totality” (2008:240). The colonial body is also connecting, but in a
contradictory way. To make a separation between self and other seem like
a first principle of human nature, it is, as was discussed above, incumbent
on the colonial body to repress its own dependence on others. Such cultural
repression leads not to “no connecting” but to a certain kind of connect-
ing, which can be seen from the cases of aid workers offered above. When
interacting with villagers, aid workers’ body behaviors tried exaggerating a
sense of private space around them, a sort of “invisible bubble around the
body” (Rosenbloom 2006). It was from this stabilized platform of monadic
individuality that aid workers would launch into connecting with villagers.
Significance: Practical and Academic Issues
Several interrelated practical and academic significances follow from the

foregoing analysis, which finds that aid workers from this study literally
gestured in a colonial way when interacting with villagers in South Africa’s

Limpopo Province. A practical matter of concern to everyone involved in
these projects can be captured in the following question: Who exactly are
the aid workers who are living and working in these South African villages
in the name of development? The development agencies and their personnel
should care about asking this question because surely, when it comes to their
conscious wishes, they would not want to be associated with anything colo-
nial. For their part, villagers will not be happy to hear that, after having spent
africa today 59(3)

decades suffering and battling the machinery and personnel of apartheid,
much of apartheid’s core philosophy of self–other division and hierarchy
appears to be grafted onto the physical persons of aid workers, who are now
coming and going from rural Limpopo in heroic fashion as uncontroversial
development workers. Given that the argument being made is based on a
study involving aid workers from four countries and villagers of two ethnic
groups, the question of who aid workers actually are might be asked of any
21
project that puts aid workers from “developed” regions and rural sub-Saharan
Africans into multiyear, face-to-face relations. If it is colonial agents who
Marcus D. Watson
are delivering the aid, all well-meaning stakeholders in African development
have good reason to be concerned.
The question of who aid workers really are can be cogently asked
because of a study that was willing to take the interpersonal or small dimen-
sions of aid more seriously. From the perspective of individuals involved
in implementing aid plans, it is at the level of the interpersonal where
development begins. As is shown below, bad beginnings can lead to bad
endings—which, in this case, meant that aid workers struggled to imple-
ment their lofty ideals and that African villagers were largely deprived of
the benefits. This is missed, however, when development is considered only
in its policy and institutional forms. Bracketing off policy and institutional
discussions to talk about gesturing will be a tall order because the shift
looks like going from “big, important, and objective” to “small, tangential,
and subjective.” Another hurdle against shifting conversations toward the
radically interpersonal is that development’s hegemonic agencies, such as
the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, speak the language
of economics. Speaking economically is thus essential for African interest
groups that want to be included in the global conversation. How does one
bring up the subject of smiling, handshaking, and fidgeting in an established
conversation about deregulation, privatization, and democracy? The answer
is to appreciate and advocate for the idea that “small actions may have
monumental consequences” (Johnson-Hanks 2005:367).
Academics willing to study the small actions of aid, coupled with
policymakers and aid managers willing to take the studies seriously, will go
a long way toward isolating moments of development that escape develop-
ment’s self-congratulatory discourses of helping others, respecting cultures,
and stimulating growth. It took just such an undercutting of development
discourse to open a window onto the question of aid workers’ real identi-
ties. Undoubtedly, part of “who the aid workers really were” in this study
is a set of consciously well-meaning, self-sacrificing, hard-working people.

Such a spotless image coincides well with an era marked by ideologies such
as postracialism, multiculturalism, free trade, and other controversy-free
images of how “we” relate to “them.” In this ideological context, most aid
workers said the “right things”—which, if taken at face value, would leave us
with a superficial understanding of the aid workers. Phenomenology helped
show that human action begins in bodies, not minds, and that aid workers’
bodies were powered by a colonial logic that understands self and other to
africa today 59(3)
be rigidly separate and hierarchical as a first principle of human interaction.

