4 - Independence and the Rhetoric of Feasibility

Summary

As Lal has shown, the reputation of the Southeast as a backwater crystallised during the transition to and the first decade of independence, notwithstanding occasional challenges to it.¹ This is hardly surprising since, during this period, the notion of development gained currency, complexity, and political significance: it became more important as a criterion to assess places by. There is an extensive and sophisticated literature on the rise of the concept, practice, and institutional apparatus of development in the post-war world, both in Africa and beyond.² Judgements differ as to its intellectual antecedents, the extent to which development was a product of Cold War strategising, a way to recast and reinvigorate colonial-era forms of dependency and control, and a means to put the putatively pre-modern, underdeveloped populations of the former colonies in their place; to culturally ‘other’ them.³