Manly Machines and Homely Objects: Gender, Development and Divergent Radio Technologies in Late-Colonial Ghana and Zambia

The paper explores and analyzes similarities and differences between French settler colonialism in Algeria and Jewish Zionist settler colonialism in Palestine. This study focuses on the history and historical development of French settler colonialism and Jewish Zionist settler colonialism by deploying the analytical framework of settler colonialism, and the comparative history of settler colonialism. Settler colonial studies and comparative settler colonialism allow for gaining insight into the genesis, and development of settler colonies. The intention behind the application of comparative settler colonialism, specifically in juxtaposing French settler colonialism in Algeria and Jewish Zionist settler colonialism in Palestine is to identify overlaps, similarities as well as differences between these settler polities. The results of this study have shown that French and Zionist settler colonialism share numerous similarities and features. The most important feature that these settler colonialisms adhere to is the logic of elimination, which is defined as policies and practices of settler colonial policies aimed at the dispossession, displacement, ethnic cleansing, genocide, as well as cultural assimilation of the indigenous populations. In this case, both French and Zionist settler colonialisms have subscribed and followed the logic of the elimination of the natives. Yet as opposed to French settler colonialism, Zionist settler colonialism has been less interested in cultural assimilation and integration of the indigenous people of Palestine into settler society. Another conspicuous difference between French and Zionist settler colonialism is that while French settler colonialism is already defunct, Zionist settler colonialism has managed to survive and persist. The current study contributes to settler colonial studies and the comparative history of settler colonialism. Moreover, our research can inform other studies in the field of settler colonialism, and we suggest that more research into comparative settler colonialism needs to be undertaken.

This chapter argues that Utopia is groundbreaking because it established the notion of ‘imperial settler utopias’ that influence attempted and fantasized manifestations of utopianism. Unlike settler utopias that are isolated and focused on inward development, imperial settler utopias—whether real or fictional—are settler colonies so entranced by their own ideals that they envision themselves as predestined to be dominant on the merit of their superiority. The interaction between fictional and attempted imperial settler utopias is cyclical. More’s Utopia influenced the development of real-world imperial settler utopian colonies and in return these colonies, combined with the legacy of Utopia, contributed to the rise of literary genres that extrapolate on imperial settler colonialism. These rising literary genres, again, continue to feed fantasies of imperialism. This chapter illustrates this cyclical interaction by, first, examining More’s influence on the development of settler colonies that eventually made up the United States. Then, it explains how, in return, the United States’ imperial settler utopian foundations led to the development of science fiction that fantasizes expansion into space as exemplified in Star Trek. These science fiction fantasies, again, affect actual attempts to explore space. This cycle of influence is one of the best examples illustrating More’s remarkable influence on the direction of history and literature since the publication of Utopia.

This chapter examines the environmental anxieties Scottish-trained doctors2 expressed about the impacts of deforestation on colonial development in India and Australasia as well as the influence of locality in modifying the bureaucratic responses which developed. Assessing whether the Indian experience was mirrored in colonial New Zealand and Victoria, this chapter argues that less acceptance of government intervention in society in the settler colonies as well as differential experiences of deforestation meant that Scottish-educated doctors did not have the same impact in Victoria and New Zealand as they did in India. The prior existence of the IMS provided a ready-made source of environmental experts who, from the late-eighteenth century, identified the impacts of deforestation and, from the 1840s, contributed to the development of India’s fledgling forest bureaucracy. The Scottish-educated doctors’ differential influence is best attributed to their sound scientific education and numerical preponderance, together with the particular forms of government in India, rather than to any ethnic inclination towards conservation (which Richard Grove and others have contended). This chapter also argues that conservation also must be understood as an attempt to further colonial development. Forest reservation and management was designed to protect agriculture from droughts, soil erosion and flooding and, not least, to meet the increasing demands for timber by a burgeoning colonial economy. Furthermore, foresters presented the development of plantations in agriculturally useless areas as an efficient use of otherwise ‘waste’ areas.

