Ownership of Development, China in Africa, and AFRICOM (Part 2) w/ Takiyah Harper-Shipman [Remastered]

Speaker 1: You remember Din Ben Phu? No! The same thing happened in Algeria, in Africa. They didn't have anything but a rifle. The French had all these highly mechanized instruments of warfare. But they put some guerrilla action on them.

Henry Huckamacki: Hello and welcome to Guerrilla History, the podcast that acts as a reconnaissance report of global proletarian history and aims to use the lessons of history to analyze the present. I'm one of your co-hosts, Henry Huckamacki, joined as usual by my co-hosts, Professor Adnan Hussain, historian and director of the School of Religion at Queen's University in Ontario, Canada. How are you today, Adnan?

Adnan Hussain: I'm well. Great to be with you, Henry.

Henry Huckamacki: Yeah, really looking forward to having you for this conversation because you missed part one of it. And I'm looking forward to the insights that you have for this one. Sorry to miss it. That's fine. That's fine. We've got you now. Also joined by Brett O'Shea, host of Revolutionary Left Radio and co-host of the Red Menace podcast. Hello, Brett. How are you doing today?

Brett O'Shea: Hello, I'm doing very good.

Henry Huckamacki: Great. Always nice to see you. How's things going in Nebraska right now?

Brett O'Shea: Good, good. The kids are in their last week or so of school, so we're just waiting for that to end, and then it's just summer. So hopefully it'll be a nice one.

Henry Huckamacki: Oh, that sounds great. Hopefully you've got a lot of stuff planned for them. Okay, so today we have the continuation of our discussion with Professor Takiyah Harper Shipman, and we've got a lot of really interesting topics planned. We're going to be talking about things... like African feminisms. We're going to be talking more about Thomas Sankara, more about ownership of development, Africa, all of these topics that we really, really wanted to dive really deep into last time and just didn't have time for. So if you're listening to this episode and you haven't previously listened to the part one episode that we did with Professor Takiyah Harper Shipman, you should go back and do that now because that episode is the introduction to all of these topics. And without that introduction, I'm sure you'd be able to get by, but that really will set you up well to dive deep into each of these topics because we're hoping to get deep here. So Adnan, why don't I start with you? You weren't here last time. You had another thing pop up at the last minute. And, you know, I was really looking forward to seeing what you had to say on these topics. And I know that you listened to part one of the discussion that we had with the professor. So what did you think about that last conversation? What kind of things are you looking forward to getting out of this conversation?

Adnan Hussain: Well, I thought it was really interesting, and I'm so glad that there's another opportunity to continue the conversation because there's so much to discuss when we're talking about a major region within a large and populous and strategically very important continent of Africa. So looking at West African development. I think I'm interested to hear a lot more about these questions of development and feminism and women in Burkina Faso, as well as, you know, the wider sort of West African region and the debates and discussions taking place in scholarship about feminism. women's development, since I noted from the last conversation that it seemed that there was a particular interest and focus by USAID. And of course, listeners go back and listen again to our previous reconnaissance report on USAID, a real emphasis on contraception, birth control, and a certain philosophy on how that fit into women's development. So I'd like to hear a about that. But also, I'm very disturbed to see how many of the coups that have been recently taking place in West Africa. We've not done dispatches for each one of them, but we did talk about Guinea. How many of these do seem to involve U.S. training and the role of AFRICOM you know, in West Africa is really crucial. I'd like to hear a little bit more and discuss a little bit more about the effects of U.S. military involvement and how it compares to the French in the region. I think that's a very important topic. And, you know, you started that discussion. So I'm looking forward to hearing much more about that. But overall, I think everybody these days is very interested in the you know, geopolitical conditions of the world, this, you know, realignment that people, you know, think is taking place, whether they're critiques of neoliberal globalization, and whether we see a different kinds of formation that might come into play with the resources that are so important to In Africa, historically, we've seen imperialist politics and competition for control in Africa, and this is only reasserting itself now. So I'd like to talk a little bit more about that aspect and issue and how it affects development and political economy in West Africa. So it was a great conversation. There's so many threads to pursue, and I'm really looking forward to speaking with Dr. Harper Shipman.

Henry Huckamacki: Yeah. Thank you for saying that it was a nice conversation. Listeners, go listen to it. Brett, let me turn to you now. Do you have any brief thoughts, maybe reflections from the first episode that we did with the professor, things that you've maybe thought about in the time since then? What are you hoping to get out of this conversation that we didn't have time for in the first conversation? Because we really were cut a lot more short than we wanted to be.

Brett O'Shea: Well, first of all, just mentioning the realignment, that might be a good idea for us to tackle domestically and globally, this idea of the realignment and, you know, kind of parse that out. But it's for another time. Yeah, the conversation was awesome. We really just it felt like, as I said last time, it just got going by the time it ended. But I want to dive deeper in some of the things you put on the table last time. Specifically, I want to talk more about the like, you know, the the meat and potatoes of development and owning development and some of these narratives and breaking them down. And I'm also very interested and I'm going to try to fit this in as well in this conversation as China's relationship to African development. That's just interesting in and of itself. But also there's huge dividing lines on the left. with regards to what the nature of China's involvement in African development is. And for that reason as well, I think it would behoove us a show like this to try to tackle that. So I'm really interested in her insights on that in particular.

Henry Huckamacki: Yeah. And as for my part, of course. I'm looking forward to each of the topics that I mentioned that we're going to be looking at. Unfortunately, feminist literature, what we're presented is often very Eurocentric, and you have to go out of your way to even find something, anything from outside of the Anglophone, Western, Global North world. We have philosophical trends in the feminist movement, which is behind me, and there's an excellent, excellent, I think one episode, maybe two of the Red Menace podcast on Brett, you and Alison did a really great episode of that, which of course is done by an Indian comrade. But I haven't read any feminist literature from Africa, so I'm really looking forward to that. But like I said, in addition to all of these other topics that we're going to be talking about during the interview, what I'm really relishing is having more opportunities to just take a dump on all over the World Bank, the IMF and AFRICOM and all of these other pernicious influences that operate under the veneer of humanitarianism and goodwill towards all people. You know, we know, people that listen to this show anyway, we know that the World Bank, the IMF and AFRICOM are incredibly destructive influences, not only in Africa, but all across the world. And I think that having somebody who has such a deep knowledge of how it is destructive within the context of West Africa is really going to be helpful for us sharpening our knives to really, you know, cut these institutions apart, at least rhetorically, until we are able to cut them apart physically, which hopefully will be you know, sooner rather than later. So that's what I'm looking forward to. And I know we'll keep this really short because we already had a discussion before and might as well save the extra time for the conversation. So let's turn it forward now to the interview that we will do with Professor Takiyah Harper-Shipman, who's an assistant professor of Africana Studies at Davidson College. We'll be right back. And we're back on Guerrilla History. We're joined by our excellent guest, Professor Takiyah Harper Shipman, who's a professor in the Africana Studies Department at Davidson College. Again, we had a part one conversation with her previously that everybody needs to listen to. And In the interim, between the introduction, recording, and now, we had a discussion with the professor, and we decided that we're going to have a part three of this conversation. We're already committing to that before we've even started part two, because we feel that the discussion of African feminisms, which we were talking so excitedly about in the introduction, warrants at least a full... episode on. So part three of this conversation is going to be entirely devoted to African feminisms, which is something that the professor teaches. So there's that caveat aside. Hello, Professor. It's nice to see you once again.

Takiyah Harper-Shipman: Hi, Henry. Hi, everyone. So good to see you all again.

Henry Huckamacki: Yeah, absolutely. It's a pleasure. So I guess we're just going to jump right into where we kind of left off last time. And again, listeners should check out that previous conversations that they're able to keep up. We were talking a lot about ownership of development last time. And I guess just briefly before we start diving even deeper. If you could briefly remind the listeners what we mean by ownership of development, where this term comes from, the current conception of ownership of development. Because, I mean, it sounds like a very nice term, but, you know, it's kind of not.