Since this colonial body tended to reroute aid workers’ “innocent” speech to
its aim of dividing self from other, “colonial” was most fundamentally who
these aid workers really were.
Further, “taking small seriously” does not mean being stuck in a
circumscribed world of emotions, bodies, and perceptions at the expense of
paying attention to more recognizable features of development. In my cases,
22
for example, the stress occurring between aid workers and villagers did not
begin and end in their face-to-face encounters but spilled well beyond these
interactions, shaping, or rather misshaping, everything from living together

to their development work. In fact, while it is typical to make an analytic dis-
tinction between residential and work life, the body, including the colonial
body of aid workers, abides by no such parameters. The example of a Peace
Corps volunteer named Ishmael shows how the colonial body was impli-
cated, in one stroke, in upsetting domestic life and derailing development.
The domestic missteps it highlights were common for all aid workers who
lived with host families. The Peace Corps placed Ishmael in a room within
the Shikibanas’ (host family’s) main house in Kwandifu Village. Two things
upset him. The first was that, upon returning home from volunteering in the
village grammar school, he realized that his hosts had been going into his
room and washing his clothes. The second was that his host parents would
ask him for money to help pay for domestic goods. In the first case, he felt
his privacy was being violated; in the second, he felt “taken advantage of.”
Two months after arriving in the village, he moved out of the main house
and was living alone in a sliver of a room attached to the Shikibanas’ garage,
where he managed his affairs by himself.
Typically, a household in rural Limpopo is a space for producing social
relations, not autonomous individuals (Kotzé 1993). By providing Ishmael
with a room within the main house, the Shikibanas felt they were offering
him physical security as well as a “relationship security” that comes with
being part of a family. When Tinida, his younger host sister, would enter his
room to collect and wash his laundry, her intention was not just to present
him with clean clothes, but also to let him and community members know
that he was cared for, that, being so far from home, he nevertheless had a
sister looking after him. When he resisted and complained about her efforts,
he was, without knowing it, refusing her overture to be seen as a sister.
Similarly, when his host parents asked him for money, they were expecting
him to behave as any family member would who was fortunate enough to

have found a job. Not only did he refuse to give the family money, but he
insisted on a “test month,” in which he would calculate his exact expenses
and contribute to the family accordingly. From the Shikibanas’ perspective,
a determined stranger, not a willing family member, had come to live with
them. As news spread of Ishmael’s domestic moves, community members,
including teachers who worked at the grammar school, turned against him,
with teachers in particular stonewalling his development efforts.
africa today 59(3)

This sort of dynamic was typical of situations where aid workers lived
with host families in rural Limpopo. I, as a researcher, was no exception.
For instance, my initial justification for doing my own laundry, which was
to relieve the host women of such drudgeries, may seem laudable, yet the
justification left me in the same position as the aid workers: alone, without
fictive kin, and thus distrusted. My study clarified that these sorts of follies
did not come from nowhere, nor were they traceable to abstractions such as
23
“cross-cultural miscommunication.” Aid workers’ push to massage spaces
of privacy out of their highly social surroundings was replaying, on a more
Marcus D. Watson
sophisticated level of human practice, exactly what their bodies were push-
ing for on a moment-by-moment basis. In projecting their cultural values
into higher forms of human practice, aid workers’ bodies were sewing their
colonial logic right into the fabric of Limpopo life. Aid workers were not just
living differently, but were living colonially—not just spearheading develop-
ment, but spearheading colonial development. Development was failing to
reach its stated aims not for any technical errors, but because it was combat-
ive and colonizing in nature. It is thus imperative that the aid workers in my
study, and perhaps those from comparable projects, consider the complicity
of their own bodies in African development’s disappointing record to date.
A final significance is the suggestion that it appears to be aid work-
ers, if development is to be decolonized, who are overdue for serious self-
reflection. In the light of their embodied practices, villagers were recognizing
something basic about being a human being: that, try as some of us might
to imagine otherwise, we are interrelated. With embodied conduct bent on
establishing detached senses of self, aid workers were misrecognizing their
factual dependence on others, including their hosts. This is startling since,
in the context of development, it is the aid workers who are charged with
assisting needy villagers, whereas the reverse may be what is in order. What
would it mean to formalize the idea that the needy have something serious to
offer their helpers? Can aid programs, such as the ones I studied, be changed
to help aid workers think more critically about their colonial approaches
to interpersonal relations, residential living, and development work? Is the
conscious goodwill of aid workers strong enough to endure hearing and doing
something about the unconscious coloniality of their body conduct and ways
of relating to others? Can aid workers learn to appreciate eating and drinking
communally with hosts? Can they say yes to fictive kin relations and the
long-term obligations they entail? Can they live without the comfort of the
“invisible bubble” if it means decolonizing aid efforts in sub-Saharan Africa?