In this article, I conduct a close reading of Ernestine Hill's Water Into Gold (1937) to argue that it reveals Hill's ambivalence about colonial development in her account of the transition of White settler colonialism from an earlier period of mythologised pioneering to one of industrial development. I show how Hill's narration frames the elimination of Aboriginal people at the frontier as inevitable and deploys religious language to sanctify the domination of nature as well as the process of colonisation. This religious aspect of Hill's work has not received previous attention. The article tracks three key features of Hill's text, contributing to three bodies of work. I demonstrate how each of these features provokes Hill's ambivalence. First, I identify how the pioneering travellers in Hill's narrative are stalled by colonial settlement and industrial development. Second, I describe the ways Hill's text paradoxically figures Aboriginal people as disappearing while attesting to their indelible presence. Third, I analyse the way Christian language provides a foundational justification for the domination of nature and White colonial settlement. Connecting these three features, I demonstrate Hill's ambivalence at the loss of mythic origins and their sanctifying role in the colonial development she endorses.

ABSTRACTThis article examines how settler colonial narratives, structures and relations constitute development. The article offers a new concept, settler development, to show how development, as a colonial template of liberal rule and economic improvement, and settler colonialism, augment and imprint each other. To understand how settler development works, I present a case study that analyzes settler texts that circulate between Zionists in the United States and in Palestine before 1948. In particular, David Ben-Gurion, leader of Jewish settlement in Palestine, and writers in the Jewish American magazine, Jewish Frontier, sought to justify settlement based on economic productivity to appeal to the British to hand over the Mandate to settlers, not indigenous Palestinians. These circulating discourses valorized the ‘pioneer’ as the quintessential subject of settler development who is assumed to have a right over indigenous land through their ability to improve economic productivity. The article combines settler colonial and critical development studies to suggest creative analyses of the way that development is epistemologically linked to the networks of settler colonialism.

It is 1950 in Barbados. Visitors arrive at Sea well Airfield (now being extended by a Colonial Development and Welfare Grant) on the propeller airplanes of British West Indian Airways. Most tourists stay at one of the several hotels south-east of Bridgetown in Hastings, among them the Marine Hotel which is ‘up to date and with more than 120 bedrooms’.1 The accommodations there defy comparison with the abject poverty of most black Barbadians. Their tiny wooden houses in the rural tenantries and urban slums often have dirt floors and thoroughly unsanitary conditions; it is therefore little wonder that the 1946 population census of the British Caribbean has shown Barbados’s infant mortality rate at 176 per 1,000 live births, by far the highest among the British Caribbean colonies. The journey to and from Bridgetown for rural Blacks is still often accomplished on foot or donkey cart but in recent years by motorbus. British planners attribute Barbados’s poverty to its chronic overpopulation (192,800 in the 1946 census) and suggest — as they have for decades — that the ‘surplus’ people might better be sent to British Honduras or British Guiana. Despite the general impoverishment, all Barbadians revel in the results of the recent test cricket match in London where, for the first time on British soil, the West Indies, powered by the fabled Barbadian batsmen Walcott, Weekes and Worrell, have defeated England.2 The few Barbadians who own radio sets have heard the news over Radio Distribution, the island’s sole radio station.

Review: <i>Imperial Wine: How the British Empire Made Wine’s New World</i>, by Jennifer Regan-Lefebvre

