Cosmopolitanism, Governmentality And

DEVELOPMENT EFFECTS: COSMOPOLITANISM, GOVERNMENTALITY AND

ANGOLAN ENGAGEMENTS IN THE WORLD

Rebecca A. Warne Peters

BA, Grinnell College, 2000

MPH, Emory University, 2004

MA, Brown University, 2007

A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of

Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Anthropology at Brown University

Providence, Rhode Island

May 2011

Department of Anthropology as satisffing the dissertation requirement for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy.

Date i t Ç,2 âo tl Daniel Jordan Sínith, Advisor

Recommended to the Graduate Council

Date I Nicholas Townsend, Reader

Keith Brown, Reader 414*M Marissa Moorman, Reader

Approved by the Graduate Council

Date Peter Weber, Dean of the Graduate School

lll

CURRICULUM VITAE

Rebecca A. Warne Peters

Date of Birth: 23 July, 1978 Place of Birth: Minneapolis, Minnesota

Education PhD Anthropology, Brown University, May 2011 Dissertation: “Development Effects: Cosmopolitanism, Governmentality, and Angolan Engagements in the World” Committee: Daniel Jordan Smith, Nicholas Townsend, Keith Brown, Marissa Moorman (Indiana University-Bloomington) Examination Fields: Africanist Anthropology, Anthropology of Development, Medical Anthropology

MA Anthropology, Brown University, May 2007 Thesis: “A Life’s Work: The Production of International Development through Professionals’ Careers” MPH International Health, Emory University, May 2004 Concentration: Reproductive Health and Population Science Thesis: “The Lightness of Eating: Dietary Preferences and Practices in Northern Mozambique” BA Anthropology and Biology, Grinnell College, May 2000 Thesis: “Patients’ Choices Between Orthodox and Integrated Medical Practices in Grinnell, Iowa”

Research and Teaching Interests

Sub-Saharan Africa Medical Anthropology Lusophone Africa Reproductive Health Colonialism and Postcolonialism International Development Globalities and Localities Global Public Health Cosmopolitanism International Organizations Social Elites Governmentality Professionals and Expertise Interventionism

Publications “Daily Life – Angola.” The World and Its Peoples (Volume 5). Oxford: BCS Publishing. (Forthcoming) Review of “The Dynamic Consultation: A Discourse Analytical Study of Doctor- Patient Communication, by Marisa Cordella.” Language 83(4): 914. (2007) Review of “The Real World of NGOs: Discourses, Diversity and Development, by Dorothea Hilhorst.” Journal of Development Studies 41(6): 1154-6. (2005)

Manuscripts in Preparation “Disciplining Development, Disciplining Angola: The Production of Governing Agents in an NGO Audit Culture” “Knowledge Out of Place: The Work of Travel and Translation in Angolan Development”

Fellowships and Grants External Funding Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award (Institutional Research Training Grant), National Institutes of Health (2010-11) Jacob K. Javits Fellowship, US Department of Education (2005-08, 2009-10) Fulbright Fellowship to Angola, International Institute of Education (2008-09)

Internal Funding Graduate Fellowship, Seminar on “The Power and Mystery of Expertise,” Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women, Brown University (2010-11) Joukowsky Summer Travel and Research Fellowship, Brown University (2008) Mellon Dissertation Fieldwork Grant, Population Studies and Training Center, Brown University (2008)

Mellon Pre-Dissertation Fieldwork Grant, Population Studies and Training Center, Brown University (2006, 2007) Research Travel Grant, Brown University Graduate School (2006, 2007) Graduate Program in Development Summer Research Grant, Watson Institute for International Studies, Brown University (2005) Summer Research Grant, Department of Anthropology, Brown University (2005) Graduate Program in Development Fellowship, Watson Institute for International Studies, Brown University (Declined) (2005-06) Graduate Fellowship, Department of Anthropology, Brown University (2004-05) Luso-American Foundation Scholarship, Center for Portuguese Studies and Culture, University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth (2004) Gangarosa Scholarship and Transcultural Experience Award, Emory University (2003) Merit Scholarship, Rollins School of Public Health, Emory University (2002-04) Trustee Honor Scholarship, Grinnell College (1996-2000) Younker Scholarship, Grinnell College (1996-2000) Grinnell Grant, Grinnell College (1996-2000)

Invited Lectures “Cosmopolitanism in International Development Work.” Department of Public Administration, The Maxwell School of Syracuse University, February 2011. “Cosmopolitics: Development professionals in Angola.” Brown Leadership Alliance / Summer Research Early Identification Program. Brown University, June 2010. “Peopling Development: Who is “local” in international development programs?” 7th Annual Wits/Brown/Colorado/APHRC Colloquium on Current and Emerging Population Issues. University of Colorado at Boulder, May 2009

Conference Presentations National/International Refereed Conferences “Development Circulations: Mobility, Knowledge, and Development Expertise in the Angolan Experience.” Session titled “Structured Inequalities and Assemblages in Motion.” American Anthropological Association. New Orleans, Louisiana, November 2010. “Siting Development: Intervention and internationality in Angola after the Cold War.” Conference titled “Cold War Cultures: Interdisciplinary and Transnational Perspectives.” University of Texas, Austin, Texas, October 2010.

“African Medical Modernities: Contested visions of childbirth in Bié Province, Angola.” Conference titled “Medical Anthropology in Global Africa.” Kansas African Studies Center, University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas, September 2010. “The Meanings of Mobilities: Claims to authoritative knowledge of the local and the global in the Angolan development experience.” Workshop titled “A New Virtue? Imaginaries and Regimes of Mobility Across the Globe.” European Association of Social Anthropologists. Maynooth, Ireland. August 2010. “Monitoring Development: Contested visions of social change and good governance in Angola” Session titled “Local Negotiations of Globalizing Theory and Global Institutions.” American Anthropological Association. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, December 2009. “Observations Allowed, Observations Invited: Anthropologists in the field.” Conference titled “Objects of Knowledge/Objects of Exchange: Contours of (Inter)disciplinarity.” Humanities Center at Harvard, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, April 2009 “The Daily Production of Health and Development through NGO Action in Central Angola.” Session titled “Development, NGOs, and Health Governance.” African Studies Association. San Francisco, California, November 2006 “Belonging and Experience in the International Health Community.” Session titled “The Organization of Culture and the Culture of Organizations.” American Anthropological Association. San Jose, California, November 2006 “Identification of Medicinal Plants Used in Obstetrics by Maasai of the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, Tanzania.” Poster session titled “Taking Care of Mothers.” American Public Health Association. Boston, Massachusetts, November 2006 “How the Science of Child Survival is Created from an Ideology of Innocence.” Session titled “Impairment, Chronicity, and Cultures of Life.” American Anthropological Association. Washington, D.C., December 2005 “Assessment of Dietary Beliefs and Intake in Nampula Province, Mozambique.” Session titled “The Impact of Cultural Beliefs on Nutrition.” American Public Health Association. Washington, D.C., November 2004 Colloquia “Dietary Preferences and Practices in Nampula Province, Mozambique.” Poster session at the Department of International Health’s Thesis Symposium. Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, April 2004 “Anthropological Contributions to the Study of Dietary Intakes.” Invited lecture in course titled “Assessment of Dietary Intakes.” Departments of International Health and Epidemiology, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, October 2003

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“Dietary Preferences and Practices in Nampula Province, Mozambique.” Invited presentation at CARE International Headquarters, Atlanta, Georgia, October 2003 “Dietary Preferences and Practices in Nampula Province, Mozambique.” Department of International Health Global Research Experiences Brownbag Series, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia October 2003 “Patients’ Choices Between Orthodox and Integrated Medical Practices in Grinnell, Iowa.” Senior Thesis Presentation, Department of Anthropology, Grinnell College, April 2000 “Patients’ Choices Between Orthodox and Integrated Medical Practices in Grinnell, Iowa.” Department of Sociology Student Research Conference, Grinnell College, February 2000 “Traditional Medicine of the Maasai of the Ngorongoro Conservation Area”. Poster presentation at the University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, December 1998

Field Experience Luanda and rural provinces of Angola (Jan 2008 - Jan 2009). Dissertation field research on international democratization interventions, cosmopolitanism of development professionals, Angolan nationalism and internationalism. Luanda, Angola (Jan - Feb 2007). Pre-dissertation research in Luanda on the presence and activities of international non-governmental organizations. Luanda, Huambo, and Bié Provinces of Angola (Dec 2005 – Feb 2006). Pre- dissertation research on the presence and activities of international non- governmental organizations. Atlanta, Boston, New York, Washington DC (Jun – Aug 2005). Interviews conducted with international development professionals. Nampula Province, Mozambique (Jun – Aug 2003). Field research on dietary beliefs and practices among pregnant and lactating women. Ngorongoro Conservation Area, Tanzania (Oct – Nov 1998). Field research on Maasai medicinal plant preparations for use during pregnancy, parturition, and the postpartum period.

Teaching Experience Instructor Introduction to Cultural Anthropology (Spring 2010), Department of Anthropology, Brown University

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Teaching Assistant Medicine and Society (Summer 2009), Instructor Kristin Skrabut, Summer and Continuing Studies Program, Brown University African Issues in Anthropological Perspective (Spring 2009), Professor Nicholas Townsend, Department of Anthropology, Brown University Science and Culture (Spring 2007), Professor Sherine Hamdy, Department of Anthropology, Brown University International Health: Anthropological Perspectives (Spring 2006), Professor Daniel Jordan Smith, Department of Anthropology, Brown University Global Public Health: Anthropological Perspectives (Fall 2003), Professor Jennifer Hirsch, Departments of Anthropology and International Health, Emory University

Advising Head Teaching Consultant for the Social Sciences and Humanities (2010-present), Sheridan Center for Teaching and Learning, Brown University Teaching Consultant (2006-10), Sheridan Center for Teaching and Learning, Brown University Writing Center Associate (2005-07), Brown University Writing Center

Field Assistant Training Luanda, Angola (3 assistants). Jan 2008 – Jan 2009 Nampula Province, Mozambique (1 assistant). Jun – Aug 2003

Writing Seminar Writing in Anthropology (Oct 2007), Brown University Writing Center

Pedagogical Training Teaching Certificates Teaching Certificate IV: Teaching Consultant Program (May 2010). Sheridan Center for Teaching and Learning, Brown University Teaching Certificate III: Professional Development Seminar (May 2010). Sheridan Center for Teaching and Learning, Brown University Teaching Certificate I: The Sheridan Teaching Seminar (May 2006). Sheridan Center for Teaching and Learning, Brown University Workshops Summer Institute for Teaching and Technology (June 2010). Instructional Technology Group, Brown University

Responding to Student Writing in the Social Sciences and Humanities (February 2010). Brown University Writing Center

Service To the Profession Manuscript Reviewer, Food and Foodways, 2006, 2010 Panel Chair, Session titled “Structured Inequalities and Assemblages in Motion.” American Anthropological Association, New Orleans, Louisiana, November 2010. Panel Chair, Session titled “Local Negotiations of Globalizing Theory and Global Institutions.” American Anthropological Association, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, December 2009. Panel Co-Organizer and Chair, Session titled “The Organization of Culture and the Culture of Organizations.” American Anthropological Association, San Jose California, November 2006 Panel Chair, “Development, NGOs and Health Governance.”African Studies Association, San Francisco, California, November 2006 Abstract Reviewer, Population, Family Planning and Reproductive Health Program, 132nd and 133rd Annual Meetings, American Public Health Association, 2004-2005 Roundtable Moderator, Population, Family Planning and Reproductive Health Roundtable: Gender Issues and Other Topics, American Public Health Association, November 2004 Manuscript Reviewer, Ecology of Food and Nutrition, 2004

To the University and Department Alternate Board Member, Brown University Institutional Review Board, 2005- present Co-Organizer, Lecture series on Anthropology, Art, and Activism, Brown University, 2004-2006 Graduate Student Representative, Department of Anthropology Committee of the Faculty, Brown University, 2004-2005 Tutor, Department of Anthropology, Culture and Religion course under William Simmons, 2004 Graduate Student Representative, Reproductive Health and Population Sciences Concentration Faculty Committee, Department of International Health, Emory University, 2003

Graduate Student Representative, Committee to Include Language Study in the International Health Curriculum, Department of International Health, Emory University, 2003

Other Professional Experience Volume Consultant, BCS Publishing, The World and Its Peoples Volume 5 – Angola entry, 2009 Resident Investigator, Centro de Estudos e Investigações Científicas, Universidade Católica de Angola, Luanda 2008-2009 Consultant, The CORE Group, Washington DC 2005 Graduate Student Intern, Child Survival and Viable Initiatives for the Development of Agriculture Projects, CARE Mozambique 2003 Graduate Research Assistant to Professor Kathryn Yount, Departments of International Health and Sociology, Emory University 2002-2004

Language Training Formal coursework in advanced Portuguese with Professor Leonor Simas-Almeida in the Department of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies, Brown University (2005-07) Summer Portuguese Intensive Language Program, Center for Portuguese Studies and Culture, University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth (2004) Private tutoring and formal coursework in Portuguese with Professor Ana Sofia Ganho, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, Emory University (2003-04)

Professional Memberships American Anthropological Association Society for Medical Anthropology American Ethnological Society Association for Africanist Anthropology Association for Political and Legal Anthropology Society for Cultural Anthropology Society for Urban, National and Transnational/Global Anthropology African Studies Association Lusophone African Studies Association European Association of Social Anthropologists (Associate Member) American Public Health Association Global Health Council

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This project has allowed me the immense and humbling privilege of working with

a number of generous people. I hope to work with each of them again, and each deserves

credit – though not blame – for the successful realization of the project. For long personal and intellectual guidance, I thank Dan Smith, Nick Townsend, and Keith Brown. Kay

Warren, Cathy Lutz, Marida Hollos, Barbara Stallings, Patrick Heller, Steve Lubkemann and Marissa Moorman have also made important contributions to my scholarly development. Inna Leykin, Kristin Skrabut, Jennifer Ashley and Matthew Warne have dramatically improved the writing and thinking represented in the dissertation.

For essential support of the fieldwork logistics before, during, and after research trips abroad I thank the staff of the Jacob K. Javits Fellowship and Fulbright (IIE)

Program offices, particularly Jermaine Jones and Dawn Kepets. For their hard work and creativity in administering the Fulbright program at the US Embassy in Luanda I thank in particular Abigail Dressel, Humberto Pereira, and Ana Paula Ferreira. At Brown

University the staff of the Department of Anthropology and the Population Studies and

Training Center, particularly Katherine Grimaldi, Matilde Andrade, and Kelley Smith, as well as Elizabeth Murphy in the Financial Aid Office and Sue Toppin at the Research

Protections Office made everything work smoothly. I thank the Catholic University of

Angola and CEIC for institutional support and particularly Salim Valimamade, Nelson

Pestana and Regina Santos at for their collegiality and intellectual support.

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Ana Catarina Teixeira helped me at key moments to translate documents and requests into proper, formal Portuguese and beyond that has been an important and enthusiastic partner in my study of Angola. Along with Ana Catarina, I thank fellow

Angolanists Claudia Gastrow, Aaron deGrassi, Filipe Calvão and Antonio Tomás for sharing their enthusiasm for contemporary Angolanist scholarship. Leonor Simas-

Almeida, Rex Nielson, Sandra Sousa, and Ana Sofia Ganho should be credited with working miracles to help my husband and I become competent speakers of Portuguese.

The most important people to thank, and whose examples I am most humbled by, are the staff and administration of the “GGAP” and its parent organizations, along with the staff of USAID in Luanda, none of whom can be thanked here by name. I greatly appreciate the candor and generosity of each of these people, all of whom are trying to live their best lives, in part by working to help others live theirs. I thank them here for their good will, their good humor, and their good ideas.

Finally, I thank my family and those who have became family, for their support and encouragement. The Warne and Peters clans outdid themselves sending good news, care packages, and even traveling abroad to parts unknown. Tania Paciência and Madôo were extra mothers in Luanda to my son David. Andrew, Kendra, and John Carlos Evans

(and, later, Anna and Grace Evans) selflessly opened their home to us at particularly fraught transitions, for both their family and ours. Arthur Molenaar and Jojanneke Spoor deserve special thanks, along with Manuel Rui and Alice, for making my family and I very comfortably at home in Luanda. Matthew, David, and now Thomas deserve my thanks for their contributions, understanding and love; if I have made this work, whatever its faults and merits, it is because they have made me.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Signature Page iii

Curriculum Vitae xii

List of Figures xv

Glossary of Terms xvi

Náusea, by Agostinho Neto (1980) 1

Chapter 1 Introduction: Angola in the Middle 2

“With February’s Determination, We Conquer Development” 42

Chapter 2 Situations and Sites 43

(Not) Speaking English in Andulo 93

Chapter 3 Development Cosmopolitans I: Angolans 94

Chapter 4 Development Cosmopolitans II: Expatriates 150

Chapter 5 Governing Development 188

The Karl Marx 225

Chapter 6 Conclusion: Angola on the Move 226

Bibliography 244

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LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1.1 Map of the Good Governance in Angola Program (GGAP) Field and Headquarters Offices 37

Figure 2.1 Slave Trade Routes in Central Angola 53

Figure 2.2 Angolan Railways 54

Figure 2.3 Locations of International Humanitarian Interventions in 2000 55

Figure 2.4 2008 Parliamentary Elections Results by Province 89

Figure 3.1 A GGAP Organizational Chart 99

Figure 3.2 GGAP Staff Organization 104

GLOSSARY OF TERMS

CIDA Canadian International Development Agency

Candongueiro Luanda’s informal mini-buses. Usually Toyota Hiaces, painted blue on the bottom and white on top. Also referred to as “taxis.”

Confusão Confusion

DfID Department for International Development (Government of the United Kingdom)

DRC Democratic Republic of the Congo

Embaixada Embassy

FNLA Frente Nacional para a Libertação de Angola National Front for the Liberation of Angola

Fortaleza Fortress

GGAP Good Governance in Angola Program

GGL Good Governance in Luanda Program

IDP Internally Displaced Person in humanitarian work, though in other contexts, Integrated Development Planning

INGO International Non-Governmental Organization

Kuduru Style of Angolan youth music and dance

M&A Monitoria e Avaliação Monitoring and Evaluation

M&E Monitoring and Evaluation

MAT Ministério de Administração Territorial Ministry of Territorial Adminstration

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MINARS Ministério da Assistência e Reinserção Social Ministry of Social Assistance and Reinsertion

MPLA Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola

Mufete Angolan dish of fish, beans and potatoes cooked with palm oil

NGO Non-Governmental Organization

ODA Organização de Desenvolvimento de Área Organization for Area Development

PRS Partido de Renovação Social Party of Social Renovation

RFA Request for Applications

RNA Rádio Nacional de Angola National Radio of Angola

SWAPO South West Africa People’s Organization

TPA Televisão Pública de Angola Public Television of Angola

TRC Truth and Reconciliation Commission

UN United Nations

UNDP United Nations Development Programme

UNITA União Nacional para a Independência Total de Angola National Union for the Total Independence of Angola

USAID United States Agency for International Development

UTCAH Unidade Técnica de Coordenação da Ajuda Humanitária Technical Unit for the Coordination of Humanitarian Assistance

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Náusea 1980 (excerpt)

Velho João já olhava de novo a areia e monologava intimamente: Mu’alunga! O mar. A morte. Esta água! Este água salgada é perdição. O mar vai muito longe, por aí fora. Até tocar o céu. Vai até a América. Por cima, azul, por baixo, muito fundo, negro. Com peixes, monstros que engolem homens, tubarões. O primo Xico tinha morrido sobre o mar quando a canoa se virou ali no mar grande. Morreu a engolir água. Kalunga. Depois vieram os navios, saíram navios. E o mar é sempre Kalunga. A morte. O mar tinha levado o avô para outros continentes. O traba-lho escravo é Kalunga. O inimigo é o mar. Velho João lembrou-se de que umas vezes o mar estava muito furioso mas nunca ninguém se levantou contra ele. Kalunga matava e o povo ia chorar vítimas nos batuques. Kalunga acorrentou gente nos porões e o povo só curou as feridas. Kalunga é a fatalidade. Mas porque foi que o povo não fugiu do mar?

Elder João looked down again at the sand and murmured an intimate monologue: Mu’alunga! The sea. Death. This water! This saltwater is hell. The sea travels so far, so far away. Until it touches the heavens. Until it reaches America. Above, blue, below, at the depths, black. With fishes, monsters that swallow men, sharks. Cousin Xico has died in the sea when his canoe went there, to the wide open sea. He died swallowing all that water. Kalunga. After the ships came, the ships left. And the sea is forever Kalunga. Death. The sea has taken grandfather to other continents. The slave-trader is Kalunga. The enemy is the sea. Elder João remembered certain times when the sea had been furious, but never had anyone acted against it. Kalunga killed and the people mourned its victims with their drumming. Kalunga chained us in cellars and the people simply bathed the wounds. Kalunga is destruction. Why is it that the people have not fled the sea?

Agostinho Neto (1922-1979)

ANGOLA IN THE MIDDLE

Em Angola, tudo é complicado.

In Angola, everything is complicated.

In Angolan literature and cultural imagination, Kalunga, the sea, represents

Angola’s greatest vulnerabilities and, paradoxically, its greatest hopes and possibilities

(Peres 1997: 118 n17). The sea – o mar in Portuguese – signifies Angolan connection

with the outside world; it is the open door Angolans cannot, and perhaps would not,

close, despite their vulnerabilities. Náusea, a short story by Angola’s first president (now deceased) Agostinho Neto, who is still revered as one of the nation’s greatest authors and poets, revolves around this paradoxical relationship with the outside as symbolized by the terrible, unpredictable sea. As Neto’s character, the elder João, expresses, the sea is at once dangerous threat and tantalizing opportunity, which may be the answer to his question “why have the people not fled?” A dramatic portrayal of foreign connection, impact, and opportunity, perhaps, but this paradoxical sentiment is felt profoundly and expressed often in Angola. Africa as a whole has a long and complex history of foreign interaction and engagement from the slave trade through contemporary industrial

extraction; Angolans may be particularly cognizant of these external relationships. In the

Angolan case, these relationships are often not viewed positively by the average citizen:

in any conversation about international affairs or current world events, an Angolan might reference the slave trade between Angola and Brazil, perpetrated by Portugal; they might

mention oil extraction by American companies and the meager revenues they see from

that industry; they might mention how many Chinese laborers are in the country working

on roads and railroads and accuse them of taking away opportunities for Angolan

laborers. Angolans frequently consider the foreign and often employ it as a referent when

describing and analyzing themselves and their national situation.

The capital city, Luanda, is itself framed by reminders of historical and present-

day overseas connection. The Fortaleza de São Miguel, built in 1576 as the Portuguese

administrative center, towers over the southern end of the bay on a high butte, a reminder

of Angola’s past as a Portuguese colony. The American embassy squats on an even

steeper cliff on the northern side of the city, a modern “blast resistant” fortress built after

the 1998 bombings of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Many consider

this modern fortress on the hill symbolic of recent neoliberal capitalist turns in Angolan

political affairs, economic organization, and foreign relations. In a strange irony of

history and sightline, in 2008 the best vantage point from which to take a good panoramic

photograph of the Luanda shoreline, encompassing the Fortaleza, was from the American

embassy on the hill. The reverse was also true – to take a good photo of the city and

include the Embaixada Americana, the best tactic was to ascend to the courtyard of the

16th century Fortaleza. That the differences in Angolan-foreign interaction across 500

years, from colonialism to neoliberal corporatism and from Old World to New World, are

not perhaps so different – foreign fortresses on Luanda’s highest hills, the extraction of

people and natural resources from Angola to the rest of the world – signals the historical resonances of contemporary Angolan life.

This dissertation investigates patterns of international cooperation, co-optation,

and influence in contemporary Angolan culture, society, and politics through an

ethnographic account of an intervention that I call the Good Governance in Angola

Program (GGAP). The ethnography is situated inside the intervention, making the

anthropological field site an institutional, programmatic one. As such, the study differs

significantly from most previous anthropological studies of development intervention, which have taken local communities as primary field sites to track the impact of introduced development programs on local livelihoods, cultural production, and social organization (e.g., Arce and Long 2000; Hymes 1972; Sanday 1976). The research project further distinguishes itself in defining “development” to be purposeful intervention with the intent to improve social well being. “Development” here, perhaps optimistically, is intervention and action – not the naturalized status of social well being

(Haugerud 1997), the operationalized measure indexed by the UN’s Human Development

Indicators1, nor an imagined goal for the future (Appadurai 2004), though each of these notions of development is emically present for the development workers in my study.

Analytically I follow Olivier de Sardan’s proposal (2005) to study development as an empirical social phenomenon, and direct my attentions to organizations and professionals engaged in development intervention. “Development” for my study is a social field in the sense of practice theory (Bourdieu 1977; LiPuma 1993; Postone, et al. 1993).

1 See http://hdr.undp.org/en/humandev/ for references on measuring human development and explication of the UN Human Development Index.

In applying the classically anthropological ethnographic method to a development

program itself – “studying up” (Nader 1972) in international development – this research

takes the discipline into new territory in studying global, and globalizing, processes (cf.

Jackson 2005; Schuller 2009). I document the paradoxes of current Angolan development

and social change as one example of the contemporary, global human experience by

tracking local, national, and international debates on interventions, and through

participant observation in the daily life of program administrators and implementers.

I reveal international development intervention to be one of the most recent

waves of otherwise longstanding cosmopolitan connections in Angola. The images of

Portuguese colonialism and American neocolonialism embodied in the Fortaleza and the

Embaixada Americana serve as convenient bookending images for this study, but should

by no means be taken to define the breadth nor depth of Angolan engagements in the

world. This examination of an international development intervention reveals the intricate

texture of Angola’s global relationships through overlapping, though sometimes

incommensurate, cosmopolitan spheres. In articulating Angolan-foreign interconnections

I contribute to a recent postcolonial literature, responding ethnographically to calls for

descriptions of contemporary Africa in its historical, global context (Comaroff and

Comaroff 1992; Mbembe 2001).

The dissertation explores the paradoxes of Angolan international connection in

everyday life. I locate “international development” as one important contemporary

system through which even ordinary Angolans have engagement outside the nation’s

borders. I focus on the “middle figure” in development – those individuals, groups, and

institutions who operate in zones of “friction” between the local and the foreign (Hunt

1999; Merry 2006; Tsing 2005). For a study of globalization and the global human

experience, “the middle” is both process and location, both a center of the international

and an interstitial gap between the local and the global. I trace the experiences of

Angolan and foreign development professionals as they work together to effect change in

Angolan political and social life at the end of more than 30 years of war. As these

professionals come together to bridge local and international communities, the past –

slave raids, colonial repression, missionary influence, liberation struggles, socialism, the

Cold War, war-time humanitarian interventions, oil drilling and diamond mining – is

contiguous with the present as it prefigures the resources, discourses, ideals and

expectations of contemporary Angolan development. Further, the international and the

global are integral in the local.

That local, national, and international power dynamics are refracted in

development efforts is well documented in the scholarly literature on development

(Cooper and Packard 1997; Crewe and Harrison 1998; Power, et al. 2006; Utting 2006)

as is the extent to which contemporary projects draw upon and perpetuate historical

relationships of dominance and resistance (Friedman 2006; Kothari 2006; Li 1999; 2007).

Less well documented are the ways in which development interventions draw upon and

perpetuate historical patterns of connection, interaction, and influence that are far more complex than those suggested by the poles of dominance and resistance, or of global and

local. The Angolan case provides rich evidence of the uses to which development

interventions and organizations can be put, far beyond their intended work, as well as the

threats they are imagined to be, much like Kalunga in Angolan cultural traditions.

The Ualipi Incident

In one such incident, roughly a year or so before the Parliamentary elections of

September, 2008, international non-governmental organizations (INGOs) became a topic

of much conversation in Luanda as to their activities, their uses, and their dangers. In July

of 2007, as I was preparing to leave to conduct this research project, online news reports

and emails from Angolan friends were briefly filled with the hubbub. Friends collected

the newspaper reports for me, and though by the time I arrived things had calmed down

again, the events, reports, and reactions provide a back drop to the social field of

development work in Angola, demonstrating that tensions around the elections were

beginning to build as much as a year or more before election day, involving both real and

imagined foreign entanglements.

The incident was a Radio Nacional de Angola (RNA) interview of Pedro Ualipi

Calenga on July 10. While I was unable to secure a recording of the original interview,

the state newspaper, O Jornal de Angola, carried coverage of it and the attentions it

received for a solid week, with the private newspapers (all weeklies, at the time)

weighing in as soon as they could afterward. Ualipi, as he's referred to by development

professionals, was at the time the director-general of UTCAH, a “technical unit” of

MINARS (Ministério da Assistência e Reinserção Social – the Ministry of Social

Assistance and Reinsertion) which is charged with coordinating humanitarian work in

Angola. UTCAH is the formal authority to which all Angolan and international non-

governmental organizations must report and the government body to whom they are

legally accountable. In his RNA interview, the newspapers reported, Ualipi “denounced”

certain national and international NGOs as acting “outside the law,” working for political,

rather than humanitarian, ends. He stated that many of these organizations receive

funding and support “from the opposition.”

Before continuing with the story of Ualipi's denunciations and what I see as their

sequelae over the period of my fieldwork with the GGAP, it is worth pausing to consider

his reference to “the opposition.” Angola is still very much a one-party state, and this reference is not to a single “opposition” party or platform but is a reference to anything,

and anyone, which might oppose the MPLA, commonly still referred to in Angola as “the

party” (o partido). The newspaper summaries include references to a sociologist who

participated in the Ualipi interview and who is quoted as making even stronger charges

about the political activities of NGOs; he says that certain NGOs “incite the population to

subversion and disorder,” and when they are rightfully charged with conducting illegal

activities2 and are either expelled from the country or disbanded, “they raise their voices

to speak of human rights violations and evoke other similar principles.” This sociologist,

a Simão Helena, continued on to say that the “Government was producing a discourse of

reconciliation while certain of these NGOs are conducting exactly the opposite, that is,

inciting the population to disobedience and anarchy.”

While Ualipi himself was not on record, as reported in the Jornal, as saying these

things about anarchy, disobedience, and subversion, he did evidently name names.3 The next day, the 12th of July, 2007, the Jornal ran a follow-up article in which Ualipi

2 That is, political activities, which are not legal for an “NGO” to conduct according to the laws of association under which they are governed in Angola. 3 In the radio interview he denounced the Associação Mãos Livres, the Associação SOS- Habitat, the Associação Justiça, Paz e Democracia and The Open Society, as well as the Instituto Republicano Internacional and the Instituto Nacional Democrático, and finally, Search for Common Ground, as examples of organizations operating outside their legal purviews.

clarified his position, as reported in the paper from the radio interview of the 10th. Ualipi

stated there that he had named these organizations as acting “outside the law” simply

because he knew these particular organizations to be as yet unauthorized by a Ministry of

Justice declaration to be conducting activities in Angola.

On the 14th, the Jornal reported on the press releases of the Open Society and the

Associação Mãos Livres, which asserted that they most certainly act within their legal

confines, that they work in partnership with local organizations on projects that both sides

agree upon, that there are no pressures or coercions to act politically for or against any

party, and that they had not, in fact, been notified by any state authority that there were concerns or complaints against them.

Columnist João Melo, who writes regularly for the Jornal, reported the following week on a lecture he had been invited to give on the 10th at the Angolan Writer’s Union.

By sheer coincidence, he reported, he had spoken on the relationship between the state, the citizenry, and civil society in Angola. He carefully pointed out in his column that the lecture and its topic had been set fully two months prior to Ualipi’s RNA interview, but took Ualipi’s interview and its aftermath as evidence of the timeliness and complexity of his lesson. His lecture, invited and arranged by Ibis (which he cites as a Danish NGO, but is organized and run by a dynamic Angolan woman), asserted a central theme that the relationship between the Angolan state and civil society organizations is a tense one, of mutual distrust. Melo goes on to write a convincing essay that the Angolan state presumes non-state organizations to be conspiring against it at all turns, while NGOs, both foreign and national, fear that the state seeks to “instrumentalize” them and manipulate them for its own good, rather than allow them to work for the good of the

people. Melo concludes with a rather heavy hand that certain of the international NGOs

would seem to be working in the interests of their home governments, rather than in the

interests of the local people.

A Capital, an independent weekly newspaper, posted two long articles a week

later (issue July 21-28, 2007) which carried more language from the press releases of the

accused NGOs, and pointed out that Ualipi4 had been silent since the radio interview and

subsequent Jornal coverage, not answering calls and not appearing in his UTCAH offices.

The newspaper coverage of Ualipi's radio interview and its responses by the accused

NGOs falls off after these few weeks, but the incident remained a topic of conversation in

international NGOs and the Angolan development community more widely, and I heard

references to it throughout 2008 and 2009, particularly in the months before the

parliamentary elections of September 2008. There were various rumors about activities or events which may have precipitated what came to be seen as Ualipi’s “attacks” on NGOs, particularly international NGOs, though I never heard a concrete assertion from inside the development community that any of the accused NGOs had been conducting illegal or even ill-advised activities. The comments of Simão Helena were summarily dismissed as clearly political, pro-MPLA filler. What the development community did take from the incident was a warning that the government would be growing ever more sensitive about political organizing, or anything that might resemble political organizing, as the date of

the parliamentary elections grew closer.

Much of the conversations that continued on from the Ualipi incident centered

around the process of becoming a legal NGO in Angola. Becoming registered, being

4 Spelled Walipi in A Capital's coverage.

announced in the Diário de Angola, where all legislative pronouncements are made, and,

rarely, changing this registration to become a “national” rather than “international”

organization, was of great concern to development organizations. The registration of

“associations” seemed to be a fickle process for international NGOs, but of the utmost

importance. Several NGOs that I frequented had framed copies of their legalization

announcements from the Diário posted in their lobbies or entry ways, and a copy of this

notice was included in most applications for grants or other support.

While members of the Angolan development community took the Ualipi incident

as a sobering reminder of how interventionist organizations and most particularly

international interventionist organizations are seen and treated by the Angolan state (and

the media), I take the incident and its long resonances within the development community

as a reinforcement of Melo’s point about the tense relationships among the Angolan state,

the international community, and national and international civil society. While I cannot

agree with him that many of the international organizations seem to be working for their

home governments rather than for Angolan communities, I understand his concern and am familiar with the arguments against international development as the imposition of

foreign values, practices, and purposes. Angolan debates such as these, spilling out from

the development and foreign aid community and the state apparatus, are common in

everyday conversations as well, indicating the central role such organizations and

interventions have in Angolan politics and cultural life. One reason the intentions and

actions of international development organizations are so sensitive for Angolans is that it

is seen as a continuance of the long interventionist history of the Cold War in Angola

(Anstee 1996; James 1992; Shubin 2008; Windrich 1992), in which American, Russian,

South African and Cuban forces, among others, were intimately and heavily involved.

The study of contemporary Angola must keep such interventions and histories in the near-background. In this research project, demonstrating how historical relationships can shape present development efforts and how foreign engagement broadly is entangled with local realities, requires a perspective from inside an international development intervention, and deepens a still-novel approach in the analysis of directed social change

(e.g., Bornstein 2003; Hilhorst 2003; Mosse 2005). Previous studies have examined questions of power in development interventions largely from the perspective of the local, end-recipients of these efforts, but not from the perspectives of those who design and conduct the interventions (Crush 1994; Escobar 1988; 1995; Seabrook 1993; Smith

2005; Uvin 1998). Studies attentive to the unintended external effects of development interventions – effects on the local communities and national structures targeted by the interventions – have overlooked significant internal effects that impact the sphere of development itself. My study balances these three axes of analysis: historical relationships of intervention and their effects on present day interventions, international relationships enacted in intervention and their impact on local realities, and acknowledgement of the “internal effects” of development work – on the professionals and institutions charged with this work – as well as the work’s external effects on recipient communities.

Ethnographic Analysis of International Development

The broad scholarly literature on development – from economics, political

science, sociology, anthropology, and the professional fields – tells us that development

programs often do not live up to their promises (e.g., Dichter 2003). This literature,

though, also contains accounts of surprising successes (e.g., Krishna, et al. 1997). Social

scientists and development professionals have demonstrated that development

programming regularly causes unintended consequences – some of them undesirable,

others happy accidents. Accumulating these analyses of development and development

work, it becomes clear that much remains unknown about development. A deceptively

simple question at the heart of what scholars do not know about development formed the

impetus for this dissertation project: “what happens inside a development program?” I

wanted to know what it was like to do development work, and how the experience

differed for people in various structural positions of development organizations. I wanted

to know how an organization’s operational culture impacted its work, its successes, and

its sustainability. Finally, I wanted to know what feedback mechanisms reinforce or

instigate changes in operational culture. I did not set out to ask if development “worked,”

but rather to ask after development “work” itself as a cultural field of action and

experience.

I see the ethnographic literature on development interventions as composed of

three overlapping approaches. These approaches differ in their treatment of development

as an ethnographic object of study, and in their justification for studying development

ethnographically. Anthropologists in the first wave of the anthropology of development

frequently planted themselves in a local community and watched “development” come in

from the outside (Apffel-Marglin and Marglin 1990; Hobart 1993). This positioning reveals a number of important insights about the “development encounter” (Peters 2000).

These studies point to development policies or practices that run counter to the values or social structures of the intended recipients and therefore have deleterious effects on the course of the intervention and on local communities. This approach is an outgrowth of an anthropological trajectory which values immersive study in local communities. To anthropologists studying “in villages” (Geertz 1973: 22), development intervention rightly seemed to “arrive,” or to “alight” in their field sites. The justification for their study of development as an ethnographic object was to understand – and often, to combat

– the effects of these externally imposed interventions. In many cases these critical analyses have been timely and insightful. Through this approach, for instance, we find out that children receiving individually-targeted sponsorship interventions – who become participants in a transnational network of direct donors and recipients – can as a result

become the targets of witchcraft accusations with real and immediate social and physical

repercussions (e.g., Bornstein 2003).

This body of work holds great value and anthropologists continue to watch

interventions expressly from the recipients’ perspective, evaluating interventions against

their stated goals and against recipient communities’ needs and preferences.

Development programmers, to their credit, have generally paid attention to the lessons of this literature. As both a professional being trained in international public health and as a participant observer inside development organizations, I understand program designers and policy makers to be thirsty for more local information. They want more and better- informed predictions about how a particular intervention might be received, and about

what unintended consequences of their work might be. An effect of situating the

ethnography in recipient communities and studying development as an intrusion,

however, is that many of these studies unquestioningly analyze development as an

external, often western, modernizing, secularizing, and disruptive force foreign to the

community. These analyses portray development professionals as intruders, imperialists

of a sort, and generally do not consider “locals” to be development professionals

(Kaufmann 1997; Stirrat 2008).

This treatment of development naturalizes its structures, its movements and

logics, and even the actions and decisions of individuals working in its service. With this language and imagery informing our analyses just as it informs development in practice,

development simply appears “like a ship, from outside the society in question” (Ortner

1984: 143). Evocative of the Angolan experience of the sea as conduit for external contact, Ortner’s metaphor describes the treatment of history in political economic analyses. It is applicable to the treatment of development in this stream of anthropological work, as well, pointing to the genealogy of this treatment. Development, like history in many political economic accounts, becomes the inventor, producer, and constructor rather than that which is invented, produced, or constructed. This literature has been refined since the 1980s and now emphasizes the dialectical interplay between local history and global process. “Development” in the literature, though, still enters into

the local situation whole and from elsewhere. An adequate examination of development

in terms both local and global, with respect to its effects as well as its sources, remains an

ethnographic challenge.

In what I call the second wave of anthropologists studying development, the

theoretical and practical focus shifted from considering development as a foreign

intervention entering a local place to anthropologists championing “local solutions to

global problems;” a grassroots advocacy approach. In this approach anthropologists

recognize that the “local” or “grassroots” places they study operate within a context of

regional and global inequality. They argue that while the problems of poverty, inequality,

poor health and limited opportunities are due to the structural violence of the world

system, solutions might best be found in a trans-local counter-system (Farmer 1999;

Farmer and Gastineau 2002; Kothari 1990; Matthews 2004; Rahnema and Bawtree 1997;

Seabrook 1993). Good and insightful anthropologists continue to argue this point. They

consider what advancements a local community most desires and how these should most

expeditiously be achieved. These anthropologists would like to see the global hierarchy

reworked into something more equitable, but are not waiting for a global revolution.

Instead they seek alternative solutions (i.e., “post-development” solutions) from below or

from outside the larger structures. Grassroots organizations of all stripes and sizes have

continuing success from these sorts of anthropological beginnings. And here again,

international development programmers and policy makers have taken notice.

“Partnering” with local organizations is now the norm, not the exception, and in many

interventions the preference is to hire local staff members, not bringing in foreign

professionals unless absolutely necessary. More and more, in the field offices and country

offices of international development agencies, one finds more national than international

staff in positions of authority (Baaz 2005; Yarrow 2008). Perhaps more importantly, there

are now international NGOs founded and headquartered in the global South, rather than

the global North (Akukwe 1998; Annis and Hakim 1988).