Takiyah Harper-Shipman: Yeah, it does sound like a nice concept. And then the history is so dark, right? So I'll start with defining the concept and then walk back with the history. So the current definition, which comes from the OECD's Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, The Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness in 2005 defines ownership as a developing government's ability to take responsibility for and lead in its own development. Right. So the concept, though, does not come from the OECD's high level forum, as is often discussed, as is often how it's promoted in the literature. It's often talked about as, again, kind of coming from. this international, this moment in the early 2000s where development practitioners and civil society agents and governments are like, you know, we want a different type of development and we want more ownership and we want more aid effectiveness. And that thus this concept kind of was created. This is also, let me say, I don't know if I said this the last time either, but part of what goes into this is not just the backlash from the structural adjustment programs, which I'll get to, but also within academia, there was this rising current of aid as ineffective, right? That was starting to have a resounding effect as well. So this is where you have like the William Easterly critiques and the Dambisa Moyo dead aid. And so there's a strong current coming out, even within academia, which as we know, previous, well, not just previously is still the case. Academia is the handmaiden to capitalism in imperialism, right? And so whenever you find, again, these currents, um, that seem to be critiquing the hegemonic approach to development, these international institutions like the World Bank and the IMF have to respond, and especially the World Bank. And so the actual origin of ownership comes from what's called the Comprehensive Development Framework, which was created by the World Bank and the IMF at the end of the 1990s. And this is important because this is the moment where the World Bank and the IMF have to grapple with the global social responses to structural adjustments, right? So all of the kind of user fees that were imposed under neoliberal policies in the 70s in Latin America, the 80s and the 90s in Africa, you know, there were like the food The protests in Egypt right over the rising cost of food in the 80s and the 90s. Right. So there are all of these these resistance movements that are responding to the material consequences of structural adjustments. Right. And again, the World Bank and the IMF and the other proponents of these shock policies, right, these Naomi Klein calls it the shock doctrine, but these shock policies was this notion that you had to suffer, right, and deal with higher food prices and higher cost of living in order to later benefit from the macroeconomic stabilization, right? But we know that didn't work. Right. We know that what it ended up doing was creating massive amounts of wealth for the already wealthy. And there's just widening the inequality gaps, especially around. So after structural adjustments in Latin America, for instance, you know, Latin America became like the most unequal continent, like the continent with the most inequality right out of any other place in the world. This is the context in which the World Bank and the IMF come up with this comprehensive development framework. And they're like, OK, we essentially have to shift the light and the focus and responsibility away from us while keeping these same structural adjustment policies intact. Right. And how do we do that? Well, we get the government to say that it's their policies, that they are in the driver's seat and they're the ones who have articulated and developed these development policies. Right. And. the, they, so the CDF effectively becomes this new framework, if you will, that the former president James Wolfensohn puts together. And it's supposed to be these, this work now it's long-term development is a long-term process. It's not the shorter, um, development strategies. Again, they used to be five years and now there's, um, Government account, government ownership. So now the governments are committed to owning their own development and owning development means essentially committing to the development strategies that the World Bank and the IMF have approved. So eventually this this framework is already there. And prior to the OECD high level four, which start with Rome in 2003. Paris in 2005, Accra 2008, and Busan in 2011. But this structure is already there before those meetings ever happened. And what also takes place at the same time is HIPC. right, the heavily indebted poor countries initiative, which is supposed to give preferential treatment to countries with exorbitant amounts of debt. But again, this is another instrument for the World Bank and IMF to decide who gets access to concessional loans. And so for a lot of African countries around this time, in order to continue to gain access to those concessional loans, the World Bank and IMF are like, well, you have to demonstrate ownership. Well, how do we demonstrate? Well, you need this poverty reduction strategy paper and we need to approve it. And the World Bank and IMF have we have to stamp off on it. And if we don't, then you don't you no longer get access to these concessional loans or to these grants. Right. And so that kind of becomes the framework in which ownership becomes, it's the origin and then the framework in which it becomes this like dominant approach to like supposedly doing development differently, right?

Henry Huckamacki: So a quick follow up. And, you know, I know that there's a million rabbit holes that we can go down with this, but I'll try to keep this short by quoting you in your book, Rethinking Ownership of Development in Africa, which I recommend that the listeners check out because I've got just highlights everywhere in here. But you mentioned they provide an example from the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa, which states that ownership is a set of relationships between Africa and international partners. This is where the question is going to come in, in which each will hold the other accountable for overall performance told mutually agreed development outcomes. African governments must adhere to agreed principles of governance and meet criteria for sound public finance management. as cited in etc, etc. This distinction further highlights the difference between what I term the ownership paradigm and other configurations of ownership. That paradigmatic version of ownership necessitates donor participation, while homegrown approaches almost require the absence of donor involvement. So my question, like I said, I hope that this will be short because I know there's a million things that the guys both want to ask too. You mentioned partners in this, and this term is a term that you kind of take apart a million ways in the book. I'm just wondering if you can briefly tell the listeners what is meant by partners here? Who are the general partners within this structure of ownership of development? And why should we not really be calling them partners within this paradigm?

Takiyah Harper-Shipman: Yes, okay. That's not fair to say, like, do this briefly.

Henry Huckamacki: I know, but I'm not going to be fair. Sorry, Professor.

Takiyah Harper-Shipman: And because there's a story that I want to tell around this. Okay, so part of what I said about the OECD and the high-level forum is that I took the structure of the CDF, right, the ownership and the long-term development, etc., But one of the other things that it did was add on to this rhetoric, right, that alluded to a change in development practice. And part of that was this notion that we'll no longer be donors and recipients. No, in this new world, we're development partners, right? And The partners are essentially the formerly known donors, right? So the World Bank, the IMF, bilateral partners as well. So USAID, the Canadian Development Fund, etc., And so instead of calling them donors, they would be referred to as development partners. And simultaneously, that word is so capacious in that it can sometimes be referring to the government and or not the government, right? So in some ways it becomes insidious, again, in that it attempts to blur the lines between who is doing what in terms of like designing the policies and overseeing them and who's in charge of accountability, right? And then the other part of that is that, you know, then everyone else becomes development stakeholders, right? Everyone else has a stake in the development outcomes and ensuring that these policies become implemented as best as possible. The brief story about how this is not just a kind of very high level detached conversation. I think I talk about this in the book. I can't remember. But when I was in Kenya and I was interviewing a government official. And again, I'm thinking like we all know this is a farce. Right. Before I come, like they're probably going to tear this apart. And I show up and I'm like, OK, start the recording. I'm like, OK, so can you tell me about your relationship with donors? And they pause the tape and they're like, just so you know, we they're not donors anymore. Right. We're partners. Right. We're development. And I was like. Whoa, whoa. Like, talk about drinking the Kool-Aid. I mean, I'm on pause and I'd like restate the question. And after after the interview, I said, you know, do you do you really feel like things have changed? Right. To the extent that you can say that you all are partners. And they kind of looked at me and they, you know, that doesn't matter anymore. The point is that by using the term donors, it assumes that you're out of touch with changes in development practices, right? And I said, whoa, there's so much there, right? So hopefully that is a quick way to answer the question while offering a very interesting story to buffer it.

Brett O'Shea: Yeah. And I think another question related to this is, you know, we're talking about rhetoric, narratives, misleading discourses, how things are framed and why that matters. And another thing you've covered in the article that I read is the Africa rising narrative and the discourse surrounding that and how that kind of dovetails with the rhetoric around owning development and partners, not donors. So I was hoping you could talk a little bit about Africa rising, what it means and what the myth is versus the reality.

