If one takes society here in terms of domains like politics or the economy, for instance, Africa’s historical experience may seem to share more with that of Asia – and indeed, the latter is a favorite comparative counterpoint in academic and policy debates on economic development in Africa.Both continents ushered into national independences at around the same time, ended up split into many nation-states divided by largely arbitrary borders, and the pioneering experiences of India and other parts of the British and French colonial empires effectively played a part both in enticing liberation struggles and in shaping the politico-institutional legacy of colonialism in the African continent . Indeed, there is much debate among Africans as to why much of post-colonial Asia has succeeded in developing itself, while their own continent was left behind. In my experience, comparisons with Brazil or Latin America along the same lines are much less frequent; in The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon even mentioned Latin America as an example not to be followed by the newly decolonized world.118Perhaps even more than the assumption about shared cultures or natures, that of a shared development timeline seems to be the most widespread in South-South cooperation at large; after all, potentially it can encompass the entire global South. It is based on the assumption that, along their peripheral developmental path, emerging countries such as Brazil would have “accumulated expertise that could be shared with other southern countries facing similar challenges” . As with other discursive claims, this may stand for a shared past between world regions that have in fact come into closer contact only recently,grow bags for gardening such as Brazil and countries outside of its historical areas of influence in Africa.
Here, such un- or little-connected pasts are brought together by an abstract universal scale: the modernization timeline, which once ranked all countries according to a same classificatory grid of developed, developing, and underdeveloped. This common scale can be indeed regarded as an effect of Western discursive hegemony , sustained by an apparatus of economic and military dominance during Europe and the U.S.’s colonial and imperialist expansion. But the assumption of a shared development timeline present in the discourse of today’s emerging donors is neither an imposition from the North, nor a mystifying, contradictory legacy of their colonial pasts. Much to the contrary, it is a strategic deployment that aims to draw a line between North and South, this time to the latter’s benefit. This move in fact echoes another one, which took place over fifty years ago: in his mythic 1949 Point Four speech, which arguably first named international development as such , President Truman called for putting the United States’ “store of technical knowledge” to the service of developing nations . And just as, speaking in the immediate aftermath of the World Wars, he was “keen to distance his project from [Europe’s] old-style imperialism” , today’s emerging donors strive to differentiate South-South cooperation from “old-style” – that is, Northern – development aid. Like the U.S. in the aftermath of World War II, Brazil and others regard themselves, and are largely regarded, as emerging powers in a context of geopolitical and geoeconomic reaccommodation. But the U.S. never thought of itself as part of the Third World, while for emerging donors of today belonging to the same geodiscursive space as the world’s poorest countries – the global South – is at the very core of their self-assigned identity as donors. The narrative of modernization theory had allowed Truman to arrange the rest of the world along the same scale as the U.S.. But with Europe ruined by war, the American president was speaking alone at the top of the development ladder: this is what allowed him the “god trick” of claiming that his country had the solutions for everyone else’s ills .
Emerging donors, on the other hand, do not regard themselves as being at the top; but rather than being a handicap, it is this precisely this “subaltern expertise” Mawdsley that would make them better donors than the U.S. and the rest of the global North. And just as in the thirties Freyre’s culturalism frontally contested prevailing racial paradigms imported from Europe in order to turn a peripheral experience into a positive asset vis-à-vis central models, South-South cooperation today is partly built on a claim of failure of the world development project championed by the global North since Truman’s times. In this sense, it can be argued that South-South cooperation rides the wave of the decoupling of the two axes of the modernization timeline – that of time, and that of status – claimed by Ferguson for contemporary globalization. Ferguson argued for this decoupling in terms of a discursive and practical failure of the original, all-encompassing, unilineal modernization project. This recognition of failure would hold more, however, for some regions of the global South, while others would be still “offered a role in the convergence narrative” ; epitomes of these poles would be Sub-Saharan Africa on the former, and emerging economies such as the BRICS on the latter. But while “no one talks about African economic convergence with the First World anymore” , this is precisely what emerging donors have been talking about: this time, in relation to themselves rather than to the First World. Emerging donors do reject the notion of a single, un-situated “package” solution to the world’s problems along the lines of modernization theory. But as much of what goes on in South-South cooperation, this movement is highly ambivalent, since provincializing the North’s development god trick does not imply a rejection of the achievements of modernity as such, especially in technical fields like agriculture. While modernity is, as Ferguson suggested , indeed decoupled from a teleological timeline that follows point-by-point the North’s path, this is not about coeval societies negotiating separately their own brand of modernity either.