My research pushes the contemporary boundaries of what I consider the third

wave of the anthropology of development. In this wave the object of inquiry is the

systems, structures, and social spaces of international development as a modern, global

phenomenon (Olivier de Sardan 2005). In this literature, “the local village” under study is

the global undertaking of development – USAID, DfID, the UN, international NGOs, the

policies and programs and reports and apparatus of international development (Barnett

and Finnemore 1999; Benthall 1993; Harper 1998; Tvedt 1998; Wallace, et al. 2006). The

tribe we study is diffuse (Brown 2011) and diverse and speaks in acronyms (Pigg 1995).

The pioneering study in this wave is “The Anti-Politics Machine,” in which James

Ferguson applied Michel Foucault’s theories on power, knowledge, and government to

“the development apparatus” (1994). This work is a highly critical analysis of a deeply

flawed intervention in Lesotho. It was groundbreaking work, but its critical tones – while

appropriate to his case – have come to color much of the work that follows it. The

strength of Ferguson’s work was, in part, that it pointed us to consider the effects of

development intervention, whatever and wherever they may be. Ferguson found political

effects where there were supposed to be only apolitical, technical effects. Ferguson

argued that the technical is political, and that in denying its political elements the

development apparatus in his case was, in effect, a tool of political oppression for the

state and its elites. Though Ferguson could not have predicted it – an “unintended effect”

of his work has been to lead a great many thoughtful and well-meaning anthropologists

down a path of strident criticism of international development efforts. Development

agencies, personnel, and programs have been pilloried in anthropology journals, not

entirely unreasonably, but not entirely reasonably, either (Apffel-Marglin and Marglin

1990; Cooper and Packard 1997; Ferguson 1997; Hill 1986; Hobart 1993).

My approach takes something from each of the preceding bodies of

anthropological literature on development. From the third wave I take an analytic focus

on development as a social phenomenon, as a social system and structure. I also take an

attention to “effects” – to the consequences of actions, decisions, practices (Mosse and

Lewis 2005). My project takes a sensitive approach to the potential for the use and abuse

of development work by other entities – states and corporations come to mind – but

resists ascribing political intent to the work (Li 2007). From the first wave, I take a

sensitivity to “encounters.” Instead of looking for encounters in the “clash” between a

local system and a foreign one, however, I examine development for its internal

encounters. Encounters in my work are the conversations, propositions, decisions and

actions – and their effects – as they are experienced by individuals in the development

apparatus. Finally, from the second wave I take a preference for situating the local within

its global context, expressly seeking out the local-to-global connections and interactions

that shape both ends of the social continuum.

Development Subjectivities and the Middle Figure

In studying development as a social phenomenon, I have found that one group in

particular emerges as an undertheorized and perhaps underappreciated, lynchpin. This

group’s experience is central to understanding what development is today and how it

operates. Borrowing from Nancy Rose Hunt’s historical work in the Congo, I refer to

them as “middle figures” (1999). The middle figures in my case are the in-country

implementers – the field staff and local administrative staff of the country offices who

run international development programs on a day-to-day basis.5 My study examines an

Angolan example in depth, investigating who the members of the local field staff were in

2008-2009, and what their experiences of development work were over the period of

about one year. I consider the theoretical implications of their “middle experiences”

(Merry 2006) to gain an anthropological understanding of the contemporary world, and

of the practical implications of their experiences for the work of directing social change.

Some of development’s middle figures have been previously described as

“brokers” or “translators” (e.g., Lewis and Mosse 2006). This work has been important in

calling attention to the middle of things, but I find the image of a broker or a translator to

be one which overemphasizes the structures of development within which these agents

maneuver and have impact. These images draw overmuch from that first wave of

anthropological analyses – the culture clash wave. In my case, Angolan development

professionals were not simply “brokering” a deal between two separate parties – one with

needs, the other with supplies. Nor were they simply “translating” – making messages

meaningful as a faithful conduit between, again, two separate parties. These images

reinforce difference and distance where my empirical findings suggest that Angolan

development workers blur the divisions between developers and developed. Further, this

previous work on development brokers and translators focused largely on consultants

5 Though my use of the “middle figure” for development professionals was not what she had in mind when she made the reference, I thank Claire Wendland for redirecting my attention to Hunt’s historical work on the local staff of colonialists in the Congo. I also thank Kristin Skrabut for pointing my attention to Merry’s work on “mapping the middle.”

(see Bierschenk, et al. 2002) and those with more power and privilege in the system than

the NGO administers and implementers I studied, normally have.

Development workers – especially locally-based administrators and implementers

– become professionals through their training and experience, and through their

relationships to their communities of service. I will argue that these professionals become

a type of cosmopolitan middle figure that should be recognized as holding extra-local

knowledge and skills, even as it is often their “localness” – for the Angolans – which

secures their positions. The foreigners in the Angolan case, often from a different

developing country, are cosmopolitan in a peculiarly development sort of way. Expatriate

development professionals circulate throughout only certain subaltern portions of the

world, develop tastes and experiences appropriate to those portions of the world, and in

any case were not likely to be the cultural elite of their home countries to begin with.

Both groups – local development works with extra-local knowledge and skills, and

expatriate development workers who find themselves “at home” in the developing world

– are members of this middle category of development cosmopolitans.

Ethnographic studies of development have demonstrated that development work

can shape the conduct and even sense-of-self of targeted individuals, families,

communities, and organizations in unexpected ways. Program recipients learn to refer to

themselves and even consider themselves needy or deserving, victims or “stakeholders,”

the underserved or the poorest poor, for instance, as the professional jargon morphs and

changes. Anthropologists have demonstrated how development interventions shape

recipients’ subjectivities in terms of gender and sexuality (Adams and Pigg 2005; Sharma

2008), that interventions shape how local people behave (Ferguson and Gupta 2002), how

they ask for what they want (Li 2007; Rivkin-Fish 2006), and what they decide to ask for

(Elyachar 2005; Mosse 2005). In the anthropology of development, recipients of

intervention are usually the “subjects” being examined and are usually found to be the

ones whose subjectivities are being shaped, the ones who are being “governed” in the

development governmentality.

The anthropological literature on development, and particularly on development

NGOs is unequivocal about their governmentalist actions and effects (Utting 2006;

Wallace, et al. 2006). Recent scholarship considers how development plays a role in a

global governmentality and in more unitary, state-oriented forms (Watts 2003). These

frameworks show development as perpetuating and justifying itself through the creation

of its object – the poor, the ill, the underdeveloped – and that in creating its object,

development also creates its subjects. This work represents a Foucauldian reading of

world systems theory, structural Marxism and dependency theories. It yields the

persistent empirical observation that development intervention grows as an industry

despite its “failure” to achieve its stated goals and purposes (Colson 1988; Escobar 1995;

Fisher 1997). Investigating why “failure” would persist and grow, scholars conclude that

development works, in large part, not to achieve its stated purposes but to justify its own

existence. Development makes its object – the poor, etc – so as to make itself a necessary

response to their conditions. In this vein, researchers examine exactly how development

makes its object, how it justifies its continued existence and even growth, and what other

effects these processes might then have. Investigations into the unintended effects, and

the governmental outcomes, of development at work have admirably revealed the

subjectivity-shaping effects of development on recipient communities. I find this research

to have stopped short of the mark, however, in tracing the mechanisms by which

subjectivities are shaped. The literature is clear that the recipients of development work

sustain the effects of that work and, for many theorists, are the “governed” in a large and

complex system of development governmentality. But who, then, are the governors, and

how are they governed (cf. Bourdieu 1993)?

It is conventional to go up the chain of command to identify the governors in the

system – international organizations, western governments, experts and opinion makers, etc – but in doing so, social scientists overlook those closest to “the action,” those most directly engaged in the productive “friction” (Tsing 2005) of international development. I argue that the locally-based NGO staff members charged with implementing these interventions, and their country office-based administrative supervisors, are a key component of these mechanisms of power. I turn ethnographic attention to the developers themselves and particularly to the staff members of international programs working in field sites and country offices as “middle figures.” These are the people, anthropologists think, who understand both sides of the development equation in the relative vernacular and who do the work of the “equals” sign in the middle of that social equation (Lewis and

Mosse 2006). These are the agents we believe make global, transnational ideas intelligible to local individuals and communities, and who express local concerns in a manner sensible to the international community. This instrumentalist interpretation assumes that the middle figure must at times manipulate their position as broker or translator to his or her own ends – no agent is without impact on the processes with which they engage. Social scientists have made this assumption, however, without

considering how these positions have been achieved and what happens to the persons

who inhabit them.

Anthropologists, in emphasizing the structures of development work, have neglected the subjectivities of development work, not adequately reconciling theories of

development subjectivity formation with the actions and intentions of the middle figures

and their own, relative subjectivity formation as agents of development, or of

governance. If recipient subjectivities are shaped by development, it is the middle figures

of development who do the shaping in program implementation. This dissertation

examines the position of development staff members – the “middle figures” of

development – to see how they are made subjects through their work and how this

subjectivity is that of the governing agent, in addition to that of the governed subject.

Global Developments and Development Cosmopolitans

In examining middle figures, it becomes clear that international development

organizations and interventions are rich with cosmopolitan connections and that these

connections are key to the subjectivities of development professionals. The ethnographic

study of development challenges our ability to describe these connections adequately:

they are never completely global, and describing them as international or transnational

over simplifies the matter. Later in the dissertation, for example, I focus on the Good

Governance in Angola Program’s Chief of Party, Osman.6 Born, raised, and educated in

Bangladesh, Osman began his professional life as a roads engineer for a large

international NGO. He moved up through the ranks of the organization and eventually

studied in the Netherlands for a master’s degree with his employer’s support. He went on

6 All names in the dissertation are pseudonyms, with the exception of public figures.

to hold high-level administrative positions in a variety of country offices – Somalia,

Kenya, the Sudan, Angola. Is describing his trajectory as an “international” one

sufficiently detailed and informative? Does describing him as “international” give us the

right conceptual tools to think about his experience and compare it to other

“international” experiences across race, class, gender, religion, and other axes of

difference?

His colleague, Samuel, the Luanda-based programs director of the same

international organization, is Angolan by birth and is considered a “local” or “national”

staff member in the organization, distinctions which are discussed at length later in the

dissertation. Samuel’s family, however, fled the Angolan civil war when he was a child

and he was raised and educated in English-speaking Zambia. He has traveled widely, has

published professional articles about his development work with South African

colleagues, and carries at least as much, if not more, responsibility for the work of the

American NGO in my case study as does Osman. He could also be described as

“international,” but not in a way that retains the specific characteristics that make him

international and that shape his interactions and experiences. Existing analytical

frameworks and descriptive terms fall short as anthropologists try to apprehend and

analyze the empirical situation of development professionals and “the developmentalist

configuration” (Olivier de Sardan 2005) – certainly in the Angolan case and likely

elsewhere. Clearly no single term, or even set of terms will be completely descriptive of

these and other cases, but I hope to refine the analytical language in the right direction by

proposing variations on the idea of the “development cosmopolitan.”

My critique of, and contribution to, the ethnographic literature on development is

inspired by Olivier de Sardan’s description of the developmentalist configuration as a

“cosmopolitan world” (2005: 25). He defines “the developmentalist configuration” as that…

…essentially cosmopolitan world of experts, bureaucrats, NGO personnel, researchers, technicians, project chiefs and field agents, who make a living, so to speak, out of developing other people, and who, to this end mobilize and manage a considerable amount of material and symbolic resources.

Olivier de Sardan’s description focuses on the whole – on the “world” of development professionals. By naming the elements of this world – different kinds of professionals – by some hybrid of their structural positions and job duties, he describes a cosmopolitan grouping that brings people from a multiplicity of origins and viewpoints into one professional sphere. His intent is to describe the entire grouping as

“cosmopolitan” rather than to name those individual professionals as cosmopolitan. I extend his term here to apply theories of cosmopolitanism to individual development professionals as well as to the professional group. Certainly, after an individual has worked in such a “cosmopolitan world,” they should be considered cosmopolitans. But perhaps it was a certain cosmopolitan leaning which brought them into the development fold in the first place. Considering development professionals as cosmopolitans requires a rather particular take on the literature on cosmopolitanism, and a grounding in the empirical work that has been done on “actually existing” cosmopolitans.

Cosmopolitan Field Work

Reading Olivier de Sardan was not the only impetus I had to developing an idea of the “development cosmopolitan.” Simply designing and arranging the logistics of this

ethnography of a development intervention in Angola required that I grapple with certain

cosmopolitan characteristics of development organizations and of Angola. I was well into

the formal fieldwork, however, when I began to realize that many of the things I was

learning about Angola and about development work were echoes of what I thought of as

my “personal” or “non-ethnographic” experiences of Angola. Re-reading James Clifford

upon my return helped me understand why.

Nearly 20 years ago, James Clifford challenged anthropology to correct for

disciplinary practices that “privileged relations of dwelling over relations of travel”

(1992: 99). He charged that anthropology confuses “culture” with the anthropological products of localized “dwelling/research,” producing its objects as geographically rooted and spatially bound through its Malinowskian insistence on co-residence over, as he implies, co-travel. Malinowski did rather a fair bit of traveling with Trobrianders as he investigated their Kula ring, of course, but Clifford’s point stands: fieldwork conventions have tended to “marginalize or erase several blurred boundary areas, historical realities that [then] slip out of the ethnographic frame” (Clifford 1992: 99). These slippages include the political, legal and logistical work of attaining grants, permissions, visas, tickets, and accommodations for anthropological fieldwork; the actual movement of anthropologist from “home” to “field” by whatever means of transport and through whatever other intermediate states, cities, and localities; and, most importantly, the personal and professional relationships that produce and facilitate research sites and relations of translation. Clifford charges that our ethnographic focus on “being there” has led us to neglect the equally important and revealing “getting there.” He charges that in allowing these slippages to occur we invent, even fabulate, our field sites and the people

we study in them (cf. Geertz 1973), depicting them as more isolated, immobile and, I would add twenty years later, unconnected, than they actually are. This artificially narrow ethnographic base necessarily results in a hobbled theoretical understanding of the contemporary world (cf. Appadurai 1988).

Considering my own travel to conduct anthropological fieldwork in Angola, I find

Clifford’s point here quite informative. My trajectory around and through the logistics of working in Angola, for instance, had really very little to do with me, and everything to do with contemporary Angolan history and politics. My first six-week trip from December

2005 to February 2006 was arranged almost entirely through international NGO contacts

I had made while a public health student and while conducting interviews with development professionals in the US. I found an organization willing to write a letter of invitation for my brief trip, as a “student intern,” a place to stay briefly in the homes of other expatriate development workers, and permission to visit several field sites and to stay in NGO guesthouses. Once in Angola for the first time, I learned my way around – how to take a candongueiro, etc – from neighborhood teenagers in Luanda’s Bairro

Popular. For my second trip and the dissertation research proper I had to work through quite different channels, although my intent was always to study these same international programs.

Several events in late 2006 and early 2007 made it clear that affiliating myself with international NGOs was not likely to be the best way to enter Angola, nor to establish a research relationship with local universities and other institutions. In one incident, for example, an American-based NGO was embarrassed when their President and Chief Executive Officer – a physician with a long and illustrious career in

international development – had her visa application denied. This was just days before

she was to arrive to visit the Angola country office as part of a larger tour of the

organization’s African offices. She still has not visited the Angola country office, to my

knowledge, even five years later. The community of international development workers

took this incident as a sign of their vulnerability in Angola, and I realized it would be

wise to seek other affiliation to support my work.

Arranging a second pre-dissertation trip for six weeks in January-February 2007, I

took a very different tack. Through professors in the Portuguese department at Brown

University, my husband and I had been put in touch with Manuel Rui Monteiro, an

Angolan poet. Towards the end of our first trip in 2006 we had had lunch with Manuel

Rui,7 who was very open to my work and offered to host us in the future. His offer came

in large part because of the excellent relationship he maintains with Brown University’s

Onésimo Almeida. I had connected myself to the Portuguese department at Brown, taking

language courses with Leonor Simas-Almeida, another member of the department and

Onésimo’s wife. Onésimo had thought to put my husband in touch with Manuel Rui as

Matthew was searching out poets, composers, and other authors to collaborate with for

his own work. Manuel Rui was astonishingly enamored of us largely because we were

Onésimo’s and Leonor’s students, and opened his home and quite a lot of his address

book to us during our second trip. These connections were a stroke of luck which literally made the research doable – but only because Manuel Rui is no “ordinary” Angolan poet, his relationship with Onésimo is unique, and, ultimately, because of the way modern history and politics have unfolded in Angola.

7 “Monteiro” is dropped from Manuel Rui’s name for most public use.

Manuel Rui is well-connected among an older generation of Portuguese-speaking

artists and social critics – highly regarded among some of them and near-reviled among others. Manuel Rui was closely involved in the Angolan independence struggle and a key

member of the MPLA early on. He was Minister of Communications during a turbulent part of the early civil war, and some call for him to be charged with war crimes for his actions in this period. He is also a prolific writer, poet, and lyricist. He composed the lyrics for the Angolan national anthem, for instance, and is consistently named among the most influential living Portuguese-language authors, from any country. His celebrity is complex. With hand-written letters of introduction from Manuel Rui, I presented myself to the Director of the National Museum of Anthropology, to the Vice-Minister of Culture, to the then-director of the Angolan National Archives (who is now new Minister of

Culture), to the director of the Angolan Writers Union, and to the Catholic University of

Angola. Having a hand-written introduction from Manuel Rui Monteiro does not enamor

you to everyone in Angola, but it certainly commands a serious sort of attention for you.

On this second trip – with Manuel Rui essentially navigating certain corners of the state

and the intelligentsia on my behalf – I established an institutional affiliation with the

Catholic University. I was later able to have the University, not an international NGO,

request my visa and write me a “guia,” a document of questionable legal standing which

facilitated my travels outside Luanda.8

8 To my knowledge there are no longer laws em vigor (in force) which restrict the movement of individuals inside the Angolan territory. During the war, however, and in a pattern closely following the restrictions of the Soviet Union in the internal movements of its citizens, any traveler had to have a guia from his or her employer or the state which explained why that person’s travel was necessary and outlining the locations and dates of the travel. My guia from the Catholic University, which was non-specific as to places and

I was able to glean several insights into the Angolan context from these series of

“logistical” or “behind-the-ethnographic-scenes” processes. For instance, I learned

through these experiences that the Angolan state is, more or less, the MPLA political

party, but that the party has been fractured over time. Manuel Rui, a founding member,

does not agree with much of what it does anymore, and he has influential, like-minded

friends. I also learned that the state has extreme control over the international aid

organizations working within its borders, and rather likes to flaunt that fact at times.

Finally, I learned that intellectuals – researchers, authors, poets, artists – are held in

extremely high esteem in Angola, as more doors opened with Manuel Rui’s name as an

author and a poet than as a revolutionary or political figure.

These insights compelled me to consider the literature on postsocialist societies

very carefully for what it can say to the Angolan case. There is precious little on African

socialism (though see Askew 2002; Donham 1999) and postsocialism, though the special

issue by Pitcher and Askew (2006) is quite helpful, as is Piot (2010). There is even less

on the Angolan case of postsocialism as such (but see Moorman 2008). But I read deep

ties to the country’s socialist past in the degree of MPLA control over the state (which

began at independence), the timbre of foreign relations between Angola and other

countries, and the role of intellectuals in political and public life. Manuel Rui’s political

and social critiques – that he publishes, it seems, at an ever accelerating pace – also push

me to consider contemporary Angola a post-revolutionary, perhaps failed-revolutionary

case. Clifford’s call to attend to what we learn from our work simply in trying to go about

dates, was only demanded once during my fieldwork, as I was leaving Luanda for Lunda Norte.

it resonates here. Quite a lot of what I know about Angola came not from studying its

development programs and professionals, but from simply trying to organize my study.

Central Arguments: Development Cosmopolitans

Much worse than neglecting our own travel and translation practices, charges

Clifford, is that our anthropological habitus has led us to overlook others’ travels and

translations. This charge resonates strongly with my ethnographic findings. Clifford

proposes that the true work of ethnography should be to portray and understand

“local/global historical encounters, co-productions, dominations, and resistances,”

necessitating a “focus on hybrid, cosmopolitan experiences as much as on rooted, native

ones” (Clifford 1992: 101). This research study attends both to travel (of the

anthropologist and of the “natives”) and to the “hybrid, cosmopolitan” experiences of

development workers in Angola. Clifford’s challenge to consider “culture as travel”

(1992: 103) is amplified by recent studies of cosmopolitanism, transnationalism, and

“translocality.” These studies presume movement, travel, and translations of and by the

study subjects, while asking very different questions about social phenomena than do

studies of globalization or globalisms (Amit and Rapport 2002; Appadurai 1991; Berry and Gabay 2009; Hannerz 1996; Ong 1999; Rogers 2010). Within these discussions of cosmopolitanism and translocality I consider ethnographic evidence about development

professionals. In seeking to understand extra-local connections which are not in point of

fact “global” connections, new theories on the translocal and on “actually existing”

cosmopolitanisms yield the language and intermediary concepts to theorize beyond the

local without inappropriately homogenizing and aggrandizing relationships, actions,

movements, and connections. The arc of these theories remains grounded in an

unapologetic empiricism that refuses to attenuate the rich detail of lived mobilities by

glossing them generically “global” or even “international.”

I develop the idea of the “development cosmopolitan” in two ways, both related to

Clifford’s challenge. First I argue that “local” development professionals hold

international – here, cosmopolitan – knowledges and capabilities far beyond what their

classification in development organizations and in the anthropological literature usually

grants. In this I join a young but growing literature on “local cosmopolitans.” Very often

Angolan professionals have come to this cosmopolitanism through their development

work, but just as often in my case study, the development work attracts and retains those

locals who are already cosmopolitan. This first argument about “local cosmopolitans”

runs counter to some of the anthropological literature on similar cases in, for instance, the

tourism industry. In my findings, development professionals and development institutions

often strategically de-emphasize, even hide, this cosmopolitanism. My contribution to the

ethnographic literature on life in the globalized world grapples with the element of

aspiration in cosmopolitanism, and in globality – here, local development professionals

may seek out opportunity to internationalize further, but often must camouflage these

interests. Alternatively, it is often not the “international” aspect of the technical, political,

and scientific knowledge that they seek that interests them directly, and in fact may be

something to be overcome.

My second argument about “development cosmopolitans” is that their

cosmopolitanism is a unique kind, a cosmopolitanism produced and producing not of the

elite, the urban, or the sophisticated, but of the poor, the disadvantaged and the subaltern.

The type of international knowledge and experience circulated in development

organizations is overwhelmingly of developing, not developed, contexts. These

professionals, whether local or expatriate, are development cosmopolitans by dint of their

particular view of the world as couched in the contexts of the underclass and the

intervened-upon. Further, they are development cosmopolitans in that their global

circulation through the developing countries of the world, their own cosmopolitan

ceiling, is lowered by the global division of the haves and the have-nots. Development

cosmopolitans may be privileged, relative to the underprivileged portions of the world,

but their profession effectively restricts their horizons to those same underprivileged

portions of the world.

This second point about “development cosmopolitans,” is perhaps best made with

reference to the expatriate development professionals in my case study. Expatriate aid

workers do come from all over the world: the United States, Canada, Britain, France,

Belgium, the Netherlands, Armenia, Bangladesh, Brazil, South Africa, Australia,

Mozambique, Cape Verde, and so on. Whether they have come from the global North or

the global South, a great many of them do not arrive in Angola directly from their

country of origin, though some do. Most expatriate development professionals in my case

study, though, have long experience in development work, or in humanitarian emergency

aid. These professionals have often spent more time in the Sudan, Rwanda, Cambodia,

Bosnia, or the Congo, or several of these places serially, than they have in any developed nation beyond childhood. A great many of the “foreign” development personnel in my case study come themselves from other developing nations. I classify them as

“development cosmopolitans,” too, to highlight that their international experience is not

the sophisticated, urban, elite type of cosmopolitanism found in much of the cultural

studies literature – nor will it ever be, as development workers. Their cosmopolitanism is

a collection of international experiences and relationships shaped directly by their work

and by the global structures of inequality that led them to travel the less developed

ground of the globe, rather than the more developed ground.

In the “essentially cosmopolitan world” of development workers, then, I find

cause to enlarge the census of individuals considered cosmopolitan, and to specify and

characterize their particular kind of cosmopolitanism. Here, the cosmopolites compare,

with the language of the connoisseur, various types of corn and cassava home brew rather

than French or Italian wines. This is a group of people who can remark on which brands

of bar soap float in freshwater. They have strong opinions about different brands of

freeze-dried ground coffee. This work produces a cadre of people who know how to reset

Word to print on either A4 paper or 8½ x 11 paper, and who can very often translate

degrees Celsius – in various languages – to degrees Fahrenheit (usually English) with a

fair approximation.

I consider the cosmopolitanism of development workers to be one of the internal

social “effects” of the international development system. The development system, and

the quotidian work of development, attracts certain people (locals and foreigners), with

certain skills and interests, and through its particular sociogeographical coverage and

technical activities then produces a new kind of person out of this curiously middle

ground between local and global – a development cosmopolitan. I find overlapping social

phenomena – governmentality and engagement – to be other “development effects” as

well.

Central Arguments: Governmentality and Engagement

I focus on one effect of development work: that it shapes the subjectivity of

development workers into a type of development cosmopolitan. But this effect is one

aspect, I argue, of a larger governmentality effect that works within the development

apparatus. This “conduct of conduct” that affects development workers comes also as a

form of discipline that I trace separately from cosmopolitanism through rules,

regulations, disciplinary actions, and the internal monitoring and evaluation mechanisms

of development programs and their implementing organizations.

Many of the ethnographic analyses of development, especially those that take a

Foucauldian perspective, have previously considered the governmentality of development

work and of non-governmental organizations (Hanson 2007; Peterson 2001; Rivkin-Fish

2000; Watts 2003). Most of these have, again, focused on the effects on local families and communities – how development programs create citizens, create needs, enhance the

power of the state, and so on. Few studies have considered the governmental effects of

development on development workers, nor their position in the system as simultaneously

the governed, inside these organizations, and the governing, in their engagement with

local communities (Kothari 2005; 2006; Yarrow 2006).

While development workers’ governing engagements with local communities are

one obvious product of development, my study points out that this contact is not

unidirectional, be it top-down, or outside-in. I examine Angolan engagement with the rest

of the world through its development contacts, including state engagement with the

international community and local communities’ contacts with the global community

through aid and development interventions. I find that development interventions open

doors to the international community that local Angolans can often take advantage of.

Local communities and local individuals find access to new resources as well as new

leveraging power over the government through these international connections.

In examining Angolan engagements with the outside world through development

interventions, I argue for a greater acknowledgement in the literature that contemporary

interventions layer over previous interventions (Li 2007). In development project

proposals or assessments, most intervention field sites are painted as new territory for

development’s manifest destiny. Sites are portrayed either as new to intervention at all, as

new to the organization, or new to the technology or to the topic of intervention. Few

policies, statements, or program designs recognize the deep history of intervention –

development or otherwise – already extant in most places. The following chapter is

devoted to this argument and the empirical evidence for it in the Angolan case. I revisit

the argument in the conclusion to focus again on Angolan engagements in the world, the

historical precursors to their contemporary forms, and their potential strategic uses in the future.

Angola in the Middle: Complications, Confusão, and Possibilities

Em Angola, tudo é possível. In Angola, anything is possible.

The focal point of this ethnographic study of development intervention in Angola is a democracy-promotion program that I refer to as the Good Governance in Angola

Program, or the GGAP. The GGAP is a democratization intervention conducted from

2006 through the present in five municipalities, in five different provinces, of Angola.

Figure 1.1

Map of the Good Governance in Angola Program Field and Headquarters Offices

The Good Governance in Angola Program (GGAP) was active in five provinces of Angola. “The American Organization” operated offices in Cuando Cubango and Bié Provinces (pink), “The Canadian Organization” operated offices in Lunda Norte and Cabinda Provinces (blue), and “The British Organization” operated an office in Huambo Province (yellow). Each organization also maintained headquarters offices in Luanda. 38

The GGAP was implemented by a consortium of three international non-

governmental organizations, one American-based, one Canadian-based, and one British-

based. Figure 1.1 presents a map of the Angolan provinces in which the GGAP was

active, coding the provinces by color to indicate which international NGO was

responsible for which provincial field site (colors correspond to those of Figure 3.2). The

structure of the intervention, its history and its field sites are discussed at length in the

following chapter. The individuals and organizations collaborating on the program are

discussed in chapters three and four. At the time of the fieldwork, the program was

funded through the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) with a

total of 16.9 million dollars for the first three years. A significant portion of this funding

came from an oil company and a diamond company as private, corporate donations to

USAID-Angola. Though USAID-Angola administered the funds and committed the

largest share of the funding for the program, they considered these two corporations

important stakeholders in the program and courted them to fund other development

initiatives.

USAID’s close involvement with the oil and diamond companies to fund a

democratization program marks a significant change in the landscape of foreign aid and

international development. In the Angolan context, accusations of state corruption and

state-corporation collusion in this corruption are commonplace and seem to be well-

founded (Hodges 2004; Reed 2009), making this shift in the development landscape

concerning. Several international NGOs declined to pursue USAID’s call for applications

for the GGAP as a result of anti-corruption, pro-transparency, and human rights policies

that prevented them from using oil company monies in their programming. A background

of extractive industry and opacity in corporate and government doings makes for odd

context in a study of a democratization program, its globalizing and disciplinary effects

on development professionals, and the engagement-promoting effects for Angolan communities. In Angola, however, “anything is possible.” A well-regarded

democratization program aiming to improve the transparency and accountability of local

government practices can, in Angola, be supported by international extractive

corporations accused of colluding with an oppressive and opaque central state.

Contradictions, complications, and juxtapositions such as this one, basic to the

study, arise again and again in the details of this ethnographic work. The anthropologist’s

task is to seek out the patterns of these complications both to understand the processes that produce them and to see possibilities for changing them. In the following chapter I

consider the complicated inception of the GGAP as an intervention program to detail the

institutional relationships among the implementing NGOs, the corporate donors, and the

Angolan state in several of its manifestations, situating these in a broader history of

Angolan engagement in the world. Not only is the broad historical and institutional

context important background for my later arguments on development cosmopolitans, it

is a central part of my argument about development as a realm of international

engagement for Angola and Angolans, and for my argument about the historical

trajectories of international interventions in Angola. In Chapters 3, 4, and 5, I go on to

compare and contrast the personal histories and professional trajectories of individual,

“middle figures” in the GGAP development program, and consider an in-depth example

of working life inside the program.

My central arguments in the dissertation, then, are:

1. That development is an important zone for Angolan engagement with the rest

of the world,

2. That development professionals are “cosmopolitan” in a peculiar way, and

that this version of cosmopolitanism is replicated in development encounters,

3. That development intervention has disciplinary effect on the professionals

conducting it as well as on the communities receiving it,

4. That contemporary development interventions are shaped and directed by

previous histories of many kinds of interventions.

In the conclusion I return to development as a social field and a significant,

distinguishing concept and practice in the modern, globalized world. Development is an idea and a practice that produces difference – the haves, the have-nots – and shapes

identities. That it does so, in part, through conditioning its agents is an insight into the

structures and functions of globalization and the production of global inequalities. While

the GGAP and its cosmopolitan personnel, like many international interventions,

intended to have positive effect on local communities and structures of government, it

also had effects which undermined local and national government. The case demonstrates

how international development programs provide local communities, often, with a “direct

line” to the international community and a way to maneuver around or make further

demands upon the state. Though not working, necessarily, to benefit other nations or

other peoples, as Melo might accuse in his editorial columns, this effect of development

can be disconcerting to Angolans in the state or with an ideology against external

interference. Studying a development program ethnographically provides such startling

examples, challenges theories of development, theories and practices of intervention, and

broadens the anthropological critique of how international connection is constructed and

used in the contemporary world. Last, in analyzing how development has become a

venue through which the local can surpass the national and contact the international

directly, the dissertation demonstrates how Angola’s modern engagements in the world

are still both threats and opportunities for the nation and for individual Angolans, much as Kalunga always has been.

“With February's Determination, We Conquer Development”

A government poster found in a cantina in Andulo, Bié Province. This image was also used for billboards in Luanda, Huambo, and elsewhere during 2008’s commemorations of the first armed uprising against the Portuguese in Angola's war for independence (February 4th, 1961). The caption communicates that the same spirit of self-determination with which Angola threw off Portuguese oppression will be used to address the challenges of development.

SITUATIONS AND SITES1

Location (terroir) and action: these seem to be the two key concepts by means of which we may hope to apprehend the ambivalence, the differentiation and the dynamism of the relationships of Africa with the rest of the world (Bayart 2000: 222).

“…and we shouldn’t even be in Cuando Cubango, that Godforsaken place…” -USAID officer, concerning the GGAP office in Cuito Cuanavale

This chapter describes the local and institutional contexts of the five Good

Governance in Angola Program (GGAP) implementation sites, bringing location and

action into simultaneous view. The descriptions provide the necessary background for

delving deeper into the daily, lived experience of the program’s administrators and

implementers in the following chapters, and facilitates the examination of the GGAP as

itself a middle site in the global sphere of development and of Angolan connections with

the rest of the world. Many of the points raised in this chapter are revisited in the

dissertation’s conclusion. Here, I recount how historical patterns of international

1 A preliminary version of this chapter was presented at the Sarah Doyle Women’s Center Dissertators’ Series (September 2010) and at the “Cold War Cultures” conference at the University of Texas at Austin (October 2010). I thank Jennifer Eyl, Kristin Skrabut, Claudia Gastrow, John Kelly, and other audience members at these venues for their productive questions and suggestions. 43

44 intervention and connection prefigure the sites and experiences of contemporary intervention in the case of the GGAP and beyond. To argue that the GGAP and other development interventions are guided by deep histories of “extraversion” and are prefigured in many cases by previous interconnections, manipulations, and mobilities, I draw on the work of political scientist Jean-François Bayart (1993; 2000; 1999).

I use the selection of the GGAP’s field sites to demonstrate how the locations of contemporary intervention were once “the middle” of the civil war, and previous to that were “the middle” during the exploitative period of colonialism as well as of the slave trade before that. Bayart’s work demands an interpretation of these historical interventions as indicators of Angolan engagement in the world and of the manipulation of power from a position of dependence in these events and relationships. My tracing of these Angolan middles through historical periods, reading them through Bayart’s theories, challenges the anthropological literature on development and other contemporary interventions to acknowledge their historical precursors (cf., Li 2007). In making this challenge I also consider the individuals and institutions active in the processual “middle” of selecting these sites for the GGAP. My Bayart-inflected reading of the anthropological literature on development suggests that many analyses focus overmuch on the international community as lone instigator of development projects, rendering local communities only “recipients” (or sometimes “targets,” even “victims”) of development. These uncomplicated dichotomies overlook both the influence of the national level in development and the agency of local communities and individuals in the development process. In my reinsertion of local and national agency, and history, into an

45 anthropological analysis of development intervention, Bayart’s concept of “extraversion” is particularly useful.

Bayart (2000) uses the Angolan example extensively in his arguments about

“African extraversion,” or the modes and strategies by which Africans manipulate a position of dependence in order to access external resources. While in this essay he does not specify which Africans he means to indict as extraverted, and he would seem at times to mean all of them, at most other times he means local elites and those employed by the state. This is his express argument in earlier work (e.g., Bayart 1993). In the later essay,

Bayart’s Angola – whether the state or perhaps all Angolans – is an extreme case of this extraversion principally as an exemplar of how debt and war are classic modes by which external resources are demanded and consumed by African states, political groups, and individuals. Published in English in 2000, Bayart’s essay follows his 1993 book on the nature of African states (“The Politics of the Belly”) and his collaboration with other political scientists on the “Criminalization of the State in Africa” (Bayart, et al. 1999).

Throughout this period, of course, Angola was actively, internally, at war, with significant outside support (Gleijeses 2002; Le Billon 2001). Bayart’s work has since shifted to consider other regions and other topics, and he has not, to my knowledge, assessed the post-war Angolan situation as regards his theories on dependence, extraversion, war and violence, or democracy.

Bayart asserts that there is action and agency in dependence, and that African leaders have been especially adept at exploiting positions of dependence to their personal advantage. Drawing upon Bayart’s arguments about agency-in-dependence, this chapter argues that the GGAP’s siting decisions, among other decisions about development

46 interventions, are not entirely externally imposed, nor top-down, but are instead the results of serial actions and reactions, negotiations and contestations, by a variety of institutional and individual actors, including “dependent” actors. These decisions are the outcomes of complicated maneuverings of power from above and below.

Understanding why development happens where it does, or how and when and by whom, requires tracing development history from a multitude of perspectives and sources. No single policy, institution, or individual has complete control over as complicated an entity as the development machine. “The middle,” as I discussed in the previous chapter, is a concept I return to again and again to point to those places, those moments, and those people who are at the center of international events and global processes such as development. Here, the middle is a rather crowded place, and is anything but stationary or “stuck” – these middles are variously hinges, actuators, fulcrum points – the moments, people, and actions that produce and animate the global.

While other chapters will examine the actions which occur in this middle space of development and the individuals who work in or even inhabit this middle, this chapter looks at where and when – the Angolan places and times – development interventions happen, and the complicated negotiations that precede and accompany them.

I begin with an outline of the GGAP’s structure and implementation activities before turning to a broad introduction to Angolan history that informs my analysis of the

GGAP’s field sites. I then discuss what regions – at the level of the province – the GGAP was designed to work in and what the relevant, interventionist histories are for those provincial sites. I trace at a more intimate level of detail the history of the GGAP’s inception, focusing on how the selection of particular municipalities in each province was

47 negotiated by the relevant organizations and individuals and how this process was seen at different levels of the program. I conclude by comparing this interventionist history of the

GGAP to other cases in the anthropology of development to argue that development interventions can be guided by deep histories of extraversion, by manipulation from positions of dependence, and are prefigured by previous interconnections, manipulations, and mobilities. Later chapters take up the issue of mobilities in the GGAP in more detail, building from this chapter’s focus on interconnections and manipulations in these

Angolan “middle” sites.

Structures of Intervention in the Good Governance in Angola Program

The GGAP was conducted jointly through three international non-governmental organizations (INGOs) that I refer to by their administrative origins: an American INGO, a Canadian INGO, and a British INGO. The American organization held the position of

“lead” NGO for the program and held the contract for the GGAP with USAID, while the

Canadian and British NGOs were technically the American NGO’s sub-contractees for implementation. The GGAP’s program director, called “The Chief of Party” after USAID conventions, held office space in the country office of the American NGO in Luanda, as did the Monitoring and Evaluation staff and two central technical advisors. The American organization was responsible for two implementation field sites, Andulo in Bié Province and Cuito Cuanavale in Cuando Cubango Province. The Canadian organization maintained an advisor at its country office in Luanda and oversaw implementation in

Cabinda City (Cabinda Province) and Dundo/Chitato (Lunda Norte Province). The

British organization, finally, was responsible for implementation in Chicala Cholohanga, in Huambo Province (see Figure 1.1).

The GGAP intended to effect political and social change towards achieving more transparent and effective local governance in Angola through two major activities: community training and organizing, and the training and support of local government offices. In the language of program materials, these two arms of the intervention were intended to complement one another and work simultaneously to promote both greater

“demand” for good governance in local communities as well as greater “supply” of capable government in local municipal administrations.

Towards the aim of improving community “demand” for good governance, the program employed field staff to organize community groups called “ODAs.” What ODA really stood for was in dispute among program staff, administrators, and donors at the time of my fieldwork. Some affiliates of the program considered the acronym to stand for

Organização de Desenvolvimento de Área (Organization for the Development of the

Area) while others considered the final “A” to stand for Aldeia (Village), instead. The difference was important to some and negligible to others, but the very fact of the debate illustrates what sorts of discussions and fluctuations were at play inside the program at the time of the fieldwork.

Those advocating for “Área” intended to emphasize a geographically broad region and a relatively larger population than they felt was referenced by the idea of the

“Aldeia,” a Portuguese term for a small rural village. The use of Aldeia was also offensive to some, as they thought the term referenced a colonial mentality. Critics would point out that “Aldeias” didn’t exist in Angola until the Portuguese unsettled indigenous

49 living patterns and formed work camps and other administrative units conducive to exploitative administration. For a variety of ideological reasons, then, reference to the

ODAs by Área was preferred, but was not accepted by all as appropriately descriptive of the scope of work and intent of the group formed.

As a matter of course, a town or zone of habitation might have had many ODAs formed within it through the auspices of the GGAP – as many as 200 or more in some of the program’s municipalities. ODAs were modeled on a democratic pattern wherein

“presidents,” “secretaries,” “treasurers,” and “advisors” were voted in by majority rule in public meetings. GGAP staff members worked with the ODAs to provide basic literacy and numeracy training, skills in advocacy and community organizing, and to advise on project proposals to be submitted to the GGAP for funding. Using these funding proposals, or “micro-projects,” as a teaching tool, GGAP staff tried to impart basic project planning, budgeting, design, and organizing skills to the ODAs.