Takiyah Harper-Shipman: Yeah, thanks for that. So the Africa Rising narrative was in response to this Economist publication that came out, I forget which year, but it was essentially calling Africa the dark continent, right? And that Africa was failing in the midst of globalization, right? So it's just happening at a time when like every other region in the global South was supposedly on its path towards industrialization and high rates of economic growth, right? You had the Asian tigers, right? You had all of these things, these supposed development miracles that were taking place in the global South and Africa figured into this conversation as kind of like the dark place that just still couldn't get it together. And that's essentially how the economists publication at the time framed it, right? And so too did Thomas Friedman, right? In his book, like The World is Flat. He does the same things. Like everywhere else is like, you know, experiencing growth and equality. And unfortunately, Africa is that poor ghetto, right? That just can't get it together. And in the aftermath of that, of course, there was considerable backlash. But what ended up happening was that around the 2000s, as well in the, around the early two thousands was that Africa started to experience substantial amounts of economic growth. Now this other part I said about the rest of the global South is very important here because as Africa starts to experience a lot of economic growth, people start to say, well, whoa, look at Africa, right? It's experienced all of those structural adjustments actually work and look at Africa starting to rise up at four, four, about, five or six years, most African countries had sustained economic growth at rates that were higher than Europe and higher than the U.S. And this narrative of Africa rising started to come. And again, the Economist publishes a subsequent publication, right? This like Africa rising to kind of account for the previous one where it had this very dark and pathological approach to thinking about Africa and to say, well, look, actually Africa is a great place for investments now. And the rates of economic growth have all types of implications for Africa. uh for global wealth right and for the continent as well now the reason this becomes in this this africa rising narrative becomes an issue is because one on one hand it starts to kind of validate this notion that structural adjustments worked right is that like see this is the lag effect if you all had just waited then you would have seen the benefits of this growth and without again, accounting for how that growth never trickles down, right? It never actually was redistributed, right? And a lot of that growth also was still going to like foreign corporations. And the reason it was going to foreign corporations goes back to that point I was just saying, which is that most, of the economic growth that African countries were experiencing under this period of like Africa rising was from raw material extraction, right? Which was the same colonial condition that Africa had been put in. And the reason that there was substantial economic growth with respect to exporting raw materials was because of the other countries in the global South that were industrializing in needing those raw materials coming out of Africa, right? So Ian Taylor actually has a really great article talking about this as well to articulate how Africa remains in a situation in a dependent condition. Right. And it's just that the receiving end of it is not Europe in the U.S. necessarily, but that the demands for raw materials that were needed for it to help the development in other countries in the global south. Still, we're linking Africa to that type of dependent relationship on raw materials. The other thing about that, though, is that the raw material market globally is a highly volatile market. Right. And so, of course, you start to see dips in economic growth in a lot of these countries. Also, and I'll state this again, and as many times as I need to say it, is that that wealth never trickled down, right? So in countries like Kenya, where there was, you know, focus on like oil extraction, right, in the Turkana region, and they have the LAPSEC project, and even countries like Ghana, right, which has been the kind of the model for development, especially in West Africa, there's significant inequality and high rates of poverty that go along with the economic growth. So the African rising narrative is, it hides the realities of what's actually taking place behind the and the reasons for the sustained amounts of economic growth. And it keeps people from actually thoroughly interrogating, like, but what is happening? That's one, generating that growth. And then two, is that being redistributed? And three, what are the ecological consequences of all of this growth that relies on capital-intensive resource extraction?

Henry Huckamacki: Yeah, I have another, I was going to say quick follow-up, but that would be, again, unfair. So one of the things that you do in your work, and this is a follow-up on the question that Brett just asked, it's a methodological question, which I guess I'm getting a penchant for on this show and is probably boring to many audience members, but I'm interested. So you use the critical discourse analysis method of linguistic analysis in your work. And this is just a call back to one of our previous episodes, because one of the founders of the critical discourse analysis mode is Ruth Vodok, who we have an episode with on far right rhetoric, which the listener should go back and listen to on our feed, wherever you get your podcasts. And you cite Bodak several times in your work. I'm just wondering if you can talk about how the critical discourse analysis method and framework is useful for looking at development, how you use it for development, why you decided that this framework of analysis is important to use for this work. Why did you decide that this is the framework that you want to be basing your work off of? And how is it useful for us to understand it from like a principled perspective and understand what's really going on here?

Takiyah Harper-Shipman: I love this question. And especially because I'm a methods geek. So I teach the methods class. And okay, so you make sure I don't go off on a tangent about methodologies and axiologies, right?

Henry Huckamacki: Adnan will cut you off whenever he's ready to ask his questions.

Takiyah Harper-Shipman: But this is a really good question, especially in thinking about, especially for people who might be interested in doing development work or any type of work, actually. Methodology is such an understudied part of the process, but super important. Yeah. So I use critical discourse analysis primarily because of the wind which it allows you to think about discourse as power and the relationships between language and practice that demarcate the boundaries of power. Development is that through and through. So the example I just gave you about the government officials saying it doesn't matter whether they do or they don't. What's important is that what that signals about you and not using the up-to-date jargon about development, right? That's embedded in the, that's a methodological kind of signal right there, right? Is in, and it's very much embedded in the development enterprise because it is one where Language signals so much. Can you keep up with the newest acronyms? Do you know what an MDG is? Do you know what an SDG is? Do you know what ECOWAS is? All of these things are signifiers about your ability to participate in this community, right? So on one hand, you could read that as, well, I need to know all of these things in order to prove that I know and I am an expert on this topic. The other part of it is you can understand how that's not just about me as a researcher, but that trickles down all the way through to the communities, right? So the communities as well, who are, again, being defined as stakeholders, right? also must know and wield that language to gain access to resources, right? You have to be able to articulate and know development partners and, you know, the PRSP and all of these, again, they jokingly call it the alphabet soup, right? But you have to be able to kind of know all of these things to be read legible to the people who hold the power and who distribute the resources, right? Critical discourse analysis, compared to a lot of other approaches, allows you to articulate that in and of itself and gives you the leeway to think about that as a methodology, right? So the things that seem... that a lot of other methodologies would not count as valuable knowledge or worthy data or information. Critical discourse analysis can take the conversation that happened between me and the government official and use that as valuable data. Critical discourse analysis allows me to take that conversation and draw important insights from it and it still be considered important. As opposed to if you think about positivism or like an empiricist approach, that's just me conjecturing, right? Or that's subjective, that tells you nothing because it's not quantifiable or it's not generalizable, right? How do you generalize that experience in a way that supposedly builds on an objective reality about the truth? Critical discourse analysis, I think, is important in that, again, it opens up the range of what we can understand as valuable data and valuable information for pinpointing the different nodes of power that are operating in the development enterprise.

Adnan Hussain: I'm really so glad to be able to join this fascinating conversation. I missed part one, but following up on what you've just been talking about, it seemed to me from listening to part one and also what you've been elaborating on here. is that there's really a kind of international cosmopolitan sort of development industry, as it were. And there's like a corporate culture of that in the NGOs and in the international agencies and bodies. And they have their kind of local kind of representatives. And so countries that want to participate and get certain kinds of development aid projects and, you know, Probably also, you know, investment, you know, all these sources of funding for necessities in the country have to do so through adopting this kind of corporate, you know, kind of. culture and producing functionaries who can interface with that. And they compete with other local, you know, local bureaucrats and people in order to get their, you know, come to their country, they have to show that they're up on the lingo, as you point out, and so on. And So firstly, you know, is that like one way of kind of thinking about this, you know, how this is operating? And then, you know, kind of secondly, is, you know, what's the consequences of this? I mean, it sounds like this is very similar and parallel to the way in which corporate capitalism has evolved. develop new ways of, you know, giving kind of multicultural symbols and marketing and so on, not fundamentally to change the way business works, but that the face of it is different and it recruits people into participating in it as diversity, but it doesn't change capitalism. And I guess that's kind of, it seems very parallel to me from the way you're describing it. I'm wondering your reaction about that.

Takiyah Harper-Shipman: That's absolutely right. And it makes sense because development is essentially a configuration of institutions that work to promote and expand capitalism. So it should and we would expect to see similar types of logic of co-optation and and appropriation and development that we see in corporate capitalism. They're not necessarily different. Although one, the profit motive is explicit, for the other, the profit motive is explicit. is realized at the country level, right? It's realized in a kind of regional sense and seems a little more diffuse and harder to kind of pinpoint. But the logics themselves are very much the same because they're expanding the same system

Adnan Hussain: I guess that puts me on this track for why I read a short piece that you published in GlobalAfricanWorker.com that I think maybe summarized and put in a more popular way. some of the outcomes of your book, and you were calling for there that, you know, countries that actually want sustainable development in a real genuine sense, rather than these branding kind of exercises, you know, should stop owning development. And so I wondered if you could elaborate a little bit on your kind of recommendation, and maybe it can also open up the conversation for what are sort of the alternatives. There's clearly... One mode is engaging with this discourse, learning that language, the OECD's kind of way of framing all of this. So why do you call for stopping ownership? What would it mean to stop ownership in your analysis? And then maybe we can talk a little bit about, well, if you do that, if you stop taking the World Bank and OECD approach, what alternatives do you have in this circumstance?

