60 years after the UN Convention - Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation

60 development dialogue december 2008 – revisiting the heart of darkness
articulation of confl ict was permanently redefi ned in the locations
where it took place. To make the point: the Sufi rebellion against the
British in Somaliland, for instance, had its own ideatic characteristics
(Samatar 1982); its occurrence, marginal as it was to British imperial
designs, was nonetheless conditioned by colonial rule. At this juncture
one needs to probe how violence could be contingent on European
doctrines of development. For this purpose, contingent is held
to mean that confl ict hinged on factors beyond the realm in which
force was debated and/or exerted. One would need to study power
and control in relation to diffi culties in the management of national
economies; hegemonic political strategies in European states; the
‘memory’ of developmental grievances; and shifting socio-economic
relations in colonies. The following discussion will limit itself to discussing
contingent mechanisms in terms of relational dynamics, requirements
of national progress, and methods of coercion.
In some cases, the nexus between doctrines and violence manifested
itself in the coordinated relational dynamics in empire in a shifting
structural environment. Arguments about labour coercion and related
practices in the British empire, for instance, shifted according
to context. The depression tended to diminish the need for coercion
by the state in commodity production because the demand for labour
decreased, and there was no shortage in individuals seeking wages.
But during the Second World War, British offi cials also argued that
there was no alternative to reverting to coercive labour in the colonies
to support the war eff ort (Cowen/Westcott 1986, Cowling 1943).
For the settler state in Southern Rhodesia, too, the agricultural crisis
during the war again enhanced the importance of coercion (Johnson
1992). Consciously coordinated relations in policy can also be observed
in the British management of colonial dollar-earning and of
ensuing protests during Britain’s economic recovery in the late 1940s.
Suppressing riots in Accra on the Gold Coast in 1947 fi rst aimed to
prevent the disruption of cocoa exports and to shield its profi tability
which risked to be compromised by any increases in dollar import
quotas. Subsequently, a modest increase of the textile quotas fulfi
lled precisely the same purpose (Krozewski 2001: 90). In the imperial
framework, arguments about labour could prompt politicians,
including the very advocates of labour coercion, to invoke African
welfare. For example, when, in 1928, Amery proposed the building
of the Zambezi bridge to boost British steel exports during a period
of slack demand in the industry, he bolstered this request by referring
to the need to clear the ‘Nyasaland slum’ (Vail 1975: 108-109). In doing
so, he reinforced the claim professed by his doctrine, namely that
imperial development benefi ted the British worker and in this way