In the provincial field offices, certain staff dedicated themselves to “community development” under the auspices of the GGAP and worked with the ODAs towards producing a coherent community voice with which to speak to local government. Other

GGAP staff worked directly with municipal government personnel to impart similar skills in budgeting, planning, and communication. GGAP staff spent time daily with certain members of the municipal government staff in each provincial site and the GGAP contributed computer and other technological support to the local government offices with the intention of improving local government’s abilities to respond to the requests of their constituents.

Together, the “community development” GGAP staff and the “municipal development” GGAP staff coordinated with the municipal government of each implementation site to organize public forums in which local government representatives discussed concerns and plans with community members. For these events the GGAP provided technological audiovisual support, catered meals, organized overnight stays for community representatives traveling from distant parts of the municipality, organized transport or reimbursement for transport for these community representatives and helped both sides – the municipal government administration as well as community representatives – prepare statements and reports to present to one another at the forums.

Angolan Interventions, Angolan Middles

International interventions like the GGAP, and the international interconnections they bring (discussed in the following chapters), have been far more usual in Angola than not. Angolan histories often begin with the Portuguese “discovery” of Angola as part of their 15th century “Voyages of Discovery.” Only after recounting events from the

continental Portuguese perspective do these histories of the Angolan nation then mention

the great indigenous kingdoms of Ngola or the Kongo, for instance, with whom the

Portuguese traded. Most histories of Angola, in fact, have been written from a Portuguese

or European perspective, and accounts of the very earliest periods focus largely on an

introduction to this exotic land and the expected exploitation of slaves, rubber, later

copper, etc, by outside powers. Notably, though, a sizeable portion of Angolan histories

focusing on the modern era have been written with an emphasis on South-South relations

between Angola and Brazil, or Angola and Cuba, etc (e.g., Gleijeses 2002; Miller 1988).

Those few histories – modern and pre-modern – written more from the indigenous perspective also emphasize the external interventions and interconnections of the slave trade and colonialism (e.g., Heintz 2010; Miller 1976). Moorman’s recent work on the

Angolan liberation struggles, in focusing expressly on the modern era inside Angola’s borders, richly detailed how Angolans began to imagine the independent nation. To do so

Moorman found herself expressly writing against the classic narrative which would have the “story of nationalism unfold[ing] almost entirely outside and on the margins of the country” (Moorman 2008: 2). From either perspective, it seems, connections with the outside world have been central to the formation and trajectory of the Angolan experience. Here, I examine sections of this Angolan history expressly to see how they have been shaped by these interconnections and interventions, keeping my focus on those points of external contact and contestation as possible points of “extraversion.”

The historical overview is organized by a rough typology of Angola’s geographic zones – the long coastal region, including Cabinda; the central highlands; the northern and the southern thirds above and below the central highlands; and last, the far eastern extremities bordering Zambia. These five large zones could, and should, of course be further subdivided for detailed examination but for my purpose here it is sufficient to conceptualize Angola first as made up of these five zones that roughly correspond to major ethnic divisions in the country, major divisions of ecological terrain, and certain patterns of historical intervention by outsiders.

While the Portuguese are credited with the first European contact with Angolan lands and peoples, other Europeans and indeed, other outsiders, were not terribly far behind. The coastal regions, and particularly the northern coast at the Congo River, saw

52 the first sustained European contact. The bays at Luanda, Benguela and Namibe, also saw early and nearly continuous contact with Portuguese, Dutch and later, Boer traders and settlers. Both Portuguese and Boer settlements, businesses, and trading routes were common in the coastal and southern areas of the country through the 1900s. Though the

Portuguese did not colonize in a manner entirely comparable to the British or the French, they did, through the late 1800s, build up several cities on the coast as well as establish infrastructure inland to pursue slaving as well as trade with the Belgian and British colonies (see Figure 2.1). These early routes, first walking and horse trails, then wagon trails, finally became Angola’s first roads and railroads. Even today, there are very few roads or railroads traversing Angola, a country roughly twice the size of Texas, and the routes of these earliest roads and railroads – themselves built upon the earliest slaving and trading routes – continue to be the important lines along which people and goods move through Angola, shaping Angolan relationships with the outside world as well as its internal dynamics (see Figure 2.2). This brief geographical history, as well as the ethnic and religious histories I touch later, are key to my arguments about how previous interventions and interconnections prefigure those of the present.

If Angola should be composed of five roughly distinguishable regions, Angolan history can also be divided into five irregularly-spaced periods: the pre-colonial, the colonial, the war for independence, the war for one-party control, and the contemporary post-war period. In each of these periods Angola has had distinctive relationships with the outside world. Different parts of Angola, in fact, have had different relationships with different outsiders. The geography and history of the nation together contextualizes the debates and concerns of the GGAP and of contemporary Angolan development.

Figure 2.1: Slave Trade Routes in Central Angola (Miller 1988)

Slaves were captured in the central highlands and beyond, brought down on established trails to one of the ports at Luanda, Amboim, Benguela, or Lobito for exportation to the Caribbean, the American south, or Brazil. 54

Figure 2.2: Angolan Railways (Guimarães 1998)

Angolan railways from the port cities of Luanda, Benguela, and Namibe were built following the old slave trails onto the highlands. 55

Figure 2.3: Locations of International Humanitarian Intervention in 2000 (OCHA 2000)

Fighting in the Angolan civil war often centered around strategic infrastructures such as roads, bridges, and railroads. Humanitarian interventions followed these same sites both to aid combatants and victims and to make use of surviving infrastructure, such as roads and railways, for their own deliveries of goods and services. 56

GGAP Provincial Sites

Tania Li (2007) traces the impacts and effects of sequential interventions in the

Sulawesi Highlands of Indonesia, finding that the unintended effects of one intervention necessitate and provide justification for the next. For Li, the history of intervention in

Indonesia is, even through its many faults, a history of attempts to improve local conditions and livelihoods, in a mode she references as “trusteeship.” Her case for

Indonesia is compelling, and this history of good intentions may be similar in other postcolonial settings. Postcolonial Angola, however, does not conform to this history of genuine trusteeship, nor to a history of well-intentioned interventions aimed at improvement, however faulty in practice. The Portuguese intended very little improvement in their colonies, though over the 500 or so years they were more or less formally engaged in Angola there is, of course, much variation. As a broad characterization, we may say the Portuguese were almost always motivated to extract goods and resources from their colonies. Alternatively, their intent was to expand their territory, settling in the colonies so as to take possession and effectively conduct their extraction and consumption in situ rather than from a distance. In neither of these scenarios was there much concern for the conditions and livelihoods of local peoples, except as a labor resource.

In more than a decade of research, Li found it very curious that one of her field sites in the Central Sulawesi highlands received “wave after wave of interventions” – beginning nearly a century before and showing no signs of abatement – while the other received almost no government or external attention in the way of improvement schemes.

Li leaves this comparative observation un-interrogated so as to follow other important

57 questions, but I pick it up here to frame my own investigation of the GGAP intervention.

Why was the GGAP implemented in the five provinces, and five municipal sites, that it was? Angola has 18 provinces and over 180 municipalities, many of them with similar problems and compelling need. That Cabinda city in Cabinda, Dundo/Chitato in Lunda

Norte, Chicala Cholohanga in Huambo, Andulo in Bié and Cuito Cuanavale in Cuando

Cubango should be singled out from all of these, for this intervention, is not necessarily a straightforward outcome to understand, or to explain.

The USAID request for applications (RFA) for the GGAP specified that the program should run in five provinces, though the particular municipalities which would be targeted in those provinces were left unspecified in the RFA. The targeted provinces, then, even before the program had been formally awarded to a consortium of implementing agencies, were Cabinda, Lunda Norte, Bié, Huambo, and Cuando

Cubango. Each of these provinces has its unique history, problems, needs, and resources, and together they are a curious grouping of development sites. Here I consider briefly these provinces at a gross level, but this orientation is necessary context and background to consider the daily workings of the GGAP in these disparate sites, as well as to understand the interconnections, manipulations, and mobilities of the program and its personnel among and across them, including in the determination of the GGAP municipalities.

Central Highlands: Bié and Huambo

Bié and Huambo as sites for intervention pair rather naturally together; they are neighbors in the central highlands of the country, and together are considered the

58 historical heartland of the Ovimbundu. Both provinces were heavily affected by the civil war, serving as a headquarters region for UNITA for much of the war. Jonas Savimbi was himself born in Bié province, near Andulo, and educated in mission schools in that municipality, where stories are still told – though somewhat surreptitiously – about his brilliance as a student of languages and his defiance of the mission authorities, even as a young boy. Clearly among the favorite stories told, one concerned Savimbi’s considerable skill as a dancer, and how he danced in a traditional Ovimbundu style, defying mission rules to dance only in “civilized,” European styles, earning several beatings for his transgressions. In the post-war period, the mansion Savimbi built in

Andulo during the civil war, including his underground bunkers, has been appropriated by the state and now houses the municipal administrator, whose cell phone fills the house with an MPLA ringtone.

The worst fighting of the 1990s occurred in Bié Province, particularly in Kuito, the provincial capital. Huambo and Bié are still considered the heart of UNITA territory and are today central targets for government investment and intervention, with the idea that these attentions will help to quell any remaining unrest in the area and win UNITA supporters over to the MPLA. All three of the GGAP consortium organizations had some programmatic history in one or both of these provinces as providers of humanitarian relief programs during the civil war. The American organization, for instance, had had an enormous demining program based in Kuito for much of the 1990s, in addition to food relief, medical services, and periodically as an organizer of IDP camps. The British organization, based out of Huambo Province, had a similarly wide variety of programming, and in fact their Huambo City office even today is larger and supports

59 more personnel than does their Luanda office. The Canadian organization, focusing on housing and livelihoods, similarly has a long-established presence in Huambo, though much less so in Bié. These three organizations would have been competitive in responding to an RFA targeting Huambo and Bié, and the government’s and USAID’s interest in fielding programs there is similarly predictable.

From all sides of the equation, Bié and Huambo are attractive field sites for development intervention. The central government wishes to provide rehabilitative services in the hopes of winning over the heartland of the resistance. USAID has long interest in the region, as well, as during the war for independence the Americans supported – at times secretly, at times openly – the UNITA resistance forces. Now, though, in partnership with the MPLA state, USAID shares concerns about stability and satisfying physical and infrastructural needs so as to avoid further conflict. For the implementing organizations of the consortium, they have long histories in the region, and are interested in turning those relationships, experiences, and expertise into further successes. Though Bié is a diamond-producing province, to my knowledge private donors have not singled it out as a strategic investment site, though this is certainly the case for Lunda Norte and Cabinda Provinces.

Northern Provinces – Lunda Norte and Cabinda

Lunda Norte is also one of Angola’s diamond-producing provinces and together with Lunda Sul, forms a region renowned for political unrest and its geographical and sociopolitical distance from the heart of the nation. The Lundas, as they are together referred to, are in the far northeast corner of Angola, and were never as firmly held by the

Portuguese colonialists as were the coastal zones. Roads, rail, colonial infrastructure, and border control have never been strong in the region. The Congo-Angolan border artificially bifurcates large ethnic groupings of the Tchokwe and the Bakongo, and linguistic, religious, and ethnic ties are very tight across the border. It is said, in Luanda, that people in the Lundas think of themselves first as Bakongo or Tchokwe, and then only secondarily as Angolan or Congolese. The border along the Lundas is, for many reasons then, very porous to the DRC, and during the war for independence Holden Roberto’s

FNLA based itself in the Congo to make frequent and ever deepening incursions into northern Angola. During the 2008 Parliamentary elections the MPLA lost an impressive

40% of the vote to PRS in Lunda Sul, and 26% in Lunda Norte, events I consider further at the close of the chapter. None of the GGAP consortium organizations had a history of working in the Lundas before the GGAP.

Lunda Norte came to be a field site for the GGAP as a result of donor restrictions.

Looking for ways to increase their “corporate social responsibility” profiles, an American diamond company approached USAID to offer their support for development programs in the provinces from which they extract diamonds. When USAID agreed to accept their money, the donation was restricted to development programs in the Lundas, specifically.

For many in the development industry, this situation seems a sort of “reverse conditionality,” and, as mentioned in the previous chapter, USAID’s working so closely with corporate donors in funding the GGAP is an unusual arrangement. Despite having no previous programs, no offices, and no contacts in Lunda Norte, in order to qualify for the GGAP award, one of the implementing consortium members had to take on the onerous job of establishing a brand new field office in the far northern border province.

The Canadian organization took on this task, literally building a field office from scratch and installing there both the GGAP as well a “Land Laws” program focusing on land rights education and land registration.

An American oil company made similar stipulations about its donations to

USAID, which is how Cabinda came to be a field site for the GGAP. This oil company has large oil drilling operations off shore near Cabinda and Zaire Provinces, and is attentive to the use of their funds through USAID and other development agencies. Once

USAID accepted both corporations’ contributions, then, at least two of the five GGAP provinces were effectively dictated, regardless of the eventual implementing organizations’ experiences or site preferences. The Canadian organization, in fact, was assigned both the Lunda Norte and Cabinda offices, a pair of field sites seen as quite burdensome by other consortium members. The Canadian organization had had a small micro-credit program in Cabinda City for several years, but it was a bare bones operation, with very few staff and no real office infrastructure to speak of. This organization was expected to establish two brand new field offices in distant provinces that it had never really worked in before.

The Southern Provinces – Cuando Cubango

The final province is perhaps the most mysterious of the GGAP collection –

Cuando Cubango. The site of the largest battle fought in Africa since World War II,

Cuando Cubango was heavily affected by the war for independence, particularly through the 1980s, as South African and Cuban forces were active in the southern parts of the country and the Namibian war for independence was being fought between the South

African forces and SWAPO. Like the Lundas, Cuando Cubango in the southern and easternmost part of Angola was not as well developed during the Portuguese colonial period, and since the war has suffered from extreme neglect. The province is known for its high density of landmines, difficulty of access, and for the presence of nomadic groups who speak languages from the Khoisan family, rather than Bantu languages as does most of the rest of Angola.2 Previous to the wars it had been rangeland and agricultural land,

and several small nomadic and semi-nomadic groups, for instance the Himba, live there.

None of the consortium members had before fielded programs in Cuando Cubango before

the GGAP, either, although UN and others had been active with de-mining operations

and IDP camps at various points during the long civil war.

To explain this selection of the five field provincial sites, then, we must account

for multiple, and competing, interests. No single involved organization – not even

USAID – had interests consistent with all of these field sites. Only two (Bié, Huambo)

had had significant NGO presence by members of the GGAP consortium prior to the start

of the GGAP. Two of the new provincial field sites (Cabinda, Lunda Norte) were

mandated by donor restrictions from an oil company on the coast and a diamond

company in the interior, and were new not only for the implementing organizations, but

for USAID presence as well. The corporate donors had themselves very little interest in

programs outside their areas of extraction. The last provincial field site (Cuando

2 In Luanda, more than half the population speaks Portuguese as a first language, and many do not speak an indigenous language whatsoever. In the provinces most people speak an indigenous Bantu language, and those with some state or religious education speak basic Portuguese. In the southern provinces there are pockets of the Khoisan language family, particularly among small nomadic groups who straddle the Angola- Namibia border.

Cubango) was mandated by the Ministry of Territorial Administration (MAT) for reasons unknown to the program staff, as I describe next. Keeping this brief, but broad, background in mind, I turn now to demonstrate how the interconnections, manipulations, and mobilities inherent in any development intervention, were perhaps particularly

“extraverted” in the GGAP case.

GGAP Situations

Program Inception

In so much as the publicly formal life of the GGAP began with the USAID call for applications under that name, the outside observer could be led to think that USAID had discretion over the methods, personnel, and location of the intervention they designed and administered. In tracing the history of that call, of the design of the program, and of the first year or two of the intervention, however, it becomes clear that no single institution had clear control over these matters. In fact, the RFA which announces the program is itself the culmination of a series of events and relationships, even though it is the beginning of the publicly available documentary trail of a development program.

The Good Governance in Angola Program was not designed from whole cloth, but roughly modeled on an intervention begun in the peri-urban neighborhoods of Luanda in 2001. This earlier program, referred to here as the Good Governance in Luanda program, or the GGL, is still ongoing. That the methods of the GGAP are similar to the methods of the GGL, however, also do not fully relay the impetus and beginnings of the

GGAP. In this section, I will explain how the GGAP is an outgrowth of the immediate post-war period, where international NGOs were scrambling for a way to continue

64 operations in a highly changed context. For decades, international NGOs had been working on “relief programs” – particularly food aid, but also medical services delivery, housing and education for internally displaced persons, and other “humanitarian emergency” programs during the war. With Savimbi’s death in 2002, the war was quite suddenly over, and international NGOs were left with orders to close up shop or justify their continuing presence in the country with post-war reconstruction programs or long term development work. The transition from emergency work to development work is fraught, and not all international NGOs working in Angola were able or willing to navigate it, though some were well positioned to do so. Here, participant interviews trace the development of the GGL in the few years immediately preceding the end of the war in 2002 and the adaptation of the GGL design in the creation of what eventually became the GGAP. What controversy existed in the creation of the GGAP seems not to have centered around its goals or its methods as much as in where it was meant to be conducted.

That the physical locations of the intervention were at issue is not so surprising, perhaps, but the debates and tactics around site selection are informative about what is at stake for which parties, and what points of leverage they each have at their disposal to direct matters the way they would like them to go. My participation with the GGAP began in the early few months of 2008, so much of the discussion and negotiation around site selection was completed by the time I began my observations. My first inkling of those debates came at the close of a meeting at USAID in March of 2008 (this meeting is discussed in more detail in the following chapter). As some of the meeting participants were being escorted out of USAID’s offices on the second floor of the American

Embassy in Luanda, a USAID program officer tossed a pen down on the table and said to the remaining GGAP staff members “…and we shouldn’t even be in Cuando Cubango, that God-forsaken place.”3 The meeting had been about the program’s operations in

Lunda Norte, and after the meeting those remaining had been discussing the logistical

challenges of working in the far northern province, but with this comment suddenly the

conversation turned to other program sites.

I was surprised, at the time, to hear that anyone involved in the program felt so strongly that it should not be happening somewhere. I had had the impression that the program was something of a USAID darling, and that while they would love to implement it almost anywhere in Angola, these sites had been specially chosen as among the neediest and most important to be working in at that time. I was still new to observing the project at the time of this meeting, and it took me a moment to process his comment. I had understood until this point that USAID was running the show as regards the GGAP – that they had originally proposed the project and its sites and its methods, awarding their funding to the best-prepared implementation proposal, which had come from this consortium of NGOs. I was surprised to hear that USAID did not, evidently, have an internally consistent opinion on the program design and project sites. Finally, I was frankly shocked that this officer had expressed his dissent with an observer in the room

(USAID people in my experience are usually quite guarded, and “on message”). The other participants – GGAP administrators from two of the consortium organizations – jumped right in, though, to what was obviously a long-running debate about where this

3 This was said in English. At the close of the Portuguese-language meeting (the significance of which I discuss in the next chapter, in “Maximino’s” example), once the corporate representatives and the USAID Mission director had left the room, the remaining USAID and GGAP personnel switched into English.

66 democratization program should work and why. As I gleaned that day, the selection of municipalities and even of provinces that the GGAP works in had been very unpopular among certain of the implementers and funders. This comment, and the discussions and interviews I participated in over the course of the fieldwork, demonstrated that each of the institutional – and many of the individual – partners involved with the GGAP had very different and often competing preferences for where the resources and skills of the program would be best directed.

I present next the explanation of the GGAP’s Chief of Party, who was a central figure in the program’s conception and design and who was administratively responsible for its implementation. I briefly compare his explanations of the program’s founding with those of Helena, a senior Angolan who had worked with the GGL for several years before becoming an advisor to the GGAP. She left the GGAP just before its midpoint to work on programs with similar methodologies in Huíla, in the southern part of Angola (her case is discussed in the next chapter). These “architects” of the GGL and GGAP programs, when their accounts are compared and contrasted, paint a picture of development in Angola which is one of interconnections and mobilities – conversations, workshops, social contacts, and visitors within the development sphere – and one of manipulation of resources, actions, and personnel. Particularly in the debates about where the GGAP should work and why, the manipulation of the program, and of other resources and actions on behalf of the program, is revealing of the different motivations and strategies – perhaps of the extraversion – of different persons and parties invested in Angolan development.

Osman was the GGAP Chief of Party from the time of the consortium’s original submission to USAID. A Bangladeshi, he had been in Angola with his wife and children for roughly four years at the time of my fieldwork, and was a 25-year veteran of the

American NGO, working with them first in Bangladesh, moving up in administrative responsibilities through Kenya, the US, the Sudan, and now Angola (his trajectory is discussed in detail in chapter four). His wife, a medical doctor, had found a position working as the resident physician for Luanda’s International School, and as a result of her staff position there, they were able to send their two children to the very expensive institution for half-price. Osman is a dedicated family man, showcasing videos of his children’s piano recitals on his computer in the office, and recounting weekend adventures and conversations he had with them. He’s proud of his wife’s professional accomplishments and her excellence as a homemaker, and fairly beams with pleasure when he discusses his home life.

He gives a lot of thought to his children’s futures, and especially to their educations. He dreams of his daughter becoming the US ambassador to Bangladesh,

“because she’s a US citizen, you know,” explaining that she was born in the US. He dreams of his son, who was born in Kenya, going into business with an MBA from

Harvard. Osman is an invariably long-term thinker, both for his family and for his professional projects. He is an energetic networker, keeping careful track of who’s who in the local international development scene (though he has more knowledge of the expatriates than of the Angolans) and paying attention to the international news media.

During the 2008 US Presidential elections and after, a favorite topic of conversation for

Osman was the list of candidates for Obama’s foreign policy team. Osman did not

68 approve of the appointment of Susan Rice, for instance, because of her track record on the Sudan.

Though avidly tracking US and international news events, Osman, to my knowledge, did not read Angolan newspapers nor attend to television or radio news in

Angola, and was strikingly unaware of current events and debates in the local public sphere. During an internal workshop on “Emergency Preparedness,” for instance, Osman and I were assigned to the same small group to help mock up a contingency plan for the

American NGO in the case of violence around the September 2008 Parliamentary elections. As part of the group’s discussion, Osman gave a heated, and lengthy, pronouncement that the government should be actively rooting out and collecting all the leftover armaments from the war as the scheduled day for the elections crept ever closer, seemingly unaware that the government had been doing just that using a massive public advertisement campaign incorporating billboards, newspaper ads, radio and television spots, etc.

Despite this lack of awareness of the local milieu, and despite other difficulties to be discussed later, Osman was highly regarded by many of the programmatic and administrative staff I spoke with during my fieldwork. The programmatic staff found him

“inspiring” and “visionary” in that he worked on that far-future time scale, arguing for social and attitudinal change in Angola. In a brief interview early on in my fieldwork,

Osman explained the GGAP program as an intervention that would help Angolans “build their own destinies:”

…we initiate processes where – in my opinion, it’s called the rights- bearers and the rights-holders – work together to build their own destinies. I came from a country which is also third world and underdeveloped and some of the dilemmas that I see here are the same in my country. The

arrogance, the non-acceptance of the role of the civil servant…particularly the civil servants. They never feel that they are the servant of the citizens, that their job is to provide services; often they take the role that they are the master of the citizens and they are taking the same colonial role, colonial path that the colonial civil servants used to do...gaining the respect and gaining the things by fear.

Osman found it easy to place blame for Angola’s political problems and its development challenges, though he was even-handed in assessing that blame. Here, he opines that the state officers do not meet their responsibilities, but elsewhere he also finds fault with the Angolan people who do not make demands, who do not work on their own behalf to agitate for change. The topic of this interview, however, was meant to be the origination of the GGAP program, which Osman goes on to locate within a dense web of interconnection between institutions and between individual development professionals.

His sense of the history of the moment in Angola’s trajectory focuses on the intervention of external bodies and the corruption of the state both during and after the war.

R: So, how did the [GGAP] come about?

Osman: So this is an interesting question. The peace in Angola came in a little bit of a sudden way. It was not a very systematic process of a peace deal that was signed. One nice day, Savimbi was killed, and peace was there. And that war was never being an ideological war because the war was between two power mongers. So when one died, the other got the victory easily. So there was no ideology here to fight for.

Osman began his answer to the question “so, how did the GGAP come about?” by first prefacing with the national post-war context – there had been “no ideology to fight for” in his estimation, and the war had ended with one “power monger” being killed, and the other “getting the victory easily.” In beginning his answer this way, I believe Osman essentially writes the state and Angolan politics out of his story. His point here is not that

70 the warring parties lacked an agenda for development, but that they even lacked a particular political agenda beyond exclusive, personal control of the nation.

In awarding the title “power monger” to Dos Santos and the MPLA, and therefore to the Angolan state as a whole, he implies that he believes the Angolan government and certainly its politicians to be unconcerned about the welfare of the people.4 This is an

opinion he reiterated throughout other conversations and comments over the course of my

fieldwork. While he is in good company in accusing the warring parties of corruption and

a lack of concern for the Angolan people, he’s not entirely accurate in pinning the

entirety of the fault with José Eduardo Dos Santos as a private individual (Hodges 2004;

Messiant 2001). In his contempt for the lack of “ideology” in the Angolan civil war,

Osman is faulting the warring sides, and particularly their respective leaders, for what he

sees as a lack of political vision for the future. He situates the war, here and in other

conversations, as a struggle between greedy men for the immediate control of present-day

resources. Osman is inclined to the revolutionary, a believer in historic, epic struggle, and

in situating the immediate post-war period thusly, as one where the greedy were in

charge, he essentially opens up a moral space for intervention by external actors with

more benevolent “ideology,” or “vision.”

Osman then enters directly into the problematic of the international NGO transitioning from relief work to development work. At the time of Savimbi’s death, the

American NGO had really only one “development” program in its portfolio – the GGL

program being run in peri-urban Luanda. All other programming was aimed at

4 Most analyses of the MPLA do not consider Dos Santos a “power monger” in the same way that Savimbi, especially in the later years, is considered to have been. Dos Santos is more often considered a front man for a powerful group of interrelated families.

71 emergency humanitarian relief for war-affected populations, mostly in Bié and Huíla

Provinces. Significantly, however, the American organization was participating in a large consortium of five international NGOs on an enormous food relief project, shipping supplies into the country through the deep water port at Lobito. Just before Osman arrived, there had been some concern across the five organizations about whether or not their emergency food relief, their “aid,” was truly getting to their intended beneficiaries.

The shared program had conducted a self study which concluded that, in that the program relied heavily on local “traditional authorities” to organize the recipient communities, distribute goods and resources, and especially to select those community members most appropriate for attendance at NGO events, the program partners felt they may well have been reinforcing patrimonial systems of exclusion and discrimination with their programming. This recent experience made the American organization very interested in alternative methodologies for interacting with communities in which they did not depend so heavily on certain private individuals – “local experts” or “traditional authorities” – to work in close, mediating partnership with them.

Among the first activities Osman participated in when he arrived in Angola in

2004, then, was to work on a “Transitional Program Initiative,” a small research study funded by USAID and the United States Institute for Peace to determine how best to work in Angola now that the war was over. What sorts of long-term development strategies were most needed? In what manner could the organization move forward without relying on local “traditional authorities” to determine participant lists? In this process the methodology of the GGL program stood out, which, beginning in 2001, had formed community committees to work with local government bodies on specific

72 projects like electrification, installing water points, etc. The GGL program, still ongoing, was a DfID-funded project run in several of the peri-urban neighborhoods of Luanda by three of the same five organizations who had been working together on the large emergency food relief program.5 These same three organizations eventually became the

GGAP consortium, as well.

Helena was an older and quiet but powerfully charismatic Angolan who had been

working with the American organization for several years when I met her. As I arrived in

Luanda to begin my fieldwork, Helena, who maintained a home in the Bairro Popular

quite near to where my family and I stayed, had been working with the GGAP after

several years with the GGL program but had recently resigned that post to take up the

same sort of work with the organization in Huíla and Cunene provinces (see next chapter

for a fuller accounting of this transition). In speaking with Helena during a brief visit of

hers back to Luanda after her move to Huíla, I asked her to tell me “the history of the

GGAP,” and she began by saying:

We implemented the GGL program, and had successes. The intention, the purpose of this program was to reduce poverty, and we thought that the models we had made in Kilamba Kiaxi [a peri-urban district of Luanda] should expand to all of the municipalities in Angola. Of course, as you know, as a non-governmental organization, we would never have the capacity or the funding to do this in every municipality.

Helena, then, began her accounting solidly within the American NGO and

emphasized the GGAP’s relationship to its precursor program, whereas Osman began

with the national context of the immediate post-war period and the lack of “ideology” in

5 Of the remaining two organizations, one did not work at all in Luanda, and the other had a health focus rather than a governance and infrastructure focus, and so did not participate in the Good Governance in Luanda program.

73 the government. Here, Helena set out a successful precedent in the GGL program, making an implicit contrast to the state with her remark that an NGO would “never” be able to address every municipality with its programming, regardless of its successfulness.

Helena’s comment here, in the Postsocialist context of Angola, should not be read as an argument for increased funding and expansion of the NGO’s operations. She implicates the state, with this comment, as the state in Angola is envisioned as having capacity to reach “every municipality.” Where Osman effectively narrated the state out of his accounting, Helena implicitly made it central; the state would be able to carry a program

out to every municipality in the country, she implied, but one NGO – even a consortium

of NGOs, no matter their funding – could not.

For both of these centrally placed staff members, the institutional setting and the

opposition of the NGO to the state were anchoring elements to the story of the GGAP,

and to their accounting of their activities as professionals over the previous several years.

For Osman, though, the state had no political – which for him means development – ideology, and therefore all the action took place outside the state, or even against the state, as I will show shortly. For Helena, the state had coverage, reach, and capacity that the NGOs would never have, but the NGOs had had “successes,” on small scales, that the state hadn’t had. She essentially saw the GGL program as pioneering something that the state should then adopt and, in its all-powerful way, roll out everywhere. In speaking with

Helena, I agreed that it would be difficult to expand the GGL program to all of Angola, and she continued:

And not only that, but Kilamba Kiaxi is a municipality in the capital of the country; you must test the program in other areas, [you must ask] ‘what do you need to do to make a successful program in the interior of the country, in municipalities with different social levels?’ And so we designed a

program, [the GGAP], to replicate what GGL has done here. We designed it and then, happily, we were able to win a donor, USAID, and also, during the design phase we consulted with MAT.

Helena here reversed the inception that Osman has outlined for us – Osman had conducted research to locate lacunae in Angolan development, and then stumbled upon the GGL as the right way to address those. Helena here is entrenched in the GGL, and knowing that it should get expanded and adapted to other areas, painted a picture of the program administrators shopping for funders to help them with that expansion and reach.

Helena makes mention here of the Ministry of Territorial Administration (MAT), which was created in 1991 with the signing of the Bicesse accords and is charged with three main responsibilities, among others: the training and oversight of “local administrations,” meaning the municipal level and below; the oversight of “traditional authorities;” and the administration of the electoral process in Angola. In that the GGAP was intended to promote fiscal decentralization and democratization, and GGAP staff spent a lot of time with local administrators, the GGAP was honestly very pleased to have the attentions of this ministry, and found then Vice-Minister Mota Liz particularly responsive and productive to work with. Technically, the operations of international non- governmental organizations like those who implemented the GGAP were supposed to be overseen by UTCAH, the “Technical Unit for the Coordination of Humanitarian

Assistance” part of the Ministry for Social Assistance and Reinsertion (MINARS).

MINARS and UTCAH had been, according to GGAP staff, unresponsive and hostile to them for years (discussed further in the dissertation’s conclusion). The GGAP was quite pleased to be able to claim oversight by and compliance to the Angolan government

75 through its connections with MAT, avoiding as much as possible any contact with

UTCAH.

It was clear to all involved that, at heart, the GGAP was simply the GGL program expanded beyond Luanda, to the provinces. But Osman painted a picture of interrogation, reflection, research-based decision making, and then simply happening upon the “right” answer right in his own backyard. After his work on the Transitional Program Initiative in 2004, he participated in 2005 in a reflection workshop with members of the five consortium NGOs about the emergency food relief program and the TPI findings. The consortium hired an external consultant who was working on similar issues in Liberia to help them sort through the issues of local contact with traditional authorities, how to otherwise go about transitioning from relief-focused work to development work, and as many in the room were familiar with the GGL program, its methodologies of community committee formation were widely discussed. Also in 2005, a new USAID Mission

Director was assigned to Angola. According to Osman, the expatriate development community had not thought highly of the outgoing director, who was rumored to be a womanizer and rather more interested in attending oil company parties than in discussing serious issues of post-conflict development.

With the incoming director, the international development community was hoping there would be renewed vigor and support for their work from USAID, and the new director was, I believe, courted by these organizations to attend their workshops, visit their field sites, and become as well-acquainted with their work as she cared to be.

Osman, acting director of the American NGO at the time, invited the new USAID

Director to Andulo to see their field sites in Bié Province, and discussed with her there

76 their new ideas for forming community committees and encouraging local communities to partner more directly with local government bodies to determine and pursue their development goals. He recalls that:

…so she came, to Andulo, and we had an overnight in Andulo and we talked to some of the members, we talked to our staff, we talked to some community members, we talked about what are the demands. And she really got the idea that as a matter of fact Angola doesn’t need heavily driven rehabilitation programs, what it needs, it needs overall awareness of the communities about their demands and pushing those demands to civil society and to government in a way that they feel obligated. So creating the dialogue and creating the democratic space is more urgent.

Osman goes on, below, to credit this orchestrated field visit with practically determining the new USAID director’s opinions and ideas on how post-war development in Angola should be pursued. He emphasizes the influence of interpersonal relationships as well:

…I stayed with her and reinforced some of these things and then the reference was given to the GGL program – what was going on in the GGL program and, as an organization, what we were learning. At that time the DfID guy was based here – [he] was a very close friend of [the new USAID director], they became very close, and [he] reinforced with [her] some of the GGL learning and pushed those issues about how he sees the longer term development for this country. Talking about good governance, transparency, pushing the components of good governance – participation, transparency, and accountability are the key factors in this case.

And then [she] did an excellent job in terms of developing their own strategy plan for the next five years, USAID’s strategy plan. They brought some consultants from the States, particularly called MSI – Management Services International – they sent some of their top-notch consultants to come and work with the USAID local mission as well as their partners, all the civil society and all the NGOs and the private sector – BFA Bank and Banco Sol and [corporate industries] to make an inclusive discussion with different stakeholders of USAID and based on the feedback that they received they have a kind of a number of days of discussion and dialogue in Hotel Alvalade, and where organizations like [the American NGO] and all the International NGOs whether they are partners of USAID or not but

they have long experience of working in Angola; they had a long discussion and reported feedback. And based on those discussions and feedback USAID came up with a new strategic plan, strategic 5 year plan.

The affiliation of USAID Angola with oil companies, diamond companies, other private industrial organizations and banks, is contentious in some circles. During my first visit to Angola in late 2005, for instance, USAID had just issued an RFA that was very attractive to the NGO Catholic Relief Services, with whom I was spending some time.

The top-level administrators of the organization were in a tizzy calling USAID to confirm whether or not oil money was being used for the proposed program, as their international headquarters offices had denied them permission, due to conservationist and human rights concerns, to work on any program being funded with money from an oil company.

After witnessing the stress of these organizations caught in the middle of tense funding negotiations – where’s the money coming from exactly? – what can we use it for? Where can we use it? – I was sensitive as to whether or not these issues were of concern to other organizations. Osman, below, takes an “ends justifying the means” approach, valuing the work that’s done with the money more highly than the ills produced by the folks making the money in the first place:

This was a major step, because USAID knows that they don’t have enough money to go around and implement all their strategic choices, so they wanted other players to come in and work together. Which is absolutely very visionary work and I think [the new director] had a vision and she pursued it and I think she did a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful job.

R: Was it controversial at all?

O: I don’t think it was controversial but one of the key, fascinating points about this relationship that [she] forged was that corporate industry like [oil companies] or [diamond companies], they are the people who are less interested in good governance; they are less interested in human rights,

they are less interested in pushing these democratic principles because their maximum effort is how they can maximize their profit level. Bringing them on board and getting involvement in a program like [the GGAP] is unbelievable. It’s huge. It’s a paradigm shift. To me. And given the fact that the government itself is very suspicious about issues like transparency and good governance issues and getting [the oil company] involved in supporting those issues is very surprising.

Osman, in these extended quotations, lauds a “visionary” and evidently charismatic personality, the new USAID director, for putting together all the

“stakeholders” in Angolan development – USAID, in private conversation with DfFID, all the international NGOs, and the banks and oil companies. I can’t myself imagine that

Angolan NGOs weren’t there, at least certain of the larger ones, but Osman doesn’t name them here. Nor does he cite the presence and influence of Angolans – state, private, non- governmental, or otherwise -- in this large conversation about setting USAID’s 5 year strategic plan. What he does emphasize, to my reading, is his own behind-the-scenes orchestration of the USAID director’s visit to Andulo, her close friendship with the director of DfID, who funded the GGL, and the gathering of certain stakeholders. We see manipulation and interconnection in this recounting rather clearly. Osman goes on to emphasize that it was really very brave of all those involved to make the decisions they made – they decided to list good governance as a top priority for USAID’s Angola mission. They decided that democratic participation was a key goal in the development of the nation. The design of the GGAP then came out of USAID’s strategic plan. Helena’s accounting of the history was very different, remember, with GGL winning over USAID to fund its expansion as the GGAP, rather than USAID setting goals and then designing the GGAP to meet them.

Importantly for the temporal-spatial analysis here, Osman further explains that, even with his influence on the USAID Director’s thinking and the collaborative nature of the workshops and feedback systems by which USAID put together its new strategic 5- year plan, when they responded to the RFA for the GGAP, it did not include specific mention of the municipalities where the program would be implemented. Applicants knew which provinces had been selected, but not which municipalities in those provinces.

According to Osman, he never did know what the rationale was behind the selection of municipal sites for the GGAP:

Right, USAID had communicated with FAS, MAT, and UNDP about their program, and they collected their views and MAT has given the provinces where this program could work, the provinces where this could be set. But the municipalities were not exactly set, you know, so we know which provinces, but then when the program was funded we said, what are the municipalities? And we thought the municipalities would be the capital municipalities because this program needs certain infrastructure as a base and a certain structure in place because you cannot start from scratch. So we expected these things but MAT completely misunderstood this program and they thought in such a way that there are some good municipalities and some bad municipalities should be combined.

This “combination” or “variation” story was told to me several times over the course of the fieldwork – to “test” the GGAP’s methods, to figure out what it needs to be successful, it should be conducted in sites with different characteristics, and the progress in those sites should be compared to figure out how rural, how urban, how big, how small, how distant, could a site be, and still be successful with GGAP methods? Osman continues:

So what they did for Bié, they selected first Camacupa, which is where UNDP is already implementing their decentralization program. So we said Camacupa is already occupied by UNDP, why should we go there, why don’t we take Andulo where we have good presence and all these things.

So we had some discussions and the Bié provincial governor accepted it and we finally got Andulo.

Here Osman is beginning to detail the negotiations, alliances, and deals that were made to situate the GGAP in specific Angolan communities. While the region, or even the provinces were set out, there was significant wiggle room within those provinces, and here is where NGO preferences, and later, the needs of individual people, can guide development. For Bié Province, the GGAP administrators were first surprised that Kuito, the provincial capital wasn’t selected by MAT, and then dismayed to receive news that

Camacupa had been selected. Camacupa was the long-standing field site of a similar program run by the UNDP. And while there certainly may have been room among the rural communities of Camacupa for the GGAP to come form more committees and award more small grants, there was certainly only room for so many advisors and técnicos in the municipal offices, which is a key tactic of the program’s approach. Here, the NGOs draw on a long history of work in the province and a good relationship with the provincial governor to intervene for them at the national level, successfully. This relationship between NGOs and the provincial level of government was markedly less successful in

Cuando Cubango.

Then MAT gave us Cuando Cubango and we put it in Menongue [the provincial capital] and they put us in Cuito Cuanavale. We said, Cuito Cuanavale is the end of the world, you don’t have certain prerequisite structures there to have success of the program. But MAT says no, you have to take some good ones and some bad ones.

Osman does not allude to the whole story here, but I was told several times over by field program staff stationed in Cuando Cubango that the program was moved out of

Menongue by the provincial governor, against the express wishes of MAT, because the provincial governor was sure that the program would bring to light his own corrupt uses

81 of the government’s infrastructure and funds in the province. A central part of the GGAP methodology, remember, is to place NGO staff within the municipal government structure as advisors, trainers, and event facilitators. Osman became aware of this situation later in the year, but here addresses it together with Cabinda:

And then at the same time they offered for Cabinda, Buco Zao, which is under conflict and [the Canadian organization] completely refused to go to Buco Zao. So we are saying, should we fight against both Cuito Cuanavale and Buco Zao, or should we take one and fight for the other one? So we accepted Cuito Cuanavale and we said, Buco Zao, we cannot work, we then got the second opinion, they said, okay, you have to go to Belize. But Belize is even worse! So then they didn’t change anything, they said Belize is the final, and [the Canadian organization] worked with the provincial governor’s office in Cabinda and it took months and months and months after months to get the supporting letter but finally MAT said that if the governor changed the municipality then they have no problem.