Limitations: Of Numbers and Regions
The argument I have made is tied to my South African case study, which
looked closely at the interactions between twenty-four aid workers and
the hundreds of Limpopo villagers they met, helped, and worked with. In a
strict sense, what I have found and argued is limited to just these instances
of development’s interpersonal dimension; however, even these instances
africa today 59(3)
encode a great deal of comparability. Aid workers, for example, represented

four countries, two languages, three aid sectors, religious and secular ori-
entations, and small-, medium-, and large-scale funding sources and opera-
tions; villagers represented two African ethnic groups, multiple professional
statuses, and diverse belief systems. Further, the aid workers and villagers
who participated in this study represented different political ideologies,
age groups, and both genders. That the embodied phenomenon in question
24
would cut across such diversity already points to a level of general signifi-
cance beyond this particular case. At the least, aid programs that, like the
ones I studied, put Western aid workers in multiyear, face-to-face relations

with sub-Saharan rural Africans should be able to relate to what was found
in rural Limpopo. Further, by offering myself as an example alongside the
aid workers, I am posing the question “Do aid workers’ professional kin,
such as academics, journalists, and politicians, also experience face-to-face
relationships on the basis of colonial bodies?”
Circumstantial evidence already supports the finding that aid workers
gesture in literally colonial ways. Their embodied insistence on demarcat-
ing an invisible line between self and other runs parallel with the dominant
movement of Aidland (Apthorpe 2005), a shorthand term for conceptual-
izing how Western development projects and personnel tend to establish
their own social enclaves, apart from people in host countries. In Southern
Africa, Ritu Verma (2011) found that French volunteers who were trying to
improve nutrition among Malagasi women created exclusive social spaces
reminiscent of older colonial communities. In West Africa, a Peace Corps
volunteer reported to me, through personal correspondence, that her fellow
volunteers established do-not-enter rules for their living spaces: “Volunteers
often complained about villagers wanting to come into their houses to look
at their stuff. One volunteer made a rule that French-speaking professionals
like the doctor and teachers could come into his house but not the local resi-
dents” (Ford 2011). Farther afield, Philip Fountain (2011) noted that Christian
aid workers from Canada, insisting on being good guests while in Indonesia,
effectively kept themselves aloof from their hosts. There is little doubt that
Aidland, in these and other forms, is basic to certain kinds of development
efforts, but are these instances of Aidland traceable to the kinds of colonial
body conduct observed in my case study? More research will need to be done
to determine the breadth of this phenomenon.

Conclusion
The intent of this article is to contribute to debates over the relationship,

if any, between colonialism and development, especially in sub-Saharan
African contexts. While some scholars uncover connections between the
two eras in history, such as the continuity of imperial interests and specific
personnel, others cross-examine colonial and development discourses and
africa today 59(3)

