6 - ‘These People, They Just Sit!’

Summary

Legitimation via the representative claim is existentially critical for non-governmental organisations in the absence of meaningful consent or authorization. The need to so compensate is manifest in iterative claims to be ‘one of the people’, to be close to the people and ultimately to stand for the people, challenging state representative monopolies that have unravelled in Tanzania, as elsewhere. Claims to stand for the people, however, are fleeting and give way to the conclusive need to act for the people when situations of uncertainty and of perceived failure solicit a more authoritative stance. This chapter expounds the hybridity of contemporary representational practice, whereby state and non-state actors continually reconcile claims to stand and to act for Others. In doing so, it uniquely identifies a productive confluence in mainstream representation theory and long-established anti/postcolonial writings in understanding representational multivalency and making today, disrupting default notions of representation in the West.