Between a Rock and a Hard Place: African NGOs, donors, and the state, edited by Jim Igoe and Tim Kelsall. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2005. xvii+309 pp. $40.00 (paperback). ISBN 1 59460 017 1.

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

This book fills a gap in the sizeable literature on democratisation in Africa. Attention has been focused too much on political parties, elections, etc. and not on the topic of this book: interactions between government, NGOs, and the international aid community. Similarly, it fills a void in the large literature on NGOs in Africa. The authors in this volume provide empirical studies, whereas up to now most writing in this field has been normative. This book acknowledges normative literature and is a good bibliographical source for what has been written on NGOs in Africa, but its interest is in the confrontation of these ideological images with empirical realities. Myth and reality is a common theme in the book, as is noted by the editors. The introduction by Tim Kelsall and Jim Igoe as well as Sara Rich Dorman’s contribution are especially perceptive in dissecting the ideological notions that assume a separation between state and the NGO community, as well as notions equating the NGO community with civil society. Sara Rich Dorman formulates appositely in her article on a Zimbabwean human rights NGO: ‘The NGO literature seems to assume that NGOs spring into being fully formed and without political links, unless they are run by civil servants, MPs or presidents’ wives in which case they are pathologized as government NGOs. Yet in reality, NGO-state relations may be better seen as a continuum’. Linkages between NGOs and power brokers ‘are often enhanced by material but also by cultural and social connections between elites as NGO staff often come from or seek the same relatively small bourgeoisie’ (p. 41).