find a basic isomorphism between them. My analysis builds on the second
form of argumentation, particularly in relation to its finding that both colo-
nial and development discourses assume, as a first principle of engagement, a
strict division, hierarchy, and unidirectionality between an us-who-help and
a them-who-receive-help—between, that is, a self and another. I agree with
Nelson Maldonado-Torres’ understanding of this self-over-other schema to
be not only an image in discourse but also a modality of being. My focus on
25
the everyday interactions between aid workers from a cross-section of devel-
oped countries and their rural South African hosts shows that the aid work-
Marcus D. Watson
ers operated according to this colonial modality of being, which, grounded
in their spontaneous body behavior, leads me to suggest that evidence for
development being characterized by a form of neocolonialism may be most
tangibly etched right into the colonial bodies of many of today’s aid workers.
Given that I have structured my case study to represent a substantial
degree of diversity and comparability in relation to both the aid-giving and
aid-receiving sides of the development relationship, my findings and argu-
ment point to general trends beyond this study. To fill in this “pointing
toward” and thereby bring additional data, nuance, and criticism to bear on
the phenomenon of aid workers’ colonial bodies, comparative studies from
sub-Saharan Africa and beyond need to be conducted. Meanwhile, this initial
investigation, to the extent that it rings true in other settings and situations,
should inspire critical self-reflection by stakeholders in African develop-
ment. The aid agencies, managers, and activists to whom my argument
applies certainly would not like to think of themselves as being neocolonial
agents, but if their bodies testify against their self-perceptions, will they dare
to subject themselves and their projects to meaningful scrutiny? For their
part, if recipients of aid in sub-Saharan Africa become adept at detecting their
benefactors’ embodied coloniality, will this empower them to have a clearer
basis than they have had to date for accepting and rejecting help from outsid-
ers? Much is to be gained by stakeholders of African development, including
academics, practitioners, and the needy, by acknowledging and studying the
interpersonal dimension of development.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The research on which this paper is based was made possible by generous funding from the
National Science Foundation and Cornell University’s Department of Anthropology. My special
thanks are extended to Helene Kramer for her advice and assistance during the writing process.
africa today 59(3)
NOTES
1. To protect the identities of research participants, all names are pseudonyms.

26
REFERENCES CITED
Alvares, Claude. 1992. Science, Development, and Violence: The Revolt against Modernity. Delhi: Oxford
University Press.
Apthorpe, Raymond. 2005. “Postcards from Aidland.” Paper presented at the meeting of the Institute
of Development Studies, Brighton, England, June 10.
Bornstein, Erica. 2005. The Spirit of Development: Protestant NGOs, Morality, and Economics in Zimbabwe.
Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press.
Charlesworth, Simon. 2000. A Phenomenology of Working-Class Experience. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Cohen, Mike. 2010. “South African Teachers’ Strike Shuts Schools, Compounds Educational Crisis.” Bloom-
berg Press. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-08-31/south-african-teachers-strike-shuts-
schools-compounds-educational-crisis.html.
Collinson, Mark, Brent Wolff, Stephen Tollman, and Kathleen Kahn. 2006. Trends in Internal Labour
Migration from the Rural Limpopo Province: Male Risk Behaviour, and Implications for the
Spread of HIV/AIDS in Rural South Africa. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 32(4):633–648.
Cooper, Frederick. 1997. Modernizing Bureaucrats, Backward Africans, and the Development Con-
cept. In International Development and the Social Sciences: Essays on the History and Politics
of Knowledge, edited by Frederick Cooper and Randall Packard. Berkeley, Calif.: University of
California Press.
Cornwall, Andrea. 2006. Historical Perspectives on Participation in Development. Commonwealth and
Comparative Politics 44(1):62–83.
Csordas. Thomas. 2008. Intersubjectivity and Intercorporeality. Subjectivity 22:110–121.
Demetre, Labadarios, Zandile Mchiza, Nelia Steyn, Gerda Gericke, Eleni Maunder, Yul Davids, and
Whadi-ah Parker. 2011. Food Security in South Africa: A Review of National Surveys. Bulletin
of the World Health Organization 89(12):891–899.
Esteva, Gustavo. 2010. What Is Development? International Studies Association’s Compendium Proj-
ect. http://www.isacompendium.com/subscriber/uid=3732/tocnode?id=g9781444336597_
yr2010_chunk_g978144433659721_ss1–4.
Ferguson, James. 1990. The Anti-Politics Machine: “Development,” Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic
Power in Lesotho. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press.