Here Osman reminds us that, even though different organizations were responsible for different field sites, each sites is a concern relative to the larger GGAP program and must be balanced against the others. The GGAP administrators, at least in this telling, did not feel that they could challenge too many of the municipal site assignments, and so had to strategize and prioritize which of them were truly unworkable.

Osman here frames the story of the site change in Cabinda province as one where the

NGOs actively lobbied for the support of the provincial governor in a struggle against the national MAT office. This is to a point true, but it is also true that the Canadian organization simply stalled, not setting up an office in their assigned municipality for nearly a year. While this sort of “passive” resistance is normally ascribed to the recipients of development interventions, I find it clearly among the tactics of the developers, as well, when faced with less than ideal circumstances.

After the original circulation of the request for applications and the competition for the award, the winning consortium of international NGOs met with MAT and USAID about the municipal site selections. The vice-minister explained to GGAP and USAID administrators that they desired an “experimental” design for the GGAP sites, and presented a pattern wherein the GGAP would work in some sites where the implementing

NGOs had a long history, some where they were new, some where they were in the provincial capitals, some where they were in more distant municipalities. They desired, the vice-minister went on, to understand more about the conditions under which such interventions had the greatest successes, and the greatest challenges. The ministry did understand the corporate donors’ demands, and generously incorporated these into the design such that Cabinda and Lunda Norte could be GGAP sites – these would then be the “new to intervention” sites in MAT’s experimental conceptualization of the program.

For all this experimentalism, of course, there were no “control” sites selected in which before and after data would be gathered without intervention, to be compared to the before and after data for the GGAP sites. This omission in an “experimental” design renders that explanation for the selection of the field sites suspect to me. From the reverse conditionality of the corporate donors directing funding to certain provinces, to the disagreements among MAT, provincial governors, municipal administrators, and NGOs as to which municipalities would be best suited or benefit most from the intervention, it is clear to me that political and other interests – far from comparative and “experimental” factors – dictated the geography of development intervention in this case. Reading this history of the GGAP through Bayart’s theories on extraversion, I propose that this case is not one of the outside, international development community imposing its ideas,

83 standards, and judgments on Angolan communities through interventions. Rather, the

GGAP case may be one of the “extraverted” Angolan state – or at least parts of it, such as

MAT – stipulating the selection of sites for the GGAP by way of marshalling the

“external” resources of USAID and the donor corporations towards its own ends.

In assessing the Angolan case, and more specifically that of the GGAP, within the anthropological literature on development, it’s helpful to return to a founding study in the

Africanist examination of development. James Ferguson (1994) writes of the occluded political effects of development projects in his case study of Lesotho’s Canadian-funded

Thaba-Tseka Development Project. The project failed, by all accounts, to improve rural livelihoods in the mountain regions of Lesotho, but was instrumental in laying the groundwork (quite literally the roads, buildings, and municipal committees) for militarization and greater governmental control more generally in the highlands region.

Ferguson’s account is quite clear that the design of Thaba-Tseka Development Project was influenced by the Jonathan administration so as to target the opposition-favoring highlands region, but his account is silent as to whether or not CIDA or the World Bank realized or approved of this politically motivated targeting. Likewise, USAID staff involved with the GGAP during the period of my field work seemed either unaware or unconcerned about the potential direction of the GGAP to those zones of lesser support for the MPLA. The crux of the matter – the reason why it is impossible to disentangle the political from the “development” in this case – is that those regions in which there is great, great need, are of course the same regions in which there will be greater political discontent – in part for that very reason. While I believe that MAT’s emphasis on Cuando

Cubango, Cabinda, Lunda Norte, Bié and Huambo Provinces is highly motivated by a

84 desire to prevent an opposition party from gaining ground there, it is simultaneously true that these regions do, in fact, have great need of investments and attentions. The fact of lessened opportunity and lowered possibility are inextricably intertwined with the political intent to protest or change such a situation, and political and state leaders are well aware of this. The intertwining of these facts, though, does not in my mind negate a political intent in decision making. Most certainly it does not negate political effects.

Though in Ferguson’s account it’s impossible to know what CIDA staff intended as they participated in planning the Thaba-Tseka Project in the late 1970s, certainly ideas about political “stability” and “inclusion” – of perhaps especially those regions which criticized the Jonathan regime – might have been supported by Canadian policies and decision makers. Or, as we could read the perhaps very similar case of the inception of the GGAP, perhaps CIDA officials – likely assigned to work on Lesotho for just 2-4 year tours – in the late 1970s were simply tasked with finding things to do, things to spend money on, and were rather receptive to the Government of Lesotho supplying them with ideas. Whether or not a similar scenario was the case between the USAID director and

Mota Liz or other MAT officials is unknowable from this vantage point.

Ferguson is also remarkably silent on whether or not there were previous histories of international intervention in the region, and on whether or not CIDA or other Canadian development organizations had themselves significant history in the Thaba-Tseka region or elsewhere in Lesotho. In the GGAP case, institutional histories and competition between organizations – for instance the UNDP program running in Camacupa, and the original proposal to site the Bié office there, instead of in Andulo – also shape the implementation and outcomes of development work. In considering the layered histories

85 of development interventions, Tania Murray Li’s study of resettlement and livelihood interventions in Indonesia is helpful (2007). Li’s focus in tracing the history of interventions in Indonesia was to understand the rationale behind them, a challenging task even for the analysis of contemporary programming, and especially so over a 200 year history. She is able to find, among misinterpretations, miscalculations, and misappropriations, very clearly good intentions. She also finds, however, that these good intentions are constrained by political-economic relations which frame them, shape them, and direct them towards interventions that do not threaten the status-quo.

Angolan Extraversions

I consider here the implications and limitations Bayart’s theories on extraversion for the Angolan case, both during wartime as well as in the post-war period. Salient for

Angola among his arguments is his assertion that the state in Africa developed differently than that of Europe – that the state in Africa is a result of European expansion and of globalization. Bayart argues that the African state is of an altogether different breed than are other states, though his implicit comparison is to European states much more than

Asian states or even North or South American states. While he evidences his argument with observations about the behaviors of state apparatuses, state officials and especially heads of state, his premise here is that African states were created from the outside, as outgrowths of globalizing processes, and that this history has left, as a central characteristic of the African state, an orientation to the external. Bayart maintains that

European states were largely formed before globalization, from local, internal struggles and decisions rather than external ones, and so are introverted more than extraverted.

This element of his argument is not unusual; his account of the African state becomes innovative, though, at the meso-level. While political scientists, historians, and others have long noted African states’ orientations to the outside, they have considered this orientation – generally classed as “dependence” – as a negative, detrimental characteristic.

Bayart contends that dependence, as part of this external orientation of the

African state, is actually an agentive strategy through which African states leverage the resources of the external world to their internal ends and purposes. The history of the

GGAP could, and perhaps should, be read using just such an idea. In the usual accounting, programs like the GGAP exist to fill in the spaces where the state should be operating to promote development, the improvement of political processes, and social and physical conditions in Angolan communities. That something like the GGAP even exists would usually be read as an indicator of the failure, ineptitude, or incapacity of the state to meet its obligations to everyday Angolans. Certainly this is Osman’s interpretation of the program and its context. For Osman, as for many development professionals, a program such as the GGAP makes up for the state’s failings, stepping in

– hopefully in a temporary manner – to provide services, goods, and training that will then allow the state to carry on without it at some point. Bayart, however, might see things differently. He might well see development programs such as the GGAP as themselves a type of utility or resource, available for African states to appropriate and manipulate to their own ends.

In considering the case of the GGAP from this perspective, the role of the MAT, the Ministry of Territorial Administration, becomes instructive. As Osman recounts, the

87 provincial selections for the GGAP field sites were dictated by MAT with input from, and some restrictions from, USAID and that Agency’s private donors, the American oil and diamond companies. While we can fairly transparently understand why the oil company mandated the Cabinda site, and why the diamond company mandated the Lunda

Norte site, and we can also understand the pull of the Huambo and Bié provinces for both the INGOs and the Angolan State, the selection of Cuando Cubango remains something of a mystery and according to USAID staff members, resided solely with MAT. At the level of the provinces, then, the role of the state in directing the program to certain areas and perhaps to certain activities is clear, and could certainly be read as a strategy of extraversion, in which the state benefits from the INGOs’ taking responsibility and taking over the burden of development work in these areas. For the state, the work of decentralization, training, providing small grants to communities – is all accomplished without the central state apparatus having to be bothered by it. Central state resources, of which there are potentially very many from the oil and diamond concessions, as well as other rents, can be directed elsewhere. The most pessimistic would contend that these funds and resources are freed up by the GGAP and other programs for the enrichment of private individuals well-positioned in the state. Others contend that the effect of the

GGAP and other programs is to allow the central state to stretch its resources further, to the benefit of the citizenry.

With Bayart in mind, though, I turn to the results of Angola’s first successful parliamentary elections, held in early September, 2008. The MPLA accomplished a crushing win, though lost what they consider to be a significant number of votes in perhaps nine of Angola’s 18 provinces. In Figure 2.4, reproduced from MAT figures in

88 the few days after the elections (and moderately revised in later publications), those provinces that turned in less than the national average of 81.7% of the vote for the MPLA are depicted in green. I would also point out the provinces of Huambo and Benguela, where UNITA won roughly 13% of the vote. All five of the GGAP sites – sites for a democratization program – are accounted for in the list of those provinces voting most heavily against the ruling party. Some among the GGAP staff took this to be a sign of their program’s successes – not that they were anti-MPLA, far from it, but that difference in political opinion was being expressed. In light of MAT’s charge not only to oversee local administrations but to oversee the electoral processes as part of its odd set of duties, though, I propose a Bayart-inflected interpretation. Perhaps MAT intentionally directed aid to those areas in which they knew the population was unsatisfied, manipulating external resources to mollify internal problems. I see here the Angolan government directing the resources of the international community – not to mention those of their corporate partners – to provide attentions to their unhappiest constituents, perhaps even to govern by proxy. I would propose the corollary, as well, and there are those who would agree, that the MPLA would have lost even more votes in these provinces without the

GGAP and other programs like it attending to them.

Figure 2.4: 2008 Parliamentary Elections by Province (Africa Confidential 2008)

In the first Parliamentary Elections since 1992, the MPLA won the vast majority of votes overall, but showed weaknesses in four of the five GGAP provinces: Cuando Cubango, Bié, Lunda Norte and Cabinda. 90

Laying out the roster of actors in Angolan development, I’m mindful of

Theidon’s reminder (2010) that very often, those who benefit the most from crisis and social upheaval remain structurally hidden from view. In Theidon’s case, studying the aftermath of the Colombian wars, she reminds us that while ex-combatants and

(para)military personnel are called to account for their actions in truth and reconciliation processes, very often local property and business owners were the ones who most benefitted from war, revolution, and what Angolans would call confusão. Those who most benefit, and have influence behind-the-scenes, in Theidon’s case, are almost never called to account for their roles as they remained physically distant from the conflict. I would add to her cautions that those who benefit the most from the reparative aftermath are also often structurally hidden from view. In Theidon’s work it would be the NGOs, lawyers, and academics enacting and studying the truth and reconciliation work. In the

Angolan case, while the absence of a TRC process is itself worth questioning, we can begin by asking who, exactly benefits the most from a post-war push to decentralize and democratize, and if perhaps it is those structurally “hidden.”

Conclusion

By way of their geography and history, this chapter introduced the five GGAP implementation sites in Cabinda, Lunda Norte, Huambo, Bié, and Cuando Cubango, reviewing the decisions and negotiations by which these sites were selected. Through this recounting of the GGAP siting decisions, I provided here an overview of the key institutional and individual actors who designed and implemented the program, focusing on the three NGOs of the GGAP consortium, USAID, and MAT. This chapter thus

91 provided important national, institutional and historical context for the series of arguments concerning the daily workings of Angolan interconnection, manipulation, and mobilities through international development that I lay out in subsequent chapters. In recounting how the selection of GGAP field sites was worked out among these institutional and individual actors, I critiqued a body of literature in the anthropology of development which has, despite a long-standing concern with the state and politics, effectively and erroneously written political negotiations at multiple levels, and their historical precedents, out of the story of African development. In the account above, the actions and preferences of each institutional actor is made clear, and I used the case of the

GGAP to bolster Jean-François Bayart’s arguments concerning African states’

“extraversion,” particularly his points about the power and agency of the African state to manipulate outside resources to its own ends.

States, of course, are not the only organizations to do this. Bayart’s arguments, moreover, do not adequately allow for the “drag,” or the pull of institutional histories and the prefiguring powers of previous interventions to temper or guide the actions and abilities of the African state. In laying out the spatiotemporal characteristics of the

GGAP, and the history of decision making about the GGAP, the chapter introduces a number of “development actors” in Angola as they appeared in the period 2005-2009, highlighting their interactions with one another and their global or international sympathies. Discussion of these actors is continued in the next chapters, as well. My premise here, as throughout the dissertation, is that development should be analyzed as a

“global assemblage,” tightly intertwined with external resources, opportunities, pressures and relationships, and that development in Angola is one of many “middles” within this

92 global assemblage. Here, even the middle has a middle though, as we look closely at just one development intervention, the GGAP. Importantly, my argument about development in Angola being global should not be read as a description of Angolan development as generic, homogenous, or necessarily like development elsewhere – “global” is not here an adjective, like “blue.”6 It is a different realm of social interaction, influence, and impact.

The global in Angola has particular shades and flavors that are unlike the global

elsewhere. I draw upon a wide range of literatures throughout the dissertation to illustrate

the uniqueness of the Angolan case, including literature on African “extraversion,”

postsocialism, and the politics of resource extraction, but will ground my discussions

with the case study of the GGAP. In this section, the characteristics of the global in

Angola were considered by tracing the histories of global interconnection and intervention in the various places the GGAP was implemented.

6 I thank Elizabeth Dunn for provocative conversations on this point (November, 2010).

(Not) Speaking English in Andulo

Antechamber of the Municipal Administrator

Félix comes in to start the computer up, and has to negotiate a very full antechamber. Alexandro, Dr. Reich, and I take up all the seats along one wall, leaving Carlota to occupy the only other seat – she’s pulled out the office chair from the desk on the other side of the crowded room. She offers Félix the chair as he comes in, but he waves her away with a polite smile and simply leans over the desk, careful not to knock against our legs, waiting for the slow machine to wake up. As Félix concentrates on his machine, the rest of us wait to be called in to see the administrator about her impressions of the Good Governance in Angola Program (GGAP).

Dr. Reich begins to ask me questions about Andulo, the GGAP, how my work is going, and I see Félix and Carlota straighten up, looking everywhere except at us as they listen to us talk. I realize that they are trying not to let on that they understand us, and that Dr. Reich, in speaking in English, might think we have a measure of privacy that we do not have. Carlota and Félix, though Angolan and working in a rural area, both speak excellent English: Félix studied English in school and was first employed as a translator by the UN in the provincial capital, and Carlota grew up and attended school in Namibia. Dr. Reich isn’t asking any revealing or sensitive questions; he’s just making relevant conversation, but I’m becoming uncomfortable. Am I in some way furthering a subterfuge by allowing Dr. Reich to think we’re speaking exclusively? If I were to try to include Félix or Carlota in the conversation in Portuguese, I think that would be the effect. If were to include them in English, though, wouldn’t I then be betraying their confidences in some way? I feel as though I shouldn’t continue the conversation, but that I can’t do anything to alter it, either.

As we talk, I realize too that Dr. Reich has met Félix only as a member of the municipal administration, not knowing that he used to work for the GGAP. As Félix prints off what he needed from the machine and leaves the antechamber, the weight of these various secrets is too heavy for me, and I ask Carlota, in Portuguese, to “confirm” if that’s the same Félix who used to work in the GGAP. She answers me, seemingly unsure why I would ask, but then Dr. Reich immediately wants to know all about this from Carlota and Alexandro, and we’re safely back in Portuguese again. As we launch into a conversation about how many staff members have left the GGAP and where they’ve ended up, though, I’m worried my intervention was worse than the original problem. When an opportunity arises later in the day, I tell Dr. Reich privately that I’ve come across several people in Andulo who speak very good English.

He’s surprised, I think.

DEVELOPMENT COSMOPOLITANS I:

ANGOLANS

Chapters 3 and 4 form the heart of my argument about the disciplinary and

globalizing effects of international development work on the “middle figures” of local

and expatriate program staff. In these chapters I present individual development worker

biographies before examining in depth, in Chapter 5, a series of interactions among a

large group of the Good Governance in Angola Program (GGAP) staff members. Taken

together, these central chapters argue that development work sets individual professionals on a trajectory of internationalization that is itself characterized by global inequalities and historical linkages. Development workers, whether “cosmopolitan” or not in their personal interests and orientations before entering the profession, become “development cosmopolitans” as a result of their professional experiences. This socialization is both beneficial and detrimental to the overall functioning of the development apparatus. In the case of the GGAP, the cosmopolitan socialization that occurs is conditioned by global inequality as well as the historical patterns of international engagement in Angola that I reviewed in the previous chapter. The effects of development cosmopolitanism and development programming as a contemporary part of Angolan foreign relations will be

95 considered in the dissertation’s conclusion. This chapter examines how Angolan personnel came to work in the GGAP program and considers their stories as “middle figures” in international development.

The preceding vignette comes from the GGAP mid-term evaluation study as Dr.

Reich, an external evaluation consultant, was traveling through several of the implementation sites seeking opinions and perspectives on the program from all of its interlocutors. It introduces the central themes of this chapter: international interactions, knowledges and experiences and their strategic representations in development work, and

I will return to consider the biographies of Félix, Carlota and other GGAP staff members in detail below. In the vignette are suggestions of the pervasive categorization of development professionals as “local” or “expatriate,” a schema determining expectations, responsibilities, rights, and privileges for GGAP staff members as well as others in the transnational social world of international development. I will begin by examining these categories as they existed in the GGAP consortium, highlighting how they are not reflective of the actual situation of individual development professionals working in the program. I will then use empirical material to build the concept of the development cosmopolitan in place of this uncritically dichotomous classification of development professionals.

My first example of development cosmopolitanism builds upon a recent groundswell of anthropological literature on “local” cosmopolitans (Ferguson 1999;

Hawkins 2010; Notar 2008; Rofel 2007; Vertovec and Cohen 2002; Wardle 2000;

Werbner 2008). These anthropologists have stridently critiqued elitist and Eurocentric depictions of cosmopolitanism. They demonstrate that less privileged groups and

96 individuals from the global south participate in global exchange and have interest and capacity to engage internationally. I contribute the cases of local development professionals who participate in a very international sphere of professional activities, though they may never have left Angola. They should be considered cosmopolitan for these experiences and actions. My second set of examples of development cosmopolitans considers instances in which these local cosmopolitans face, or fear, negative consequences should their international knowledges, capacities, or experiences be brought to light in the wrong circumstances. My analysis on this point follows the lead of

Brink-Danan (in press), though with significant differences in our two cases. I consider when, where, and by whom international knowledge and experience might be considered

“dangerous” for development professionals, and should perhaps be strategically hidden.

In the final example of the chapter, I demonstrate the performative utility of international knowledge and experience both for the individual development cosmopolitan and for the institutions that engage in the work. I trace a series of presentations in which one staff member’s international experience is first strategically omitted to establish “local” authenticity, and then later purposefully deployed to establish institutional credibility.

This case suggests that cosmopolitanism, for development workers and organizations, may be something of a commodity to be strategically manipulated.

I close the chapter by suggesting that in the case of development work there is a continuum between locality and internationality for development professionals. In the following chapter I complement the arguments here with attention to expatriate development professionals working in Angola, rounding out my depiction of development cosmopolitans as a transnational class created by the work of foreign aid.

Moving around on this continuum is something that development professionals can, to a certain extent, strategize and work towards, but this sort of professional mobility entails other sorts of transformations and commitments as well. In the last of the core chapters, chapter 5, I consider the governmental techniques employed in development organizations and consider how cosmopolitanism and a capacity for working with “the global” is part and parcel of the development apparatus’s self-discipline.

Charting the Local and the International in the GGAP

The GGAP used several variations on a standard organizational chart (see Figure

3.1) to depict its staff structure. This version placed the program’s Chief of Party, Osman, as the authority ultimately responsible for the program, reporting as such to USAID, the corporate donors, and the implementing consortium of international NGOs. Immediately beneath Osman were a Luanda-based grants officer and, in the original formulation, one

Luanda-based monitoring and evaluation officer. It was well-accepted that these three most senior positions needed to be filled by foreign professionals as very few Angolans would be capable of performing the required duties. Two other Luanda-based positions – the Community Development Advisor and the Municipal Development Advisor – report directly to Osman and are depicted on this hierarchical chart just below the grants officer and the monitoring and evaluation officer. It was thought that these two positions had to be filled by Angolan personnel for political reasons, and as they required a very close working relationship with representatives from all levels of the Angolan government, these positions required a fluent command of Portuguese. The program was designed, then, to have three international and two national staff members operating as the core

98 administrative and technical advisory team. This chart also shows the field teams of two

GGAP implementation sites: Andulo, in Bié Province, and Cuito Cuanavale in Cuando

Cubango Province, as reporting directly to the Chief of Party.

This chart was published in a job description from the American organization and the GGAP as they sought candidates for the leadership of the Kuito regional office. All three consortium organizations had slightly different versions of the GGAP chart, depending on the context for which they were presenting the program’s structure. This particular version gives a sense of the hierarchical nature of the program’s organization.

No matter the context or purpose for designing or presenting a new chart – which were legion over the course of my fieldwork – the result was a hierarchical display of positions. At the top of the chart was usually the Chief of Party of the Program, though sometimes it was the Country Director of one of the NGOs, or a Director of Programs for one of the NGOs. A second-highest level usually incorporated the Luanda-based staff. An important feature of this particular chart is that the grants officer and the M&E officer are placed higher than the implementation advisors. Finally, the field offices were at the base of most charts, often without detailing the titles of the field staff members.

Figure 3.1: A GGAP Organizational Chart

The Good Governance in Angola Program published several different kinds of organigrams, but each of them emphasized hierarchical structures of authority. Here the staff members of two GGAP field offices are depicted in relation to the central administration of the program, with authority over one field office’s Municipal Development Coordinator shared between both the Chief of Party of the GGAP and the Regional Director of the implementing international NGO. 100

In the international NGOs I studied, as in nearly all of the large INGOs, the UN, and bilateral aid organizations, there are codified, institutional differences in the treatment of personnel considered foreign to the place of operations and those considered local to the place of operations. The most obvious and salient of these institutional differences are the rights INGO staff members have to compensation, insurance, housing, transportation, and other recompense and benefits. As a general rule, expat staff working in a large international NGO can expect to be paid more than local staff. Even in the equivalent position, they can expect extra benefits like housing subsidy or outright provision, access to company cars, regular vacation time in addition to “home leave” and regular airfare “home,” relocation funds for arrival and departure, and internal international mailing privileges. Amazon delivers a lot of packages to US headquarters, that the organization then ships all over the world for its international (expat) employees.

“Local” staff are usually not considered eligible for housing subsidy or provision, access to company vehicles on private time, paid airline tickets to other countries, certain insurances and health benefits (these are regulated by country of service) nor relocation for beginning or ending a contract/post. Monthly salaries can be highly discrepant between international and national staff members, even for similar job posts, functions, education and experience. In these ways, degree of “foreignness” can be directly translated into dollar (or sterling pound, or euro) amounts.

Institutionalized, bureaucratic differences between national and international staff in the GGAP consortium were among the first and most obvious tensions I noticed studying the development program and its implementing organizations. One day early in the study, as I was scrambling to get up to speed with the details of the complex

101 intervention, insiders suggested I seize a rare opportunity to interview the recently resigned Municipal Development Advisor, Helena. She was considered an “architect” of the program. She had participated in the predecessor program, and had worked hard on the proposal and was instrumental in getting the field sites up and running in the first year. Just a few months before my arrival, Helena had left the GGAP to take up a position of similar responsibility elsewhere in the American organization – outside the auspices of the GGAP proper. She was now working in the southern provinces of Angola, and was visiting Luanda just briefly. With strings pulled by the appropriate people, I got a detailed origin-story that helped me understand the GGAP’s orientation and activities

(discussed in previous chapter). When I commented positively about the interview to my encouragers, though, they seemed disappointed, suggesting that I had missed something important.

Weeks later I found out what they had been hinting at: Helena had delivered an ultimatum about her position and lost. This was how a great “architect” of the GGAP had left the program so suddenly, and in only its second year. Helena, I gathered, had discovered that Julie, the highly inexperienced monitoring and evaluation officer, and a young British woman (see next chapter), was being paid a much larger salary than was

Helena – a woman with decades of professional experience and an important, founding role in the GGAP itself. Upon discovering the disparity she, by all accounts, threatened to leave her position if she wasn’t immediately given a raise, to be paid at least as much as the upstart was making. She lost because Julie was international staff and Helena, national. Helena had essentially reached the ceiling of what a national staff person was allowed to be paid within the structures of the American NGO. In this instance, this

102 happened to be rather less than what a beginning expatriate makes. I was never able to get the details directly from Helena herself, but having run across comparable figures and similar stories over the course of my field work, I believe the salary difference to have been about triple. One assumes Helena would have been familiar with the discrepant pay scales, given her long experience in development work, but this case seems to have particularly galled her. This may have been because the monitoring and evaluation officer was so inexperienced or because the working relationship was so close in the small

GGAP program.

Patterns of International “Trangressions” in the GGAP

I found it very difficult, in the early weeks and months of my fieldwork, to come to grips with the organization of the GGAP. Besides there being multiple organizational charts in circulation, as well as a history of revision of duties and offices, there was no central chart which clearly articulated the three international non-governmental organizations together through the lens of the GGAP. There were no charts that detailed the working relationships of program staff for other shared programs, either. I was confounded when I tried to map the individual people I was meeting and interviewing to the positions on these charts in a way that coincided with their stories. For instance, interviewing the GGAP staff members of the central office, I heard just as much information about non-GGAP staff members as I heard about fellow GGAP staff members. I heard just as much about colleagues from other organizations as about GGAP colleagues. The existing connections and relationships did not map to the hierarchical organization charts used within the program. In attempting to make sense of the program

103 and of the experiences GGAP staff members shared with me, I prepared an alternative pictorial description of the program’s organization (see Figure 3.2).

In my version of the GGAP organigram, the Chief of Party and the core, Luanda- based staff occupy the center of a pentagram. Each arm of the pentagram represents the field staff of one of the GGAP’s five field sites. The most senior officers in each of the collaborating INGOs – the Country Director and Programs Director of each organization

– also held responsibility for the GGAP as one program among many, and these positions are included here in boxes on the upper left, upper right, and below, the pentagram. The field offices are color-coded to match their sponsoring member of the INGO consortium.

The central GGAP office is color-coded to match the American organization, as that

NGO was responsible for those individual staff members in terms of insurances, payroll, etc. I found that, visualizing the GGAP not as a hierarchical structure within each of the collaborating NGOs but as its own organism with links to its three parents, I was better able to “see” the entire program at once. While the original impetus behind this organigram was simply my own attempt to map out those individuals with some direct responsibility for the GGAP, this chart allowed me to visualize other patterns within the structure of the GGAP, including patterns of international engagement and experience.

104

Figure 3.2: GGAP Staff Organization

In my analytical organigram of the GGAP staff organization, field offices are housed in the arms of the star, central GGAP administrators and advisers are in the center of the star, and NGO administrators who hold responsibility for the GGAP as one program among many are in boxes external to the star. “National” and “International” staff positions are indicated by black and red text, respectively, and italicized text indicates a staff member with what I call transgressive characteristics in regards to their designation as national or international staff. 105

The organigram allowed me to highlight those positions expected or required to be filled with national staff members, and those expected to be filled with international staff members. I realized that some positions – three, over the course of my fieldwork – had in fact been changed, either from international to national (two), or national to international (one). Most importantly, the new organigram allowed me to notice discrepancies between “national” or “international” positions and the cosmopolitanism of the stories told to me by the individual holding that position. Several of the most senior members of the organizations seemed to be deeply tied to the local Angolan context for personal, family, or professional reasons. They represented a type of “transgression” of the local-international assumptions held by the organizations. For instance, many large international aid organizations expressly prohibit national staff members from holding the highest offices in an attempt to prevent corruption and to ensure a global identity for each country office. In two of the GGAP organizations, while the Country Directors or

Program Directors were technically international staff members, having been raised elsewhere and holding foreign passports, their long personal histories in Angola as well as their family lives gave them strong local ties. Perhaps most striking on the pentagram chart, though, was a cluster of local-international “transgressions” in the Bié field office where nearly every one of the five field staff members had far more “international” experience, knowledge, and capacity than revealed or expected by their classification as

“national staff members.”

As I paid more attention to the nuances of the dichotomy between national and international staff members, cases of exception kept arising. Cases in which a national staff member had replaced an international staff member, or vice versa, were problematic

106 and contentious. There were also “hybrid” cases, as well, that GGAP staff discussed among themselves. Outside the GGAP, for instance, there was the new HIV/AIDS advisor for the American organization who had started just as I arrived to begin my fieldwork. Towards the end of the fieldwork period, she made a tour of several of the

GGAP sites as a “consultant” on HIV/AIDS mainstreaming. A Dutch woman, she was classified in most ways as an expatriate staff person and was entitled to home leave, including plane tickets, received a housing allowance and subsidies for internet subscription at her home, etc. She was hired, however, after having been resident in

Angola for over a year with her partner who was employed by the same organization through a Dutch governmental program. Living in Angola, she was a very attractive hire for the organization, as they didn’t have to transport her there to begin the post, already spoke very good Portuguese, could be interviewed and vetted in person, etc. The fact that she had no training or experience in HIV/AIDS was, I believe, excused away by her being a well-educated European who would obviously be able to learn on the job, while hiring an HIV/AIDS advisor with no prior training or experience in the topical area was justified to the US headquarters as a conveniently “local” hire.

The case of Maximino further complicates the neat contradiction of local-vs- foreign in international development. Maximino is an Angolan, 32 years old at the time of my fieldwork, who received a master’s degree in development studies from a British university in 2007. Coming back to Angola, he interviewed with several organizations and was made a few offers. In fact the GGAP’s chief of party made one such offer, seeking to replace Helena, and several months later was still lamenting the fact that they hadn’t been able to hire him. Maximino was asking for a salary that the organization’s

107 international headquarters, in the US, considered ridiculous for a local staff person, especially one new to the organization – regardless of his excellent foreign education. He was asking for an amount roughly comparable to Julie’s salary, the young British woman, who, as it happens, had graduated with him in the same year, from the same institution, though with a different concentration for her master’s degree. He likely did not know about the history of the position and of Helena’s abrupt exit at the time of his failed negotiations. Maximino ended up working for the GGAP, but through a different member of the consortium who was able to make him a much higher offer. He was considered a demanding, high-maintenance colleague in part because of his bargaining over salary at the beginning of his employment.

Many of the resentments, practical differences, and effects of the national- international staff categorization in these international NGOs were material. National staff members resented the access international staff members had to the organization’s vehicles, particularly after office hours and on the weekends. National staff members resented the generous housing allowances international staff members enjoyed, as well as the subsidized utilities, maintenance, furniture, and other logistical support international staff received in the matter of housing. International staff members resented the programs and opportunities in which local staff members could pursue further training and advanced degrees through the organization. This was especially frustrating for those expatriates who were themselves citizens of other developing countries. Most of these differences ran across the local/foreign divide, and for the organizations I studied, most of these policies were set out by the international headquarters, not the in-country administrative staff. Classifying international staff as such across the organization

108 seemed fine to most of the Angolan professionals I studied, but they held out that classifying Angolan staff as “local” and applying, then, rules and limits that were also applied to “national staff” in Zambia, Bangladesh, Peru, and elsewhere, seemed entirely ridiculous to them. “The Angolan context,” they would tell me, “is unique” (é único). But being “local” in these international organizations, was just “local” as a generic category, not Angolan-local, or local-in-Angola. Several Angolans confided to me that they longed for an opening in their specialty to come up in Mozambique, where they might be competitive candidates because of their language abilities and experience, but would have to be classed as “international staff” and treated accordingly (see next chapter for cases of developing country nationals working in Angola).

Félix

Félix had already left the Andulo field staff when I began studying the GGAP full time in February 2008. I met Félix originally in 2006 when he was a Kuito-based field agent for the American NGO’s HIV/AIDS mainstreaming program and I was passing through to investigate dissertation field sites and programs. My husband and I were generously allowed to tag along for a few days and nights in 2006 as Félix and a driver made coordinating trips to several rural communities in Bié and Huambo provinces.

These are the “pre-trip” trips that must be made to coordinate with community leaders so that they know when and where an event – in this case a large, multi-community

HIV/AIDS training workshop – will be held, how many people are invited to attend, who they should be, how long it will take, whether or not transport or meals would be provided or reimbursed, what the expectations of the participants are afterward, etc. All

109 the logistical details must be set out for each community well before the meeting if there is to be good attendance and productive participation.

The INGO staff and community contacts hash out who’s available to attend such a workshop, though there are multiple mediating factors. For instance while the NGOs would like to have young people, especially young women, attend events, it happens in many places that women are less likely to speak good Portuguese and to be able to read and write. Community leaders always ask if the participants will be paid, or if they’ll receive anything else – kits, condoms, pamphlets? There must be a general idea of what will be taught and whether or not it’s considered appropriate. Then the true logistics are usually a sticking point – will there be “taxis” for transport? Will participants be able to get home before dark? If not, is there a place they can stay where the workshop is being held, so that they can travel home the following day? Would that mean they’d have to travel there the day before the event? Then how long will they really be gone? Field staff working out all these details, one comuna at a time, can easily spend a week or more simply alerting communities of an event, to say nothing of working to organize and prepare materials for the event proper, back at the office. Especially in 2006, and especially in Bié province, rural Angolan roads existed only through the strength of drivers’ convictions, and this sort of heavy travel takes not only immense amounts of personnel time, but is physically wearing on them, and on the vehicles, as well. To complicate matters further, at this time INGO staff and vehicles were required to be back in Kuito by sundown or very shortly after for security concerns after dark. Even shifting the workday to leave at sunup and get back at the latest moment possible, such restrictions severely limit the number of communities a program can reach in any given

110 amount of time, particularly if only one vehicle (with driver) and one staff member are assigned to this type of activity, or have the language capacity to conduct it.

In 2006 there were no other means of communication available by which to do this sort of organizing in the comunas of Bié and Huambo Provinces – not radio, cell phones, nor regular traffic in the region (otherwise messages can sometimes be sent with long-haul truck or bus drivers). Field agents, then, once it had been organized at the office that an event like this was funded and should be held, would spent several days, even weeks, physically travelling out to all the involved communities, hoping to catch the local responsible parties at home or otherwise available to speak for a little while, and working out these details fresh for each community. As we spoke in more depth near the end of 2008, Félix remembered this earlier visit of mine, but it is a testament to the sheer frequency and number of foreign visitors he and other local INGO staff receive and allow to tag along during their daily work that it took some conversation to identify my particular visit – where we had gone and who had accompanied us.

In our conversations about the GGAP and about Félix’s trajectory in development work, he spoke most animatedly about this period of his career – as a field agent for the

HIV mainstreaming project. He was working then under a Dutch anthropologist whose methods he found unique and extremely enjoyable. Marieke, in an admirable display of tenacity, had insisted on receiving permission from the Kuito administrators to spend whole days and nights – up to two or three at a time – “in the field” in the communities the HIV program was working with. At a time when agents were not supposed to be even returning from a trip after dark, this sort of arrangement was certainly difficult to achieve, despite the fact that staying in a community overnight is much safer than traveling the

111 roads at night. Félix spoke nostalgically about how they would arrive in a community, set up their tents and explain to everyone that there was no official meeting or task or activity

– that they should all simply be as they were normally. He laughed, relating how it might take five or six hours but that eventually, everyone did seem to relax, even bringing out their alcoholic beverages in the evening (according to Félix something they would never do normally in front of INGO project staff, whether foreign or Angolan). Later on in the visits, he recounted, community members would explain that “those things, that we told you in the meeting earlier – those were lies.” He thought very highly of this method of spending not only more time in communities than field staff are usually expected (or allowed) to, but of spending time building rapport and trying to find out how “life really is” (a vida real, a vida actual) in each community, rather than structuring all community contact by INGO objectives, methods, and assessments. Many in the GGAP consortium remembered Marieke and her anthropological methods quite fondly and I believe I benefitted from her good reputation among the field staff, though our time in Angola did not overlap.

In tracing his work trajectory to this point, Félix told a story that would resonate well with anthropologists studying tourist sites and the “locals” who maintain them for the stream of international visitors passing through (e.g., Hawkins 2010; Notar 2008).

Though he grew up in a very bad situation geopolitically – on the Angolan planalto during the height of the civil war – Félix considers himself fortunate in many ways.

While still very young, his parents were separated by the war and though he was not able to meet his father until he was already an adult, his mother was educated and had stable employment as a schoolteacher. With her support, encouragement, and connections, Félix

112 was able to attend school and was quite accomplished academically. His mother was also very active in her church and he remembers spending, outside school, more time at church than at home. He especially enjoyed math and the sciences, and did notably well in other subjects such as English.

After finishing primary school – at this time in Kuito there was no secondary institution – he secured employment with the government’s demining operations. This could not have been a politically or logistically easy position to hold in the center of the country during wartime, but he glosses over those aspects of the experience and focuses on his professional assignments of the period. He was immediately put to work where he and his schooling were most needed: he became a translator, housed within the national demining unit for the United Nations personnel and foreign NGO workers conducting emergency relief work on the planalto. He remembers working with, at various times, foreigners from Brazil, Ireland, Scotland, England, Spain, France, Italy, the Netherlands,

Nigeria, South Africa, New Zealand, Pakistan, and the Philippines. He prefers to refer to his work in this first phase as “interpretation” rather than “translation,” because

you can’t just translate the words – you have to understand what someone really means, and you have to interpret the meaning between the two worlds. If someone says something funny, they’re expecting a reaction from the other person, and if you don’t interpret the essence, the sentiment, you only communicate the exact words, then they won’t see the right reaction. You have to be a bridge between the two cultures.

Félix’s English became quite good in this position, and he reports that at one point he was essentially translating even between English speakers, as the Nigerians, Scots,

Dutch, and South Africans couldn’t, as he remembers it, understand one another’s accents, even though they were all speaking in English. While working as a translator in the demining programs he also learned French from the foreigners. This was informal,

113 but he became quite good and was officially listed as an English-Portuguese-French translator with the local UN offices. That he also spoke Umbundu went without saying, evidently, or was beside the point. He worked in various interpreting capacities for four years, while teaching computer literacy courses at night, on the side. During this time he represented the local demining offices to multiple international NGOs as well as to other government offices and bilateral aid organizations, networking thoroughly among those assessing or delivering services in the humanitarian emergency of the war-time central highlands. After a time he was hired by a British NGO as an interpreter, and from there worked briefly with a Canadian NGO on a field assessment team. This was the first position he held that used his knowledge of Umbundu – all the previous years had been

English-Portuguese or French-Portuguese. From the Canadian organization he moved to

UNICEF and from there to the American organization where he was when I first met him in 2006. Neither he nor I knew anything about the GGAP at the time, but as it turns out both he and the driver on those 2006 trips would become GGAP field staff members in

Andulo.

I sought to get reacquainted with Félix during my 2008-2009 fieldwork as his story had become central to several programmatic and organizational debates on staffing the GGAP. Though I cannot relate the entire story, as I understand it Félix had, in very early 2008, left his position in Andulo as the Municipal Development Officer to take a government position with the Andulo municipal administrator’s office. The transition was a collegial one for him, the municipal staff, and the field staff of the Andulo office.

There were institutional tensions, however, as the American NGO considered Félix to have earned several disciplinary citations – many of them for using the GGAP’s vehicles

114 on the evenings and weekends without approval – and not everyone in the Luanda headquarters office considered his departure entirely voluntary or collegial. His example was cited several times in conversations about the differential rights and responsibilities between local and international staff, as his use of the organization’s vehicles, some charged, would not have been troublesome were he an international staff member. There were also debates and concerns about retaining staff in the GGAP and in the larger international NGOs in general, and the usual case was that staff members – after having been trained in the NGOs – left to take similar positions in government or the corporate world for much better pay and, as they often pointed out, more stability and permanency of employment than the NGOs were able to guarantee.

“Local” Development Cosmopolitanism: Institutional Mobilities and Viral

Development

Considering Félix’s story alongside the trajectories of other development professionals in the GGAP, I struggled to find appropriate terms to discuss his experiences and how his work was meaningful to him, to compare his case to others, and to refine my own presumptions of development work in light of his empirical case.

