Snakes in paradise: NGOs and the aid industry in Africa, by Hans Holmén, Sterling, VA, Kumarian Press, 2010, xxiii + 294 pp., £22.50 (paperback), ISBN 9781565493018
This book examines the ‘NGO scramble for Africa’ which has taken place since the 1980s, and seeks to understand its developmental impact. The author is deeply informed about civil society and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in Africa and the book has a distinctive structure, covering both eastern and southern Africa, and West Africa. The book is generally well written and accessible for an undergraduate audience in particular. This is perhaps its intended market and it will serve as a good introduction to these issues at that level.
The strength of this book is its innovative structure and coverage and the insight of the author. Its weaknesses are the relative lack of engagement with theories of civil society and a sometimes excessive reliance on secondary material and quotations, perhaps reflecting its target market as a more introductory text.
Holmén makes reasoned and well-judged arguments after assessing the literature on civil society. He is a geographer by training and the explicitly geographical focus is perhaps another novel feature of the book. He finds that NGOs are more likely to succeed in higher-income regions that are more highly developed, and are better connected to external markets. This is generally well known. However, he also undertakes some macro-regional analysis to examine why NGOs have been more successful in general in western than in eastern and southern Africa. He traces this back to the 1970s drought in the Sahel and West Africa and the fact that they consequently have a longer history and have become more embedded there. He includes case studies of a variety of NGOs to illustrate this point, some of which are fascinating, such as the ‘Six S’ group, the acronym for the French for ‘using the dry season in the Sahel’. This is a group started by a French aid worker and local activist to develop infrastructure and other initiatives during the dry season and has been very successful. He notes however that success may also sow the seeds of failure as people increasingly focus on securing external funding, rather than local empowerment. This dialectical tension between the local and ‘the global’ is an implicit theme which runs throughout the book. Holmén also finds, based on other studies, that there is a ‘“middle class” effect of participation’ as the truly poor are often too time-constrained to effectively participate.
The overall impression from the book is that NGOs are often donor-sponsored and driven and that they should best be viewed as elements of people's livelihood strategies rather than necessarily driven by solidaristic impulses in the first instance. This leads the author to some keen insights. For example, while laws governing the behaviour of NGOs have been adopted by many African states in the face of opposition from ‘donors’, as this is often seen as an attempt to restrict political space, Holmén argues that given corruption and nepotism in many NGOs this could equally be seen as an example of good governance.
The one area in the book where there is more substantive engagement with theories of civil society is around the critique of work done on social movements in Africa. The author argues that in the post-Soviet era there has been a tendency on the part of leftists to romanticise certain organisations, such as the West Africa Network of Peasants' and Producers' Organisations, as class-based sites of resistance to neoliberal globalisation, whereas in reality they do not seek to overturn globalisation but to alter it to their advantage. Consequently Holmén classifies them as NGOs rather than social movements. The focus on alter-globalisation is an interesting one, but arguably does downplay the class-based nature of some of these movements. The author is at pains during the course of the book to highlight the liminal and discursively constructed nature of civil society and his overly dismissive conclusions consequently jar somewhat. This is also reflected in the discourse of the book in other places. At times for example the author speaks of the ‘evil eye of the [African] state’ (p. 36) rather uncritically, as an accepted fact. Also, while the author is deeply immersed in the NGO and civil society literature there are some seemingly strange comments about other aspects of African development. For example, Holmén argues that ‘Nigeria is unique among sub-Saharan countries in that it has enjoyed large incomes from oil exports’ (p. 128). This might be news to Gabon, which has produced oil for decades, or Angola, which now rivals Nigeria as potentially Africa's largest oil producer. These small criticisms notwithstanding, this is a worthwhile and deeply insightful book. It is particularly suitable for undergraduates as an accessible introduction to the role of NGOs in Africa today.