60 years after the UN Convention - Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation

66 development dialogue december 2008 – revisiting the heart of darkness
national migration, and payments options for raw materials, among
others. In Italy, Gini construed plausible necessities in fascist agency
by relating his argument about Italy’s path to modernity to concrete
grievances in national economic management. He discussed the
colonial question, for instance, together with Italy’s long-standing
problems in generating exports able to sustain suffi cient quantities of
imports of industrial raw materials (Gini 1926: 327). The prosperity
of individual Italians and the nation as a whole was allegedly compromised
by the ensuing limitations on the domestic production of
consumer goods. In tapping the memory of the diffi culties of Italian
industrialisation, yet at the same time liberating itself from the
past in normative agency, Gini’s argument had the potential to rally
a national constituency around issues of welfare in an obviously unfavourable
international economic climate. In a similar way as did
economic sanctions, this line of reasoning arguably helped to overcome
opposition in Italy to an initially unpopular and risky military
campaign in Africa.
With regard to Britain, African colonies acquired a role in concrete
contingency plans for communications, production and supplies, and
manpower in the late 1930s and the war. Earlier, at the turn of the
century, the very lobbying for protectionist imperial union by Amery
and Joseph Chamberlain had originated in concerns about the diminishing
comparative competitiveness of British industry (Green 1995:
ch.9). An example of control realms involving actors in an imperial
and regional-hegemonic setting was the labour recruitment scheme
in Southern Africa established by Wenela (Witwatersrand Native Labour
Association) in 1928. This scheme enhanced the labour control
by South African fi rms by exporting coercion to Mozambique, while
Portugal benefi ted from its colony via the gold payments which the
fi rms derived from the proceeds of investing wages in the South African
market and delaying the pay to workers (Katzenellenbogen 1982:
153, O’Loughlin 2002: 521). Besides, arguments about national development
were played out in strategies of social politics, whether Amery’s
quest to appeal to industrial workers, or the Italian fascist rallying
cry that the state’s elite renewed itself organically via the lower
classes (Israel/Nastasi 1998: 124-127, Gini 1927b).
Lineages of confl ict, relevant to the study of its origins, implicated
distinct choices which cannot be separated from structured arguments
about development. Conceived of in this manner, colonies
were permanently present as a selective control realm, though violence
in itself exhibited no coherent rationale, only a dynamics in
terms of its articulation. These control scenarios were not random. In