Several themes that resonate with the stories I was told by other contemporary and former

GGAP staff members are illustrated in Félix’s case. First, in his planalto hometown in the middle of the Angolan civil war, “development” work and interaction with foreign aid workers was one of the very few jobs available to him after he completed primary school as a young adult. He considered himself lucky to find work with the state demining agency, and went on to pursue professional advances in development in part because he

115 enjoyed the work, but in part because there was little other opportunity. In terms of entering development as a professional field, certainly some development professionals have had little other choice if they were to be employed and able to pursue a profession of any kind. Second, Félix recounts moving through several development organizations – central state organs, the UN, and international NGOs – before landing in the municipal government. This sort of institutional mobility typifies Angolan development professionals in my case studies. Particularly as programs begin and end, as funding changes, and as supervisors make their own career transitions, Angolans very often

“moved up” by moving out to different organizations. Several professional autobiographies that I collected during the fieldwork detail how a professional left and then re-entered the same organization multiple times, depending upon the grants the organization had, and who the supervisors were at the time. Last, Félix recounted his trajectory in large part by recalling not only who he had worked with on which projects and in which organizations, but seemed to recall them and reconstruct the history of it all by referencing their nationalities and what languages they spoke. For Félix, as for many of the development professionals working in the GGAP and the parent organizations, development work is an inherently international experience, and is defined and recalled with details describing the internationalism of the workers and the organizations.

Hearing Félix explain his “translating” among the different accents of the English speakers in his first position helped me to focus on just how international and foreign development work can be, even for local professionals. Félix, I know from other sources, was well-regarded by Marieke, the Dutch anthropologist, and was frequently hosted by her and her husband in their Kuito home during their time there. They were still in touch

116 at the time of my 2008 interview, though Marieke had moved on to a position in Sierra

Leone. It wouldn’t be out of the question for Félix to visit the couple in Holland some day, though in 2008 he had not ever traveled outside Angola. Cases like Félix’s, with close, international ties among professionals, and the clearly international characteristics imparted to their work histories, led me to investigate the anthropological literature on local-global connections and on cosmopolitanism specifically.

Cosmopolitanism has enjoyed something of a recent surge in academic interest, and the literature on cosmopolitanism runs along several distinct lines. An enormous literature considers the political ideology of cosmopolitanism, as well as its relationship to national citizenship and international relations (Beck 2002; Breckenridge, et al. 2002;

Cheah and Robbins 1998; Nussbaum 1996). These discussions debate the merit, the logic, and the utility of a political ideal that renders all people responsible to one another directly. An equally large literature considers cosmopolitanism as more of a cultural aesthetic by which one appreciates the foreign, or as a personal system of ethics in which one acts with regard to the foreign, rather than as a model for formally organizing a system of global governance (Appadurai 1996; Appiah 2006; Ferguson 1999; Hannerz

1987; Palmie 2006). A subset of this latter, culturalist approach, are ethnographic studies of “actually existing” cosmopolitans that seek to examine exactly what sort of foreign experience or capability can make one a cosmopolitan, and how one comes to have those characteristics, preferences, or knowledges (e.g., Wardle 2000). The underlying purpose of this branch of the literature, to which I contribute Félix’s example, is to argue against a conception of the cosmopolitan as elite and western. The literature on “actually existing” cosmopolitans seeks to address, with a variety of empirical examples, the way in which

117 internationalism exists for less powerful, non-western, even non-urban social actors.

Félix’s emphasis on how much time he had spent with foreigners, learning French from some of them, becoming close friends with some of them, etc, propelled me into this literature to explore exactly what it means to be international, or cosmopolitan. I believe

Félix is an excellent example of a “local cosmopolitan,” who can successfully communicate with a wide variety of foreigners on their own linguistic and professional terms.

For Africanist scholars, Ferguson's explorations of “cosmopolitan style” (1999) in self-presentation and comportment along the Zambian Copperbelt are an obvious touchstone in this literature, and have been important to my formation of “development cosmopolitans.” Ferguson found himself at something of a loss for theoretical language to describe the “cultural dualism” he observed in urban Zambia, where Zambians seemed to be strategically defining social practices and ambitions between two emic poles – the rural/traditional and the urban/modern, very roughly. Ferguson seizes upon cosmopolitanism not to emphasize a sense of global political responsibility (as a “citizen of the world”), nor to emphasize affiliation with “a plurality of contrasting cultures”

(drawing on Hannerz’s definitions), but to mark a “cultural dynamic of reaching out to and signifying affinity with an ‘outside,’ a world beyond the ‘local’” (1999: 212).

Ferguson emphasizes that his Zambian cosmopolitans “whatever they may or may not know about the wider world – cannot or will not be ‘at home’ at home; cannot or will not be bound by the claims and properties of the local” (1999: 212). For Ferguson, then, cosmopolitanism is expressly a rejection of the local. For his Zambian informants “the local” is very often the rural. In his analysis, cosmopolitanism is an expression of

118 preference and affiliation for an unspecified “out there,” a generic “not-here,” which is very often glossed as modern and urban, though not necessarily western. In this use, where cosmopolitans reject the local and the rural in favor of the foreign and the urban,

Ferguson’s cosmopolitans do not speak very clearly to Félix’s case.

Félix, and many of the “local development cosmopolitans” I spent time with in

Angola, are not necessarily performing an affiliation with the outside so as to reject claims made on them by local interlocutors. They are not necessarily seeking the urban or the modern as something exclusive to their current experiences. Nor, considering

Mandel’s case of Kazakhstani indigenous development professionals (2002), has Félix been “rendered unsuitable” to work in the Angolan government by his experiences in international foreign aid organizations. Exactly the opposite, in fact. Félix was immediately snapped up by the Andulo municipal administrator after his experiences

(some would say indiscretions) at the GGAP office compelled him to seek other employment, and individuals from other INGO programs also left international development work to take positions with the Angolan state at various levels, or with international organizations such as the UN. During the mid-term review of the program, in fact, the municipal administrator of Cabinda City made several comments to the evaluation consultants about hoping to “hire away” local GGAP staff members. Such cases, and such comments, prompted the evaluators to include musings on a “‘viral form’ of exit strategy” by placing GGAP staff members directly into state positions at the close of the program.

Local development cosmopolitans, in my conception then, are not necessarily distancing themselves from the local. They are, however, clearly capable and interested

119 in engaging with the foreign. That an engagement with the foreign does not have to mean a disengagement, or a distancing, from the local is something Ferguson grappled with in his Zambian cases. His solution was to emphasize the strategic and performative aspects of cosmopolitanism, rather than local or foreign affiliation as a matter of essential values or identity. Regarding cosmopolitanism (or “localism,” the other pole in Ferguson’s case studies) as performance is an important advance that will be considered further in my next examples. I would also suggest for the Angolan example, however, that the urban, the modern, and the ‘foreign’ in fact becomes an important part of the local experience, rather than something that opposes the local.

Much of Ferguson’s theorizing about the cosmopolitan – especially his use of it as expressly that which is “a gesture of antimembership…a series of slaps in the face” directed to one’s closest social interlocutors (1999: 212) – is written against a definition of cosmopolitanism as Hannerz (1996: 103) uses it:

A more genuine cosmopolitanism is first of all an orientation, a willingness to engage with the Other. It entails an intellectual and esthetic openness toward divergent cultural experiences, a search for contrasts rather than uniformity…. At the same time, however, cosmopolitanism can be a matter of competence, and competence of both a generalized and a more specialized kind. There is the aspect of a state of readiness, a personal ability to make one’s way into other cultures, through listening, looking, intuiting, and reflecting. And there is cultural competence in the stricter sense of the term, a built-up skill in maneuvering more or less expertly with a particular system of meanings.

Ferguson’s concern with local cosmopolitans is firmly bounded to their interpersonal social experiences with friends, family members, neighbors and co-workers.

It is a strictly ‘local’ social sphere he examines as he makes sense of the techniques people employ to make claims on one another and to avoid the claims made upon them.

Ferguson’s analysis of “cultural style” as just such a technique is a point I take up in

120 considering Maximino’s case shortly, but for Félix the analysis is unhelpful. Félix, in my observations and in the recollections of his colleagues, has never affected a particularly foreign “style.” Most of the development cosmopolitans I met never did either. I will consider briefly how some development cosmopolitans, in fact, were motivated to conceal their international knowledges and experiences rather than cultivating a style to impress them upon others.

Cosmopolitanism for development professionals is something much closer to

Hannerz’s definition – an enjoyment and capacity for foreign-ness, and a competence and skill in working within foreign structures and systems. That this competence is perhaps selected for, cultivated within and rewarded by the structures of international development work is what leads me, among other factors, to identify the cosmopolitan- ness of my study informants as “development cosmopolitanism.” On this point Ferguson is helpful, as he considers the “political economic compulsions” which have made rural- urban migration so necessary in his case studies. For local development professionals, like Ferguson’s mine workers, there often are not many options for employment and career development. Where Ferguson’s mine workers, though, find themselves becoming

“urbanized” and therefore reluctant to return to the rural homes they remember and imagine, my local development workers may never leave “home,” but work with people, and in ways, that demand they cultivate a certain cosmopolitan-ness, a certain facility for working with the foreign, if they are to be successful.

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Field Staff in Bié

Spending time in the Andulo office of the GGAP, in rural Bié Province, I came across several moments of social disjuncture and discomfort that were important for my thinking on development cosmopolitanism. One such instance is captured in the vignette which foreshadows this chapter, in which the external evaluation consultant for the

GGAP was unaware that other people in the room, apart from the two of us, spoke

English. In another instance, I had been waiting with the newest member of the provincial

GGAP staff, Arnaldo, for the beginning of an important provincial forum meeting. We were taking in the scene together and watching forum attendees file into the newly built meeting hall when a young man’s eyes alighted on Arnaldo, and widened in disbelief as he came over to speak to us. As it turns out, Arnaldo and the young man had been good friends while at university together in Namibia, but they had lost track of one another since school. They each had known, of course, that the other was Angolan, but in trying to explain their surprise at the coincidental meeting to me, they emphasized that they had not known they were both from the planalto region, and neither had ever thought it possible to run into the other in rural, hard-to-reach Andulo, of all places. Arnaldo’s friend had been sent as a journalist from Kuito to cover the municipal forum for the national radio, and Arnaldo had himself been on the job in Andulo for just a few months, after his sister had made contacts for him inside the American NGO (more on this in a moment). The two exchanged phone numbers and thought they might see one another again in Kuito or better, Huambo, and parted ways to go on with their work. After I wondered aloud if his friend would be staying in Andulo for the night and if he would want to join us for dinner, Arnaldo made it clear to me that it would be more acceptable

122 to catch up with another “returned” young person well away from the rural areas. He then made sure I wasn’t mentioning to local community members or government employees that he had grown up in Namibia.

Assuring Arnaldo that I never discuss people’s personal histories with others, we got caught up in the proceedings of the municipal forum, but this exchange, among several others, alerted me to the fact that at least some people were uncomfortable with their personal and perhaps also their educational histories becoming known in Andulo.

There were also times, as in the vignette, when GGAP staff members were careful about revealing their capacity for different languages. As I have mentioned before, the Andulo office of the GGAP was, at certain times, staffed completely by Angolans whose histories

I had marked on my organizational chart as “transgressive” of the local-international dichotomy used by most international NGOs.

Arnaldo and two of the other staff members of the team had been raised in

Namibian refugee camps during the war and had only recently moved back to Angola to establish their families and careers. Another staff member of the Andulo office, though having lived in Angola for decades, marrying and raising his family there, was originally from Cape Verde and held both nationalities. He was considered “national” staff by the

American organization. In this section I review Cristóvão’s history, who, like Arnaldo and Carlota, had moved to Namibia with his family for most of his upbringing and education. I also briefly compare Samuel’s and Josué’s stories, brothers who were raised almost entirely in Zambia during the war, before returning as adults to Angola and both finding positions with the American organization. This cluster of examples compels me to consider how previous, or already extant, cosmopolitanism may predispose someone to

123 become a development professional, or make them more attractive to development organizations. Considering Félix’s example, as well as Maximino’s in a moment, I believe that the strongest internationalizing effects happen to development professionals inside the organizations, on the job, but there is a subset of people who were already quite cosmopolitan before they became development professionals.

Cristóvão, 29 at the time of my fieldwork, was born in Lubango in the south of

Angola and left for Namibia with his family when he was 13. The family had tried, at first, to arrange passage to Brazil but this proved “economically unfeasible” with eight children and they settled in Namibia instead. Cristóvão had to repeat the seventh grade there because of language difficulties. He did well in school from then on, however, and traveled to South Africa in 1999 and Germany in 2000 to take courses as a young adult, focusing on accountancy and business. He had thought to remain in Germany to attend university but found the language too difficult, and returned to Namibia to study. After finishing high school and attending university for a while, he returned to Angola in 2003, leaving the rest of his family in Namibia. His brothers and sisters were still finishing their schooling, or had found work in Namibia. He had wanted to find work in banking, but had little luck.

Cristóvão describes living and looking for work after his return to Lubango as very difficult, filled with unnecessary bureaucracy, nepotism, and suspicion of an outsider: “everyone who works is from that same house” (os que trabalham só são mesmo os de casa). He took his first professional position there with a South African investment program, and worked to assess agricultural operations that the company might invest in. He liked the work somewhat, in that he felt he was participating in something

124 that would help Angola recover from the long wars, but did not see much opportunity to develop his own skills and career in that company. An aunt began having conversations with him about on-the-job training, and pointed out how international NGOs work to improve capacity in their staff members. When an opportunity arose he left the investment firm to take an accountant’s job with the American organization’s Lubango office. He found the organization very different, “like a school,” and took advantage of several training opportunities to improve his skills. He enjoys attending NGO workshops, meeting people who work in similar organizations or the government, and learning about new areas of development work. After a few years in the Lubango office he moved to take a position in the Kuito office, where his new wife’s family was from. He was assigned to the GGAP in Andulo from very near the beginning of the program, and sees himself staying in the Kuito area for several more years, as he is now supporting several of his wife’s family members there, and would like to see them all through school in

Kuito.

To work in the Andulo office, Cristóvão, Arnaldo, Paulo, and several other employees of the American organization who work on other programs out of the Andulo office commute there from Huambo or Kuito. The GGAP staff members take regional busses on Monday morning or sometimes Sunday night to get to Andulo, stay together during the week in a house that they rent, and leave on a bus again on Friday afternoons.

If there are NGO vehicles making the trip on Friday or Monday they’ll try to arrange to come along, saving both time and bus fare. As a general rule, however, on Fridays and

Mondays not much gets done in the Andulo office. The local grants manager, Carlota, who also grew up in Namibia much like Cristóvão and Arnaldo, has moved her husband

125 and four children to Andulo and does not make this weekly commute. Discussing the commute with the Bié staff, both Cristóvão and Paulo make it clear that educational opportunities for their children and other dependents, as well as general living conditions, make it “impossible” to move their families out of Kuito and Huambo, respectively. As their children get older, Carlota and her husband plan to move to Huambo, if not Luanda, for their educations. Cristóvão and Arnaldo both intimate, as well, that spending time in

Andulo is socially uncomfortable for them because of their backgrounds.

“Local” Development Cosmopolitanism: Patterns and Dangers of Difference

Mobility and cosmopolitanism would seem to go hand in hand, but Cristóvão’s experiences, along with Arnaldo, Carlota, Samuel and Josué, trouble the arguments about cosmopolitanism in many of the same ways Félix’s case did. This set of development professionals were all “cosmopolitan,” of a sort, well before entering the development profession. In speaking with members of the GGAP during my fieldwork I came to believe that these individuals, and others, were attractive hires in part because they spoke

English. Certainly Osman was able to communicate with them far better than he could with other staff members because he could speak and send emails to them in English.

Even in speaking in Portuguese, however, these individuals were far better able to understand him. Osman, for instance, had a communicative tic where he would insert the

English phrases “you know?” and “isn’t it?” into his speech at frequent intervals, whether speaking in English or in Portuguese. Cristóvão, Carlota, Samuel and others with solid

English language competencies were better able to communicate with Osman where many others had a more difficult time. The Luanda-based grants officer, Shameem, was

126 even more dependent on using English when he could with GGAP staff members.

Departing from Félix’s example, however, this set of development cosmopolitans had learned their English, and many other things, abroad.

In the early anthropological literature on cosmopolitanism, and indeed the earliest philosophical thinking on cosmopolitanism, certain types of mobility were logically prerequisite for a cosmopolitan, or a cosmopolite. The type of mobility that led to someone becoming or being cosmopolitan was the type of mobility afforded only to the elite – the diplomat, the business professional, the explorer, the well-heeled tourist.

Servants, as Clifford (1992) points out, even those accompanying the diplomats, businesspeople, explorers and tourists, were not cosmopolitan. Neither were missionaries, military personnel, or shipping agents who did quite as much travel as the elites.

Certainly forced migrants or refugees were not cosmopolitan. These travels were qualitatively different in motivation: elites had privilege and choice in their travel, and in exercising that privilege and choice, became cosmopolitan.

Elites also, in exercising this agency, determined what contexts, what knowledge, and what experiences made one cosmopolitan. European travel, speaking French, seeing the seven wonders, etc, were cosmopolitan. Traveling elsewhere, speaking other languages, seeing other things, were markedly less cosmopolitan. Correcting this elite- centric view has been a preoccupation for anthropology over the last 25 years.

Considering this anthropological trajectory against the stories of the Bié field staff, I argue that if cosmopolitanism comes in large part from mobility, anthropologists must attend not only to the effects of mobility but, in attending to the above “causes” of mobility, to the patterns of how mobilities work. Here, this set of development

127 cosmopolitans shares certain characteristics from their experiences of the Angolan war – they elected to leave Angola during the war, or their families did, and became refugees or exiles. But arguing that refugees are cosmopolitans does not go far enough in considering pattern, cause, and consequence of mobility and cosmopolitan-ness.

In the case of the Bié staff members, and of Samuel and Josué’s family, these refugees could go no further than the neighboring countries. That the neighboring countries were English-speaking and used a British-derived educational system, shapes their cosmopolitan-ness. Their particular experiences of refugee-ness have gone on to shape their re-entry into Angola, as well. Speaking English and having been educated in a

British-inflected system has, I believe, given this group of people an edge in finding work in international NGOs and in development more broadly. Their particular experiences of refugee-ness have left some difficulties, as well, however. It is broadly understood on the planalto that, if your family fled to Namibia or Zambia during the war, your family was most likely a UNITA family. That Cristóvão, Carlota, Arnaldo, etc, were children at the time tempers judgment against them, but does not absolve them of being affiliated with

UNITA, and certainly does not absolve them of having escaped the worst of the war.

Having grown up abroad and coming as an adult to work on the planalto, then, can be personally unnerving and more importantly, could be very concerning as regards being able to build rapport with the local community as part of your job.

The investigation of cosmopolitanism has become, in many ways, an investigation of difference and individuals and groups approach their differences (Appiah 2006). In this new formulation, cultural and social difference is not necessarily something achieved or produced by travel, though often it is. The travel, though, may be indicative of

128 difference or a product of it, rather than the thing that causes the difference. The

“foreign” may be – may originate, may stay – literally next door (Brink-Danan in press;

Grant 2010). Recent work has uncovered a Euro-centric view in the literature, and part of the stream of adjectivized cosmopolitanisms (Holton 2009: Appendix 1) has been to make the point that we must distinguish among many cosmopolitans, rather than to continue a fiction of one universal cosmopolitanism (Harvey 2009).

To consider this set of cases from the GGAP, I rely on a broad concept of individual “mobility,” one which emphasizes the personal accumulation of knowledge and experience as one “moves.” The focus here has been on the after-effects of mobility as an experience, on the products of mobility – not on mobility as a potential to move, but on what happens because of movement. I have also had to consider the movement a product of political or social difference, in addition to a factor producing such difference.

Mobility here appears as several types of personal and professional movements – physical travel between places and contexts, whether for professional or personal reasons; the taking up of professional positions in different organizations; advancement of professional position or the taking of a different position in an organization wherein one develops a wider set of professionals skills; and finally activities in different professional or personal realms either serially or simultaneously. I argue that experiencing any of these types of “mobilities” accrues identifiably foreign knowledge and experience to the individual, in turn increasing that individual’s ability to “translate” across professional, organizational, geographic and cultural divides. In this sense, moving from one job to another, from one office to another, or from one organization to another, is here considered a type of “travel,” which, for most, results in new knowledge.

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That Arnaldo, Cristóvão, Carlota, sometimes Félix, etc, chose to conceal some of their foreign experiences and knowledges either as a point of subterfuge – as in the preceding vignette – or a matter of fitting in on the planalto – as Arnaldo’s concerns may have been, individuals were not the only parties to strategize around their internationality or locality. Development institutions and organizations manipulate the local and international reputations of their staff members as well, as I demonstrate with several observations of Maximino at work.

Maximino

Maximino and I met for the first time, briefly and rather disastrously, at the

Angolan National Assembly. We were each being introduced around as new INGO folk –

Maximino had just been hired by the Canadian organization to be the Luanda-based coordinator of the Lunda Norte and Cabinda offices of the GGAP (and was new enough that he hadn’t been to either of the field sites yet). I was being introduced around as an

American doctoral student studying the GGAP for her thesis. When we were introduced I rather stupidly asked Maximino if his family had some sort of Italian connection – his real name still sounds Italian to me for some reason – and he responded, rather affronted,

“No, I’m perfectly Angolan,” walking away before I could recover the moment.

Maximino in the end came to be one of my closest informants, and a good friend, and we traveled widely together as he worked to shape and reshape the GGAP. In fact, I was later able to travel along on his first visits to Cabinda and Lunda Norte, but we certainly got off to a bad start, what with my trying to insert an internationality that he clearly rejected.

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My next encounter with Maximino was much more productive, and I was able to learn some of the back story to his life and his professional training while we prepared for a meeting at USAID the next day. He had grown up partly in the central highlands of the country and partly in the south, where his family had fled during the civil war. In the south Maximino was educated at mission schools and first found employment with a local development NGO, traveling around among the semi-nomadic tribes in the deeply rural southern and eastern parts of the country. He speaks beautiful Portuguese, at least three indigenous languages that I know of, and with the help of this development NGO ended up in England not long ago to pursue a master’s degree in development studies. He likes to discuss Robert Chambers (e.g., 1983) and may very well pursue a doctoral degree in political science or government in the near future.

We were invited, at this time, to a meeting between USAID, the GGAP, and the diamond company that funded the program in Lunda Norte. The topic of the meeting was a three-year old memorandum of understanding between USAID and the diamond company in which each vowed to work together towards development in Lunda Norte, the province in which this firm had the bulk of its industrial interests. Evidently the diamond company had expressed concern about USAID’s progress under the memorandum, and USAID had convened the meeting to present the GGAP. Reviewing the original memorandum with GGAP staff after the meeting, it was their opinion that, in fact the GGAP monies from the diamond company were different than those discussed in the memorandum. The GGAP staff, puzzling through the meeting afterward, came to the conclusion that they had just done USAID an enormous favor, and perhaps had just aided

131 in perpetrating some sort of evasion in representing the GGAP to the diamond company as part of USAID’s work under this memorandum.

Preparing for the meeting in the days before it, I kept close to Osman, the chief of party, and Emile, Maximino’s immediate supervisor from the Canadian NGO and their programs officer. As Osman had me updating his PowerPoint slides (themselves

“borrowed” from the Canadian organization’s Country Director), and as we arranged where everyone would meet and who needed special passes and permissions to enter the

US Embassy, it was agreed among Osman, Emile, and Maximino that Maximino should do the presentation, and that it should be in Portuguese.

The conversation was a significant one in that Maximino was so new to the

Canadian organization and to the GGAP, and had never been to Lunda Norte. But he was being selected to present the program’s progress there to date to the donors despite having no firsthand knowledge of it as yet. This was the consensus because Maximino was Angolan, and it was agreed – largely between the two more experienced staff – that a presentation about the program would be better received if it were seen to be “locally owned” and “Angolan.” A presentation by an Angolan achieves that end far better than if the Bangladeshi chief of party or the Swiss programs director from the Canadian organization leads the presentation, in any language. Osman, though, was also insistent on the presentation being in Portuguese.

At the meeting, Osman introduced Maximino as the new GGAP Advisor for the

Canadian Organization, stating how pleased the program was to have him, and asked

Maximino to say just a few words about himself by way of introduction before beginning the formal presentation. Maximino, in his turn, thanked everyone for their attention and

132 expressed his own pleasure at being a new participant in the GGAP, and said that if it was alright with everyone else, he thought the focus of the meeting should properly be on the program. He jumped right in to the presentation. I do not intend to imply here that

Maximino was intentionally secreting his foreign educational credentials and perpetrating a type of fraud on his audience. Maximino is, as it happens, very modest in these sorts of situations and really did think the focus should be on the presentation of the program. But the effect of what happened was, in fact, to conceal his international credentials.

The meeting went well, and my next experience with Maximino was on a trip to

Lunda Norte just a few weeks later – both his first to the region, and mine. We spent just over a week in the remote diamond mining area, and his job during that week was to introduce himself as the new coordinator to the field staff there, and review with them the goals and methods of the program. Maximino spent the week lecturing, making work plans, and setting up goals and accountability points for the 4-person team. His authority in doing so, however, was not just that he was the newly hired regional coordinator for the position. In making the first introduction, his boss, Emile, explained that he had just finished a master’s degree in England and that he had a knowledge and grasp of development and good governance processes that rivaled those of the donors and architects of the program, but that was arguably even better because he also knew the

Angolan situation so well, being Angolan and having worked in development in the southern provinces for so long. It was on this authority that Maximino led the field staff – a combination of “outside” education and knowledge and a type of “inside” familiarity and legitimacy.

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Maximino, with collegial and institutional collusion, presented himself as local, and therefore credible, in the USAID offices. Of course he was not local to Lunda Norte, and in fact at that meeting had not yet been there. But he was sufficiently local for

USAID’s purposes in that he was Angolan and spoke Portuguese. In the provincial field offices, however, he was international – educated in Britain – and therefore credible. Part of the strategy in introducing Maximino as so “international” to these field offices may have been because he was replacing an international staff member. The man who previously held Maximino’s position was Indonesian-American, with several years of work experience in Brazil. Making the case to the field teams that Maximino had all of the professional qualifications of an international staff member but was also a “local”

Angolan was in part a reaction to problems and concerns held over from the work of this previous GGAP supervisor.

“Local” Development Cosmopolitanism: Commodity, Strategy

The types of local and international experience Maximino holds, and that his colleagues emphasize at times, is also significant. Had he been something other than

Angolan in those field offices, of course, say a technical advisor from abroad but with the same education, etc, I believe he wouldn’t have held quite the authority he did in that office, even though he knew nothing of the local language or culture (Tchokwe) and had never visited the region before. As well, I believe that because his degree was from

Britain – not Brazil or Portugal or South Africa – that he was accorded greater respect than he would have had his degree been earned in one of these other places. This is not because Britain is a gloss for the global, but because Britain is Britain, and not these

134 other, arguably equally foreign and global places. Perhaps most significantly, I believe

Emile was anxious to replace his own “French” internationality with Maximino’s localness and his British education, because Lunda Norte and Cabinda are so close to the

Congo, where the international very often comes in a Francophone version and can be considered divisive on the Angolan side of the border (see previous chapter).

In Maximino’s example, as in others, to be “local” or to be “international” was something that changed depending on your context, and on what you were trying to achieve. Even for someone like me, who might expect to be unsalvageably international when wandering around Angola, came to be considered more or less “local” by dint of language ability, knowledge of Angola, and that my husband and son were also living in

Angola. In that respect, being “local” or como nós is sometimes an acknowledgement not of belonging in terms of origin, but of belonging in terms of a commitment. That said, when a colleague in the central highlands was in a serious car accident and others had had a difficult time getting into her overfull municipal hospital ward to see her, they brought me along on the next trip and had me lead the way into the ward – staff and patients alike assumed I was a foreign physician, and we quite literally walked into the ward with none of the hassles they had been subject to on previous attempts. Being international versus local, then, can be a strategic use and decision, and can be something one manipulates, or something one’s colleagues manipulate.

Anthropologists have documented this strategic use of locality and internationality for decades, but in reading the literature I’m struck that the local is considered the characteristic of the particular, and the international – glossed usually as the global – is considered the characteristic of the general, that monolithic and

135 characterless ‘global’ other. Living these strategies and watching these decisions in

Angola the global never seemed generic to me – it was always something. British, South

African, Brazilian, Zambian. It was named and was foreign and international with a character and flavor not found in our imaginings of the ‘global.’ Equally, the ‘local’ was very often generically Angolan – or Portuguese-speaking – or Black African – it was rarely Ovimbundu, or central highlands, or the “most local” local.

In Maximino’s case, it was important for people to know not just that he had studied abroad, and not just that he had studied abroad in a western or a developed country – but to specify which country, in which language. Equally in my case, Angolans clearly identified me as foreign, but it was always important what kind of foreign – no matter how casual the conversation, we always had to clear up whether I was Brazilian,

French, British, Russian (the most usual guesses), or finally, American-in-Angola.

I started to realize, during my year of watching international development get negotiated from inside these INGOs, that looking for the local and the global was simply not going to work because that is not the level on which these negotiations are conducted

– they are conducted instead on the level of the international, perhaps the cosmopolitan, which must be specified and is actually a remarkably fine level on which to discuss these things as it gives us simultaneously the details of language, colonial history, and region, at the same time that these all combine to create a broader picture of developed or not, rich or not, powerful or not.

The international came out as a level of interaction and influence that runs betwixt and between the local and the global, making up a far larger percentage of the movement of people and ideas than I had been used to considering. As useful as it seems to be in the

136 negotiations of development and governance, I think it might also be very useful as we consider our analyses of how these things are working and changing in an increasingly international context.

Development Effects: Local Cosmopolitans

Attracting cosmopolitan individuals to work in the development industry and cosmopolitanizing workers of all stripes is one of the “internal” effects of the development apparatus – an effect upon itself. If an individual has skills or interests valuable to the industry, like Félix and his language skills, they can quickly become circulating members of the development world. That Félix’s language skill was so valuable to the development industry, though, is itself an indicator of its international character and of the cosmopolitanness that must be developed in order to successfully operate in the social milieu of development work. A person like Félix may never leave

Angola, but they have knowledge of, and can navigate through, complexly international groups and institutions, and in fact their ability to do so may be their entrée into the field, more than another more technical or topical skill. Ironically, in fact, local professionals’ language skills may be more important to their entry into the world of development work than are their other knowledges and skills, despite rhetoric and policy making in development organizations around “local perspectives” and “local ownership.” It may be, if development work “globalizes” (Jackson 2005), that it does so in part by attracting and then accentuating elements of the local that are already “international.”

Whether previously “cosmopolitan” or not, however, working in development – with the stream of international visitors, multinational collection of colleagues, policies

137 and regulations developed elsewhere, adoption of “global best practices,” and more – even the “most local” local becomes something of a cosmopolitan after some time working in development. International NGOs facilitate and encourage this, organizing international conferences and workshops and sending staff members and even local community members abroad for these short exercises. Maximino’s story more properly begins at this level – he had never left Angola before his engagement with international development work began, but with organizational sponsorship he has now earned an advanced degree and, in just the year of my fieldwork alone, had traveled to Brazil,

Morocco, and South Africa on work-related trips.

In the GGAP example, a great many of the national staff members had either developed very strong international knowledges and skills through their work, or were – despite their “locality” – rather international to begin with. Cristóvão’s, Carlota’s,

Arnaldo’s, Samuel’s and Josué’s excursions into the international followed historical and geographical patterns that lend a particular flavor to the international in contemporary

Angola. Their returns to Angola do the same. I mean to say here that it is not mere

“coincidence” or “happenstance” that Angola’s neighbors are English-speaking countries, that Angolan war refugees spent decades in those countries, and that upon their return to

Angola they would find work in international development. These are historical sequelae of African colonization and Cold War politics. That certain international development interventions find well-trodden paths to follow in the Angolan highlands is similarly no accident, but is the latest in a longer series of historical events and relationships. English- speaking war refugees returning to Angola and finding work in a USAID-funded democratization program in the central highlands, in short, seems to me to be noteworthy,

138 not for its convoluted uniqueness but for its formulaic updating of historical patterns and events.

The ethnographic literature on cosmopolitanism is helpful in understanding this empirical situation, in large part because it pushes past essentialist discussions of local development professionals as “hybrid,” and instrumentalist discussions of them as

“brokers” and “translators.” James Clifford’s influential essay on “Traveling Cultures,” a seminal essay for social scientists and cultural studies scholars seeking to examine the transnational patterns and experiences of the modern world, interrogates who is, and who isn’t, a “hybrid” of multiple cultures. He discusses that feeling of the “uncanny” that happens when one comes across something one isn’t expecting to come across:

Perhaps I could start with a travel conjuncture that has, to my thinking at least, come to occupy a paradigmatic place. Call it the “Squanto effect.” Squanto was, of course, the Indian who greeted the Pilgrims in 1620 in Plymouth, Massachusetts, who helped them through a hard winter and who spoke good English. To imagine the full effect, you have to remember what the “New World” was like in 1620; you could smell the pines fifty miles out to sea. Think of coming into a new place like that and having the uncanny experience of running into a Patuxet just back from Europe (Clifford 1992: 97).

Clifford invokes the “uncanny” example of a “Patuxet just back from Europe:” “a disconcertingly hybrid ‘native’ met at the ends of the earth: strangely familiar, and different precisely in that unprocessed familiarity” (1992: 97). Clifford’s thought experiment, wherein readers are invited to imagine themselves Pilgrims arriving in the

New World, encountering Squanto where they might expect to find a stereotypical

“native,” does evoke the uncanny – the interaction is “strangely familiar,” and

“disconcerting” in its hybridity of place, language, and shared knowledge. In Clifford’s telling, though, it is Squanto's individual hybridity which is disconcerting and strangely

139 familiar – not the overall encounter, not the social situation as a whole. As Pilgrims landing at Plymouth, readers expect everything to be different, most especially the people, but uncomfortably find that some things are not so different after all. Clifford aptly identifies an “unprocessed familiarity” as the source of discomfort, but neglects to consider exactly what it is that is familiar, and to whom.

I would suggest that it is not just that Squanto can speak in English about New

World things – how to get through that hard winter, etc – that is unsettling, but that he has been to Europe and can speak about European things as well. Though Clifford does not push his readers consider it from their perspectives, I imagine that the encounter between the arriving Pilgrims and Squanto was just as unsettling for the local Wampanoag and

Massachusett onlookers, as well. Would it not be equally uncanny to witness a fellow native speaking incomprehensibly and getting on rather well with the strange new arrivals? What is unsettling here, considered from both sides of the encounter, is

Squanto’s knowledge “out of place,” to invoke Douglas’s classic analysis of purity and pollution, symbolic order and disorder. Here Clifford details for us a situation in which a well-travelled1 Patuxet is unsettling not because of the idiom in which he speaks, but

because he knows things he is not entirely supposed to know. He violates the order of the

encounter by holding European knowledge in his Native American self.

1 “Well-travelled” may well give an inappropriate sense to Squanto’s story. Squanto was trafficked against his will, being captured by English traders in 1605, returned, captured again in 1614 to be sold to Spaniards, rescued by Spanish friars, released to London and finally returning to New England in 1619 to find his family and, indeed, his entire tribe fallen victim to smallpox during his second absence. I would not compare modern development workers to Squanto as though they were victims of human trafficking, though the limited opportunities many local staff members have for employment could be seen as an element of “compulsion” in the cultivation of development cosmopolitanism, as Ferguson (1999) notes for Zambian mine workers and urban migrants.

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Angolan international development professionals present a similarly unsettling case for those practically engaged in the work as well as for the anthropological literature. Within the institutional structures of international development, to restate, all

Angolans working in Angola are “local” or “national” staff and those holding foreign passports are “expatriate” or “international” staff. The practical Angolan case sometimes admits finer distinctions than these: there are staff members from other African countries, for instance, who are “more local” internationals, and staff from other Portuguese speaking countries who are in many ways “less foreign” than are other foreigners. The closest thing to an Angolan, without actually being one, is a professional from another

Lusophone African country, and I will consider cases of this situation in the next chapter.

Here, I considered cases in which Angolans, though, might be just as comfortable or even more comfortable, elsewhere, as for the Bié staff members who grew up in

Namibia and still have family there. The bureaucracy of international non-governmental organizations looms above these practicalities of language and experience, though, and the official classifications are rigid: Angolan passport-holders are local, to be treated as are other locals in other locales, and everyone else is international, to be treated as one international class.

I have argued in this chapter that not all Angolan development professionals are

“local” in the same way when they are working in Angola. Nor, as I will demonstrate in the next chapter, are all foreign-born development professionals working in Angola “ex- pats” in the same way. In working to understand the modern Angolan experience or the transnational society of development professionals, in fact, the bureaucratic categories obscure more than they reveal, and should not be adopted into the ethnographic literature

141 uncritically. In addition to the small, practical refinements above of categories of the foreign, details about the local also change matters for individual development workers.

The Angolan born and raised in Huambo but then posted to Lunda Norte feels very much the outsider, despite his shared classification of “national staff” with his colleagues native to the province. Each of these cases might well demand an analytical, “hybrid” category, describing those who, like Squanto, possess knowledge out of place.

Discussing individual or group knowledges, skills, and experiences as though these things turn people into “hybrid” types implies a permanence or essentialism, a naturalization of difference that I find disrespectful, not least because it implies that certain knowledge belongs “naturally” to some, while in others it is disconcerting.

Consider Clifford’s example again. Pilgrims speaking some Patuxet, I think, would be considered bilingual, not hybrid. If anthropology is to adequately describe the dislocations and relative characteristics of development workers, local or otherwise,

“hybrid” for some and “bilingual” or another term for others, simply isn’t going to do. In place of the “hybrid” for development studies, I have turned to the literature on cosmopolitanism as that which identifies difference and considers how difference is negotiated in the social world, advancing for my cases a concept of the development cosmopolitan.

The idea of the cosmopolitan is an appropriate complement to the ideas of the

“broker” or the “translator” that a group of European anthropologists are working with, as well (Bierschenk, et al. 2002; Long 2001). These discussions are collected in Lewis and

Mosse’s 2006 collection titled “Development Brokers and Translators.” “Brokers” for these scholars are the structurally in-between positions of consultants and gatekeepers:

142 those “social actors who specialize in the acquisition, control, and redistribution of development ‘revenue.’” Authors in the collection are attempting to further “a new ethnography of the social spaces that exist between aid funders and recipients” (Mosse and Lewis 2006: 12). In focusing on this section of the development world, these analyses differ significantly from my view of the development apparatus through the

GGAP. The local development professionals working in the GGAP had no control over the acquisition or redistribution of development ‘revenue’ in the way development consultants working directly with funding agencies might (see last chapter’s discussion of siting decisions for the GGAP). Félix, Cristóvão, and Maximino and their colleagues may have certain discretionary power in relation to the resources of the small field offices for local communities, and this is another power dynamic that Mosse and Lewis’s collection focuses on. In focusing on brokerage positions between whole communities and whole agencies, the Lewis and Mosse collection overemphasizes structural constraints, negotiations, and manipulations, and neglects to consider the individual, lived experience of the folks in those positions. Further, I believe the real productive friction of international development for local communities exists with the local implementing development professionals – not the negotiators who function between aid agencies NGO administrative staff.

I have argued to consider local development professionals as “cosmopolitan” as any other development professional, and I seek to change the language with which professionals working in the developmentalist configuration are compared and contrasted to one another. This proposal argues against previous portrayals of local development workers as being a negative result of development work – especially those who develop

143 the skills, interests, and experiences of more obviously “international” staff. For instance,

Mandel considers “indigenous development professionals” part of “the human fallout of international development aid” (2002: 279) by tracing examples in which local professionals have left Kazakhstan as their experiences in international aid work have

“rendered them unsuitable to work for their own governments” (2002: 287). In her critical study of programs intended to increase civil society formation in Kazakhstan, for instance, Mandel provides brief “snapshots” of six local USAID employees. She criticizes the upward and outward mobility of these professionals as they strategically make use of the skills and contacts they gain working at USAID:

these people do indeed possess social capital, but its deployment takes the form of writing grant proposals to study abroad, and knowing how to speak convincingly in interviews with the vetting consular officials; this promotes only their own eventual deracinated cosmopolitanism. Western development aid personnel facilitate the dissolution of this precarious, indigenous professional class, by encouraging them on the road to self-improvement, and in many cases, exit from the region.” 292

While arguments to recognize vernacular cosmopolitans and rooted cosmopolitans refute her criticism of a “deracinated” cosmopolitanism (Werbner 2008), I take issue with Mandel’s narrow-sightedness in evaluating the effects of Kazakhstani professional mobility. How is it any worse that a Kazakhstani advances through the ranks of development work, going off to run a program in Latin America, say, than for a

Canadian to do the same? I understand Mandel’s point that perhaps Kazakhstan is in some way worse off for “losing” these professionals, and Mandel concludes from this point that foreign aid is working against itself in the region. It is my contention, however, that these professionals are not “lost” forever and completely, and that their circulation in the development apparatus and in the wider professional world has benefit for

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Kazakhstan in the modern, globalized era. Expecting all Kazakhstani’s to stay put would seem, in the long run, far more detrimental to change and development in the region.