Reviewed by: The Fabric of Indigeneity: Ainu Identity, Gender, and Settler Colonialism in Japan by ann-elise lewallen Kinko Ito (bio) The Fabric of Indigeneity: Ainu Identity, Gender, and Settler Colonialism in Japan. By ann-elise lewallen. University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 2016. xx, 289 pages. $49.95, paper. The Fabric of Indigeneity and Ainu Identity is excellent, informative, and insightful. This thought-provoking book is about contemporary Ainu women artists' efforts in cultural revival and vitalization as they perform cloth work (sewing, embroidery, appliqué, etc.). It is a must-read for anyone [End Page 469] who wants to study about Japan, especially the Ainu, a racial and ethnic minority group. In this book, ann-elise lewallen covers the long history of the Ainu and the Japanese in general, with her main focus on the period between the end of World War II and 2008. The author guides her readers through the major social and historical events of the Ainu, including the Ainu Cultural Promotion Act of 1997, which led to the revival of Ainu culture. She also provides context on political and cultural backgrounds surrounding the relationship between the Ainu and the wajin (non-Ainu Japanese). This contextual understanding is indispensable for analyzing racism, the gendered nature of settler colonialism, and contemporary women's cloth work and its significance. Throughout the book, lewallen introduces readers to the history of the Ainu. The ancestors of the Ainu lived in the Ainu mosir (Ainu homeland, including the Kuril Islands, Sakhalin, Hokkaido, and the northern part of Honshu). The Japanese government claimed Ezo (non-Japanese territories in the northern part of today's Japan) in the fifteenth century, and colonization started in 1604. Ezo was renamed Hokkaido, and formal settler colonialism started in 1869. The wajin engaged in colonial violence, and they brought diseases unknown to the Ainu (such as smallpox, sexually transmitted infection, and measles). They instituted forced labor camps that placed Ainu men far from their homes and families and pushed the Ainu women to become "local wives" of the wajin settlers. Today's Ainu live mostly in Hokkaido and in metropolitan areas near Tokyo. The author brings her description of the Ainu up to the present by highlighting the rise of citizens' groups tackling the problem of hate speech that affects not only the Ainu but other ethnic minorities in contemporary Japan. The Ainu are socially and politically categorized as an ethnic collectivity in Japan, but they are not a monolithic group. Regional, social, and cultural differences are found among different Ainu groups as well as between Ainu women and men. Wajin babies and children left behind by their settler parents who could not succeed in Hokkaido were often adopted by the Ainu people and brought up as Ainu. These people may look like Japanese physically but they self-identify as Ainu. Throughout the book, lewallen describes and explains the relationship between women's craftwork and their identity as well as the relationship between their work and the settler patriarchy and formal colonialism that started in 1869. I found the book unique in that its main focus is on Ainu women artists' craftwork as it relates to Indigenous modernity and self-identification.1 The term "Indigenous modernity" seems to be a contradiction, [End Page 470] but lewallen explains it in a convincing manner. The threads of the Ainu women artists' lives in the contemporary world and those of their Ainu ancestors' lives under settler colonialism are beautifully woven together by the author. The history of the Ainu is essentially the same as that of other Indigenous people in North and South America, Oceania, and elsewhere. Many of these groups have been exposed to colonialism, settler colonialism, racism, ethnic cleansing, exploitation, oppression, violence, and social stigma. Women almost always became objects of sexism and sexual violence as well. The author introduces the experiences of various Indigenous groups in Japan (those of Okinawa, for example) and in other countries (such as India under British rule and Aboriginal communities in Canada and Australia). She compares and contrasts them with those of the Ainu to make her points. This comparative approach helps readers to situate the unique experiences of the Ainu in...

This article takes a visual approach to the study of an aural medium. It argues that the radio set had a powerful visual presence in popular culture in Southern Africa between the 1950s and the 1970s when most people bought their first radio sets. Advertisements for radios carried by the press offer the most prominent examples of this iconography. In South Africa, Rhodesia and Zambia, radio advertisements developed a distinctive aesthetic that blended global and local influences and framed the relationship between the new technology and society. Although the radio set was presented as part of a forward-looking, ostensibly inclusive vision of modernity, sales strategies also served to associate radio with whiteness and masculinity by looking backwards to the racial and gendered hierarchies of the colonial past. The homogeneity of advertising on both sides of the liberation divide demonstrates the pervasive cultural influence of settler colonialism both before and after formal decolonisation.

As European powers began to assert hegemony in much of Africa during the early twentieth century, forced labor became a common and cheap method of organizing the labor of colonial subjects. The impoverished colonial states needed cheap African labor for infrastructure development while, in settler colonies, European immigrants and business interests also required affordable labor to squeeze out profit margins.1 The myth of the lazy African male, unresponsive to economic incentives and lethargic due to the labor of his womenfolk, fueled the ideological justification for forced labor as an aspect of progressive rule.2 Essentially, if Africans would not work for Europeans, which was in their best interests anyway, they must be forced to work. Out of this moral and economic “dilemma” of development grew the multiheaded Hydra of forced labor in Africa: forced labor for private interests, government forced labor, and coercion in the interests of community. In this chapter we first, broadly, examine the general archetypes of forced labor in colonial Africa and their connection to economic development.KeywordsIvory CoastGold CoastColonial RuleCommunal LaborCocoa PlantationThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