In South-South cooperation discourse, the developmental experience is resituated in time and space according to each country’s national developmental experience, against the backdrop of a historical experience of being at the world’s peripheries that is presumably shared by all of them. Indeed, during fieldwork, in all sorts of technical and non-technical contexts, it was common to hear Brazilians remark to their African colleagues how “we were in the same situation X years ago”. One Brazilian farmer I met in Ghana had even “calculated” how far back in time were local agricultural techniques: “around 80 years”. An idea behind the original Embrapa Africa model was to transfer technologies whose patents had already prescribed, but which could be nonetheless useful for Africans, since “varieties released in Brazil twenty years or more ago,garden grow bags in the public domain and even outdated in Brazil, can be very useful here given the countries’ technological backwardness” . While still following a teleology of progress, these notions manifest the decoupling noted by Ferguson: Africans do not need to absorb the latest development package wholesale, but could profit from some technologies that, even though no longer the cutting-edge in their sites of origin, could be better suited to their infrastructural conditions. A problem with this, as with “appropriate technology” kinds of schemes in general, is that African researchers usually do want the latest technology. Many of them have been trained in the global North and/or are well aware about the state-of-the-art in their own scientific fields, and often that is what they demand from cooperation partners. In spite of the demise of modernization remarked by Ferguson , one domain where teleology still holds sway and produces vast material effects has been precisely techno-science, especially technology research, development & innovation and its speedy treadmill. In Brazil-Africa cooperation, therefore, there is an ambivalent and sometimes contradictory coexistence of different temporalities on on-the-ground assemblages, somewhat along the lines of what Mbembe referred to as “time of entanglement”.This is reflected in Brazilians’ views on Africa’s agricultural development. The denial of coevalness found here was not grounded in inevitabilities or determinisms tracing the roots of African underdevelopment to any domain outside of history, be it biology or the environment. These reflected, rather, Brazilian actors’ own experiences, in two ways. On the one hand, and resonating with basic tenets of dependency theory, African underdevelopment was generally traced to its peripheral position in the world system, in a historical process that was regarded as having some analogies and connections with that of Brazil.
This appeared for instance in expressions of sympathy such as that “we have also been colonized”, or that both Brazil and Africa were still imposed unequal conditions by Northern countries in global trade. On the other hand, views on African development were largely refracted by views on Brazil’s own experience of domestic development, shaped by the hierarchical topography inscribed by internal coloniality. Denial of coevalness is not total, since it is not the case that African countries taken as a whole were regarded as being the past of Brazil taken as a whole. Part of what Brazilian front liners saw in African institutes was considered fairly “up to date”, such as the technical background of many African researchers. Other domains were, conversely, deemed more or less backward, such as the state of equipment and infrastructure in the research institutes. As one left the institutes to peasant areas, this temporalhierarchical continuum became more clearly mapped onto a spatial one, translated into comments along the lines of “we were in the same situation X years ago, and in some places in Brazil this is still the case”, or “here [in Brazil], we’ve passed through the stage where you [Africans] are now, but we’re still living all stages at the same time”. Indeed, many of the familiarities Brazilians recognized in African countries referred to the inferior term in coloniality’s dichotomies. African peasants were often associated with rural areas in the semi-arid hinterlands of the Brazilian Northeast, where a less technology and capital-intensive kind of family agriculture has historically prevailed. This contrasted both to the Center-West, characterized by large agribusiness farms, and to the South and Southwest, where family farmers make more intensive use of modern technologies and associational models like cooperatives. But as in all forms of coloniality – the iconic one being probably the cannibal/noble savage dyad –, the inferior term might carry contradictory connotations. Thus, while peasant agriculture was generally regarded as backward and unable to compete in the contemporary globalized world, for many at Embrapa it was also something to be defended and respected, including in terms of farmers’ special experiential wisdom for taking care of the land. These and other temporal-spatial analogies made during cooperation activities were however far from exhaustive; African farmers, policies, research institutes, soil, climate would never find a perfect fit in the Brazilians’ classificatory grids. Sometimes, these misfits would elicit a loosely articulated recognition of the complexities of Africa’s agriculture precisely through the contradictions it showed when compared to the Brazilian experience. Even if, in cooperation settings such as CECAT, these problematizations were not usually carried forward or systematized, they would inevitably lead to an acknowledgement of the potential difficulties for engaging in effective, sustained technical cooperation with African partners. Even in official discourse, Embrapa cooperantes tended to be more cautious than their counterparts in Itamaraty. Thus, in the concluding paragraphs of Paralelos, after over sixty pages of “parallels” one finds a somewhat dissonant caution note: “It should be kept in mind that this work is not a mere transfer of the experience obtained at the Brazilian cerrado, since there are significant socio-economic differences. Thus, the project to be implemented will take advantage of the lessons learned and the techniques developed in other Embrapa initiatives, considering the peculiarities of Mozambique” . This brief admonition about the significance of “socio-economic differences” between Brazil and Africa and the need to take into account the “peculiarities” of recipient countries as well as “lessons learned” on the ground in fact encapsulates a remarkable challenge: how to do technology adaptation and transfer in a domain like agriculture, which is highly contextsensitive? And how to do it without the bureaucratic apparatus and bountiful resources available to Northern donors and multilateral institutions? The remainder of this chapter will look closer at one of Embrapa’s South-South cooperation modalities – capacity-building trainings – to suggest how some of these questions have been explicitly raised and pursued by means of a mode of engagement that differs from that of Northern aid, and which I will characterize here as being based on demonstration rather than intervention.