Ford, Emily. 2011. Interview by author, 14 December. Laramie, Wyoming.
Fountain, Philip. 2011. Orienting Guesthood in the Mennonite Central Committee in Indonesia. In
Inside the Everyday Lives of Development Workers: The Challenges and Futures of Aidland, edited
by Anne-Meike Fechter and Heather Hindman. Sterling, VA: Kumarian Press.
Garland, Elizabeth. 1999. Developing Bushmen: Building Civil(ized) Society in the Kalahari and Beyond.
In Civil Society and the Political Imagination in Africa: Critical Perspectives, edited by Jean
africa today 59(3)

Comaroff and John Comaroff. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Greenspan, Patricia. 2004. Practical Reasoning and Emotion. In The Oxford Handbook of Rationality,
edited by Alfred R. Mele and Piers Rawling. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.
Groenemeyer, Marianne. 1992. Helping. In The Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge as Power,
edited by Wolfgang Sachs. London: Zed Books.
Hall, Edward T. [1976] 1981. Beyond Culture. New York: Doubleday.
Hödl, Gerald, and Martina Kopf. 2011. “Developing Africa: Development Discourse(s) in Late Colonial-
ism.” Paper presented at a workshop, Department of African Studies, University of Vienna.
27
http://hsozkult.geschichte.hu-berlin.de/tagungsberichte/id=3558.
Hofstede, Geert. 1980. Culture’s Consequences. Beverley Hills, Calif.: Sage.
Marcus D. Watson
Jackson, Michael. 1998. Minima Ethnographica: Intersubjectivity and the Anthropological Project. London
and Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Johnston-Hanks, Jennifer. 2005. When the Future Decides: Uncertainty and Intentional Action in
Contemporary Cameroon. Current Anthropology 46(3):363–385.
Kebebe, Messay. 2011. African Development and the Primacy of Mental Decolonisation. In Philosophy
and African Development: Theory and Practice, edited by Lansana Keita. Dakar: CODESRIA.
Khumalo, Nanku. 2011. Race Still Dividing Factor in SA—Study. Sowetan Live. http://www.sowetanlive
.co.za/news/2011/06/29/race-still-dividing-factor-in-sa—study.
Kothari, Smitu. 2007. In Reflection on Fifty Years of Development. Development 50:4–32. http://www
.palgrave-journals.com/development/journal/v50/n1s/full/1100394a.html.
Kothari, Uma. 2006. From Colonialism to Development: Reflections of Former Colonial Officers.
Commonwealth and Comparative Politics 44(1):118–136.
Kotzé, J. C. 1993. In Their Shoes: Understanding Black South Africans through Their Experiences of Life.
Kenwyn: Juta and Company.
Latouche, Serge. 1993. In the Wake of the Affluent Society: An Exploration of Post-Development. London:
Zed Books.
Lurie, Mark, Abigail Harrison, David Wilkinson, and Salim Karim. 1997. Circular Migration and Sexual
Networking in Rural Kwazulu/Natal: Implications for the Spread of HIV and Other Sexually
Transmitted Diseases. Health Transition Review 17(3):17–27.
Maldonado-Torres, Nelson. 2008. Against War: Views from the Underside of Modernity. Durham and
London: Duke University Press.
Manji, Firoze, and Carl O’Coill. 2002. The Missionary Position: NGOs and Development in Africa.
International Affairs 78(3):567–583.
Mauss, Marcel. 1973. Techniques of the Body. Economy and Society 2(1):70–78.
McKnight, John. 1977. Professionalized Services and Disabling Help. In Disabling Professions, edited by
Ivan Illich, Irving Zola, and John McKnight. London: Marion Boyars.
———. 1985. The Careless Society: Community and Its Counterfeits. New York: Basic Books.
Merleau-Ponty Maurice. 1964. Primacy of Perception. Edited by Edie James. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern
University Press.

Moyo, Dambisa. 2009. Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa. New
York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Nyamnjoh, Francis. 2000. “For Many Are Called but Few Are Chosen”: Globalisation and Popular
Disenchantment in Africa. African Sociological Review 4(2):1–45.
———. 2001. Delusions of Development and the Enrichment of Witchcraft Discourses in Cameroon. In
Magical Interpretations, Material Realities: Modernity, Witchcraft, and the Occult in Postcolonial
africa today 59(3)
Africa, edited by Henrietta Moore and Todd Sanders. London and New York: Routledge.
Ocampo, Jose A., and Maria A. Parra. 2006. The Commodity Terms of Trade and Their Strategic Implica-
tions for Development. In Globalization under Hegemony: The Changing World Economy, edited
by Jomo K. Sundaram. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Rahnema, Majid. 1992. Participation. In The Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge as Power,
edited by Wolfgang Sachs. London: Zed Books.
———, and Victoria Bawtree. 1997. The Post-Development Reader. London: Zed Books.
Rapley, John. 2007. Understanding Development: Theory and Practice in the Third World. Boulder, Colo.:
28
Lynne Rienner Publishers.