On a continent where the majority of people are poor, do political parties represent class cleavages? Do parties have strong linkages to ordinary voters? Do economic policies address their needs? In the initial years following democratic transitions across the African continent in the 1990s, the answers to such questions were negative. Clientelism and patronage were the principal means by which parties interacted with their constituencies; elites and elite interests determined the objectives of political parties; voters in many African countries shifted parties frequently; and neoliberal economic policies largely reflected the preferences of foreign donors and international financial institutions. As parties and voters have adjusted to the institutional arrangements and political demands associated with democracy, a more heterogeneous political landscape has materialized since 2010. Party systems demonstrate distinct patterns of variation, from the more stable, institutionalized systems in Ghana and Botswana to fluid, inchoate configurations in Benin and Malawi. These variations in the degree to which party systems have institutionalized affect economic policy choices by parties and those who benefit from them. Furthermore, democratic politics has intensified pressures on ruling parties to provide goods such as electricity and education. Here too, patterns of goods provision show substantial variation over time and across countries, calling attention to the differences in the incentives and capacities of parties to respond to distributive demands by the electorate. To explore the political and economic heterogeneity of contemporary Africa, scholars have combined well-established qualitative and comparative approaches with new analytical tools. The use of cross-national public opinion surveys, field and survey experiments, satellite imagery, and geo-coded data have enabled more systematic, fine-grained study of the economic determinants of party system competition, economic voting, the distribution of goods, and the management of private sector development by ruling parties in recent years. These empirical approaches enrich understanding of the relationship between parties and political economy in Africa and facilitate more fruitful comparisons with other regions of the world.

Radio research of the 1930s and 40s poses a challenge to the contemporary scholar of broadcast history. In the early days of radio research, scholars and practitioners often placed emphasis on material extraneous to the broadcast content rather the content itself. As a result, radio scripts and broadcast material that might have been preserved for contemporary scholarship was at best inconsistently and imperfectly preserved, and at worst discarded altogether. Considering the development of radio research in the 1930s and 40s, Leo Löwenthal and other members of the Frankfurt School often found that their emphasis on content analysis meant they were at the center of methodological disputes that put them at odds with their peers but firmly on the side of today’s radio historians and preservationists. In this essay, I argue that the historical emphasis on radio audiences and effects analysis that tends to predominate early radio research often obscured the broadcast content that produced those effects. However, with their studies of the techniques of right-wing radio agitators, the Frankfurt School’s insistence on content analysis inadvertently helped preserve historically significant broadcast material that not only would have otherwise been lost, but which also provides an important template for understanding contemporary manifestations of demagoguery. For today’s scholars invested in the preservation of broadcast content, following the trail left by these methodological iconoclasts can help us fill in missing pieces of radio’s historical puzzle.

This book challenges assumptions that poor post-colonial economic performance is always a direct product of colonialism by reconsidering the Belgian Congo (1908–1959) as a developmental state. The book demonstrates that despite the colonial system’s economic exploitation and extraction, brutality, excessive taxation, and inequities, the Belgian Congo achieved successes in developing the economy in a short period of time. The Belgian Congo was able to achieve this by investing its higher rates of fiscal revenue in political stability, physical infrastructure, education, and healthcare. By reconsidering the Belgian colonial state as a developmental state, this book encourages scholars to adopt a more nuanced analysis of African history. Considering state capacity and state autonomy as key features of a developmental state, the book demonstrates that colonial state managers in the Belgian Congo were able to supply these public goods that sustained economic growth for decades. Whilst by no means glorifying colonialism or the atrocities that were conducted during the Belgian occupation, the book nonetheless outlines how different forms of capitalism were deployed to further economic development in the country. In contrast, predatory state managers of the Congo Free State (1885–1908) and post-colonial kleptocrats (1960–2018) have squandered Congo’s natural resources with disastrous economic and social consequences. Contrasting the Belgian Congo with colonies of settlement and other colonies of extraction, this book encourages researchers and students to reconsider the dominant narratives within colonial history, development, and African Studies.