The anthropological literature on cosmopolitanism, them, assists an ethnographic analysis of local development workers with more theoretically sophisticated language than that of the “hybrid,” the “broker,” or the “translator,” and allows an analysis without prejudice against increased internationality or cosmopolitanness as a negative characteristic of a “local” person, or as a negative product of development and globalization. The literature on cosmopolitanism forces the analyst to consider wider, global, patterns of interconnection, circulation, difference, relationality and complementarity.

One of the theoretical advances afforded by the concept of the development cosmopolitan comes from recent work examining cosmopolitan social interactions as inherently relational. In these studies cosmopolitanism is revealed to be not an ideal, value, or self-contained identity (cf. Appiah 2006), but a relational characteristic wherein one person is more or less, or differently, cosmopolitan than another. Ferguson’s analysis of Zambian urban dwellers affecting “cosmopolitan style” in order to distance themselves from the claims of local affiliates is among the first examples in the literature of cosmopolitanism as relational characteristic or as performance. More recently, Hawkins

(2010) has contributed an essay on the cosmopolitan-ness of local salesmen and foreign tourists in the medina of Tunis, concluding that each is cosmopolitan because they oppose the other's “localness,” presumed or feigned cross-cultural ignorance, or

“parochiality.”

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In Hawkins case the tourists presume that the salespeople are local Tunisians, engaging in something quintessentially Tunisian – selling, trading, buying, and especially, haggling for the best deal in all of it. The salespeople are simultaneously engaging the tourists to sell them this mirage of exoticness, in addition to, perhaps, a rug or a handbag. In navigating the social situation, Hawkins’ salespeople engage with a broad – but usually rather shallow – understanding of foreigners’ character, desire, wealth, and language use (see also Notar 2008). In describing the tourist-salesperson interactions, Hawkins demonstrates how salespeople work to identify the tourist's nationality early on, so as to calibrate the sales approach appropriately – not only to build rapport but to establish a sense of the boundaries of cost and the tenor the interaction should take to be most profitable. Hawkins argues to class his Tunisian salespeople as

“cosmopolitans” because they can identify and classify a range of foreigners, and adjust their behavior and language appropriately, within the limits of the sales exchange.

For Hawkins, cosmopolitanism exists in the repertoire of knowledge and performance held by, and produced by, these salespeople both in their accumulated individual experience and as a professional class. In this manner, though, it is not one kind of cosmopolitan interacting with another kind of cosmopolitan, but rather that the salesman becomes cosmopolitan because he is interacting knowledgeably with difference, while in the salesman’s estimation the tourist is acting in ignorance with little or no knowledge, or perhaps erroneous knowledge, of Tunsia and Tunisians. Hawkins emphasizes, then, that cosmopolitanism is a relative effect – one is only more or less cosmopolitan, in some fashion, in comparison to something else – and an effect which dependent on an antonym. Someone must be “local,” he argues, for the interlocutor to be

146 cosmopolitan. This clearly resonates with Ferguson’s emphasis on cosmopolitanism as a way to produce and enforce distance from the local. For Hawkins, it would appear that the tourist and the salesman cannot be differently cosmopolitan together, but that they must be opposites – one local or parochial, one cosmopolitan. That is the emic perspective. Etically, of course, Hawkins is arguing that both parties are differently cosmopolitan, but that each must consider their counterpart “uncosmopolitan” to produce the effect.

Félix and other local GGAP staff members are “local” cosmopolitans in much the same way Hawkins sees his Tunisian salesmen (cf. Notar 2008): by virtue of contact with foreigners in their worked with international organizations in their natal province of Bié.

That is, for Félix and others, the international came to them in the particular form of foreign humanitarian aid workers during the decades-long conflict in the central Angolan highlands. Samuel, Arnaldo, Carlota, and Cristóvão, among others, became cosmopolitan more in the manner of Squanto – they left their natal communities under duress, then returned. Finally, as counterpunch to Mandel’s criticisms, Maximino was raised in

Angola through his work with international development organizations, traveled to

Britain for a master's degree, and returned to Angola to take a position that had previously been assigned to an “international” staff person. In each case, as Ferguson and other authors remind us, these individuals are cosmopolitan only in relation to others – either others less cosmopolitan, or perhaps others differently cosmopolitan. I think using this sort of language – though cumbersome at times – allows the analyst to refine the discussions and debates well beyond “brokers,” etc, in a manner that accounts for individual trajectories, goal-setting, reactions and relations.

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The literature on cosmopolitanism and cosmopolitan knowledge also provides insight into the aesthetics and cultural characteristics of local development professionals as they are development cosmopolitans. Once local development professionals are recognized as development cosmopolitans – as a class of persons with knowledge, experience, and appreciation of the foreign, the analyst can begin to define what sorts of knowledge experience, etc, feed into this particular cosmopolitanism. The version of cosmopolitanism that this class of persons inhabits is produced and bound by their participation in the international development assemblage, and is therefore a unique version of the international, the foreign, and the cosmopolitan. They are often, but not necessarily, an elite class. As a class, development professionals in Angola certainly do not consider themselves elite – they reserve that term for employees of the state and of private international corporations. Finally, even if some development cosmopolitans are elite, certainly not all of them are.

Conclusion

After the previous chapter’s historical, bird’s-eye view of the Good Governance in Angola Program, this chapter considered some of the individual development professionals who were making their way in the program in 2008-2009. The central argument of the dissertation is that international development work has globalizing and disciplinary effects not only on the “recipients” or “targets” of such work, but on the workers too, as the “middle figures” of international development. The dissertation traces several effects of development on the professionals engaged in the work, and here considered how development work demanded an aptitude for foreign engagement and

148 rewarded such engagement. The chapter examined the experiences and trajectories of

Angolan development workers in the GGAP to consider first how institutional mobility, as in Félix’s case, maps onto facility with the foreign and may interface with the Angolan government as NGO-trained development workers are “poached” by the state or, alternatively, are “virally” inserted into the state. The chapter then demonstrated how the particular variety of the foreign in which local GGAP staff members were competent was

English-speaking, and Southern as well as Northern. The chapter considered how both individuals and institutions might strategically portray – concealing as well as flaunting – their internationalism and localism.

In comparing and contrasting these biographies, I proposed a concept of

"development cosmopolitanism" to classify the particular – but variable in patterned ways – sets of knowledge, skills, and experiences produced through Angolan professionals' mobile trajectories. This idea of development cosmopolitanism, and perhaps especially local Angolan development cosmopolitanism, continues the previous chapter's discussion of the patterned, historical sequelae of international engagement which combine to produce a uniquely Angolan version of the international. I considered the multiplicity of ways in which the Angolan development professionals working with the GGAP came to be as international or cosmopolitan as they are. In the next chapter I review the professional trajectories of a variety of “international” or “expatriate” professionals working in the GGAP. Among these international staff members are several individuals from other developing countries – these individuals will be considered in relation to the cases of cosmopolitan locals considered here. Maximino, Cristóvão, even

Félix could well decide someday to seek a position in international development

149 elsewhere, outside Angola, themselves then becoming expatriate aid workers. This international circulation of development professionals is one of the sustaining mechanisms of the development apparatus.

DEVELOPMENT COSMOPOLITANS II:

EXPATRIATES

Together with the previous chapter, this essay explicates my argument for an

analytical concept of the “development cosmopolitan,” a central part of my larger point

about the globalizing and disciplinary effects of development work on the “middle

figures” of development professionals. The previous chapter examined the personal and

professional mobilities of local Good Governance in Angola Program (GGAP) staff

members into and through the development apparatus to demonstrate how they are, in

many cases, as international as are their expatriate counterparts. I argued that

development work cosmopolitanizes local staff members by immersing them in a

fundamentally international professional sphere. I considered how development work

may also disproportionately attract local staff members who already have cosmopolitan

or international knowledge and/or interests. In this chapter I consider how development

work conditions the cosmopolitanism of this professional group, local and expatriate

alike, by routing the circulation of development professionals through the developing,

and not the developed, world. Considering a group of people with little or with truncated

experience in the western, industrialized, urban, modern culture capitals of the world is a

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significant addition to the anthropological literature on cosmopolitanism, and is a

companion argument to those advocating for “rooted,” “vernacular,” or “local” cosmopolitanisms to carry theoretical weight in investigations of the modern human experience (Glick Schiller, et al. 2011; Glick Schiller, et al. 2009; Gupta 1997; Wardle

2000; Werbner 2008).

Dividing my analysis of the GGAP staff into local and international members

risks undermining, perhaps, the larger argument about development cosmopolitans. I do

so to follow the emic use of the terms in the development social sphere – dividing my

cases as they appear to the people I study – in order to highlight the discrepancies and

inconsistencies of this conception of “local” and “expatriate” staff members as so

dramatically different from one another. This emic conception has bled into parts of the

anthropological literature and must be reconsidered in light of empirical data on the

similarities and differences between local and expatriate development professionals.

Examining the travel and translation experiences of expatriate staff, considering what

they know of development, and from where, it should become very clear indeed that there

are far more similarities than there are differences between the two groups. By pointing

out those “transgressive” cases highlighted in Figure 3.2 and then broadening the scope to

consider in depth the “average” international staff member working in contemporary

Angolan development, I hope to establish an idea of development cosmopolitans as a

coherent group with some internal variation, rather than a bifurcated population of local

or international professionals.

In the first example of development cosmopolitanism here, I consider the case of

expatriate professionals who come to work in Angola from other Portuguese-speaking 152

developing countries. These professionals, coming from Brazil, Cape Verde, Guinea

Bissau, and Mozambique, arrive in Angola as expatriate workers, but with a significant

amount of shared cultural history and ideology, and of course, language. This group of

expatriate workers is perhaps the most challenging to the local/expatriate divide in the

case of Angolan development work, as they share so many of the characteristics, knowledges, and experiences of the local staff members, yet receive the privileges of

their international classification. It may also be this set of exemplars that most directly suggests to local Angolan staff members that they, in order to advance in the field or fully partake of the profession, should consider leaving Angola to work elsewhere, perhaps another Portuguese-speaking developing country. I use this first set of examples to argue the practical point that considering exactly which sets of knowledges, experiences, and skills a position requires in a development program will be more informative, and yield better “fit” than will simply classifying a position “national” or “international” as a type of shorthand for those skills.

In the second example of development cosmopolitans I consider the case of professionals who have come to work in Angola from other (not Lusophone) developing countries, though there may be significantly less shared history between their home countries and Angola. These professionals come from anywhere and everywhere in the developing world but in my experience, come in great numbers from Latin America, both because speaking Spanish is considered advantageous in Angola if you have no capacity in Portuguese and because of historical linkages between Angola and, particularly, Cuba.

This group of development professionals, developing country nationals working as

expatriates in Angola, often come from other African countries, or from south Asia, also. 153

Finally, in my last set of examples I consider the “classic” case of the expatriate development professional who embarks on a career from a developed country. I use these cases to demonstrate how, even for those originally from developed countries, development work routes professionals through the world along the fault line of

inequality, shaping them as cosmopolitans in a particular register. Kimberley Coles,

studying international elections advisors in Bosnia-Herzegovina traces these routes as

“circuits of power,” listing the countries to which she has seen colleagues of hers move

on after having worked on democratization programs in Bosnia: Kosovo, Serbia, Croatia,

Macedonia, Uganda, East Timor, Kazakhstan, Palestine, the Ivory Coast, Haiti,

Afghanistan, Iraq, Peru, Indonesia, and Fiji (Coles 2007: 241). Her point, that I will

return to, is that these are the global locations of international intervention, the locations

in which global power shows itself and acts, reproducing itself and perhaps reproducing

inequality along the way.

I close the chapter by considering how the national/international, or

local/expatriate divide – a fiction in terms of adequately describing how different skills,

experiences and knowledge are distributed among development professionals – serves

both to reinforce/recreate development cosmopolitans as I now describe them, and

contributes to other elements of disciplinary power in the development apparatus. I

consider, in light of both the fiction of the local/expat divide and the new category of the

development cosmopolitan that I have proposed, anthropological critiques of

international development as a hierarachizing, dependency-creating force in the modern

world. I propose, that in large part, the privilege of the expatriate worker comes not from

the substantive differences in knowledge, experience, or skills, but in the brute fact of 154

coming from elsewhere – and not necessarily coming from a privileged elsewhere, in

fact. In the following chapter I recount an intensive, program-wide workshop in which

GGAP staff members – development cosmopolitans all – directly engage in self-

disciplinary exercises, becoming the governing agents of development as much as they

are the governed subjects of development work.

Expatriate Development Cosmopolitans from the Global South

In considering the examples of expatriate development professionals as

development cosmopolitans, the generic exemplar which first comes to mind is the well-

educated, white, young aid worker from North America or Europe (e.g., Kaufmann 1997;

Stirrat 2008). In studying the GGAP, however, I came to realize that not all expatriates

working in development are from the global north. I came across many expatriate

development workers from other poor Portuguese-speaking countries, particularly Cape

Verde, Brazil, and Mozambique. I also met development professionals from Peru,

Guatemala, Mexico, Cuba, Ghana, Tanzania, Kenya, Armenia, China, Vietnam, and

Bangladesh. Their experiences in the development assemblage are significant. Their

positions and experiences in the development apparatus challenge both the emic

categories of local/international as well as the terms used in anthropological analysis of

development. Their challenge to the emic categories is to point out that, at times, the

holder of the “international” passport does not carry the education, experience, or

perspective that is implicitly assumed in development work to be that of the

industrialized, western native. At the same time, however, their presence and often

successful work contributions to the programs and organizations they join also prove that 155

one can hold the knowledge, experience, and skill of the (presumably western) expat,

without being from a developed country or having spent significant time there.

In the anthropological critique of development these developing country

expatriate professionals present similar challenge. If one critique of development work is

that it imposes a western or northern mentality onto places that do not perhaps want to

become more western or northern – just more developed – can that critique be sustained

if a significant number of the imposing professionals are not themselves western or

northern (Crewe and Harrison 1998)? In addition to these practical and theoretical points,

the expatriate development workers from other developing countries captured my

attentions during the fieldwork because many of the Angolan development professionals

I spent time with discussed their cases at length, and wondered aloud if they might be

given the opportunity someday to conduct their work in another country. This was an

open question for many of my “local” development professional interlocutors, and many

were actively pursuing such opportunities, or attempting to build a resume that would

allow them to do so someday. Many others, however, were not keen to leave Angola –

their extended family members, their churches, their communities – and were concerned

that they would reach a point in their career trajectories where they would stagnate if they

did not.

The presence of expatriate staff members, then, both from developed and other

developing countries, was not only a clear, cosmopolitanizing force for “local” Angolan

development professionals. Their presence was also a reminder that the pathway to

advancement in the development profession may well necessitate such international

circulation. Here I consider two cases, Osman and Santiago as examples of expatriate, 156

career development professionals, from the global south. Osman’s story is significant for

my study for several other reasons, as well. First, his position – Chief of Party for the

GGAP – was a very important one for the program. Osman was the acting country

director for the American NGO when USAID was developing the call for applications for

the GGAP, and was directly involved in preparing the consortium’s successful proposal

(as reviewed in chapter 2). He had not been named in the proposal as the “Chief of Party”

for the GGAP, but when that person – also an expatriate – rather unexpectedly took a

position that took her away from Angola, Osman was asked by USAID to take over.

Osman, then, had been the individual ultimately responsible for the program nearly from

its inception. He remained an employee of the American NGO for logistical and

bureaucratic purposes (benefits, etc), but was responsible only for the GGAP in this

position. Second, Osman was a career development professional, and useful for my study

in that he had a career trajectory that covered more than 25 years. Many of the staff

members of the GGAP – Angolan field staff, especially – were very young, in their late

twenties and early thirties, and while their work and their examples are important,

considering a longer career trajectory in development is also useful. Santiago, similarly,

held a structurally important position for the GGAP as the programs officer for the

British organization for much of my fieldwork, and was a 20-year veteran in development

work, as well.

There are no figures available which accurately describe the number of

international development professionals working as foreigners, outside their native

countries. There are certainly no figures available which consider how many developing

country nationals might travel to other developing countries to work as development 157

professionals. Considering the case of the GGAP as an exemplar, though, roughly ten percent of the forty or so staff members employed in the GGAP at any one time, held citizenship in another developing country. Osman, the chief of party, and Shameem, the

Luanda-based grants officer, were both Bangladeshi. I consider Osman in detail shortly, and Shameem’s trajectory is quite similar. In the program offices of the British organization, and in the field offices of the American organization, expatriate staff from

Cape Verde, Mozambique, and Guinea Bissau also held supervisory positions. I examine

next Santiago’s story, a professional from Guinea Bissau who held the programs director

position in the British organization until he transferred to another job outside the country.

When he left, shortly before the end of my fieldwork, his position was taken by Emile,

the Swiss citizen who had formerly been the programs director at the Canadian organization.

Santiago

Growing up and going to school in Guinea Bissau, Santiago’s first trip outside the

country was to Senegal for a vacation with extended family members at the end of his high school years. Forty-two at the time of my study, Santiago points to that first

experience as something that left him with practically a “vice” or a thirst for travel.

Among the youngest of six children, Santiago and only one other brother completed high

school. The liberation war in Guinea Bissau had disrupted his siblings’ educational

access, and Santiago recalls travelling with his much older brothers to all go to school

together in the same grade levels as the war closed. After high school Santiago began working with an integrated development project in the southern provinces of the country, 158

extremely rural and neglected places that had been affected deeply by the war. This

project was run the ministry of agriculture with significant support by “organizations on

the left” – churches and international organizations that had supported the liberation

struggle. He remembers thinking of this work as being – though agricultural development

– very political work. It made a deep impression, and he thought that working to improve

the lot of disaffected communities “was very beautiful.”

After two years on this project Santiago won a fellowship from the world council

of churches to attend the University of East Anglia for an undergraduate degree, where he

qualified in development studies. He found his professors and his peers there “a little

radical,” and remembers reading Andre Gunder Frank (e.g., Frank 1969) and learning

about theories of underdevelopment and the world capitalist system. He was unable to

travel home during those years, and had a hard time returning to Guinea Bissau after his

degree program had concluded. He had been living with very good friends while in

Britain and missed them terribly when he left. Santiago joined the same integrated

development program again, this time as its monitoring and evaluation supervisor. He

remained in that position for three years and then transferred to the national institute for

agricultural research in the capital city, researching rural extension methods. His

specialty throughout all of this was rice cultivation, and he enjoyed combining the

research aspect of things with the more practical aspects of things.

It was in this position with the national institute for agricultural research that

Santiago was able to travel widely throughout west Africa: he enjoyed visiting Niger,

Mali, Cote d’Ivoire, Senegal, Burkina Faso, and other countries. He recalls being very

impressed at how well all of these other countries “worked” (funcionar) as compared to 159

Guinea Bissau. They had good roads, the lights were on, etc. Along these travels he

became acquainted with several professors teaching at Purdue University, and they

helped arrange research assistantships for him to attend Purdue for two years for a

master’s degree in agricultural economics. He had intended to return to Guinea Bissau at

the end of his master’s degree, but the country was experiencing more political upheaval

(1999-2000) and he found a temporary position with the United Nations (FAO) in New

York instead.

He spent 18 months with the UN in New York, and did not enjoy office life – too

many meetings, too much email and memorandum writing; he was eager to return to field

work. He was actively looking for positions in Portuguese-speaking countries when a

college friend of his who works at the same British organization that participates in the

GGAP alerted him to an advertisement they had posted. He went to London for the interview and won a position with the Good Governance in Luanda (GGL) Program (see chapter 2). Though it was only meant to be an 18-month position he moved his family to

Luanda, and when the GGL program won an extension he ended up working on that program for three years. From that position he was promoted to programs director of the organization, where he had been for about three years when I spoke with him. He was about to leave the British organization, however, to take up a consultancy position with a

“small but very interesting project” in Benguela, Luanda, and to do consultancy work with some of the UN agencies. He had recently turned down a position in Liberia because he felt it would be too hard for his family to move to an English-speaking country. He

enjoyed living in Angola as an expatriate, recognizing that he enjoyed many benefits that 160

he wouldn’t receive in Guinea Bissau. He would like to continue working in Portuguese-

speaking countries.

Osman

Forty-six years old during my fieldwork, Osman had been an international

development professional nearly his entire adult life. In recounting his personal trajectory

he began with stories about his natal family, reminding me that in Bangladesh, it is very

important to have sons. With that reminder, he went on to recount his parents’ trials in

building their family, constructing a narrative to make the point that he was always

considered a very special person in his family. Before Osman’s birth, his parents had

suffered the death of a firstborn boy as a young infant, had then had a healthy girl, but

had then suffered another loss with a stillborn boy. Significant health problems for his

mother had followed, all relating to, or affecting, childbearing. After these losses and

difficulties followed the happy births of three more girls, but the family had begun to

think they would not have sons. Finally Osman was born to great celebration, but there

was then another long period of health problems for his mother, and the family had feared

that both mother and long-awaited son would be lost. Mother and son recovered, happily,

and after nine more years Osman’s two younger sisters were born, completing the family.

Osman introduced his personal story by framing it as a narrative of how he came to hold

a unique and privileged place – the only son among seven surviving children – in a

society with very strong son preference. He recounted, as well, that there came great

responsibility and very high expectations with his privileged position. 161

In answering questions about his professional trajectory, why he had chosen to

work in international development, and what he might like to pursue next, Osman

continued to couch his answers in stories of his family, his childhood, his education, and

what he saw as his natural tendencies. He recounted stories of a “timid,” risk-averse

father, asserting that he, in contrast, had always been more “aggressive” and more

“ambitious,” more like his mother. Osman recounted that he had always been very good in school, and that although the family could not afford to send him to good preparatory schools, he nevertheless attained the highest score in his year on the university entrance

examinations, entering the best engineering university in Bangladesh after finishing high

school with highest honors. He saw his personal trajectory shift significantly at university

– he became politically active, less academically focused, and wanted to be a leader.

As a first-year university student, Osman participated in and eventually became a

leader of political activism, protesting the policies and actions of the military government

in control of Bangladesh at the time. He points to one experience in February of 1982 as

particularly formative. It was still just his first year at university, and the military

government had rearranged the structure of the university system such that only half of

the seats at university would be reserved for students with the highest entrance exam

scores. The other half would, under the revised system, now be available for purchase.

The change was widely condemned as undemocratic – now privileged families could

send even their “daft” children to the best universities, while more meritorious students

would be denied entry. The previous system, according to Osman, had allowed any

student of merit to attend university for extremely low cost – but you had to be bright, 162

and score well on the entrance exams. Osman and other students protested the change in

policy, writing petitions and finally taking to the streets.

Osman was arrested and endured three brutal interrogation sessions, as he had

been one of the organizers of the petitions and protests. During this period of several days

his parents feared he was dead – 87 other students were, from similar treatment. He

survived, but was then held for nearly a month in solitary confinement. After all was said

and done, the government withdrew the policy change, and released Osman and other

students. He considers himself a “freedom fighter” for participating in this and other

protests against the military government during his student years.

Osman: It’s a very rare thing, for a human being to be a freedom fighter for his own country. It’s a very rare opportunity. I didn’t participate in any of the liberation war in my country, but that was my contribution for the country.

Rebecca: Eighty-seven people died to change an educational policy – was that worth it?

O: Of course, of course. Come on, what would happen that we would have daft people getting the best educational seats? We had to protest. This is what it costs in third world countries.

Recounting the story, Osman was very proud of his actions, and intended, in the

retelling, to illustrate how decisive, aggressive, and revolutionary his natural tendencies

are. He told a similar story of his later years at university. In his second year he had been

voted in as president of the student body at his engineering school, and he became more

and more politically active. His studies began to suffer, but he was reading the works of

Karl Marx, realizing that he “could translate them to a different level” in his position as

student body president. He realized that he “had a gift from God, as an educator – I can

educate [others] quickly, can spread the message eloquently, and motivate the students.” 163

He organized another large street protest against a change in the municipal government

system that the central government was trying to push through. At this protest the

military fired shots on the protestors, killing nine street children. Osman tells the story of

trying to transport one of the injured children to a hospital with several of his friends that

day, but the child died “on our laps” en route. As a further act of protest he and his

friends buried the child on university grounds. At this, Osman and his friends were expelled from the university and charged with the child’s death. Osman and the other

accused students fled Dhaka until the situation was eventually resolved. He ended up being allowed to sit for the required graduation and certification exams, and graduated with a degree in civil engineering at the age of 22. Another student who participated in these events – also charged with the street child’s death, etc – is now, Osman recounts, the Bangladeshi ambassador to Singapore.

Upon graduating, Osman considered himself capable only of a technical job, and anticipated looking for work – perhaps ironically – with the government. But “following the theme of my life – it’s unconventional,” he took a job with an American-based non- governmental organization – the same NGO he still works for, more than twenty years later. The “unique,” “special,” and “unconventional” trajectory of his childhood and his years at university continued in his career at the American NGO. Osman’s first position with the NGO was as a field-based technical advisor to the United States Food for Work program, which had been constructing roads across rural Bangladesh for over a decade at that time. He was hired, as a civil engineer, to design the bridges and culverts necessary for the road construction projects, and at times refers to this position as “being a ditch- digger” for the NGO. After two years in this position, Osman was suddenly summoned to 164

the headquarters office and offered a position as deputy to the director of the entire food

for work program in Bangladesh. He was, after accepting the position, the “highest national staff” in the organization, at the age of just 25. Shortly after accepting the deputy position, his boss took a six-week vacation, and Osman found himself the de facto director of a 47 million dollar program, albeit temporarily so.

Osman still can’t exactly explain why he was promoted so spectacularly, and simply presented the story as further evidence of is unconventional life. At the time he’d been working in his first post-university position for only two years, was still only 25 years old. He had been promoted upwards by about four positions, in his reckoning, catapulting over colleagues who had been in the organization for decades. He was suddenly the highest Bangladeshi staff member in the Food for Work Program, supervising 21 other national staff members from “a beautiful office – I will never again have an office that beautiful. I had two landlines, one of them a red line, directly to the government.” He had his own latest model car and full time driver. He thinks this

“breakthrough” happened because he

…put technical ideas in an unconventional way. I said, “let’s compact these roads so they’ll be more durable. Let’s make a different kind of bridge here instead of the costly concrete ones.” They’d been building roads in rural Bangladesh for 15 years and no one had said these things before. No one had written them into a nice proposal, and done this unconventional thing…

He stayed in this position for five and a half years, and while in this position took

a leave of about a year to study for a master’s degree in Holland. He also applied during

this time for an Executive MPA program at Harvard, and was accepted, though without

funding. 165

Osman’s interest in these advanced degrees, and particularly in pursuing one at

Harvard, was, at first, to return to Bangladesh and enter politics. He felt that he needed

these academic degrees to make a good entry into politics, and his plan in the early 1990s

was to take the MPA degree at Harvard, return to the American NGO for two to three

years, and from there run for election as a government official. Just as he had been

accepted into the Harvard program, however, he was offered a senior position at the

American NGO’s office in Somalia. His original Food for Work director – who had

promoted him so spectacularly from the field office position – had moved to Somalia to

take the Country Director position there, and shortly after called to offer Osman the

assistant director position. With this opportunity, Osman changed course, and has not

looked back. “I realized I didn’t need Harvard to do this job. I was seven years in

Somalia. I saw the war. I saw the whole of world politics.” Osman went back to

Bangladesh after a few years in Somalia to marry his wife, a medical doctor, who had

never before left Bangladesh. She was “excited to see Africa,” however, and now shares

his enthusiasm for development work, having worked for UNICEF for several years

while Osman was in the Somalia and other East African offices of the American

organization. Now in Angola she is the resident physician for the local International

School, which allows the couple to send their two children to school there for a reduced

price.

After seven years in Somalia, where Osman “saw the whole of world politics,” he

moved to Nairobi to oversee the operations of the American NGO in southern Somalia.

He cites this posting as the “best posting we ever had. We were well taken care of – never

had to cook, housing was taken care of, and there was an airplane under my control.” The 166

couple’s son was born in Nairobi, and after four or five years there the family moved to the Sudan, where Osman was again the assistant country director. After four years in that position, which he describes as “very difficult,” Osman was sent to Angola as an Acting

Country Director during a period of transition for the American NGO. At the time,

Osman had expressed a preference for a similar position in the Ethiopia office, but had been assigned to Angola instead.

Development’s “Circuits of Power”

Osman’s experience as a cosmopolitan, then, begins in Bangladesh, and spans the

Netherlands, Somalia, the Sudan, Kenya, a few short stints in Tanzania and Ethiopia, and

Angola. In traveling for professional conferences and meetings he had been to the United

States, Britain, and South Africa. His cohort of friends and family members from

Bangladesh were also well-traveled, and he had a sister living in Canada. Santiago’s

family was not as well traveled or as well educated as he had had opportunity to become,

but his cosmopolitanism began in Guinea Bissau, and through educational opportunities

in the global north and work-related travel in west Africa, he had built a significantly

international network of friends and colleagues.

Osman’s trajectory was somewhat unusual perhaps, in that he was promoted very

quickly inside the Bangladesh office, and then into the role of expatriate in the Somalia

country office of the American organization. Where this timing may be unusual, the

pattern of movement across sites of development intervention, under the auspices of an

enormous international NGO, is not. Osman’s early trajectory here can be compared to

Maximino’s, from the previous chapter, perhaps, as well as to Santiago’s. Maximino was 167

much earlier in his career trajectory than were Osman and Santiago at this point, but all

three men began as a member of the local field staff of an international NGO. All three

men were sponsored to attend higher education programs in the global north.

There are meaningful differences between the leave-and-return stories of

Maximino and Santiago, and those of, for instance, Samuel, Arnaldo, Carlota and

Cristóvão from the previous chapter, though educational opportunities figure significantly

in both sets. Throughout these examples, of interest is the manner in which each

cosmopolitan became so, the historically contingent particularity of "the foreign" that

they encountered or acquired, and how their cosmopolitan-ness has then affected their

professional trajectories. Osman, Santiago and Maximino “became cosmopolitan” in part

through the formal, advanced educational opportunities they pursued through their

development work. These were opportunities expressly targeted to individuals from

developing countries – each man studied for a degree, in one way or another, in

“development studies,” and enjoyed the work. These educational experiences, however,

are far more technical and professionally oriented than would be a basic liberal arts

education, and significantly color the genre of cosmopolitanism that such “transgressive”

local development workers have access to.

In addition to the formal education, the institutional biographies of these

development cosmopolitans are informative. In my study most development professionals

had transferred jobs roughly every three years, and many of them had changed

organizations almost as frequently, though not always of their own volition. Coincidental

with Maximino’s return from studying abroad, for instance, the Dutch organization that

had sponsored him was closing its doors in Angola, and he then found work with the 168

GGAP through the Canadian organization. Santiago, meanwhile, returned after his

university degree to Guinea Bissau to re-join the same integrated development program,

but in a position of higher authority and expertise. Osman also returned to Bangladesh briefly, and then became an expatriate professional, not returning again to Bangladesh.

His work history, entirely within one large international NGO, is unusual and he would seem to have become rather “stuck” at the assistant country director level of that

American organization; a very high position of responsibility, but not the highest position, and not the position that might advance him into the highest internal administration of the organization.

Having worked in development in Angola, studied for an advanced degree abroad, and returned to work a few more years in Angola, Maximino would seem to be in much the same situation Osman was in, in the early 1990s, upon returning from his master’s level study in the Netherlands, or that Santiago was in upon returning from his undergraduate studies. Osman felt at the time that he was at a professional crossroads – he had risen as far in the ranks of national staff as he could in the international NGO, and was planning to pursue the master’s in public administration at Harvard and then return to

Bangladesh to leave development work and seek public office. Santiago, meanwhile, had further advancements to make in Guinea Bissau, but was perhaps about to exhaust those when he left for Purdue, from which he became an expatriate worker in Angola.

Maximino, and a multitude of other local development professionals may be considering the same. At that juncture, however, Osman received an opportunity to continue advancing as a development professional, which required his leaving Bangladesh. 169

In speaking comparatively of his postings – Somalia, Sudan, Ethiopia, Kenya,

Angola – Osman discusses the living and working conditions, and how he and his family

“were treated,” far more readily than he discusses the particular work goals or practices he was engaged in at each office. This sense of lifestyle is significant among

development professionals, and as discussed briefly in the previous chapter, “differential

treatment” is a key point of contention between local and expatriate staff members. The

situation of development professionals who themselves come from other developing

countries and receive the benefits and attentions of the “expat” may be particularly irksome for local development professionals. Perhaps all the more so, in fact, when

Osman and others draw upon their own experiences – as in his retelling of the student

protests against commoditizing access to the university, or in his explanation of the goals

of the GGAP in chapter 2 – are discussed in terms of “the third world.” Osman and other

development professionals from developing countries used this rhetorical device

frequently – that they knew, deeply and personally, the experience of the developing

world or the third world. Osman and others would, strategically, reference their personal

backgrounds not as evidence of their “locality” to the Angolan context – as in

Maximino’s example previously – but as evidence of their “locality” to, via a their familiarity with, the generic context of the developing country.

As these developing-country development professionals advance in their careers,

however, and their experience of being truly local recedes, the resentment of the local staff in their postings may increase. Angolan staff members, particularly those who worked in the finances office or the general administrative offices of the American organization and who therefore had responsibility for transferring NGO money to, for 170

instance, Osman’s landlord for rent and repairs, were acutely aware of his privileged

situation in Angola, and were galled, sometimes, to hear him reference “how it is” in a

third world country. Osman for his part, was not unaware of his privileged position in

Angola. He appreciated it greatly, but clearly felt he deserved it and had earned it, too.

Being in Angola was truly a hardship for him and his family, and the house, the car, the

tuition support, all the privileges of expatriate-ness, were therefore deserved in his

estimation, and certainly did not diminish his history or personal knowledge of life as a

local in a developing country.

For Santiago, however, being in Angola as an expatriate was perhaps a particularly pleasant and comfortable experience. He had recently turned down an opportunity in Liberia, for instance, where he would have “been treated” just as well, but where he and his family would have had to adjust to an English-speaking environment.

He enjoyed, and appreciated, having his house and car paid for by the organization, having his children’s educations subsidized, and all of the other benefits of being an international staff member. He did not, however, want to be an international staff member just anywhere – not in Liberia, for instance – and here is a suggestion, then, of the bounded linkages of different varieties of the international, even in, or perhaps especially in, development work.

The ethnographic situation of the developing country national – be he

Bangladeshi or Peruvian or Mozambican – circulating into a position of privilege in another developing country like Angola, poses a significant challenge to the anthropological literature. Consider Coles’ “circuits of power” (Coles 2007). In much of

Coles’ study, the international staff members of the UN and other international aid and 171

development organizations are westerners. When westerners traverse her list of post-

Bosnia postings, theoretically equivalent perhaps to my list of pre-Angola postings, the

case can be convincingly made that those with more power are given reign to traipse

about in locations where people have much less power, both as a result of that power

differential, and in a reproduction of it. When those traipsing about along these circuits of

power are not western, with “original privilege,” does that change things? Considering

the case of Osman, I think not. Osman has simply become one of these relatively

powerful expatriate development workers, in part because of the cosmopolitanism of the

work. In the lived experience of being a node on circuits of power, Angolan development

professionals, I don’t think, distinguish much between Osman and other expat colleagues.

When Osman, though, seeks to distinguish himself by making claims to his experience as

a local, developing country national elsewhere, this introduces a discrepancy into the

system which breeds significant misunderstandings and resentments.

While the case is in many ways more clear cut for the final example, of

international development professionals who come to the profession from developed

countries, there are complexities introduced by the global routes that the development

“circuits of power” take. International development workers – like Coles’ election

observers and democratization professionals – travel through the globe along the fault

line of global inequality – traveling through developing countries almost exclusively. In

doing so, not only are they having impact on these contexts by linking them together and

“traipsing” about in them, but it must also be the case that the contexts have impact on

them, as well (cf. Comaroff and Comaroff 1991). In that developing country national

ascend to the more elite status of international development worker as they leave their 172

home countries and arrive elsewhere, this is perhaps an advancement along (and

concomitantly a reinforcement of) a global hierarchy of value (Herzfeld 2004). In that

these new elites, however, then traverse those circuits of power that allow access to other

developing countries, their access is also restricted in large part to these developing

countries. In other words, while local development cosmopolitans may be able to advance

out of their own developing country context, they are only really able to advance into

another developing country context. They will be “treated well” there, perhaps, but also

constrained by those circuits of power that had seemed to offer a way out and up. It is a

rare case that these expatriate development professionals make their way permanently to

the developed world through these circuits.

Developing country nationals, then, are mobile along routes of development

cosmopolitanism in a manner that deepens their cosmopolitanization, but simultaneously

restricts their cosmopolitanism to a particularly “development” version. Are developed

country nationals – the classical case of the expatriate aid worker – similarly constrained

by these circuits of power to a peculiarly “development” sort of cosmopolitanism? I

compare two of the classical cases of the expatriate development worker as they occurred

in the GGAP, to examine their motivations and experiences as development cosmopolitans.

173

Expatriate Development Cosmopolitans from the Global North

“After all, an international has to come from somewhere” (Coles 2007: 14)

In the Good Governance in Angola Program proper, during the period of my

fieldwork, the only expatriate staff member who came originally from a developed

country was the monitoring and evaluation officer, Julie. Julie, again, left her position

with the GGAP to take a position with multi-program responsibility in the British

organization shortly after my arrival, and was replaced in her position by an Angolan,

Raul. Julie’s case is discussed in detail, next. Another developed-country expatriate

worker, towards the end of my period of field work, contracted in to the GGAP part-time

as a substitute community development advisor (Alexandro’s position, before he left to

become head of the Kuito regional office). A young Dutch man, he had been working on

other programs in the American organization for almost three years at that point, and was

shortly to return to Holland. While GGAP staff members, then, were overwhelmingly

Angolan and beyond that were professionals from other developing countries, the

Country Directors of the three consortium NGOs were citizens of western nations: a

Canadian (in charge of the Canadian organization), an American (in charge of the British

organization), and a Dutch man (in charge of the American organization).

Two of these men, the heads of the Canadian and the American organizations, I

would cite as being far more “local” in knowledge and lifestyle than expatriate

development professionals are usually given credit for. The Canadian professional had

founded the Canadian organization nearly 30 years previous to my fieldwork, moving

with his wife to Angola in the 1970s. They raised their children in Angola, and have held 174

consistent residence there throughout. The Dutch professional, Jonathan, in charge of the

American organization at the time of my fieldwork had also held long residence in

Angola, living with an Angolan partner and maintaining a household shared with her

(Appiah 2006: 175-176). The three men had deep working histories with Angola, as well

as with one another. Beyond the three organizations have worked together before on

other programs such as the GGL, the American professional, Nate, had previously been

Country Director of the American organization in Angola, before circulating out to

another posting and then back to Angola to take the directorship of the British

organization. The relationships they have with one another evoke those among the

foreign journalists studied by Ulf Hannerz (1998; 2004; 2007). Hannerz’s work to

identify “spiralists” and “long-timers” among foreign correspondents working in

Johannesburg, Jerusalem, Hong Kong, Tokyo, and other global cities, is a touch point for

my analysis of development cosmopolitans. Hannerz uses “spiralists,” drawing on

Watson’s work (1964) to refer “to the way social mobility within the hierarchy of an organization can be coordinated with geographical mobility” (Hannerz 2004: 82).

Hannerz compares the reasons why “spiralists” and “long-timers” in international journalism work might specialize as such, and why one might be better suited to a particular story than might another. For instance, being “fresh” to a place may be an advantage necessary to a particular story, and a spiralist can be expected to perform better

than would a correspondent who with longer residence in that place. Other stories,

however, require deeper knowledge of a place, more developed connections, etc, that a

long-timer has cultivated and that a spiralist could not be expected to have access to.

Hannerz’s coupling of professional advancement with disparate geographical locations, 175

and travel among them, is helpful for understanding development cosmopolitans. There is

a sense that having seen development in a great many different places is advantageous, as

is a “fresh” perspective on the work in a local place. For the deep knowledge and social

connections, institutions rely on the local staff members, of course, and there may be then

a sense also that the “long-timers” are perhaps less valuable in that way for development

work than for international journalism, because of the presence of local staff.

That local staff – such as Osman in Bangladesh or Santiago in Guinea Bissau –

can one day go on to be international staff somewhere else is a potential not considered in

Hannerz’s work, or perhaps not evident in the professional sphere of international

journalism. His work, then, is best considered with the expatriate workers.