Takiyah Harper-Shipman: Yeah, this is one that we actually just attempted to grapple with in a forum. I curated a forum for Miami Institute of Social Sciences on this about what happens if you extract race from development or racism and race from development. And the... uncomfortable position it leaves us in, even for those of us who are critiquing development and when there are very real, tangible consequences for people in their daily lives in terms of access to water and at food security, all of these things. What I mean in this piece when I say in the Global African Worker about not owning development is essentially to disabuse ourselves of the underlying project of modernity, political and economic modernity, that propels and sustains the development enterprise. And that means the... Economic development is fundamentally the project of putting in place policies and instruments that advance capitalism, right? There's no other way to think about economic development. Political development is fundamentally about liberal democracies, how to put in place institutions that mirror the political arrangements in the U.S. and in Europe without giving consideration to the outside world. Various possibilities, or as Ndobu Gichengi borrows and talks about, like, pluriversality, right? The various possible ways in which we could arrange ourselves politically are not considered viable. So if you do not have a court, right, and you do not have a president or a prime minister, and you do not have a bicameral, right, all of these things, then those political arrangements are considered illegitimate. When the project of ownership, again, becomes a way of getting people to buy into that without realizing that the origin is still there. the European modernity, right? But to suggest that we can reconstitute it or repackage it as a Senegalese project. Without thinking about how the ideals themselves, though, are not, Europe does not have a monopoly. Europe does not have a monopoly on democracy or governance by the people. Europe does not have a monopoly on respecting human beings. Those things are, which are often, unfortunately, associated with capitalism and with, liberal democracy, we know they're not. We know that you cannot have capitalism and democracy. Oliver Cromwell Cox and others talk about it's impossible. Capitalism requires an anti-democratic political structure. So To not own development means to not buy into that, right? To not suggest, to not become a development stakeholder, to not, maybe if that means to not feel compelled to understand and wield the jargon of development and to know that you can have well water without, you know, without becoming a part of that infrastructure as well. The other part of that, the notion of not owning development, which I keep kind of leaning on now more and more in my work, is about the environment. And there's a really great book by Julie Livingstone called Self-Devouring Growth, which talks about, again, it's impossible to reach the level of overdevelopment and overconsumption that we find in Europe and the U.S., Ecologically, like the environment is just not sustained. It's not capable of reaching that level for everyone. At this point, I think Africa has is only responsible for like three percent of the global emission of global greenhouse gases or something like that. The aspiration should not be to get to the level of the U.S. and Europe, right? And the real development, if you will, needs to be taking place in the global north, right? That is where the unsustainable consumption is happening. And so I'm thinking about in that article and then also in another article I have is what are the... the kind of anti-colonial or decolonial practices and relationships that exist alongside the projects of development, right? And so, like, how are the different types... How are people engaged in these different types of relationships? And this is part of where the second book is going towards that... produced alternate consequences for how we behave and think as humans that also kind of like re repurposed technology. Right. So in the case of the second book, like family planning technology, which is typically which is typically been used as a Cold War politic. It's been used under Neo Malthusian policy. Neo-Malthusian frameworks has been used for sterilization, all of those things. But how people have, again, been creating their own versions of modernity by kind of capturing these technologies and re-embedding them in society to create alternate types of relationships. So that's fundamentally what I mean by doing by, you know, no longer owning development. It doesn't really require that we reinvent the wheel necessarily. or that we kind of imagine some quixotic community or quixotic version of the world that we're not really close to achieving. But what are the very tangible and real instances of decolonial practices that people have always been engaged in and have continuously been maintaining that we can tap into?

Henry Huckamacki: Just a quick aside before Adnan comes in with his next question. You mentioned how we look at how Africa needs to develop, but it's the global north that needs to develop because this is the unsustainable part of the world. It reminds me, and I have endless joy thinking about this paper that was put out from Duke University last year. I think it was last year, might have been two years ago now, where they they did some analysis and they said, wow, we look at how much we could reduce emissions if we were able to switch people in sub-Saharan Africa, particularly within the Congo Basin. from using wood-burning stoves to cook their food to some alternative fuel source. They did all of this and they said, we have this initiative going on where we're going to switch all of these people from using wood to cook their food. And it was like... I can't believe how tone deaf it was. If you look at any sort of the emission levels from the Congo River Basin, it doesn't even register. If you look at the map that stratifies countries based on emission per capita with different colors and whatnot, the Democratic Republic of the Congo isn't even colored. It's not even in green. It's just gray. There's no emissions there. But they're saying, if we switched people to a cleaner fuel source to cook their food, we'd be able to save... you know, X and X amount of carbon emissions. Duke university probably emits more than the entire country of the democratic Republic of the Congo, but they don't worry about that. They care about switching these people that are living in the middle of the forest in many cases, as well as, you know, the slums of Kinshasa from using, you know, wood in their stove to what natural gas or something cleaner. Like it's, it's absolutely insane. But thinking about that paper, It both makes me laugh and makes me furious that the people at Duke could be so completely tone deaf and so completely overlooking where the actual problem is. Anyway, I'm getting my dander worked up, so go ahead, Adnan.

Takiyah Harper-Shipman: If I could just say really quickly, sorry, because I quite off saying, this is why I said academia is the handmaiden to all of this, right? You cannot have this without academia at every turn.

Adnan Hussain: Right.

Takiyah Harper-Shipman: Okay, Adnan, sorry.

Adnan Hussain: Well, yeah, I mean, well, as you were pointing out overall, it's like these papers that have to be produced. I mean, who produces these papers? These are people basically using the new academic lingo and jargon that's developed. And they say, yes, we will also do our poverty reduction using the same kind of techniques and concepts and practices and so on. So you're absolutely right. And I really appreciate that eco-imperialist interlude there, Henry. But what I wanted to just pick up on what you said, and maybe it's more common, but maybe you'll have some reaction to it, is just that you pointed out that it seems like all roads must lead in state formation to liberal democracy as the form. And of course, we know that statecraft has a broader history than just the liberal, you know, nation state model, you know, that we've had, you know, 20th century, late 19th, 20th century, all across the world, statecraft and bureaucracy and, you know, organizing people, that's not some invention of, you know, Europe and the US, you know, that's got a longer history. And Um, but it seems like all of the, I had a friend who worked in the EU's, uh, the EU commission's development, um, kind of agency. Um, and, uh, she told me that like, you know, the big problem is that, uh, Everything is conditioned on anti-corruption and rule of law initiatives and, you know, absolutely demanding, you know, your whole political setup conform to some image of what it's supposed to be. And that other possible models, you know, we'll talk a little bit, hopefully, I think Brett's going to ask about China. I mean, they don't demand the same thing, which is why people, you know, are happy to go with them. It's because it doesn't come with all this baggage of, you know, tutoring you on how you should run your society and so on. And it just reminds me a little bit of when both you and Henry were essentially saying, it's like, you know, the North needs to develop, right? is kind of what Fanon and the wretched of the earth kind of in that stirring conclusion says is that we're not going to escape this system until Europe decides that it's going to become a civilization rather than, you know, perpetuate barbarism and keep imposing its failed model on the rest of the world. And so it just seems like that's what you're talking about when you say stop You know, this ownership, there are other other models. So I don't know if you want to react to that, but it's maybe also leads to Brett's question, I think, about about China as well as an alternative.

Takiyah Harper-Shipman: Yeah, that's absolutely right. Fanon, Césaire and discourses on, right? So same exact thing, right? The barbarism of, or barbarianism, I think words are funny things, right? Right. But the uncivilized nature of Europe, right, that it was able to kind of met out on the rest of the world because it counted them as non-humans. Right. That logic in those practices came back to roost right on itself. And so, again, without fundamentally dealing with the root of what's propelling that those uncivilized propensities. We just have kind of reframed them in different ways and use different link. Right. So, you know, it's no longer a civilizational mission or civilizing missions. It's development. Very similar. Very similar in practice. The other thing I'll say about very quickly in terms of, yeah, thinking about how. There's so much that, you know, Europe and the U.S. and the West kind of needing to develop. And also that there are lessons to be gleaned from Africa in order to do that. Right. And on the rest of the global South, I think about Oye Ronke, Oye Wumi's book, What Gender is Motherhood? And she starts off telling this quick story because we know that gender is a colonial construct. And she talks about being at a panel where, you know, the American students all have their pronouns. They're like, you know, they, me, him, she, her, et cetera. And she's like, you know, that's so funny because in Yoruba, we don't have pronouns. Right. Right. So if you were to actually to learn and borrow from your you wouldn't even need to use these pronouns to identify yourself because you wouldn't have to be trying to undo this kind of this colonial practice. Right. So I just think about that as, again, an example of how these things are already existing. Right. We don't have to reimagine and reinvent the wheel there. They're already there. If as we. again, expand our methodological practices to include things that are not traditionally considered valuable or worthy of studying and start to rethink that practice as well.