Ratner, Carl. 2000. A Cultural-Psychological Analysis of Emotions. Culture and Psychology 6:5–39.
Richman, Amy L., Patrice M. Miller, and Margaret Johnson Solomon. 1988. The Socialization of Infants
in Suburban Boston. In Parental Behavior in Diverse Societies, edited by Robert A. LeVine, Patrice
M. Miller, and Mary Maxwell. San Francisco and London: Jossey-Bass Publishers.
Rist, Gilbert. 1997. The History of Development: From Western Origins to Global Faith. London and New
York: Zed Books.
Rogers, Graeme. 2010. Friendship, Distance, and Kinship-Talk among Mozambican Refugees in South
Africa. In The Ways of Friendship: Anthropological Perspectives, edited by Amit Desai and Evan
Killick. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books.
Rosenbloom, Stephanie. 2006. In Certain Circles, Two Is a Crowd. The New York Times, November 16.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/16/fashion/16space.html?pagewanted=all.
Sachs, Wolfgang, ed. 1992. The Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge as Power. London: Zed
Books.
Slaby Jan. 2008. Affective Intentionality and the Feeling Body. Phenomenology and the Cognitive
Sciences 7:429–444.
Sundaram, Jomo Kwame, with Oliver Schwank and Rudiger von Arnim. 2011. Globalization and Devel-
opment in Sub-Saharan Africa. United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs,
working paper 102. http://www.un.org/esa/desa/papers/2011/wp102_2011.pdf.
Verma, Ritu. 2011. Intercultural Encounters, Colonial Continuities, and Contemporary Disconnects in
Rural Aid: An Ethnography of Development Practitioners in Madagascar. In Inside the Everyday
Lives of Development Workers: The Challenges and Futures of Aidland, edited by Anne-Meike
Fechter and Heather Hindman. Sterling, VA: Kumarian Press.
Watson, Marcus D. 2012. Are Sustainable Relationships a Key to Sustainable Developments? A View
from Rural South Africa. IRCAB Journal of Social and Management Sciences 2(2):1–9.
Weiss, Gail. 1999. Body Images: Embodiment as Intercorporeality. New York and London: Routledge.
Zein-Elabdin, Eiman Osman. 2011. Postcoloniality and Development: Development as Colonial Dis-
course. In Philosophy and African Development: Theory and Practice, edited by Lansana Keita.
Dakar: CODESRIA.

HIGH QUALITY FORUM WHERE SCHOLARSHIP AND POLICY DEBATES INTERACT
African Conflict & Peacebuilding Review
Edited by African Conflict

Abu Bakarr Bah, and Peacebuilding
Mark Davidheiser, Review (ACPR) is an
Tricia Redeker Hepner,
interdisciplinary forum
and Niklas Hultin
for creative and rigorous
studies of conflict and
peace in Africa and for
discussions between
scholars, practitioners,
and public intellectuals in Africa, the United States,
and other parts of the world. It includes a wide
range of theoretical, methodological, and empirical
perspectives on the causes of conflicts and peace
processes including, among others, cultural practices
relating to conflict resolution and peacebuilding,
legal and political conflict preventative measures, and
the intersection of international, regional, and local
interests and conceptions of conflict and peace.
ACPR is a joint publication of the Africa Peace
and Conflict Network, the West African Research
Association, and Indiana University Press. It is
published twice a year.
Published semiannually
pISSN 2156-695X | eISSN 2156-7263
http://www.jstor.org/r/iupress
For more information on Indiana University Press
http://www.iupress.indiana.edu


The Colonial Gesture of Development

Uploaded by

Document Information

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

The Colonial Gesture of Development

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

The Colonial Gesture of Development: The Interpersonal as a Promising Site for Rethinking