Julie

In 2006, Julie was a young British woman who sought out foreign work

experience upon the completion of her master’s degree in development studies, becoming

for a time the monitoring and evaluation supervisor for the GGAP. When she arrived in

Angola she spoke no Portuguese and had no specialized training in data collection or analysis methods, communication or public relations. She was passionate about social change, however, and threw herself into learning about the work and making contributions where she thought they were needed. My understanding is that once Julie was on the scene and demonstrated an interest in learning how such a system should work, the program never advertised for a dedicated M&E staff person. In part this is a testament to Julie’s dedication and commitment to the work, and in part this is because

Osman saw himself as expert in M&E and considered his tutelage to be all the 176

preparation Julie, or perhaps anyone, might need for the position. In fact, however, Julie

found herself needing to seek out other expertise as well and set up a series of meetings

with other development professionals in Luanda, particularly at USAID and AED, to

have her questions and concerns about designing and carrying out the system answered.

At the beginning of her tenure with the GGAP, Julie was assigned an experienced

Angolan staff person, Fernando, who spoke both Portuguese and English, to help her translate and test her data collection instruments. With his help as translator, Julie designed and conducted the baseline survey in the targeted communities, and simultaneously began to develop the M&E tools and system. With Fernando, Julie was also involved in some of the work towards producing the municipal profiles, though as she was housed as an intern in the American NGO, and it was the Canadian organization which did the bulk of the work towards the profiles, she had less opportunity to contribute to that work. Later, Fernando was reassigned to work in a provincial field office, and Julie participated in hiring a new M&E person, Raul, to be her second-in- command. At the beginning of the second year of the GGAP, however, and after roughly three years of working with the American NGO, Julie left the organization to take up a position with the British NGO, in which she would conduct M&E on all of their programs, as well as pitch in with the central processing of the GGAP information from all three organizations. For personal reasons Julie arranged this new position with the

British NGO to be only part-time in country. While she worked full-time in this position, she did so from South Africa or England, making visits to Angola three to four times per year for a few weeks each time. Julie was 25 at the time of my fieldwork, and had recently negotiated this new position with the British organization. In this position she 177

maintained a consultant’s affiliation with the GGAP proper, and participated in a mid-

program M&E workshop for the GGAP as such in October 2008. This workshop is

considered in detail in the following chapter.

Julie was born in Germany, in a British Royal Air Force hospital – her parents had

met while serving in the RAF. On her mother’s side, Julie explained to me, her family

had “in colonial times, been lords and ladies” and at the close of the British Empire, like

many of “the Raj families,” many members of her mother’s family had joined the air

force. Her mother had then grown up a member of an RAF family – “moving house 22

times in 19 years,” including travel through Singapore and many other places. Julie is the

youngest of three in her family and perhaps because her two siblings were more than ten

years older than she was, she was as a “loner,” and “very quiet” as a young child. She

explained that in primary school other children didn’t like her, and she didn’t like them.

She was ten when her parents divorced, and as an adolescent “became very naughty,”

eschewing her age-mates at school and spending time with older teenagers who drank

and did street drugs. She always enjoyed school work, however, even if she didn’t enjoy

her classmates. She was “very bored by ordinary life” as an adolescent, “cared about

Africa, and about animals,” and knew that she wanted to do something different, even if

she didn’t yet “know what it was, or how to get there.”

Although she enjoyed her studies greatly, she had social troubles into high school

as well, and was suspended three times for transgressions like “smoking on the field, and

hitting people,” and generally “causing controversy” by, for instance, “saying things

about the headmaster on the radio.” She didn’t feel like she belonged to England, but

instead identified with Africa. She grew up wanting to change the world, with big 178

ambitions, but without knowing what they really were. Looking back, she thinks that she

wanted to work in high powered policy positions, but just didn’t understand the structure

of such things yet. She went to a boys’ school, as well, and that taught her to “stand on

your own.” She knew she was smart and could do what she wanted, but just had a hard

time figuring out what that might be. She knew, though, that she wanted to do good

things for people, and refused to work in positions that weren’t “stepping stones” for her

future.

Julie elected to spend a gap year between high school and university in India, and

joined a program for teaching English to school children. She had a tumultuous year,

however, leaving her teaching assignment and getting into trouble with Syrian and

Palestinian young people. Her family insisted she return early from India, and under

protest she did, realizing later that her family was right to help her “get her head straight”

again that year. At university Julie had thought that she wanted to study philosophy but

her mother “interfered” and reported to the politics department that she wanted to study

politics instead, and Julie was so glad that she did, and very much enjoyed it. She got the

highest mark in the country on her British politics A-level exam, but didn’t do as well in

history. Julie ended up following her brother to the same university for her undergraduate

degree, which she conducted in politics and philosophy. Even at university, when people

would suggest that she work in a bar or a restaurant for spending money, she refused and

sought out positions at charity organizations instead. “Doing the right thing has enabled

me to find myself.” At the close of her undergraduate studies, Julie knew that her degree

in politics was not going to lead her directly to where she wanted to go. At a party during

this time, Julie heard another student talking excitedly about how she was “going to do 179

‘make poverty history’ for her master’s degree” and, suddenly realizing that that was

what she wanted to do too, contacted the program officials and talked her way into the

course just days before it began. She had been considering other master’s level courses in

international political economy and international peacekeeping, and had been unsatisfied

by them. She was interested in “conflict issues that prevent peace” and “was really

interested in Africa,” she also “recognized that the international economic system is

really unjust,” but found herself balking at the political economy course as too theory

heavy and the peacekeeping course as too limited.

Upon hearing about what turned out to be a degree program in international

development, Julie enrolled, then, and went to Sierra Leone for three weeks as part of the

course. Even upon arriving at the airport she “felt like she was home.” She was hosted in

Sierra Leone, along with several other students, by the local office of the American

Organization that in Angola works with the GGAP. During her study trip there Julie met

a Zimbabwean professional who told her that if she wanted to “get into development” she

had to have a longer internship experience, and while still in the Sierra Leone office she

checked the organization’s international headquarters website and found an

announcement for an internship with the GGAP in Angola. Just days after filing her

master’s thesis she landed in Luanda as an intern.

Julie did not enjoy her internship, and did not enjoy Luanda. She felt that the

organization did not support her very well, nor did they value her work and her ideas. She

felt as though there was an attitude that she was “just the intern.” She worked on a

website for the GGAP and on the baseline data collection in the GGAP provincial field

sites. In her estimation, the program more or less got those services for free. In reflecting 180

on the internship – that got converted to a fulltime position as the monitoring and evaluations supervisor for the program – she …

…let it [the mistreatment] go, because I knew in the long run it would work out. I felt I’d come all the way to this foreign country to help them and they were just using me. That wasn’t very nice. During the internship I was trying to leave; I didn’t like Angola and I had several job offers in England but I thought I should stay because an opportunity like this doesn’t come around very often and I was getting good experience. And I was quite happy to help [The GGAP] but I didn’t want to be in Angola anymore.

Julie’s arrangement towards the end of my fieldwork, to visit Angola periodically and otherwise analyze data and write reports from either her new home in South Africa or her family home in England, was working out much better for her. Her family still wondered when she was “going to come back and do a proper job,” but was proud that she was “working hard to make a difference.” In the future Julie would like to do a wide variety of things, including focusing more on international development from the point of view of environmental studies and ecological responsibility, as well as pursue interests in the arts such as photography and vocal performance. Ideally, of course she “would quite like to be the head of the world government at some point. But that doesn’t exist yet.”

Development Expertise, Routes and Roots

Michel de Certeau has told us that “every story is a travel story” (de Certeau

1984: 115), and while development cosmopolitans are clearly products of just such a story, development work is itself, in many ways, a travel story. Julie and other expatriates must gain experience “in the field” if they hope to become bona fide development professionals. Osman, Santiago, Maximino and others who come, arguably, from “the 181

field” must read Robert Chambers and Andre Gunder Frank while in a classroom of the

global north if they hope to become bona fide development professionals. Development work, then, is also a story of global privilege and global inequality, which are of course necessary, but not sufficient, considerations. Studying the global, and studying development as a global phenomenon, requires us to consider questions of difference and experience that push past a postcolonial analysis of power and the obvious hierarchies.

There are multiple mechanisms, techniques, routes and roots in development work, and if development is to be taken seriously as an anthropological problem, one of those global assemblages in which “in which the forms and values of individual and collective existence are problematized or at stake” (Collier and Ong 2005: 4), its processes and procedures must be examined without reading malfeasance and manipulation as its drivers. Here I will propose that, among the other mechanics of development cosmopolitanism, the simple fact of being from somewhere else is an element of expertise and privilege, and that this is one manner in which expatriate workers from developing and developed countries are able to be lumped so cleanly together by bureaucratic and social processes in development organizations.

In July of 2008, a “troca de experiência” conference on "Integrated Development

Planning" was held for a week in Lubango, in the south of Angola. The conference had been organized by the American NGO to bring together state employees – municipal officials from several rural provinces – to share their ideas and experiences around a process called “Integrated Development Planning.” IDP was a process that had been, as an Angolan NGO staff member explained in his opening comments, developed in South

Africa, but was now being adopted by small municipalities around the world. The IDP 182

process, he continued, had been conducted in Andulo and in Matala in the previous year

or so, and representatives of both municipalities were here to share their experiences of

that process with others, so that other municipalities might also consider conducting IDP

in their towns. The guests were attentive and, I would say, eager throughout the rest of

the week long workshop, to speak to their counterparts from around the country.

I recognized several of the Andulo representatives from the GGAP’s work there,

and knew them to be rather marginal figures to the IDP progress that had taken place the

previous year. The cultural officer, the officer of youth, and of recreation. None of them

were from the central administration office; none of them from finances; none of them

from planning. Not health. Not education. Not infrastructure. During their presentations,

they confidently presented the goals of the long-range plan and the activities that were

propelling them to achieve the goals of the medium-range development plan for Andulo.

They shared their knowledge that the municipal administrator had taken these goals and

plans and activity reports and successfully won a sizeable grant for the municipality from

an oil company, which would substantially increase the municipality’s budget as handed

down by the central government. Throughout the week, these men – rather “marginal” in

the Andulo context – became the center of the workshop. Throughout the week as they

participated in small groups conducting “mock” IDP exercises, acting as knowledgeable

advisors on the IDP process and how it plays out in Angola. They were called upon to

give their opinions on the municipal goals and activity plans that the other participants

began to put together for their hometowns in a series of activities, acting as leaders in

small group exercises, generally acting “expert” in Angolan Integrated Development

Planning, because they were from a place where it had been done. A few months after the 183

close of the workshop, I heard that several of these men, from Andulo and from Matala

had been invited by various other municipalities throughout the country to come speak

independently on the IDP process and their local experiences of it.

My point about development expertise being a travel story is, in part, that in

trying to demonstrate that these men are a type of expert, my pointing to their invitations and their activities traveling around Angola to talk about IDP is a type of evidence of their expertise, of the demand for their presence and ideas. My larger point is that, sometimes, experts are from elsewhere, and not necessarily a privileged elsewhere. So, keeping in mind that these IDP experts, especially the men from Andulo, were actually rather marginal to the process in Andulo, but were sought after outside Andulo as a type of expert, I turn now to an example with Julie.

As an intern, Julie had offered to help design the baseline survey instruments for the program, and was assigned a bilingual Angolan staff person, Fernando, to help her translate and test the new instruments. Julie conducted the baseline work for the entire

GGAP as an intern, traveling to all of the intended field sites of the program, before becoming the formal head of monitoring and evaluation for the GGAP after the term of her internship expired. Fernando, for his part, had grown up in Kuito, in Bié province, and had learned English as a seminary student there. In Kuito in the 1990s, Fernando was able to find a job translating for one of the international NGOs providing humanitarian aid there. One job, with one NGO, led to another job with another NGO, and before he knew it he'd been working for international NGOs -- sometimes as a translator

(Umbundu-Portuguese-English) but increasingly as a supervisor and specifically as a 184

monitor and evaluator -- for 15 years. For many of those years he monitored and audited

large humanitarian projects and activities.

Fernando, had, I think, quite a lot more experience conducting monitoring and

evaluation activities with international NGOs in Angola than did Julie when the GGAP

came around. Fernando had not yet worked on a decentralization and democratization

program, but he knew how to track activities, how to compile different sites’ progress

towards shared goals, how forms and reports should be stored and shared up through

headquarters to the donors, etc. It was this experience, perhaps even more than his

English language capacity and his experience as a translator, that predicated his selection

as Julie’s assistant during the baseline surveys in 2007. Once the program became a reality, however, Julie was selected to be the M&E staff person, not Fernando. It seemed to me, once I had pieced together the history of all of this from the mid-point of the program in 2008, that Fernando might have been a much better choice -- natively fluent

in Portuguese but able to communicate very well in English with donors and outside

evaluators, over a decade of experience with a variety of monitoring and evaluation

regimes, including USAID's, the UN's, and private NGO systems. When I asked around

about this and other staffing decisions in the GGAP, though, there seemed to be no question in anyone else’s mind. Fernando, in fact, had this to say about it all, when I

compared Julie’s experience and “expertise” rather unfavorably to his one day.

He said, as though he couldn’t believe he had to tell me: “She's an expert in

development.” I asked how – she had her master’s degree, yes, but it was highly

theoretical and she’d never worked in development before coming to Angola, how was

she an expert? What does she know how to do? Fernando patiently explained: 185

“She's from the most developed country in the world. She can walk down the street and point to things, and tell us, ‘this should be better.’ ‘this should be different.’ ‘this should work like this instead, and not like that.’ For us, for Angolans who have always been here, living this way, we can’t tell what should be different and what could be better. She can, because she knows what ‘developed’ is.”

He was very sincere, it seemed, that even if Julie didn’t have specific, formal

training or experience in the ins-and-outs of monitoring and evaluating development

programs, that her perspective as someone who grew up in a developed country, was an

expert one, in a way that his perspective could not be.

Julie’s perspective as someone native to “the most developed country in the

world” is privileged in development work, at least by Fernando and I can say by others.

This is clear power, and privilege. But there is an element of difference, and elsewhere

here, and of comparative imagination. Considering again the gentlemen from Andulo and

Matala, the IDP experts who had not been particularly expert in Andulo, but who were

certainly sought after and I think became a type of expert outside Andulo, I think

experience becomes expertise as it travels. It may be, most especially for development

work, that people become experts by going elsewhere.

Obviously, it is usually the privileged and the powerful who can travel, and go

elsewhere. To read “expertise” from “mobility” would be inadequate, but to read mobility

and expertise as only a reflection or result of power I think is also inadequate and risks

missing the mechanism, the frictive, the actual making of something in the world. There

is something here about mobility and travel and being from elsewhere that can create

expertise, create power and privilege. To examine the global, and global configurations

of power, I suggest here that we consider how power has its beginnings and its endings,

how circulation starts and stops. 186

But not everyone felt the way Fernando felt, about Julie, or about other expatriate

colleagues. This became clear to me in a conversation with Maximino. Maximino,

remember, received a master's degree in development studies from the same university

Julie did. Hurrying down a Luanda city street between meetings with him one day, I'd

been asking Maximino if he'd gotten to meet his predecessor at all when he took his new

job. Maximino was reporting that he hadn’t been able to meet with him to make a “full

transfer” from the old staff member to the new, and the conversation turned to Julie, who,

at the time, had just left her position with the GGAP to take on the larger monitoring and

evaluation position for the British organization.

Maximino was wondering when a new M&E person would be hired for the

GGAP and whether or not Julie would be able to meet with that person and do a proper

“transfer.” I was asking about whether or not the new person could be an Angolan, or if it

would have to be an expatriate again, and Maximino responded that it was likely still to

be an expatriate even though, he said rather pointedly, “we don't seem to get the best

people from the developed countries, to come and help us.”

This comment about “not getting the best people” from the developed world to

work in the developing world came back to me as I was considering the case of the

Andulo administrators becoming development experts and traveling round to other sites –

they were not, remember, the folks most central to the IDP process in Andulo. Julie,

while being from perhaps the most developed country in the world, isn’t necessarily more

knowledgeable about development because of it; not any more than perhaps the cultural

officer from Andulo is about the IDP that was done in the finances and planning offices. I

know the comparison isn’t a fair one – Julie held a leadership position in a 16 million 187

dollar program just two years after being done with her master’s. The gentlemen from

Andulo made a few hundred dollars at a workshop in Lubango.

The comparison raises interesting points for thinking about development

cosmopolitans and development expertise. It may be that part of being a development

professional – a reason, perhaps, that being an expatriate of any stripe is rewarded so

richly – is simply about being from elsewhere. Being from elsewhere may, like

Hannerz’s “spiralists” yield a type of fresh perspective that can be good for development

work. Simply being from “somewhere” else, as Coles’ internationals are in the quote I

include at the beginning of the previous section, may be difference, and privilege,

enough.

GOVERNING DEVELOPMENT

“…the monitors are all of you!”

-Maximino, to field staff at the M&E workshop

The ethnographic examples in this chapter come from a two-day “emergency” workshop held to address the myriad problems extant in the GGAP’s monitoring and evaluation (M&E) system1. I examine the workshop in depth to consider the lived

experiences of the Good Governance in Angola Program (GGAP) staff members in terms

of the conflict and social discipline of international development organizations. Far

beyond the internationalizing effects of working in development organizations,

development professionals’ subjectivities are shaped in other ways as well. Where tensions certainly existed between “national” and “international” staff, as previously

discussed, other distinctions and dichotomies pointed me to several other “effects” of

development work on staff members. Tensions existed, for instance, between the

1 While development professionals refer to a program’s or an organization’s “monitoring and evaluation “system,” I will from here attempt more precise language, using as appropriate “activities,” “practices,” “requirements,” “documents,” “forms,” “reports,” and so on. All of these are implied and intended when development professionals refer to the “M&E system,” however, and I hope not to lose this emic sense of a bounded totality as I strive for more precise and descriptive discussion.

188 189 administration and the field staff, the administration and the donors, and even among members of the field staff, concerning the design and conduct of the GGAP’s internal monitoring and evaluation activities. In this chapter I will demonstrate these difficulties as they surrounded one essential activity – monitoring the progress and outcomes of the program – to argue that they signal a creative, productive force disciplining development professionals and shaping their comportment in other ways, beyond the cosmopolitanization of their work.

After describing these conflicts, I review the current literature on audit cultures to argue that the internal monitoring and evaluation practices of international development

NGOs can profitably be considered a type of audit culture. I then demonstrate how it is that, through the governing technology of the audit culture, GGAP staff are socially conditioned to act as governing agents. Audit cultures by definition introduce an evaluative and authoritative third party into previously dyadic relationships of logic and action. In introducing this new evaluative party, audit cultures effectively divorce action from its originating and guiding logic. This uncoupling of action from its underlying logic is how GGAP staff, and likely other development workers elsewhere, are trained to act as governing agents. Monitoring and Evaluation activities, I argue, were more than a genuine effort to record the program and its successes; the structures and procedures of

M&E served as a social process in which NGO staff were taught to act not because they understood and agreed with the underlying logics dictating the actions, but simply because that was what was expected of them.

M&E should be seen, socially, as a disciplinary field with far-reaching effect.

Audit cultures promote a style of obedient action which remains uncoupled from its

190 originating logic, and this style was modeled to the GGAP field staff in the workshop excerpted above. The workshop is examined here in detail to demonstrate how administrative staff performed an audit culture, making assertions and requirements without justifying them logically. Throughout the course of the workshop field staff resisted this formation, pointing out the lack of explanatory logic, but through administrative example were made to see that it was in their interests to act as requested, not to understand why, and that their own advancement hinged upon their actions as governing agents.

Finally, after considering the ethnographic case of the M&E workshop, I present evidence of the field staff adopting the attitudes and behaviors of governing agents as they conduct themselves in local communities. I close with a discussion of the theoretical implications of this empirical argument: though anthropologists have come to understand that audit cultures help to govern populations through effect on auditees, these technologies of governance also create governing agents though effect on auditors. That

“the international development machine” makes use of this technology to produce governing agents is an extension of our theoretical understanding of power and its processes.

Monitoring, Evaluation, Communication: Productive Frictions in the GGAP

Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) is standard, required practice in most development programs. The moniker stands for the internal tracking and assessment of development activities to report on how well the program’s goals are being met.

Monitoring and evaluation should ideally happen at the level of the program and at the

191 level of the implementing or sponsoring organization, and often is pursued at intermediate levels also. For instance, when an organization has a portfolio of similar programs (focused on health or education, say) they may also monitor at the level of this portfolio. The purposes of monitoring and evaluation are generally conceptualized as disparate but complementary: monitoring is formulated to track the daily, weekly, and monthly activities and expenditures of a program – a way to verify that work is being done to appropriate standards – while evaluation is conducted to judge the success of this work against the program’s stated goals2. Often certain staff positions are dedicated to

these activities in a program or organization; just as often, however, the responsibilities

for M&E are distributed among programmatic or administrative staff in addition to their

other duties.

M&E activities should, by industry standard, use no more than five percent of a

program’s budget or staff time. Arguably this standard is often exceeded on both counts

because of the pressure to present the program well to donors and outsiders. I cannot say

with certainty that M&E for the GGAP exceeded these amounts, but it is easy to imagine

that it was so. During the creation of the GGAP, before USAID’s call for applications

and before the award had been made, the designers had worked relatively little on the

specifics of what would be kept track of through monitoring procedures, and what would

be the standards of measure for evaluation. The architects of the program were more

2 The terms for these activities have undergone recent revision, especially in public health practice. What is here called “monitoring” is now more properly referred to as “process evaluation” in contrast to the assessment of end-results which is “impact evaluation” or “outcome evaluation.” Colloquially, however, “M&E” (pronounced as “emmenee”) as well as the more formal “Monitoring and Evaluation” are still very commonly used and understood and were certainly the terms of use in the GGAP during my fieldwork.

192 concerned, rightly so perhaps, with site selection, the composition and tasks of the field staff, and the administrative complexities of a large program shared across three organizations. The design of M&E forms and procedures then fell during the first year of implementation to an expatriate intern, Julie, who later became the central M&E and communications person for the program for a period of time. Given Julie’s inexperience in Angola, with development programs, or with monitoring and evaluation procedures and standards, it is perhaps understandable that the “system” she designed would adopt in nearly whole form the RFA’s “illustrative” indicators.

Within the GGAP, one or two staff positions were dedicated to M&E activities at any particular time, formally stationed in Luanda and tasked with data analysis and the compilation of periodic progress reports. The bulk of the data collection for M&E, however, was allocated to the program’s field staff, adding significantly to their daily duties and concerns. Field staff were provided with activity and financial report forms to fill out periodically, as well as survey and brief interview forms they were meant to administer to community members and other “stakeholders.” Depending on the “tool” or form, these were due regularly at the end of the month or were to be completed and submitted immediately after certain events or meetings, for instance after a community forum had been held. These completed forms and reports were to be sent by email to the

Luanda office where the data would be checked, compiled over the five field sites, and presented in unified format to the chief of party, the donors, the public, and finally returned in their polished, whole-program form to the field sites so that each field site might keep abreast of progress in the program as a whole.

193

In fact, monitoring and evaluation processes in the GGAP rarely, if ever, ran as smoothly as outlined here.

M&E Staff

Julie, Raul, Osman, and to a lesser extent Fernando, are the central players in the

GGAP M&E story, occupying as they did that tenuous space between the external and the internal – they answered directly to the donors at times; directly to the international supervision of the partnering NGOs; and directly to the field staff and local beneficiaries of the program. These few people were the authors of the bulk of public relations materials about the GGAP, and determined in large part which knowledge “counted” about the GGAP’s design, conduct, and effects. For three or four people to have such immense influence in how a 16 million dollar democracy-promotion program is perceived outside its organizational home is perhaps sobering, but it is the case that much of development knowledge is produced and controlled by a relative few.

In general, GGAP staff members greatly appreciated Julie’s dedication and admired her work ethic, her strides in learning Portuguese, and her willingness to revise surveys and reports to reflect better what she was hearing from her colleagues. The organization and content of the M&E system caused extreme stress and frustration at the same time, however, and these reactions were hard for staff to separate from their feelings about Julie, Raul, Osman, and other administrative staff in Luanda. A major problem was Julie’s Portuguese language skills – though she studied hard during her first few months of work in Angola and kept a translation dictionary close to hand as she composed iterations of the M&E tools, her skills in verbal and written expression were

194 poor at best, leading to countless moments of miscommunication and preventing several staff members from understanding not only their role in the M&E system, but even what the M&E instruments were trying to measure. And while Raul was a native Portuguese speaker, these problems were actually exacerbated after he took over the bulk of the central processing of M&E data after Julie’s departure. Perhaps as a matter of personality and perhaps as a matter of past experience, Raul’s attitude towards the field staff was routinely condescending and combative, essentially one of a disapproving supervisor chastising his charges for not performing to his standards.

Emmenee as an Audit Culture

Audit cultures are identified by certain “conceptual ingredients” (Power 1997): independence, technical evidence pertaining to the objects of audit, and interpretation of this evidence which is subject to social consensus among authoritative “experts.” The purpose of audit is to provide an arena in which accountability can be demonstrated and regulatory control enforced. Auditing has come in many ways to frame organizational life, “contributing to a style of evaluation from which organizations emerge as legitimate, safe, efficient, cost-effective, and so on” (Power 1997: 8). Many productive analyses of

“audit cultures” or the ideas and practices which have sprung up to reinforce the technical intervention of the audit, have recently pursued these formations in conjunction with an examination of governance, particularly forms of neoliberal governance (e.g. Greenhalgh and Winckler 2005; Ong 2006), in which the audit is seen as a technique by which the state is able to condition auditees to self-monitor and act in a manner beneficial to the state. Though the vast majority of analyses have centered on the instantiation of audits in education (e.g. Apple 2004), healthcare (e.g. Fisher and Owen 2008), agriculture (e.g.

195

Campbell, et al. 2006), and, as it happens, anthropological research and cultural studies

(Brenneis 2009; Gray 2003; Strathern 2000), this chapter will contribute the case of international development to this accelerating stream of literature.

Audit practices are often considered to arise from and contribute to a lack of trust in social relations (Baert and Shipman 2005; Wain 2006), particularly in those relations wherein organizations and professionals are expected to be working toward the betterment of society or of individuals, as in the case of education or healthcare. In instituting a system of external, standardized evaluation, the “trust” perceived to have been inherent in these working relationships is seen, at the very least, to be questioned, and even banished altogether in favor of an impersonal and hierarchical system of verification. Trust, often thought to be instrumental in the effective functioning of an educational or medical relationship, becomes displaced from the patient-healer or student-teacher dyad to occupy instead a triadic relationship in which the impersonal system of audit – of checking and evaluation – mediates and validates the relationship between service provider and service recipient.

Subjects often resist audit practices (Fisher and Owen 2008; McGivem and Ferlie

2007), and these practices are often regarded as damaging to the people and processes they are intended to monitor (Belfiore 2004; Cribb and Gewirtz 2006; Groundwater-

Smith and Sachs 2002; Hodkinson 2008; Weiner 2002). Audits themselves are seen to become the focus of attention and action, rather than the education, cultural production, agricultural production, healthcare, or other practice which should be the focus (Gray and

Jenkins 2004). In many cases, resistance to audit practices becomes the focus of activity, an outcome also seen as detrimental to the processes and relationships of interest. The

196 end result of all this social disruption and the insertion of a third party into these social relationships is, it is often argued, the expansion of a neoliberal agenda to condition subjects to act and see themselves in a manner which benefits the state (Brehony and

Deem 2005; Butterwick and Dawson 2005; Middleton 2008).

In these analyses an audit system is seen to act through the efforts of governing agents working on behalf of the state or a corporation to effect behavioral and attitudinal change in the governed, the objects of audit – the auditees – through their “rituals of verification” (Power 1997). In effect, we can now understand audit cultures as one of the many ways in which power (often as the state) distances itself from those it governs yet still inserts itself into social relations to shape behavior to its desires and utilities. In examining the GGAP development experience, we are presented with an opportunity to further enrich this understanding of governmentality and its workings through audit cultures and other disciplinary tactics.

Here we are able to lay bare the internal workings of one such audit culture, to examine not only how it is able to produce and discipline the governed, but how it must also simultaneously produce and discipline the governing agents which are essential to the workings of power. In the stream of literature cited above, the analytical focus is, without exception, on the results of audit practices on the subjects of audit. In this analysis I hope to expand our understanding of an audit culture as having effect on auditees, emphasizing instead an audit culture’s effect on auditors as governing agents

(Dunn 2004; Greenhalgh and Winckler 2005; Kipnis 2008).

In appreciating the GGAP’s M&E system as an audit culture we are able to understand another important procedural aspect of governmentality: how it is that a

197 governing power is able to co-opt the actions and attitudes of certain people as its agents, through whom it is then able to have effect on the larger population of the governed. As we examine this process we see too that it is not only the governed who might be positioned to resist the advances or pressures of the state, but also these would-be governing agents. Much of this co-optation, and even more of the resistance against it in the case of the GGAP, came through the form and discourse of scientistic approaches to knowledge and representation in the monitoring and evaluation system, which forms the topic of the next chapter. Here, however, the social interactions and the broad enactment of the audit culture of development through M&E procedures will be examined, following Kipnis’s call for a “classic anthropological approach” to the study of audit cultures, and producing a “careful ethnographic stud[y] of the interrelations among written plans, official pronouncements, off-the-record comments, and observed social practice” (2008: 285). In this analysis of social interactions, I demonstrate how a hierarchy of power and action is modeled by the administrative staff of the GGAP and then continued by the field staff. In essence, the social mechanism of the GGAP’s M&E system worked to divorce decisions and actions from the facts, ideas, and logics which are supposed to have originated them. In disconnecting action from logic – essentially

“disappearing” the logic – the GGAP’s M&E system conditioned the field staff to act as they were told, almost mimicking the automaton, without questioning or understanding the ideas and logics which should lay behind the desired actions.

What follows is an empirical examination of the people, practices, and institutional context of monitoring and evaluation as it was pursued and experienced in the Good Governance in Angola Program, focusing on the formation of governing agents

198 through the technology of the audit. A central event in the life of the program and its

M&E system was the “emergency” workshop I cite briefly above, held mid-way through the program, which we will consider in detail for what it reveals to us about the formation of governing agents, their opportunities for resistance, and the complicated relationships which obtain in the messy business of development and of governance more broadly. In the ethnographic example below I further demonstrate the tensions which existed between the administration and the field staff in the GGAP as regards the M&E system, arising as the administration modeled the type of comportment they desired from the resistant field staff.

The administration read the field staff’s resistance as ignorance or disregard for the importance of monitoring and evaluation activities. The administration had constant frustration over the apparent disregard of the field staff for filling out forms completely and for sending them to the headquarters staff punctually. In their more generous moments they assumed paternalistically that the field staff required more training or that the forms were too complicated, but in other moments would conclude that the field staff were simply “unmotivated” (i.e., lazy), unconcerned or uninterested in this key part of the program’s work. For their part, the field staff found the demands of the M&E requirements to be onerous on top of their other duties, unavoidably placing them in uncomfortable positions between the program and their home organization, and between recipients and the program and its supporting organizations. The field staff held well- founded criticisms of the M&E forms themselves (poorly rendered in Portuguese, do not capture locally pertinent information, etc) the logistical requirements for filling them in

(e.g., the requirement to hold forum participants for nearly another hour after the

199 conclusion of a several-hours’ meeting to fill out forms, when the journey home will already be long and difficult), as well as practical difficulties in transmitting the completed forms to Luanda (internet and photocopy limitations), only to have them sent back again with vague and undecipherable criticisms as to how they were “wrong.”

Each position has valid points, as they find themselves facing different and very often competing priorities. For the administration, they face the powerful demands of donors and have little access to local information to satisfy these demands except as transmitted from the field teams through M&E documentation. At the field level, their daily demands and priorities severely compromise their abilities to attend to formulaic, bureaucratic needs. Add to this situation of dueling realities an M&E coordinator who compulsively revises forms and requirements, rendering them very poorly indeed in

Portuguese, and the situation would seem unsalvageable. The field teams did in fact care very deeply that their work be recorded and transmitted favorably to all levels of stakeholders and supervisors, and found great utility in what analyses and conclusions could be drawn across the field sites about their work. In the ethnographic moment presented below, however, I demonstrate the difficulty field staff encountered in obtaining information about M&E requirements, processes, and standards. At several moments the workshop participants, all members of the field staff of the GGAP literally clamor for information about how to fill out a form, why a form is used, what relationships the various forms have to one another and to the goals or needs of the program as a whole. And at every turn, the administrative staff respond not with the requested information, but with admonishments to turn forms in on time, and completely.

The administrative staff consistently put off field staffs’ questions and concerns in favor

200 of berating them for poor performance and extracting promises to improve this performance, without also providing the information or examples which might help this outcome be achieved.

It is in this series of interactions, in which the administrative staff resolutely refuse to provide the explanatory logics behind the procedural requirements imposed upon the field staff, that I find disciplinary intent and effect: the conditioning of the field staff to be governing agents.

The Workshop: Divorcing Logics from Actions and Modeling Authority

September 2008, Huambo office of the British NGO

The emergency M&E workshop had been scheduled for a Tuesday and a

Wednesday in late September, giving members of the far-flung field staff time over the weekend and on Monday to travel to Huambo, on the planalto. That it was an

“emergency” workshop was due to the program-wide retreat that had been held in early

May that year. The retreat had identified the M&E system as an enormous problem for the program, at both field office and central office levels, and among the recommendations of that retreat was that another workshop be held, immediately, which would bring together both field staff and central administrative staff to debate, come to a consensus, and iron out the many kinks in the system. Four months3 after the retreat, the

“emergency” workshop was finally being held.

3 The emergency M&E workshop was finally held, I believe, because the external consultant hired to conduct the mid-term evaluation was due to arrive in early October. I believe the mid-term review and especially the presence of a strange(r), outside evaluator to conduct the review, precipitated this workshop due to several reasons. First, the program administration felt it needed to be able to demonstrate a certain type of

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Travelling to Huambo that Monday, I shared an early morning flight from Luanda with more expatriate NGO workers, several nuns, and a handful of Angolan families. Air traffic4 between Huambo and Luanda had increased rapidly in recent months, with

TAAG, Deixim Express, Air 26, Air Gemini, and others running flights between the two

cities several times per week. The TAAG flight was even scheduled daily, and though in

actuality it was often postponed to the next day or cancelled altogether, this had been

occurring much less often toward the end of 2008. Huambo still hosts dozens of

international NGO offices, many of them established to do relief work in the 1980s. The

nuns and priests I regularly met on my travels between Luanda and Huambo were sometimes on the planalto for similar reasons, with several religious houses having been established to aid the relief effort during the war. Most of the religious orders present on the planalto had been there since the colonial era, however, and directions given by locals

“progress” and growth throughout the life of the program thus far. As the May 2008 retreat was impeccably documented, including recommendations to hold a workshop expressly to address M&E concerns, the administration felt obligated to fulfill this recommendation before the consultant came, lest he point out their lack of “follow- through.” Related, the program administration had had to forward to this external consultant much, if not all, of the accumulated M&E forms and documents of the program, and because the lacunae in this data are so obvious, wanted to be able to point to the recent workshop as their conscientious response to these lacunae, even though (or perhaps especially because) it would be so recent to the mid-term review that no change in M&E practice or output would yet be discernable to the consultant (cf. Strathern 2005). Last, I believe the workshop was a targeted opportunity to “orient” the field staff to the expectations of the administration for the mid-term review proper – to give them the language, attitudes, and make clear to them the parameters of the “road show” they were to put on shortly for the external consultant.

4 Until mid-2008 travel by road between Luanda and Huambo was impossible due to the neglect and sabotage of infrastructure during the civil war, including landmines and destroyed bridges. The highway between the two major cities was nearly completed during my fieldwork by Chinese firms, and I made the trip by car with personnel from the British NGO in September 2008, at which time bridges were still under construction, but temporary pass-arounds had been constructed, and trip was completed in one (long) day.

202 often reference the various missions, convents, seminaries, schools, and clinics established over the last 50 or more years. Entire neighborhoods, in fact, have been named in part for the presence of these religious orders, as in the “Bairro dos

Adventistas” neighborhood, or the “João Baptista” neighborhood.

The air traffic between Huambo and Luanda was always, in my experience, a strange mix of foreign aid worker, clergy, and everyday Angolans travelling with large gifts and much baggage. Most of these Angolans were re-establishing ties with family members left behind in the heartland during the war exodus or capitalizing on those ties to create business opportunities, usually an inter-city “import-export” undertaking.

Noticeably lacking from the Luanda-Huambo circuit were the foreign business investors, oil company workers, and industry consultants who regularly flew among and between the more coastal cities of Luanda, Lubango, Lobito, Benguela, and Cabinda. Claiming baggage and finding a ride into town from the airport was, as compared to Luanda, a pleasant and well-organized affair, as there was little of this “corporate” foreign traffic.

Nearly all the foreigners arriving in Huambo spoke enough Portuguese to pass easily through immigration control, where you had to state your profession, the organization sponsoring your stay in Huambo, where you would be staying, and the length of your visit. Even baggage claim ran smoothly, though passengers were separated from baggage by a tall counter and had to address a handler on the other side as to which bags should be passed over the barrier. NGOs or religious orders sent cars to pick up their colleagues, while a fleet of independent moto-taxis met each airplane and carted away convoys of

Angolan families and their bags.

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In Huambo last-minute preparations for the workshop seemed halting. Julie had been in town just a few days, and found herself swamped not only with preparations for the workshop, but with report-writing for her new job as the British organization’s M&E administrator (which included GGAP work as a part of the much larger job), and assignments for the online master’s degree she was starting that very day for her newest passion, environmental science. Osman was due in from Luanda on the flight after mine, but Maximino had already arrived, though he found himself under similar demands to do work while in Huambo which was unrelated to the workshop beginning the next day.

Raul would not arrive until the next morning, traveling with the program’s expatriate grants officer, Shameem, on the early morning flight from Luanda.

With Raul still in Luanda until the next day, it fell to Julie and Osman to make the final arrangements for the workshop. Maximino offered to help as well, making their small trio incidentally representative of the larger consortium; one from each organization. This caused some confusion when one of them might casually mention meeting “at the office” or “at the guesthouse,” as there was more than one office or guesthouse they might be referring to. This very confusion caused a delay for most of

Monday morning, when Julie and Maximino had planned to meet to discuss the workshop, each waiting at their respective guesthouses and working on other things, before they were able to straighten out the confusion and arrive at the same place together. This meant Maximino finally arriving at Julie’s guesthouse where they convened in the living room briefly, Maximino wearing a stylish and professional suit and tie, Julie in her workout clothes for an anticipated run after the meeting. At this late morning meeting we ended up simply scheduling another for three o’clock that afternoon,

204 when Osman would be at the guesthouse and Julie felt she might be more prepared to prepare for the workshop. Despite Maximino’s asking after Raul – “shouldn’t he be here to get everything ready?” – Julie had confidence that everything would be fine, as Osman would have the whole afternoon in Huambo to take care of anything that might come up.

At the 3pm meeting, held in English, Julie, Maximino and Osman spend time

“brainstorming” about the scorecards – one element of the M&E system which is intended to track changes in both good governance and public participation – because they have received no scorecards from several of the field teams, and very, very few from the remainder of the five teams. Osman in particular is very concerned, even angry, about the situation, as he has sent out several detailed reminders to the field staff about reporting data in general, and about the scorecards in particular. The trio agrees, after

Maximino suggests it, that the field staff are simply shirking this element of their duties, and that if they would only fill out the form at the appointed opportunities then the central administration team would have the data they need. Julie fixates on revision of the scorecard to “make it easier” for the field teams to fill out. Later that night, Julie decides to stay in for dinner while the rest of us go out, and upon our return she greets us at the door excitedly, saying “I’ve just redesigned the scorecard! I know we were all supposed to do it together [as part of the workshop], but now I’ve done it anyway, would you like to see it?”

The next morning, those of us staying at the British organization’s guesthouse – myself, Julie, Osman, and Marco, an Angolan who works for the British NGO but whose primary residence is in Luanda and so has arranged a semi-permanent room at the guest house – organize ourselves in the Land Rover for the quick ride to the office. As we

205 leave, Julie is asking Osman to look over her PowerPoint presentations that she’ll be giving later, and Osman is clearly rehearsing in his head what he’ll say as he convenes the group, asking us for the best way to say “trends” in Portuguese. We arrive at the NGO office and climb the stairs to the meeting room to find Cristóvão and Cláudio, representatives from the Andulo office, already present. Osman flies off to track down sufficient markers and the flip chart stand they’ve realized they’ll need, on the way out the door asking Cristóvão to check the Portuguese on Julie’s presentations. Marco and

Julie are occupied with sorting papers and setting up the projector in the center of the room. The rest of the attendees arrive shortly, including Raul and Shameem who have just arrived from the airport. The American and British organizations have sent two representatives from each of their field sites, while the Canadian organization has sent one from each plus Maximino, who works on the GGAP out of their Luanda office.

This is the extent of the “last-minute preparation” that I’m able to observe before the workshop begins, and over the two days of the workshop the lack of practical preparation further strains the relations between the administrative staff running the workshop and the field staff attending it – the meeting room is not set up with the proper equipment, translations are incomplete, copies are not made and paper not purchased, necessary forms and examples are misplaced. We spend time at each transition simply waiting for Osman, Julie, and Raul to organize themselves and prepare to address us. The situation suggests that it is not just the field staff who are shirking their duties, but that the administrative staff do this at times as well. Or perhaps the workshop simply is not a priority for them, we wonder, though they profess often and loudly enough to be very concerned about the monitoring and evaluation system and its problems.