Brett O'Shea: I know we're beating up on Europe and the U.S., and I want to throw a few kicks in myself. Just this idea that the rest of the world should mirror the political arrangement of a place like the U.S., a place where unelected people are actively rolling back rights we've taken for granted, where corruption is worse than anywhere else in the world, at least as bad. Europe, the place where two world wars and the Holocaust happened, the disintegrating EU, a war going on right now. Leading causers of climate change. And then they can turn around soaked in blood and then wag their finger at other countries. It is just amazing that the hubris never ends. But I do want to shift to a discussion about China. This is a contentious issue specifically on the left. You know, there's lots of disagreement here. Is China replicating colonialist and extractivist models of engaging with the global south, with Africa in particular? Or are they genuinely presenting a different way of doing things, a different way of forming alliances with the country and developing their societies that are different in function and quality from the European and American models? So what role does China play in all this? And does China's approach genuinely represent an alternative way of doing this stuff?

Takiyah Harper-Shipman: Mm hmm. Yeah, so I'm gonna, I often cite, there are a lot of thoughts about this, but I often cite and recommend that people read HLT Kwan's Savage Developmentalism. Because H.L.T. Kwan actually tackles this in a very astute and poignant way, how China, we all know about the Bandung Conferences of 19, the Bandung Conference of 1955 and the establishment of this kind of South-South solidarity approach, which was an attempt to identify the third world as non-aligned. In the midst of the Cold War and to kind of build on the decolonial and anti-colonial struggles that Africa and Asia were undergoing at that particular time. The funny thing about this historically, though, is that at this point in time, Africa was primed to be where Asia is now. Right. And Asia was considered like the Africa of today. Asia was considered that part of the world that just was not going to be able to get it together. And so what came out of that, that the Bandung conferences in that particular historical moment, right, was, again, this framework of like South-South solidarity. While it was not overtly Marxist, it had a Marxist tinge to it, right? Because again, they were not overtly committing to Marxist practices because they were not trying to be aligned with the second world, which was the Soviet Union. But part of what happened over time and HLT Kwan talks about this in Savage Developmentalism is that as China became fundamentally capitalist, once they opened back up and they adopted the government of China adopted capitalism as its economic system. is that as with capitalism in any form, it necessitates expropriation, exploitation, right? And dispossession in order to accumulate, right? China and Africa, while some of the roots go back to, again, that 1955 and those earlier moments, you know, where the relationships were very different. Sino-African relationships looked very differently at that time. That is not the case today. But China still, and this is why I appreciate the Kwan book a lot, is because she talks about how China still draws on that language, though, of South-South solidarity. in order to gain preferential access to the material resources in Africa. Part of what does happen in this is this becomes the narrative. And it's an it's an interesting current as well in how people talk about, you know, Africa is Africans prefer to deal with China because they just come and build the roads. Right. They're not going to say, oh, you had to deal with democracy and they just want the roads. And I think we have to be careful when we buy into that notion, because it kind of goes back to that politics of the belly. Right. This assumption that Africans do not want genuine democracy and they do not want to have a deep sense of participation in their own kind of notions of progress and what happens to resources and how infrastructure and things get built. Because that is actually the case, right? There's a lot of pushback and resistance to Chinese presence in a lot of places in Africa. The other part of that is, you know, in coming in to build the roads is that China has the same practice that the U.S. and the West had for a long time and still do, even though that now they you know, they talk about like knowledge experts and all of that other nonsense is that it does not transfer knowledge. Right. They're not training people. You know, Namibians and how to build and maintain a road. They come in and they use their own labor, their own resources to build that road. So now you have the debt that they're accruing money from the debt to build the road. They're accruing money from the labor, right, for paying their own people. They're accruing money from the procurement of materials that go back to their own companies, right? So they're using the very same practices that the West uses. But what they have at their disposal is the discourse of self-self-solidarity, right? So, you know, there are a lot of disagreements, of course, within different circles about like the role of China. And I'm not even necessarily trying to suggest that even what I'm putting forward is straightforward. But I mean, in talking to people, you know, in West Africa and in East and South Africa, people that I know, especially in Kenya. is that it's not all, well, we just want the roads and we don't want democracy. People want genuine democracy and they want the roads and they want the knowledge to be able to maintain those roads themselves. And they don't want the debt, right? And the interest that their tax paying dollars are going to pay, right? That they had no say so, right? On the cost of what it's going to take to build that road either. You know, so I think we have to be more nuanced again and complicated in how we how we perceive China's involvement in Africa.

Adnan Hussain: I'm so glad that you mentioned the 1955 Afro-Asian Conference in Bandung, Indonesia, a topic that I've been interested in for so long and thinking about its geopolitical legacies and especially a culture of global solidarity. We actually just released from the archives an episode we did a year or so ago on the Bandung Conference episode. And so listeners may want to go check that out because it is a very important moment in global geopolitics. And so just to pick up on that is that one of the legacies of Zhu Enlai's performance at the Bandung conference is that it created a legacy of China as a benevolent kind of force in global South-South relations vis-a-vis the other blocs. And so, yeah, I can see that that would be of interest kind of benefit later on. But listeners do go check out that episode.

Henry Huckamacki: Yeah, I'm going to follow up now on the previous question and try to nail you down a little bit more on this topic of China. So, you know, like you said, it's not really a straightforward question of what is the role of China, like beneficial, pernicious, something in between? How is it in between? It's obviously in between, right? You know, but how exactly is it in between purely good and purely detrimental? And I think that one interesting way that we can kind of throw into the conversation is in a surplus value and capitalist division of labor sense from world systems analysis. And there is a really interesting piece that came out. about a year ago in monthly review. It's titled China Imperialism or Semi-Periphery by Ming-Chi Lee. And it's a piece that actually I'd be interested in, you know, bringing the author onto the show to talk about with because, you know, we have these conversations about China periodically and it's a really interesting piece. But it's very, very long and very, very technical. So I'm just going to skip down and go to the conclusion to kind of quote something to throw a little bit of This other way of thinking about it into it and then feed it back to you to see if you have any reflections on it. So down in the conclusion, he says that currently available evidence does not support the argument that China has become an imperialist country. Remember, in world systems analysis, we have core periphery and semi periphery, which is somewhere in the middle. So anyway, the currently available evidence does not support the argument that China has become an imperialist country in the sense that China belongs to the privileged small minority that exploits the great majority of the world population. On the whole, China continues to have an exploited position in the global capitalist division of labor and transfers more surplus value to the core historical imperialist countries than it receives from the periphery. However, China's per capita GDP has riven to levels substantially above the peripheral income levels, and in terms of international labor transfer flows, China has established exploitative relations with nearly half the world's population, including Africa, South Asia, and parts of East Asia. Therefore, China is best considered a semi-peripheral country in the capitalist world system. Anyway, the reason that I read this extract from this paper is because it does take an analytical and data-driven look at how to classify where China fits within the global capitalist world system. But Again, we're looking at something very specific here in terms of transfers of surplus value and the capitalist division of labor and how exploited those positions are between relations of countries. And I think that it's fair to say that in the relations between China and West Africa, in the example that we've been using, that China does have this exploitative position in terms of if you look at the numbers that are crunched, including in articles like this, as well as other articles all over the place, there is a transfer of surplus value from West Africa, again, for example, to China. However, And we also have that perspective that we were talking about in terms of like, to what end, right? You know, is it just because the way that they structured the relations is simply, you know, there's this, it's not as big as the relations between the capital, the global north countries and African countries, but is it just because the relations were structured in a way that it ended up being slightly beneficial to China? Or is there, you know, some more pernicious influence that They're putting this money in and this developmental aid in, this direct investment, in order to try to influence the decision-making of countries in a way that they wouldn't otherwise have done, which is something that we've been talking about with ways that the United States does or European countries do. There's always this... you know, under the table dealings that are going on when it looks like they're doing something nice and wholesome, there's always this ulterior motive. Is it that we're seeing this exploitative relation between China and West African countries, for example, because that's just the way that it was set up? Or is there a more pernicious influence in your opinion? This is the, you know, in your opinion part.

