Social and cultural destruction

The road to the slum

Cultural change is something that is actively sought by the governments of the Third World. For them resettlement and development projects are a vital means of bringing ‘progress’ to the people. Indeed, the aim is quite explicit: to transform traditional lifestyles. Nomads must be settled, pastoralists turned into farmers, subsistence farmers into modern agriculturalists.

Introducing the Mahaweli Scheme to Sri Lanka’s Parliament, for instance, the then Minister for the Mahaweli made it clear that a major aim of the scheme was to break the mould of traditional farming. The explicit intention of the resettlement programme was “to enable the peasant colonist farmers to produce a surplus . . . not to create a large body of subsistence farmers”. The feasibility study prepared for the government went further: “The Objectives of the project are to increase production, productivity and income, to arouse peasant initiative, to integrate the population and to generalise social change”. [35]

Even those who argue for better planning of social change, however, are well aware that such planning is incapable of preventing all adverse cultural change. Discussing the impact of development on tribal peoples, for instance, the World Bank itself makes it clear that it sees its task as providing a cushion to the inevitable cultural blow that development will bring:

“It is not the Bank’s policy to prevent the development of areas presently occupied by tribal people. The Bank will assist projects within areas used or occupied by such people only if it is satisfied that best efforts have been made to obtain the voluntary, full and conscionable agreement of the tribal people . . . Assuming that tribal people will either acculturate or disappear, there are two basic design options: The World Bank can assist the government either with acculturalisation, or with protection in order to avoid harm.” [37]

For those tribal people who will be affected, it is a galling prospect. The World Bank is right to assume that ‘acculturalisation’ is the inevitable consequence of development. If, as we have seen, even the smallest change can spell cultural death for traditional society, how much more likely is it that the wholesale changes demanded by resettlement will bring cultural disintegration? Consider, for example, what being settled could mean for a pastoral society like the Dinka of Southern Sudan.

Originally, it was intended that the Jonglei Canal Scheme would lead to the development of a 250,000-acre irrigation project alongside the banks of the canal. Under the scheme, the Dinka were to have been forced to abandon their cattle-herding way of life in order to become farmers. It is simply inconceivable that the Dinka’s traditional culture could have survived such a change. Indeed, for the Dinka, their cattle are the very basis of their culture: everything revolves around them.

Godfrey Leinhardt, the anthropologist whose book on Dinka religion is rightly considered a classic, gives some examples. [38] Thus, the Dinka perceive colour, light and shade in terms of the colours and markings of their cattle; they imitate cattle in their dances and it is considered the height of elegance and grace to stand with one’s arms outstretched so that they look like the curved horns of an ox: when boys reach manhood, they are named after the colour of a cow; there is thought to be a binding contract between a man and his beasts, and it is considered outrageous to kill an ox or a cow simply because one has an appetite for meat (as distinct from eating meat in order to survive a famine); and cattle have a prominent place in the Dinka after life, a cow which has been killed without appropriate ceremony being thought to haunt its killers.

In the event, the Sudanese Government decided against settling the Dinka under the Jonglei scheme. Nonetheless the point is made. To change a traditional society is effectively to ask its people to abandon their whole way of life. It is not comparable to, let us say, asking a Western pig-farmer to ‘go into’ cattle; nor is it comparable to asking a man to change his job. What it is asking is that traditional societies should embrace ‘modern’ values and ‘modern’ lifestyles regardless of what such change will do to their own culture. As Stanley Johnson comments of the Volta scheme:

“Anyone who has endured the horrors of down-town Accra and witnessed the ultimate consequences of ‘modern’ sets of values and a ‘modern approach to life’ may justifiably wonder whether the game is really worth the candle.” [39]

Indeed they might. Deprived of their traditional culture, and stripped of the support of their communities, many of those who are resettled drift towards the cities. There, a now familiar tragedy repeats itself. The men frequently turn to alcohol whilst the women are often forced to prostitute themselves and their families. Malnutrition and disease are rife, jobs almost impossible to find. It is a world far removed from the ‘paradise’ offered to them by the authorities. Unfortunately, it is a world in which most of them will spend the rest of their lives.

References

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