In The Idea of Development in Africa, Corrie Decker and Elisabeth McMahon examine development theory and practice over time, asserting that development “arose directly out of imperialism, colonialism, and neocolonialism” (275). This text not only situates development in a historical setting but also explains key theories and connects the past to the present. Ultimately, Decker and McMahon conclude, “Despite the rhetoric on saving, helping, and equalizing, the development industry has done more to maintain global and local inequalities than it has to dismantle them” (16). Thus they make a compelling argument for rethinking established development paradigms by centering the futures and visions that Africans have for themselves.This work builds on a body of literature that has focused on how the construction of both development expertise and the objects of development have been political projects. Unlike previous scholarship, Decker and McMahon emphasize the origins of what they call “the development episteme itself,” shifting the standard narrative away from the creation of the Bretton Woods institutions and instead locating those origins in Enlightenment philosophies and the “civilizing mission.” In doing so, the authors argue that the “logic of difference and differentiation is built into the foundations of development,” and they then show how these ideas have shaped policy and practice up to the present (4–5).Relying largely on published scholarly works, published primary sources, online reports, and news media, along with limited oral histories and archival research, The Idea of Development is broken down into three parts. Part 1 examines the origins of the development episteme in the nineteenth-century world, emphasizing its imperialist setting, knowledge production, and racist ideologies, and closing with a chapter calling for decolonizing development. Part 2 explores how these ideas have shaped colonial and postcolonial development practice in Africa, with chapters on the importance of science, African contestations of development, economic development theories, and nongovernmental organizations. Part 3 focuses on some specific development “problems” in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Here Decker and McMahon take residential spaces, education, health care, and manufacturing as their case studies.This work is at its strongest when centering African ideas, explaining difficult concepts, and tying the past to the present. The section on African communities' vernacular notions of progress illustrates, for example, how various societies “have generated their own diverse meanings of development” (5). The authors' explanation of knowledge production—noting that “its collection and construction by individuals was deeply subjective”—will be especially helpful for undergraduate readers (42). Perhaps most important, this work emphasizes that the racist underpinnings of early colonial development have endured in more recent development discourse that distinguishes between the “developed” West and the “developing” countries of Africa.Such contributions will be of interest to students and scholars alike. The focus on the genesis and earlier history of development, as well as the accessibility of the writing, make this an especially appealing book for teaching. Readers of Agricultural History will also find much of relevance in this volume. With sidebars on the Amani Research Institute, the Tanganyikan groundnut scheme, usufruct land tenure, Wangari Maathai's Green Belt Movement, and pastoralism, there is ample space devoted to agricultural development. Various chapters, particularly in part 3, delve into additional questions related to agriculture, such as land resettlement, agricultural commodities, and irrigation schemes.The book not only provides rich insights into an impressive number of development topics, but it also covers the history of development in Africa from the nineteenth century to the present. Writing such a sweeping history is no easy task and necessarily entails making some omissions. This monograph does tend to emphasize the more distant past as well as the present, with the mid- to late twentieth century—particularly, the rise of neoliberalism and the implementation of structural adjustment programs—garnering less attention.Even so, this is an important work and will be essential teaching material for courses on the history of development. The authors strike a delicate balance between writing a history that pushes scholarly understanding forward, while also making this work accessible to students. The epilogue persuasively argues, “Development is not the powerful edifice it claims to be; it is a holdover of colonialism that is quickly losing relevance in our current world” (288). The Idea of Development in Africa is a smart and engaging study, which will be of interest to scholars and students of African history, development history, agricultural history, and labor history.

Focusing on the youth, this paper explores the social policy dimensions of Zimbabwe’s fast-track land reform programme (FTLRP) using the transformative social policy (TSP) theoretical framework. It shows that in rural Zimbabwe, the FTLRP has impacted the youth in diverse ways which are only becoming visible now. Using the TSP framework, the paper argues that land reform is a social policy instrument that can be used to transform livelihoods and bring about inclusive development in former settler colonies. It uses empirical evidence gathered in Goromonzi district in Zimbabwe to show that there are discernible redistribution, production and social protection outcomes of the FTLRP. In a context where some Southern African countries are grappling with how best to deal with their “land questions,” the paper argues that there are lessons to be learned from the Zimbabwean experience.