Takiyah Harper-Shipman: Yeah. Yeah. Ooh, okay.

Henry Huckamacki: And again, you know, sorry for giving you an impossible question.

Takiyah Harper-Shipman: No, no, no, that's better this time. You didn't put time limits on it. You weren't like two minutes ago. So I immediately started to think about how the... relative difference in transfer of surplus value does not necessarily negate or diminish the relationships of exploitation, right, that are taking place between China and Africa. And I thought, for example, about, like, Portugal, right? Like, under the Mercantile system, Portugal was the lead in the beginning, right? Portugal actually, like, jumped everything off actually, and ended up kind of losing its wealth over time because it was transferring so much surplus value back to Britain, right? And like from the mines of Potosi and all of that, right? Which was originally under Portuguese control. But Portugal was still an empire, even though the shifting of surplus value and wealth was going to Britain to pay Portuguese debts. And then if you think about the legacies of Portuguese colonialism, how that led to Portugal having some of the most brutal colonial structures ever found, right? One can't necessarily say that because Portugal at that time, especially by the 1970s when it was still holding on to its colonies, right, that Portugal, that its position kind of at that point would have been perhaps semi-periphery hell, even completely peripheral, right? Portugal was... Not even thriving in Europe, which is part of why it held on to its colonies for so long, that it was not still engaged in an exploitative relationship with Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, and its colonies, right? Yeah. And so I guess I bring that up to shed light on that analysis, right, and to suggest that China's relationships with a more powerful empire, right, or a more powerful capitalist country may somehow, you know, relegates it to a semi-peripheral position, which may somehow have implications for whether or not we can deem it as exploitative or having imperial aspirations, right? And so, you know, I can't necessarily I don't study China in depth enough to say what is China trying to do. I know that if we take the fundamental logics of capitalism, Lenin told us. Right. And Kruma told us. Right. Then they need to expand. Right. Right. Goldman, Emma Goldman. Right. They all have told us David Harvey. Right. China will be looking to expand. It has no choice but to expand. It has no choice but to look for other ways to accumulate capital. Right. And to derive surplus value. And that means at the expense of anything that gets in its way. Right. people, the environment, etc. China has not necessarily shown any indication that it does not seek to expand in order to become an empire, right? While it may not necessarily use that language, the impulse to to do so is fundamentally, in the way that race is fundamentally embedded in capitalism, so too is the impulse to expand. So I can't speak, again, to the political, any, you know, what Xi Jinping or anyone else from the Communist Party has said specifically. I'm sure they've been like, no, we're democratic, love us, right? Like, we're the good guys. I'm almost certain. But so too has the U.S., so too is France, so too is Canada, right? What is the fundamental difference in the discourses that all of these countries espouse other than us having record of their historical trajectories and try the happening to have a different kind of origin point, right? But if everybody's playing the same game, China's now on the same board with the U.S. and with the West,

Adnan Hussain: Yeah, I mean, I think it comes a little bit less encumbered by the kind of neoliberal discourse of, you know, democracy and rights and so on. But, you know, I think what you're suggesting in some ways is that perhaps it just fills a different kind of space role that's more suitable for certain kinds of local elites that they're happy to work with who now are not under pressure you know to change the laws and you know do these anti-corruption things and so that's preferable for certain kinds of established already you know elites and what we're not talking about is necessarily you know popular expansion of you know um you know, social development at the populist level. But, you know, speaking of imperialism and their different forms, obviously in the last conversation, you began to discuss the disruptive role of AFRICOM in West Africa. And so one thing I was wondering about is, is given that you know the geopolitical situation has been changing there's a lot of critiques of uh the neoliberal global globalization era there's all this discussion about china's rise and you know that we might be entering um you know a more multipolar sort of world that isn't going to follow the dictates of neoliberal forms of capitalism globally and um And also, I think, at the same time, also something that has receded, I think, you know, with U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, you know, U.S. changing its defense posture and defense strategy away from global war on terrorism as the predominant mode to great power or multi, you know, major power conflict and resource wars. That, of course, that's going to mean that Africa is going to remain in this contested zone. because of its resources. But I'm wondering, has there been any shift since the real rationale for it was, um, you know, for Africom was, you know, global war on terrorism, theater management, right. And this being a theater that, uh, both recognized and also produced, you might say, these unstable, extreme jihadist groups and so on, like Mali. But there's the other story of French involvement and U.S. involvement in Mali, which is, that's where all the uranium comes from. So I'm wondering, is there any shift in the discourse about the rationale for AFRICOM's involvement in West Africa as a result of moving away from global war on terrorism discourse globally speaking, or is that still really the present rationale in West Africa? What do you see happening basically vis-a-vis AFRICOM?

Takiyah Harper-Shipman: Yeah. So it's funny because, you know, the security realm is very much like the development realm, right? Where the practices themselves have always kind of been the same. And what we see changing is the rhetoric and then the way in which it's reorganized. And that's especially the case with like AFRICOM. So again, you know, we know AFRICOM was established in 2008. But essentially what it did was to reorganize. Africa previously was under like three different commands. And so AFRICOM was the reorganization of those commands under one. And the issues of... kind of resource extraction and global war on terror are like a hand in a glove, right? They just go so well together and have always kind of gone well together because part of what actually prompted As the U.S. was trying to figure out what to do with Africa at that particular moment, part of what helped the U.S. reconfigure its strategy was Dick Cheney's report on like the energy, like the need to increase the energy sources right in the world and Africa being this untapped space where there was potential for so much natural resource extraction. Right. I think at the so so it doesn't actually change the fundamental reasoning for why AFRICOM came to be and how it kind of, you know, ended up taking place in the Sahel. But what it did do. was put forward the notion of, again, the less global... Well, at the time, yeah, in 2008, it was still global war on terror. But then, of course, it shifts to security and development, right? That AFRICOM will stabilize the region and cause security and, you know, allow for security and poverty reduction and all of these things that are supposed to be kind of... Feeders for terrorism. Right. So if there's if there are high levels of poverty, then there's more there's a higher propensity for very same racist logic that we see in the US and everywhere. Right. The higher propensity for crime. Right. The more likely people are to become social menaces. Right. They're going to become terror. They're going to lead into terrorist groups because they don't go to school and they don't have food and all these other things. And so the solution we need to increase in brain development to these regions in order to stabilize them. Now we know the U.S. has like a history of destabilizing to stabilize, right? It just, you know, that's how it works. It finds where things are not broken and it breaks them and then says, we're here to fix it. And so the U.S. did exactly that, right? I mean, there are even reports and speculations about the U.S. being like on the ground in Mali to actually, to foment a lot of the kind of, The military resistance or the types of like extremist violence that we saw in Mali. Right. And around like 2011 and a few years leading up to that, that the U.S. was like actually a part of that. And the State Department has denied that. Any implications similar to like Boko Haram. Right. So there are all like, you know, who's there? There have been speculations and reports about the U.S. being a part of the the arms trade that has like heavily armed a lot of these, you know, extremist groups, which is an important thing to think about where the arms for all of these groups. This violence coming from the U.S. is like one of the number one traffickers in arms. You know, so we'll see.

Adnan Hussain: Sorry, we'll see more coming from Ukraine now to probably they'll disappear and end up in Africa.

Takiyah Harper-Shipman: You know, right. You know, this is an important thing to think about because it's it's kind of like, again, the war on drugs in the U.S., Most people in the community, they don't have the resources to go to the global and bring this type of, you know, bring narcotics at that level into their community. Right. Most of the extremist groups and they don't have the resources to go and bring those levels of armament into their countries, into their community. You need a very powerful friend to do that. Right. We know the U.S. is is very good. It is that friend and it will always be the person to help you get access to that. And so, you know, AFRICOM. Is essentially this is a military force that has destabilized West Africa. It is the military and then created a space for itself to validate and legitimate its existence. Right. And and to deepen the footprint of U.S. imperialism in West Africa. It is no mistake either that this, again, coincides with a lot of countries in West Africa. kind of stepping into like oil drilling, right? And natural resources, right? Like, so Ghana is trying to promote natural gas extraction. Senegal has started drilling off the coast for oil, right? It's not a coincidence that all of these things are happening simultaneously with the kind of deepening of AFRICOM in the region.