This content downloaded from 195.78.109.84 on Tue, 13 May 2014 20:42:56 PM

This content downloaded from 195.78.109.84 on Tue, 13 May 2014 20:42:56 PM

While some scholars uncover connections between African

Kathy1 is an aid worker from Ireland working for an organization charged

This content downloaded from 195.78.109.84 on Tue, 13 May 2014 20:42:56 PM

scholars affirm such a relationship, but they tend to do so by invoking

larities. My study of the interpersonal dimension of aid leads me to suggest

This content downloaded from 195.78.109.84 on Tue, 13 May 2014 20:42:56 PM

africa today 59(3)

There are many reasons to criticize development, especially in sub-Saharan

This content downloaded from 195.78.109.84 on Tue, 13 May 2014 20:42:56 PM

This content downloaded from 195.78.109.84 on Tue, 13 May 2014 20:42:56 PM

africa today 59(3)

As I use it here, colonialism does not refer so much to the

When A considers it essential for B to be empowered, A

The Maldonado-Torres statement is just another way of saying what

This content downloaded from 195.78.109.84 on Tue, 13 May 2014 20:42:56 PM

enced themselves as hierarchically above their hosts, though this surely

era. Aid workers resisted villagers’ invitations to participate in obligatory

The Research Study: A General Background

My findings and perspective were inspired by studying the everyday inter-

This content downloaded from 195.78.109.84 on Tue, 13 May 2014 20:42:56 PM

africa today 59(3)

This research was grounded in two years of fieldwork (2005–2007) in rural

This content downloaded from 195.78.109.84 on Tue, 13 May 2014 20:42:56 PM

human action begins with the conscious intentions of individual minds,

Phenomenology is intended to be a methodological perspective, telling us

This content downloaded from 195.78.109.84 on Tue, 13 May 2014 20:42:56 PM

africa today 59(3)

Findings: Examples of Embodied Tensions

The theoretical use I am making of intercorporeality and colonialism is

This content downloaded from 195.78.109.84 on Tue, 13 May 2014 20:42:56 PM

some was to be hard-bodied and assertive, whereas that of others was to be

experiences as a Peace Corps volunteer will serve as a measure of my critical

participated in this study.

In Tsonga and Pedi cultures, particularly in their rural forms, a handshake

Steady Eye Contact

In Tsonga- and Pedi-speaking villages, eye contact is usually situational,

This content downloaded from 195.78.109.84 on Tue, 13 May 2014 20:42:56 PM

africa today 59(3)

By withdrawal, I mean a sudden pulling back from something, as if threat-

This content downloaded from 195.78.109.84 on Tue, 13 May 2014 20:42:56 PM

The dynamics of cross-cultural miscommunication being described here

This content downloaded from 195.78.109.84 on Tue, 13 May 2014 20:42:56 PM

africa today 59(3)

The Colonial Bodies of Aid Workers: An Analysis

This content downloaded from 195.78.109.84 on Tue, 13 May 2014 20:42:56 PM

doing so at the sight of Mulani, who responds to Valerie’s speed-walking

This content downloaded from 195.78.109.84 on Tue, 13 May 2014 20:42:56 PM

africa today 59(3)

This content downloaded from 195.78.109.84 on Tue, 13 May 2014 20:42:56 PM

This content downloaded from 195.78.109.84 on Tue, 13 May 2014 20:42:56 PM

africa today 59(3)

This content downloaded from 195.78.109.84 on Tue, 13 May 2014 20:42:56 PM

as egocentric and sociocentric selves (Ratner 2000), undomesticated and

mutual complicity in body-to-body dependency. To say that aid workers’

different cultural evaluations of intercorporeality is to say that their apparent

Significance: Practical and Academic Issues

Several interrelated practical and academic significances follow from the

This content downloaded from 195.78.109.84 on Tue, 13 May 2014 20:42:56 PM

africa today 59(3)

This content downloaded from 195.78.109.84 on Tue, 13 May 2014 20:42:56 PM

be rigidly separate and hierarchical as a first principle of human interaction.