Henry Huckamacki: Yeah, I think that that's I mean, there's so much more to say. I know I have a lot of other questions that I could ask, but you've been very generous with your time already. Somehow we've managed to have like two and a half hours worth of conversation with you already between part one and part two. And I still feel like we're just getting into the conversation. So, you know, it's kind of a talent of yours. It makes me want to keep digging deeper. But I will say that we already have you on record saying that you'll do a part three with us about African feminisms in the hopefully near future. I'm really looking forward to that. Like I mentioned in the introduction, it's a field that I know very little about, despite having read feminist literature, because... In the West, even when we look for feminist literature, we don't find any information about African feminism. So I'm really looking forward to that. Professor, again, thank you for your time. Is there anything that you'd like to direct our listeners to as we close out this interview with you?

Takiyah Harper-Shipman: No, not that I can think of. I'm all tapped out, I think.

Henry Huckamacki: Okay, great. Well, we'll just save that for the next time, man. Part three upcoming. Hopefully the listeners are looking forward to it as much as I am. So listeners, again, our guest was Professor Takiyah Harper Shipman from the Africana Studies Department at Davidson College. And we'll be back very soon with the wrap up and hopefully very soon with a part three of this conversation. And listeners, we're back on Guerrilla History. We just finished our recording with Professor Takiyah Harper Shipman, where we talked about, well, a lot of things. Ownership of development in Africa, AFRICOM, China's role in Africa. We deferred African Feminism's tour to next time, which I'm really looking forward to. But, you know, this conversation... As I mentioned during the interview, we've been talking to Professor for about two and a half hours now, and I still feel like we're just getting into these interesting topics. So I definitely recommend that the listeners check out her work, like her book. I think it's Rethinking Ownership of Development in Africa. It's an academic text, but it's written in a really straightforward and easy to understand way, even if you don't come from the field of development studies. But I highly recommend that you do that because these subjects can get very deep and they can get very detailed, but it is really useful for us to understand in order to understand potential other conceptions that we can work our way through to have development broadly conceived in a way that is much more just and equitable for the people of the global South and in the context of the conversation, West Africa. Brett, I'm going to kick it over to you now. What is the thing that you want to open up with during this wrap up segment? Was there anything that really struck you during the conversation that we talked about that you want to expand on anymore?

Brett O'Shea: Sure. Yeah, a couple of things. One is just like a note going forward, like what I would like to do a deeper dive on Africa in general is like. you know, possibly at one point do a country or key country by country breakdown just to see the differences between different African countries. I know in part one, we made it very clear that a lot of people talk about Africa as if it's a monolith, but it's not. But, you know, still sometimes even people that are aware of that can fall into at least rhetorically talking like that. And so breaking it down could be helpful going forward. Just an idea. But a couple of things. One, I really loved everything about learning from her and her discussion and her knowledge and increasingly be important on the left in the U.S., specifically because a lot of the rhetoric from the liberal center is about how democracy is under attack. And if we can parse out the ways in which capitalism is hostile, actually. Yeah. That could be helpful, especially in educating people that might be moving leftward. But broadly, I kind of wanted to hone in on the China part. I thought it was really interesting. And I think her big argument was because China is in this, you know, whatever your feelings on China are, because China is in this global crisis. operate to some degree according to capitalist logics, that that logic of capitalism will almost always make these relationships in some way asymmetrical, unfair, even outright hostile. And in the great powers competition, United States, it gives China, I think, even less wiggle room to be outwardly altruistic when it comes to trade and engaging with other countries. Having said that, there are some things that China could do to be better on this front. Shippman pointed out that oftentimes China will bring its own labor. And there's obviously domestic reasons for that. But if your point is to build up goodwill and to not be extractive and exploitative and to try to benefit these countries and build up that goodwill that could pay dividends in the future, employing local labor could be something that could be done relatively easily and could help a lot. Building infrastructure without strings attached. trade deals than you're in America, but continue to be less and less predatory if they really wanted to put their energy and time behind that, even if it means sometimes losing out on economic benefits or at least the full spectrum of them. But I really appreciate her honesty on that. And I think it's something that people on the left Should really wrestle with, you know, there's the Maoist Leninist divide on this issue. Maoists have no problem critiquing China. ML sometimes do. But I think it behooves Marxist Leninists in particular to just be open and honest about some of the things that China does. That doesn't mean you have to. that country down or shit on it or whatever. But, you know, wrestle with some of these complexities and these conflicts instead of wrinkling them over or pretending they don't exist. So I enjoyed that. But, you know, overall, I found the conversation incredibly informative. And as you say, I just want to continue talking and learning from you.

Henry Huckamacki: Yeah, I agree with basically everything you said, at least everything that I heard. We're having some technical difficulties here, but hopefully the listeners will have it ironed out for you. But yeah, I think that the discussion of China was really useful because, you know, as you mentioned in that last part of your response, We have these two broad groups. I mean, obviously, there's a lot more groups, but within the two groups of Leninists and Maoists, there is this, at least within large sections of this, groups of individuals that say like China can do no wrong and groups that say everything that China does is wrong. Modern China, that is like current day China or at least post 78 China. So, you know, obviously, neither of those is true. And I know that I'm going to hurt the feelings of both of those groups by saying that at least some individuals of both of those groups, but like, come on, nothing in the world is black and white. I'm a immunobiologist by training, nothing in biology is black and white, like there is shades of gray in everything. And the the world and ideology is no different. Like there is gray everywhere. And so coming to grips, regardless of what you think of China, like pro or con, current day China or post-78 China, being honest about shortcomings and just kind of trying to think through how you can rectify those is how you can hopefully see change in the future that is in a more positive direction to work towards that ideal that some people try to think is actually existing today. right now. So I think that that's a very important point. And, you know, it made me think it might be interesting in the future to have a pan Africanist Africana Studies scholar who's focusing on the Belt and Road Initiative, and its impacts on Africa, alongside a Chinese scholar who is also studying the Belt and Road Initiative and bring them on at the same time and kind of hash out those things. Like, it's just something that kind of struck me during your answer that might be interesting to get that perspective of both sides. Like, China's influence from the perspective of the pan-Africanist perspective, radical left pan-Africanist perspective, as well as the perspective of a scholar of China who also looks at these relationships within Africa within the same exact framework. Because even if they agree, they're going to look at it from different ways. So that might be something to look into in the future. Adnan, what are your national thoughts?

Adnan Hussain: Well, I mean, I just following up on that particular topic, I think what I appreciated in her remarks was that her analysis of China's involvement in West African development and, you know, kind of. major infrastructure projects and so on is coming really more from the perspective of African working class people as opposed to, say, statist relations. And that's one thing I think we often forget is that fundamentally our loyalties are to the peoples and not necessarily the states, which make, you know, all kinds of national decisions for the sake of geopolitical interests and that there isn't a pure relationship between those two things. So China can be an alternative pole in the global system. It can be something that offers resistance to American hegemony, for example, and that can be positive, but it doesn't mean necessarily that all the decisions by Chinese companies or Chinese governments are you know, necessarily reflects the benefit, you know, benefit of the will and will of, you know, working class people in other regions, you know, so this is a kind of complicated dynamic. And obviously, China is inhabiting a fairly interesting and unique position within the global capitalist order, one that tries to create space for more social projects of, you economic development within China and we know about the amazing you know improvements in standard of living and so on there that doesn't have to be you know wiped away to at the same time say from the perspective of Africans you know their choices are limited between you know uh Western capitalist interests and Chinese ones. That's how they have to look at it. I do think, however, it is worth pointing out that there's much less of the language. There may be a different discursive register. So Western aid organizations are always... highlighting the importance of reform, anti-corruption, rule of law, you know, and they always emphasize these as part of their development, you know, projects. And China doesn't necessarily require the same. And it has a different, you know, kind of affiliative language of South-South. I mean, I remember we just had this episode on the Bandung Conference. I remember I went to a 50th anniversary conference in Cairo, where it is still housed, the AFRO conference. Asian Solidarity Organization that was created after it. And the Chinese ambassador came and addressed the conference. And he spoke perfect Arabic. And I thought, this is an example of of this kind of continuing South-South was like, they send an ambassador to attend a Bandung conference, because that's important for global South solidarity. And when they send somebody, they know how to speak Arabic, they are taking that component seriously. And so that's the... venue through which they're engaging in diplomatic and economic and political relations with the rest of the global South. And that's going to have some advantages. It doesn't mean it always, uh, redounds to the interest of everybody, you know, in the working class environment of each of these societies. Um, So anyway, I thought that that was the perspective she was taking. So that's important to clarify. It doesn't mean you have to take a position, yay or nay, on China's overall impact or how it inhabits the global geopolitical capitalist system.

Henry Huckamacki: Yeah, so I agree with all of that, Adnan, and I just want to clarify my previous position a little bit because I'm sure, you know, saying that China is neither perfect nor inherently flawed, I'm going to get attacked from Maoists and Leninists on this. But what I want to clarify is that we have to look beyond the rhetoric, right? Because as we talked about both in this conversation as well as part one with the professor, The rhetoric of development and ownership of development is just rhetoric. They frame it in a way that it's a win-win for the World Bank, the IMF, etc., all of these Western institutions that go in and ostensibly are doing aid for the benefit of the people there. But what in reality is happening is not to the benefit of the people there. We see... It's a win-win for the World Bank and the IMF because they're able to impose these structural adjustment policies that they wanted to do anyway, you know, and that they would have enforced in a much more blatant way previously. But because of this paradigm of ownership of development, they're able to put it as a condition within IMF. their aid and frame it in a way that these countries are then owning their own development. What this means is that the IMF and the World Bank get exactly what they want. These countries are on structural adjustment policies. And of course, the people in the countries are going to suffer because of them. But when we see horrible failures, either directly or indirectly as a result of these policies, terrible poverty, even coups in many cases taking place all across the African continent, but particularly in West Africa these days, The World Bank and the IMF are able to frame it in a way that they're able to shift all of the blame onto these countries because they own their own development. This is the danger of the rhetoric and buying into the rhetoric of these institutions like the World Bank and the IMF. Now, what I am not saying is that China, and as you've mentioned, they have like this global South solidarity, South-South solidarity rhetoric that's going on with their Belt and Road Initiative. I am not claiming that it is only rhetoric. What I am saying is that we have to ensure that it is not only rhetoric. Because we see through analyses like those that I mentioned from Ming-Chi Lee, that we do see China in a position of exploitative, of... Africa with regard to transfers of surplus value. That is more or less unequivocal based on the analyses that have been done. We see that they are in an exploitative position relative to Africa. That isn't necessarily intentional, as I think you had alluded to recently, Adnan, when you mentioned that perhaps just operating within the capitalist global system more or You know, power relationships, you can almost say. And that perhaps China is trying to rectify that. And China, I'm sure, you know, I don't look at every single release that they put out about the Belt and Road Initiative, but I'm sure that they focus pretty frequently on saying that they're trying to rectify this and that they are trying to do this from a position of solidarity and not a position of transfer of surplus value. Right. However, we just need to make sure that that's actually the case and that they are striving for that, right? That's the position that I'm taking is listen to what they say, but verify what they say. Don't take it at face value because one group makes that mistake. They take everything that's said at face value for one group. You know, it can even be one. we're not necessarily talking about Leninist Samoas here, but you know, Democrats take everything that Democrats say at face value. A Democratic candidate says something, they believe it wholeheartedly. Obama says he was going to close Guantanamo Bay day one. Guess what? Day one comes, all the Democrats thought Guantanamo Bay was going to close. And then eight years later, Obama leaves office. They completely forgot that that had been promised, but they still believe everything that the Democrats say. The Republicans, exactly the same way. You know, Donald Trump promises that we're going to build the wall with Mexico's money. The wall was not built with Mexico's money, but Republicans still say Donald Trump cannot lie. The Republican Party cannot lie. And we have these same sorts of problems within the far left. Like we have groups that we inherently trust more than others. That is not a problem to believe a group more than you would believe like the Republicans. Like, yes, I believe China far more than I believe the Republican Party. I think that that's fair to say because the Republican Party is absolutely bonkers these days and pretty much always has been. But we need to verify. We cannot take anything at face value. And that verification, I think, is the most important thing that we can do because we do see contradictions even within the relationships between China and Africa. And I think that By examining this, and I don't want to say holding China's feet to the fire because none of us live in China, you know, what are we really going to do to hold their feet to the fire? But at least to think about these sorts of problems, we can perhaps propose ways in which this could be rectified and propose ways in which we can see a more equitable relationship between Africa and, again, in this specific context, West Africa. Brett, is there any other thoughts that you want to get out before we wrap up? Now's the time. Final thoughts for you, and then I'll turn to Adnan.

Brett O'Shea: No, I'm pretty good. I mean, I really enjoyed the conversation. I look forward to talking more with her and her colleagues, specifically around African feminisms. And yeah, I think overall, this was a really fascinating two-parter, and I hope the audience learns a lot from it.

Henry Huckamacki: As I'm sure they will. Adnan, is there anything else that you want to get out here before we really turn towards African feminisms the next time that we have the professor? And as Brett mentioned, she's hoping to bring on some colleagues with her to discuss various African feminisms. Is there anything else that you want to get out from the context of this conversation before we wrap up?

Adnan Hussain: I just wanted to say I was really glad that I could join this. I missed the first, but I really enjoyed this conversation. And I'm glad that I also got to discuss a little bit about the AFRICOM issues and whether there are things that are changing in the way in which it's operating or rationalizing its place in West Africa. And I think what we learned from Dr. Harper Shipman is that They always find ways to continue to justify the very same, the rhetoric changes, but the practices seem to remain the same in terms of maintaining military capabilities and intervention in the affairs of Africa to ensure its subordinate position in the world system and the exploitation of their resources and resources. and labor. So, you know, it was it was useful to kind of clarify that, despite changes that have taken place in overall geopolitical questions about the role of the global war on terrorism, moving to a different kind of mode that fundamentally, it's a form of neo imperialism that we need to be clear about, and that we need to be in solidarity and resistance against. So that was a great conversation. Looking forward to the next part.

Henry Huckamacki: Yeah, as am I. So since you mentioned about ownership and a false sense of choice, I actually have a note from her book on almost that exact same topic. So I'll close this out with a quote from Rethinking Ownership of Development in Africa by Professor Takiyah Harper Shipman. Ownership offers a false sense of choice, which one bank, World Bank, officially acknowledged. Nevertheless, the ownership paradigm propagates this provincial set of knowledge as universal and objective. The information and analyses that donors like the World Bank offer constitute and reproduce power differentials across development stakeholders in ways that must be questioned if Kenyan, in this specific context, stakeholders are to envision and implement a form of development that conforms to their unique context. So on that note, Adnan, how can our listeners find you and the other excellent podcasts that you do?

Adnan Hussain: Well, listeners can follow me on Twitter at Adnan A. Hussain, H-U-S-A-I-N, and give a listen to The Much List podcast, M-A-J-L-I-S, on all the major platforms.

Henry Huckamacki: Highly recommend that. I learn a lot from every episode, which I feel like I say every time we close out one of these episodes, but it's true nevertheless. Brett, how can our listeners find you and the other excellent shows that you do as well as any other miscellaneous work that you do?

Brett O'Shea: Yeah, thank you. RevolutionaryLeftRadio.com. You can find everything that I do. And I am experimenting with some new formats for Rev Left. More monologue style and analyzing the news mixed in with the long form interview. So if you're interested in that, definitely. Yeah, you can go to Revolutionary Left Radio or follow us on Twitter. That's where basically we are.

Henry Huckamacki: Yeah, excellent. I'm looking forward to seeing how that pans out and, you know, I've been a fan of the show since basically the beginning, and every change that you've made, I've been very fond of, and I'm hoping that this one is also going to be in that same mold. Listeners, as for me, you can find me on Twitter at Huck1995. I will tease that I am also launching another show with... Sophie, who has been a guest host on Guerrilla History a couple times, she was one of the guest hosts of the Ruth Vodok episode and one of the guest hosts when we talked about art in the working class. We're going to be having a show that's going to be dropping basically the same time that this episode comes out called What the Huck. You can find... The information about that by following me on Twitter at Huck1995. You can follow the show on Twitter at Gorilla underscore pod, G-U-E-R-R-I-L-L-A underscore pod. And you can support the show, help us keep the lights on by going to patreon.com forward slash Gorilla History, G-U-E-R-R-I-L-L-A history where you'll find bonus content and early releases. We try to make it worth your while and we do appreciate all of the support that you give us. So, until next time listeners, solidarity.