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We finally convene – 16 of us all totaled – by 8:30 in the meeting room at the

British organization’s Huambo office, which is considerably larger than their Luanda headquarters. The second-floor room feels like a place where important decisions get made, where work gets done. An enormous, detailed military map of Huambo province takes up most of one wall, with the organization’s worksites highlighted and years’ worth of accumulated notations tracking the demining efforts which dictate how those worksites can be reached by field teams. Beyond the map nearly every square foot of the other three walls, from the floor to very near the ceiling, shows an equally impressive accumulation of the blue, yellow, and white adhesive putty that successions of workshops have used to post butcher paper to the walls of the room. A pair of glass sliding doors opens out to a small balcony where below the occasional moto-taxi can be heard to go by. The British

NGO is situated on the last paved road at the northern edge of town, however, and traffic is infrequent, save their own Land Rovers and those of their partners arriving for meetings. The view is green beyond the paved road at the foot of the building, where houses are being built by families with new access to NGO credit programs, and we watch the afternoon rains approach from the fields and homesteads at the far edges of town.

Just before the official opening, as we are all more or less seated, Alexandro is able to quickly command Osman’s attention and introduce him to the newest member of the Andulo GGAP staff, Cláudio, who until recently was a driver for the American organization in the Kuito office. As Osman calls us to order afterward, Sonia of the

Chicala Cholohanga office is asking Josué of the Cuito Cuanavale office next to her if he’s brought everything from his office that was requested in a recent pre-workshop

207 email memo. His reply is “the minimum possible” and they both laugh quietly as the workshop begins.

Osman calls us to order and declares that the nature of the workshop is meant to be very informal; that he expects a lot of discussion and debate with everyone “speaking from their hearts.” He reminds us that monitoring and evaluation are not “extra work,” though “some colleagues seem to think so:”

“I think some colleagues have the attitude that this is additional work, to fill out these forms, etc, and why? ‘We have trainings, we have micro- projects, we have all these things to do, and we don’t have to document – we’re doing them!’ But if we don’t have good documentation we can’t put together a database; we can’t demonstrate that we did these activities. We have to have a system to demonstrate that our activities were done, we have to know that we have these problems, or these, and that we have done these things to fix them.”

Osman reiterates that the purpose of the workshop is for all of us to reflect on and discuss the M&E system and to discover where the problem lies – is it a problem of the system? Of attitude? Of the demands involved? He declares the central principles of the workshop are consensus, promises, and accountability:

“Our fundamental objective for this workshop is to develop consensus – we’ll all have the same consensus. It won’t be that the central team has one objective and the field teams have another objective; we’ll have the same consensus. Then we’ll develop promises that we’ll implement. Then we’ll have accountability – this isn’t a workshop where we’ll talk and then return and forget everything; we’ll have accountability here. These are the three principles we have – develop consensus, develop promises, and establish accountability. This isn’t for talking and then forgetting, we’ll make accountability.”

He does not seem to mean “promises” and “accountability” on behalf of the entire

GGAP, but seems to be directing these comments on promises and accountability to the field staff exclusively. As he speaks, it is only the field staff who are attentive to him;

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Julie and Raul are working on their computers at the side of the room, preparing the next phases of the workshop.

Many in the room are not accustomed to his heavily accented Portuguese and a staff member from Cabinda continually leans over to his neighbor to verify that he understands Osman’s words. Osman moves on to stating his own goals and speaking

“from my own heart” that

“…one thing I want to achieve is that in our reports I want to have quality data. Right now, we have a lots of problems; the first is that we do not get our data on time…many times we have complaints – ‘we don’t have internet, we don’t have email, we don’t have this or that’ – and we need to see why. So the first problem is that reports and data do not get submitted on time. The second thing is that we do not get quality information. We don’t get things on time, and we don’t get them with good data. This is something I need to achieve. But we need to discuss what you all want to achieve as well.”

As he closes this portion of the opening lecture and moves to the flipchart board to begin his next points, Maximino interrupts politely to say, in his characteristically eloquent Portuguese, that to the financiers and partners of the program, it’s quite obvious that the M&E system is simply not working. He suggests that it’s resistance and reluctance which prevents the system from working:

“I need to support the words of our Director that there is a situation, a clear situation at the level of the consortium, but also at the level of the program that our system of monitoring is not at all effective. We cannot, we are not able, to demonstrate not even to the donors that we have made any progress. So we have this workshop exactly for this reason; so that those invited, but especially the CDMs, can accept their final responsibility for the implementation of the system. We have an inertia and a resistance on the part of the field teams to implement the system and for instance the scorecards. In my personal opinion the scorecard isn’t part of the monitoring of the GGAP but rather an implement to collect data after a forum or a workshop where we can collect the opinions of people who participated, and it only works if people know how to use the information. If you don’t know how to use the information then you don’t know how to fill it out so that it can be useful…”

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There are protests rising from the other workshop participants at this, to which

Maximino looks around and responds, “It’s true!” and continues on:

“The forms and the tables that we have are only useful if you know how to use the information, and if you don’t know, than you can’t fill it out properly and make it useful. And so our teams have to have more imagination and more initiative to see how this information can be useful to our teams, to our program, to improving our activities, and then it will be clearer how you need to collect this information so you can use it. It’s true that if you say this information is only for the donors than it’s true that you’ll fill it out only for the donors and not pay attention to doing it well and completely, because the information isn’t for you. But on one side we have the scorecards, and on the other side we have the other methods for monitoring the approach and the success of the GGAP. So my opinion is that the scorecard is another tool that we can use to see if we’re going in the right direction or not and so this workshop is to identify the problems we have, to speak frankly, and to find solutions to these problems. If not, then the final evaluation of this program is going to be very difficult.”

Before Osman can respond to this, Alexandro speaks up to defend the field staff:

“Would it be possible to say another thing? In relation to all that Maximino has said, I think there is a big problem in that there is no clarity (não há clareza) in what we are doing. So for me an important thing to do today would be to make an outline (um mapeamento) of the instruments that make up the M&E system and to make an analysis of which are the most important, and a lesson on how you are supposed to use each tool – how it should be filled out. The question of the logframe (quadro lógico) too, would be very good to go over and to explain how each of the tools of the M&E system is linked to the logframe.”

Already, not twenty minutes into the two-day workshop, the lines had been clearly drawn. The sides are not Expatriate vs. Angolan, but Administrative vs. Field. In

Maximino’s suggestion that the system is not working because of “inertia and resistance” he is not suggesting that the designers or administrators of the system are resistant; he is obviously accusing the field staff of reluctance to do the work. Alexandro, who occupies a space somewhat between the field staff and the administrative staff, leaps to respond on

210 behalf of the former, though not in quite so many words, that the problem is the nonsensical “system,” not the work ethic or capabilities of the field staff expected to implement it. Tussles such as these, of obvious frustration and sometimes barely concealed anger, leave craters throughout the landscape of the workshop, matching those created by actual, war time landmines just outside the doors of the conference. At times emotions run high and staff on both sides must take time outside the room for a moment to compose themselves.

Osman stops this particular exchange, though, remarking that Alexandro has made a good point and that they will be sure to include such a mapeamento exercise in the workshop. He then polls each field office to see if they have brought with them the requested documents. No one has them all, and some offices have very few items indeed, as evidently the request to bring these particular things was not sent out until after many of the attendees had already left their field offices to travel to Huambo. Osman reacts angrily to this:

“Well, this is one small evaluation of how we don’t listen and we don’t follow instructions. Each field office was supposed to bring these documents to share so that we can see and review them. This is one point to record, that we don’t have these things.”

Osman changes tactics abruptly and draws a diagram on the flipchart, saying that he needs to create a moment to review why M&E is so important. It’s important, he says, for implementing a program. He insists that the process of implementing a program “is very simple:”

“This is very simple to demonstrate, very simple. This is the first thing for designing a project: you need to do diagnostic work with the target group. We do a root cause analysis, then we do a program plan, then we do a proposal and we have the logframe, our objectives, our desired results – all of this goes into planning a project. Then after our proposal we do our

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implementation and inside our implementation we need to have monitoring. Why do we need to have monitoring? Alexandro: We need to track, regularly, our progress towards our objectives. Osman: Exactly. Another reason? Josué: To demonstrate that we’ve met our objectives. Osman: Right, this is the core definition of monitoring – at whatever moment, how is our project going? This is a definition – how is our project going? To see how our project is going, we can’t verify anything without our system of monitoring – the monitoring…we will see in whatever moment, during or after the project, how the project is going.”

Osman begins to elaborate upon these answers, drawing on examples where he has been asked for information that would only come from the monitoring system. For instance, in organizing the mid-term review that is to take place shortly, the external consultant, Dr. Reich, asked Osman if there was a “baseline” that he could review and

Osman was “proud” to send this document on to him. This retold pride quickly turns into something more admonishing, however, as he continues the story. Dr. Reich also asked him for other monitoring information and Osman had “only bad information” to give him. “When he gets here, he’s going to ask why,” Osman stresses to us. Seemingly inspired by mention of the baseline and the mid-term evaluation which was being planned, Osman picks up a copy of the most recent quarterly report from the table in the center of the room:

“I think when we have a database, we can do a very good evaluation. We need this information for a second phase. When will GGAP end? In July. Don’t we want a second phase? Participants respond: We do! (Queremos!) Osman: How many revisions do you think it takes to make this document [holding up the quarterly report]? How much data is in here? Do you think we make up the numbers in here? Is that possible? Where do we get these numbers from? But when we don’t have information from you, we can’t make these documents. This document, what is it for? The first group to use this document is us – it’s our document. We have achieved these results. I need to say a few things about how this is a system. When we went to finalize this document, we had so many problems – you know how many emails Raul had to send. You saw them. ‘Why do these data not link well together? Why do these data not add up? What is correct? Why is so much missing?’ But we don’t

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need to do this. You need to just send good information, and then we would not need to do this. This system has been working for more than one year, and we should not have this problem. I think, a final word, that you all think that this monitoring work is not a key activity. You think that after a training, you’re done, that you don’t need to fill anything out, that you don’t need to document, you don’t take any of this seriously.”

Osman is tossing the quarterly report on the table in front of him, clearly upset, and not yet able to direct his attention to the next task of the workshop. Maximino speaks up again, perhaps to take some of the tension out of this last piece of Osman’s lecture and to suggest a practical action:

“I think it would be good if the CDMs took this message back to the teams, that monitoring and evaluation makes up part of the normal administration of the project and is a normal element of the work. We want to have a project that is funded in the second phase, and the only thing we have to convince a donor is our data from our monitoring that we are making good progress and should be funded. In my opinion monitoring can’t be done outside the project. Raul and Julie are not the monitors of the GGAP in my opinion; the monitors are all of you. Because who is accompanying the project everyday? Who knows the daily progress of the program? The only level of Julie and Raul is to guarantee the quality of the data that makes it to the level of the donors or whatever other outside party.”

Osman is able to recall his train of thought while Maximino is speaking, and goes on to begin an exercise in which each “tool” or document in the M&E system is meant to be reviewed systematically. The workshop attendees visibly perk up as they anticipate learning new information or clearing up confusions which have surrounded certain of the tools and the manner in which they are intended to complement one another, but will be disappointed:

Osman: “Okay, so which are the tools that we have inside our monitoring system? What are our forms? Our first thing, when we have an activity – trainings or a forum – we have to have a participant list, isn’t it? This is our first tool. Alexandro jumps in hopefully: Excuse me, but we should detail each of these tools – what goes into a participant list, why do we do

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that, what is useful about this information? Why don’t we use another form, why this one?

There is a rising tide of agreement and affirmation from the other workshop participants; they have many questions about the details of these forms which remain unanswered, and are loath to allow Osman to move on to another tool without thoroughly discussing the first one, the participant list which is required of every activity they conduct with community members, municipal administration staff, or even internally among NGO staff. Osman moves as though to list the tools as a complete set, however, and even

Maximino, who largely sympathizes with the administration against the field staff, tries to pull him into a discussion about the details of this first tool:

Osman: Good, we’ll have a discussion like that for every piece of the system. So, the second piece of the system is that we have the monthly report, and then a trimester report…Maximino: But, Osman, Alexandro’s idea is that for each one we should identify what the importance of it is. So for example, the participant list….let us say, what does it show us? We can see the list and we can say, did the administrator participate? Did the traditional authorities participate? We can see the diversity of participants coming from the community, and to me this is the value of the participant lists.

Maximino’s comments spark animated conversation among the workshop attendees: each of them sees great potential utility of the participant lists as records of community and stakeholder participation in their activities, but questions remain as to the format of the sheets, and how and when and by whom this information should be recorded, and most importantly, how the information is used and archived in Luanda and beyond. Its useful here to note that the incredible richness of information available from lists of participants in NGO activities is really only available to those with the local knowledge to interpret them: for the reader to know if the “traditional authorities” have been participating in the program, she must literally know the sobas and their assistants

214 by name. Equally for recognizing the participation of religious leaders, political party activists, school teachers, nurses – as the participant lists usually contain only the most basic information about a participant’s name and residence, any other information about them must be already known by the reader. In many cases even identifying participants as female or male requires knowledge of the local indigenous language and naming conventions, if not the actual individuals involved. Certainly none of this information, deeply encoded in participant lists, is available to the administrative staff in Luanda without interpretation by those with mastery of the local social situations and conventions.

Osman does not pause to consider whether or not these ideas are valid in his use or experience of the participant lists as part of the M&E system, however, nor to correct whether or not that type of information about participants is useful at the administrative or donor levels, and continues on despite being asked repeatedly to go into more practical detail about this particular tool:

Osman: Good, and after we make this list we can discuss each part. So now we have three key parts to the system, the participant list, the monthly report, the trimester report...for micro-projects we have proposal forms…Frankly, these are all the forms we have. Is it a lot? No. It’s six forms. Six forms for the entire monitoring system. So we need to discuss this whole system. Julie, are there other forms? [Julie responds in English about a list she’s preparing for later in the workshop] Okay, we have a list we’ll give you all later. Okay, so we’ll discuss, very briefly and clearly, some of the definitions or elaborations of each form. Julie and Raul can say more on this. So, why do we have a list of participants as one of these forms? We see that when we have a training or a meeting, we have a participant list as a white page. A white page doesn’t have data at first; you need the name, the organization, the purpose. What is the objective of this workshop? When we don’t have a system, then each municipality will use a different system. Some municipalities will use a blank page that gives only name and organization and nothing else – finished.

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Each of the implementing organizations, of course, is also tracking GGAP activities for their own internal reporting purposes. Each organization must account to its own regional and international headquarters as well as other donors as to how they are running their programs, including the GGAP. So for some organizations, this means they must track the proportion of women in these groups, while for others they must track the number of people under the age of 22 that they are reaching. Something as deceptively simple as a participant list is genuinely complex for the field offices as they try to meet the demands of multiple reporting mechanisms. At this point in the workshop, Osman is becoming visibly agitated, lecturing about how “useless” some of the participant forms are that the Luanda office receives:

Osman: And so then when we have to pull these lists out we cannot determine what meeting or training the sheet is from; we need to have a system where all this information is recorded for us. Here there are spaces – what is the date, the objective of this meeting, then we have name, organization, purpose. Then we can know why this meeting happened. This system will help us document our activities. We have a form to document our activities and to document the list of participants. We’re not just doing this so that the donor can know, we’re doing this for our own interest. Alexandro: And not only that Sr. Osman, for example if Dr. Reich wants to know what the level of women’s participation is in local democratization, he can look at these lists and see how many women there are. Osman: Exactly! And forms for the monthly reports and the trimester reports. I think that these documents – some of you participated when we discussed these forms over a year ago – these forms are what we use to do planning. At the end of each month we have to have a plan for the next month for our activities – all the colleagues have to sit around the table and review what has happened over the last month and then make a plan for the coming month. And you use this form. And then at the end of that month the team sits down again to discuss; what activities were done, or not, and then you make the report to document them. It’s central. And then the trimester report – it’s for three months. What activities were done in the last three months. Big ones. We need to see some information from the Municipal Administration, from the Provincial Budget Office, what was done about the Plan for Integrated Development, etc. We need to include these activities. This is the reason for having, for filling in these trimester

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forms. Some changes – the governor was changed, etc – what are our observations, we need to document. The scorecard – you know. We need to fill in these spaces on the scorecard; how many people were in these municipal forums, what’s their level of satisfaction with the experience? For the micro-projects, we have a system, we don’t have to talk about it more. We’re a little behind, we need to advance a little quickly now. I think we have some cards – I’ll give four cards to each person, and you will write one or two cards on the expectations you have about this workshop, and then cards for the challenges and the positive aspects of our M&E system. When you’re done you can post them.

The cards that the workshop participants filled out reflect the tensions and frustrations of the GGAP M&E system. During the break that followed, Osman asked several senior field staff members to collect the cards, and three or four men adjourned to the next room to sort the cards out and paste them to butcher paper to be posted on the walls of the workshop room.

Written largely in Portuguese, but with a few cards tellingly in English, the negative comments concerning the monitoring and evaluation system vastly outweighed the positive comments, and “workshop expectations” revolved around increased learning and understanding, seemingly universally:

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“Our Expectations”

 A better understanding of the importance of each data collection instrument  A better understanding of the monitoring process for our program  To see that we are all speaking the same language  Clarifications on the M&E process  Clarification on the concepts and duties in the regular use of the forms  To share new concepts on M&E  To better understand the process and to improve on my weaknesses in M&E  To learn more about M&E  I hope not just to listen, but to practice with simulated forms, step by step to fill them out  To have a shared understanding of the concept of monitoring  A better understanding of the system for M&E  More clarity on the tools and why they are important  That the workshop increases our level of understanding in the monitoring and evaluation of projects

“M&E Positives”

 Although there have been certain difficulties, something has been done (alguma coisa tem sido feita) in the ambit of monitoring and evaluation  The existence of an M&E system  Return of information  The availability and willingness of the team to produce the instruments and to support the field teams  We have a system which is functioning, despite difficulties  The forms and tools which exist are very positive for the proper functioning of the project  The system exists  The tools and forms exist  The good will of the municipal administrations and of the provincial governors  The capacity to note immediately where there are gaps and to correct them  Simplification of the forms  The programmatic structure of the GGAP  We have a baseline  The scorecard is a template for M&E  We measure the impact of the project  We evaluate the activities  It helps document our data for the future  It helps evaluate the program’s activities, keeping track of the results to reach our goals

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“M&E Challenges”

 To improve or make adequate the available M&E instruments  To increase the capacities of the teams  To structure an M&E system adapted specifically to the GGAP  To create other instruments of data collection and analysis  To review regularly the importance of each monitoring instrument, and to reinforce the monitoring of monitoring  Better humility and collaborative spirit among the whole team, for example, with whatever doubt no one should hesitate, we’re at your disposal for more information  Improve the language (especially those documents we sent to external partners)  Improve the circulation of information  Improve the data collection process  Better punctuality and particularity in sending the monitoring reports  Better mastery over the forms for the teams  Improve the quality of information sent in the monitoring reports  Respond in good time to the forms  Better mesh the actual with the intended use of the forms and train the teams  Influencing the political will of the municipal administrations and the provincial governor  Provide the monthly and trimester reports in Portuguese so we may circulate them with more partners  Revise the text in the forms – language  Better mastery over the progress of the project  To see the gaps and to correct them  To attain the goals of the project  The need to send all documents two or three times – the same documents!  Better routine for advisor travel to visit field staff and explain the tools  Redundancy in the tools  How to give good quality information, keeping in mind the poor quality of the tools  Improve the tardiness of sending information  Better definition of each tool of the system  Make the information gathered satisfactory to each level  Collect information that is useful to the teams  Communications [English]  Personnel changes [English]  Follow up gap from 2nd level of supervision [English]  Level of understanding at the teams level [English]  Interest level of staff [English]  Definition of the M&E tools  Satisfy all the different levels with the information collected

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As these points are read aloud to the group, more are suggested by workshop participants

– that the quarterly reports should be in Portuguese; that many of the tools are repetitive and record the same information in duplicate; that there are no forms or spots on the current forms for recording some of the relevant information that the field teams do have.

***

Though the idea behind the workshop had been to air everyone’s concerns and ensure that all staff members, but especially the field staff, developed a mastery over the theory and purpose of monitoring and evaluation, the messages from the central office leaders of the workshop belied other concerns, particularly in this opening session.

Osman, and later on in the two-day workshop, Raul and Julie too, focused their comments and presentations on the unmet responsibilities of the field staff: data not sent in on time nor done so in the proper format; data coming in from the wrong individuals; data being incomplete or contradictory. In response, the field staff persisted in asking questions about exactly why and how these data were meant to be collected and presented. In general, the field staff evinced an immense desire to understand what lies behind the M&E tools, how the system fits together to answer their questions, and what the best way to continue on might be. The central administrative team paid lip service to these concerns, but gave little – or no – formal instruction in the use and intention of each tool, speaking instead of “responsibility” and “accountability” – coming down hard, that is, with blame and shaming, but with precious little information which might practically resolve the issues at hand. The workshop, as it wore on through two long days, seemed not to be about information, education, training, or monitoring. It seemed to be instead

220 about discipline, about establishing and maintaining a hierarchy of knowledge and power in the program, and a record of who was at fault in any programmatic lack.

Audit Cultures: the governed and the governing

Power’s (1997) foundational text on audit cultures (he uses the more expansive term “audit society”) carries auto-ethnographic authority and reads as the minutely detailed analysis one might expect from a financial auditor and professor of accounting.

Though admittedly lean as an empirical argument (see Power 2000), Power elaborates on his “hunch” that there has been, at least for the United Kingdom, a systematic

“explosion” of the practice and idea of audit. In investigating why this might be, Power traces the changing uses and meanings of audit to describe a practice which has become divorced from that which it purports to monitor. If at one time auditors researched and verified each financial transaction undertaken by a company or institution, the quantity and diversity of transactions has since increased such that this direct analysis of transactions is no longer feasible. Instead, explains Power, what auditors now audit is no longer these individual transactions of a company or institution but rather that company’s internal control system – one level divorced from the ostensible object of audit. Audit practice reasons that if the control system is checked, verified, and seen to work, then each transaction overseen by this system must therefore also be valid and true. It becomes

(theoretically) unnecessary to actually check transactions once the system of control of these has been investigated.

Power sees modern auditing practice as the “control of control,” “an idea that has become central to a certain style of controlling individuals and which has permeated

221 organizational life” (1997: 4). In tracing this trajectory Power asserts that the moral purpose of audit has also shifted. Originally, audits were largely performed to detect fraud; this purpose changed throughout the course of the twentieth century such that the internal control measures took on this burden of fraud detection, and the audit took on a more evaluative and judgmental purpose. Audits no longer simply verify a series of transactions as true and fair, but rather they now pass judgment on entire systems of control, forming opinions as to their health, robustness, fairness and ethicalness. This idea of audit – as something which examines and judges not the validity of individual actions but the quality of the internal system of self-control of these – inspires commitment and embodies social norms and hopes. Audit here becomes something aspirational rather than something practical, divorced as the practice has become from the supposedly intended objects of audit.

Power goes on to examine the methods and processes by which certain systems or practices become “auditable,” or susceptible to this new quality judgment. Since it is no longer individual actions or transactions which are examined for veracity, nearly any

“system” of self-control and assessment is conceivably auditable, from production to consumption, education to healthcare. The idea and practice of audit potentially renders technical (Li 2007) any system of relations, all the more so as the individual actions of interest are not directly examined, but only indirectly so by validating the system of control of these. Power goes on to examine how these audit practices are then held up to demonstrate the accountability, transparency, and legitimacy of organizational life and reputation (see also Power 2003). So as a practical matter, Power instructs us that audits exist not to directly verify their stated objects of inquiry, but rather to conduct some kind

222 of examination tangential to these objects, which can then be referred to as evidence of legitimacy. Finally, Power asserts that without a social consensus as to the nature of

“evidence,” the authority of auditors to pass judgment, and the acceptance of their judgments as to the quality of internal self-control systems, the audit society would crumble. Essentially, audit ideas and practices require impressive and expansive social approval and support in order to continue.

Strathern (2005) demonstrates this same characteristic of audits in her examination of a Canadian government commission tasked to identify and report on the values held by Canadian society as regards new reproductive technologies. The commission’s organization and approach was one which privileged the “liberalness” of

Canadian society and supposed a trajectory of increasing diversity in society. These presumptions dictated the design and implementation of a social audit whose technological approach to collecting data predetermined the commission’s findings: the final report and attendant policy recommendations are consistent with the foundational presumptions of the commission’s inquiry, but do not, Strathern asserts, reflect views held by the wider society. In such a case, Strathern finds herself forced to conclude that the purpose of the social audit must not have been to actually investigate and present upon the values held by Canadian society, but rather simply to go through the process of attempting to; to present the image of having done so. This mirage of accountability would seem to be a key element of an audit culture: wherever a requirement of accountability surfaces but must perhaps be circumnavigated to satisfy other demands, the audit appears. Audits perform for onlookers the processes and proofs by which organizations or institutions can be said to be accountable to other parties, but very often

223 without the consequence of genuine accountability for these organizations or institutions.

This is to say, audits would seem not to change the practices, organizations, or institutions they inspect, but rather to provide a cover of obfuscation for them such that criticism or interrogation can be deflected by the appearance of proper (and technical) supervision and verification. Strathern (2000: 5) proposes that we see audit itself as a social actant to which “all kind of powers are attributed” – but this deflects a critical analysis of the uses and consequence of audit. It is a tool, put into effect by some power, with the aim of shaping the subjectivities of both auditees and auditors. Audit itself, I argue, is not an agentic actant, but is a technology in the employ of power.

Conclusion: Emmenee, Audits, Resistance and “The Governing Agent”

I have attempted to make sense of the tensions produced by the GGAP M&E system. It would seem from both the program administrators’ perspective as well as that of the field staff that the M&E system – in its tools, its process, its products – did not

“work.” It did not do as intended. The system repeatedly failed to produce the data with which the outcome of the program was to be judged. This chapter asks not only why this failure existed, but asks further after what the M&E system did do. I ask why, despite evident failure, the system endured over the course of the program with only superficial modifications. My answer to this question is obviously that it must have been doing something of worth, something which allowed it or perhaps required it to continue on in the manner it did. I follow here one Foucauldian bent in the anthropology of development which asks, starting with Ferguson (1994), after the effects of development thinking, planning, and action, not only in respect to stated goals but with respect to “unintended”

224 consequences and perhaps “authorless” effects. Like Ferguson I find that the GGAP’s ostensibly ineffectual M&E system did in fact have effect, just not its overtly intended effect.

To demonstrate the effect of the M&E system I turned to a much more recent concern in anthropology – audit cultures. Audit cultures have, we are told, quite suddenly burst from every corner of the world. Whether in education or business, development or tourism, “rituals of verification” (Power 1997) speak to a lack of trust, a growing need to pass judgment, and a narrowing of those ideas and opinions which are granted the power to represent and to inform these evaluations. In recent accounts, an audit culture is one which distances those judging from those being judged; provides objective and scientific bases on which to form judgments; and inculcates in the judged a sense and behavioral pattern of internal supervision and evaluation. In the burgeoning literature on governmentality, an audit culture is presumed to be one key manner in which governing agents shape the comportment of the governed, with the long-term effect of instilling self-censure in the governed. My contribution to this literature has been to examine the internal workings of one audit culture and audit system, and to look specifically beyond how the “governed” are produced and directed through this system to examine how governing agents themselves are created within such a system. The presumption in the governmentality literature has been that governing agents act unquestioningly on behalf of the state – that resistance, if to be found anywhere, will be found only at the ends of the system, with the governed. I argued that the creation of governing agents is similarly problematic, with opportunity and motivation for multiple kinds of resistance.

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The Karl Marx

The Karl Marx, abandoned on the Praia de Santiago, just north of Luanda. The Karl Marx and upwards of 25 other large ships were grounded at Santiago Beach, evidently at the close of the war for independence when state authorities could not afford to staff nor supply them without the help of Cuban, Russian, and other anti-colonial allies. Praia de Santiago is a popular weekend destination for Angolans who cannot afford to enter the exclusive beach resorts of Luanda. Most Angolans travel to recreational spots like the Praia de Santiago, as in their everyday activities, on the informally organized candongueiro minivans, or by foot. There is no paved or graded road access to the Praia de Santiago.

ANGOLA ON THE MOVE

In the several weeks before the September 2008 Parliamentary elections, TPA

(Televisão Pública de Angola , Angolan Public Television) ran increasingly upbeat and

polished spots between their regular programs with the tagline, “ Angola em Movimento ,” or “Angola on the Move.” Thinly disguised advertisements for the MPLA and all that it had supposedly accomplished as the majority party in government, these spots featured film footage of beautiful Angolan coastline and countryside; heavily-laden tractor-trailers barreling down smooth roads; tall new office buildings and hotels; shiny buses and airplanes marked with state agency logos; and smiling, uniformed workers, service attendants, and well-dressed young couples and families, traveling. These images were of an Angola unarguably sophisticated, modern, mobile, and therefore, “going places.” The televised images provide stark contrast to the wreck of the Karl Marx that precedes this

conclusion and to the lived reality of most ordinary Angolans, who do not travel except

for their daily travails over poor roads and bridges in even poorer vehicles or on foot.

The contradictions between the publically broadcast images of an Angola “on the

move” and the everyday experiences of most Angolans as they do their best to move

ahead with personal projects and goals illustrate the many contradictions revealed in the

study of contemporary Angolan life and, perhaps especially, of a development program

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227 designed to improve Angolan lives. Contradictions abound in the case of Angolan development work and are most acutely felt by those at the center of the work: the in- country, local and expatriate, administrative and field staff of development organizations and programs. These contradictions are explicated by examining the empirical evidence for each of the descriptive words I use in the previous statement, and are even foretold in their pairing: “local and expatriate,” “administrative and field,” “organizations and programs.” This dissertation project sought to examine the daily, lived experiences of the dualities – the contradictions – inherent to development work for those directly engaged in it in the Angolan case.

Angolans working in international development may be among the few who actually are “on the move,” but their opportunities are likely to be constrained by language and the geosocial particularities of development work. International development has become an important route through which Angola and Angolans engage with the rest of the world, but rather than representing a fresh, new trajectory this engagement follows established, historical patterns of connection. Many individual

Angolans see working in development, especially with a foreign NGO, to be a stepping stone to a better-paying job with an international corporation or a more stable position with the state. For individuals, working in international development can be a route up and perhaps out, but for many these routes lead out only to other developing nations. For the Angolan state, development is a route to the resources and opportunities of the international as well, which can be mobilized for internal purposes. Like Kalunga for

Agostinho Neto’s “Elder João” (see introduction), however, the foreign is capricious and

228 dangerous – as when the state fears that foreign NGOs are working against it under the guise of development – as well as full of richness and opportunity.

As a professional field, development work in Angola, as elsewhere, seeks to redress global social immobilities, promoting socioeconomic change and movement upward for everyday Angolans. It must do so in the face of contradictions, whether it is political propaganda that would assert the sophistication of the nation even as the state requests further aid, or international opinion which would assert that development work in Angola only supports a corrupt state. Development work here is at the center of

Angolan and international dialogue about the rights of citizens, the responsibilities of government, and which of these are of local, national, and international concern. This dissertation has grappled with these contradictions of contemporary Angolan life, culture, and politics through examining a development intervention deeply entwined in them – a good governance intervention that worked expressly with local government and local communities with support from the international aid community and corporate donors.

Following the rich data produced by the ethnographic approach to studying

Angolan development work, I focused on the individuals and organizations of the Good

Governance in Angola Program (GGAP), creating an anthropological field site out of a development intervention. Studying the experience of development at close range, I found development professionals to be at the center of Angolan international connections, debates, and aspirations. My analysis focused tightly on the personal and professional trajectories of the individual staff members of the GGAP as “middle figures” in Angolan development. These individuals are certainly in the “middle” of the work – the field staff directly interact with program beneficiaries and report back to program administrators.

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Administrators, in turn, keep in touch with the field work proper and then report back to corporate and international donors, as well as state overseers. Administrative and field staff members of development programs are in the “middle” in a global sense, as well, often as the lynchpin between a local community or group and its needs, and the international community and its resources. Whether development is something that happens between nations, between institutions, or between people, development professionals are middle figures in each case.

In the remainder of the conclusion I outline the theoretical contributions made by my study of development’s middle figures to the anthropology of development and globalization. I begin with further explication on how I see “the middle” as a global phenomenon and continue on to discuss my concept of the development cosmopolitan as

a subject-formation that emerges from development’s middle zones. I then review my

argument on the discipline of development workers into govern ing , as well as govern ed ,

agents in development and globalization, and conclude by considering how, though these

processes and outcomes articulate closely with global processes and events, they are

uniquely Angolan in many ways as well, following a historical trajectory of Angolan-

foreign engagement that reaches back to at least the 16 th century and continues today.

Middle Figures in Development

The global background of movement, scale, morality and affiliation in

development work brings the Angolan case I have described in the dissertation into sharp

focus. Borrowing from Nancy Rose Hunt’s (1999) historical work on the Congo, I

considered development professionals such as Félix, Cristóvão, Arnaldo, and Maximino

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“middle figures” in Angolan development work. Hunt’s work sought to examine indigenous Congolese, educated by missionaries and then with employment as nurses, teachers, and government staff, moving into a new, “middle” class of the educated indigene in the colonial era. My use of “the middle figure,” however, seeks to examine development workers as a global phenomenon, one that certainly happens in Angola and furthers the study of contemporary Angola, but is not necessarily particular to the

Angolan case. My use of “the middle” here is informed by Tsing’s sense of the “friction” of global connections (Tsing 2005), examining local encounters for their production of the global and examining global phenomena for their local instantiations.

In my use, “the middle” is both process and location, both a center of the international and an interstitial gap between the local and the global. As different as each of my cases of Angolan development professionals are – Félix having never left the central highlands, Cristóvão and Arnaldo having grown up in Namibia before returning to

Angola to work, and Maximino traveling abroad to earn an advanced degree in Europe – they represent a large and diverse group of Angolans and development professionals whose experiences challenge academic and practical theories on development. These individuals are directly involved in the most intimate, one-on-one parts of the global processes of development work, humanitarian work, foreign aid and globalization. They do this work under the guise of being “local,” and in many ways they are local, everyday

Angolans. In working in international development though, they become cosmopolitan in a certain way, a point I will return to below. Using Hunt’s concept of “the middle figure” for Angolan development workers, and extrapolating the point to the global, social process of development, is one theoretical contribution of this study. There is another

231 way I stretch Hunt’s use of the middle figure, though, which is by attending as well to

Félix’s, Cristóvão’s, Arnaldo’s and Maximino’s expatriate colleagues.

In my study, expatriate development workers like Santiago, Osman, and Julie, among many others, are also members of the same middle. This aspect of my use of the middle may be a more dramatic departure from Hunt’s path-clearing work than my earlier extension of the idea to global processes of development. For Hunt, the middle figures are indigenous Congolese who become translators and brokers between their local communities and the new colonial powers. There are moments of resistance and opportunities for manipulation in this new in-between position. A more important part of

Hunt’s argument here, and part of why her argument focuses on local Congolese, is that colonialism created this “middle” in part by designating a new, “lower” class of uneducated, un-civilized indigenes. Hunt’s purpose is in part to understand how new class divisions were introduced into Congolese societies as a byproduct of colonialism.

She traces the emergence of an “upper-class” Congolese – the assimilados of the

Angolan case, perhaps – by locating them in the middle between the powerful colonizers and the colonized as a new, lower, class.

In development work the hierarchies, while similar, are more complicated, and the avowed moralities of the work differ greatly from the colonial case. Expatriate development workers – and even “local” development workers – enter local field sites in an avowed spirit of equality and partnership, acknowledging now more than ever that their extra-local knowledge of development processes and practices is incomplete without deep, local knowledge of the social and historical context in which the intended beneficiaries live their lives and pursue their goals. Expatriate development workers are

232 just as key a part of this middle as are local development workers, and my empirical evidence shows that expatriate development workers can have more and deeper local ties to their place of intervention than some of the “local” or “national” staff members do.

Further, many expatriate development workers themselves hail from developing countries, and this fact alone necessitates an expansion and re-adjustment of Hunt’s concept, developed for the colonial case in which, to my knowledge, colonized agents from one outpost did not travel to become the colonizing agents of another.

My adaptation of the “middle figure” concept for development work, then, is meant to call attention to hierarchy and the instrumental opportunities available to those agents of the middle. It allows me to draw distinctions more complicated and more faithful to the empirical data on contemporary development interventions, than were appropriate to Hunt’s colonial Congolese case. In my case, the middle has local Angolans and professionals from a widely diverse international origins working together. They are the middle in many senses: they are between Angola and the international community; between the state and the citizenry; and often between foreign states and the Angolan state. Development professionals, most especially those working administratively and practically inside implementation organizations, are at the center of global processes of social change and governance. Pointing to them as “middle figures” allows me to include

Angolans and foreigners in this same group, a necessary step of inclusion that allows me to differentiate among them in innovative ways.

Analyzing the processes and locations of development to find the most central figures is only the first step in contributing to the anthropological understanding of the structural position of the middle figure in development and the agentic possibilities

233 created and exercised there. Working closely with development professionals on a day to day basis – looking at development from the inside-out – I found that working as a middle figure changed the individual person. I came to think of these effects as akin to

“development subjectivities” for the professionals I saw every day, though the idea of development subjectivity has before been explicated as something development does to beneficiaries to shape their self-concepts, desires, aspirations, and style of communicating. I saw similar effects on the professionals charged with implementing, evaluating, and administering the program, and not only on beneficiaries of the GGAP.

Among the subjective effects of development work that I trace through in the dissertation are two important ones: a pattern of internationalization I came to conceive of as development cosmopolitanism , and disciplinary effect that created governing agents out of the development professionals I studied.

Development Cosmopolitans

The morality behind development work and its close cousin, humanitarian intervention, is cosmopolitan in a Kantian sense (Appiah 2006; Kant 2006 [1795]) and brings to the fore questions of universal human rights and the scales of relatedness along which affiliations and decisions are made for interventions and transfers. A great deal of the literature on development dovetails with the political and philosophical-ideological literature on cosmopolitanism as there are portions of both which argue for a revised system of global governance. Development workers often have these debates in the backs of their minds, both because they may have come to their professional field through the academic study of religion and philosophy – especially for mission-trained, “local”

234 development workers – or through the study of international politics and critical development studies, and because they do see themselves as helping others in a very practical sense. Julie, for instance, when pressed to consider her “ideal” work, replied that she “would quite like to be the head of the world government at some point. But that doesn’t exist yet” (see Chapter 4), illustrating some of the philosophical and ideological thinking that is behind some development work. Many other development professionals in my study cited an enjoyment or a satisfaction that comes from their work “helping” people to live better lives, or “helping” to build a better future for the Angolan nation.

My use of the term cosmopolitanism departs both from the political and philosophical bodies of scholarship, however, and from individual, moral rationales for doing development work. My analysis does not apply directly to philosophical or political theories of action and governance in the world. My use derives from a complementary literature on “actually existing cosmopolitans;” ethnographic descriptions of people’s lives, their travels, and their cultural competencies (Brink-Danan in press;

Grant 2010; Hannerz 1996; Hawkins 2010; Notar 2008; Peterson 2011; Wardle 2000;

Werbner 2008). My use also derives from individual development workers descriptions and characterizations of their work as deeply and richly “international.” The ethnographic literature on cosmopolitanism examines the experience and conduct of international connection in the globalized world, and development workers are a fresh, illuminating case study for this body of scholarship. Making the ethnographic scholarship on cosmopolitans applicable to the anthropology of development is another novel and productive addition to that literature, as well.

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Beginning with the fundamentally inclusive notion of the “middle figure” in development work, such that both Angolans and expatriates staff members could be analyzed as one group, I opened a theoretical consideration not only of the differences among development’s middle figures, but of their similarities. Describing the development cosmopolitan is a theoretical innovation in two ways. First, following the grouping together of field and administrative development workers as middle figures, the innovation emphasizes the shared international knowledges and capabilities this group of professionals holds. Second, assessing their similarities as well as their differences, the concept emphasizes not only how development is cosmopolitan – by virtue of shared international knowledges – but how cosmopolitanism can be constrained by development as a global phenomenon of difference-making (more on this below).

Development and Governance, Power and Modernity

An anthropological study of contemporary Angola, as for the contemporary

human experience broadly, must grapple with the classic questions of personhood, social

organization, and cultural meaning on dramatically different yet intersecting scales.

Movement and mobility – both real and imagined, agentic and forced – are more

important factors of everyday experience than ever before. Social life is now mobile,

interconnected, and global in many ways, not least in Angola and in the “developing

world” (Lloyd 2005; Piot 1999). The case of development cosmopolitans, becoming

cosmopolitan as they do through travel or intense professional contact with foreigners,

adds a new dimension to these considerations. Beyond the internationalism of

development cosmopolitans, though, lay their limited global horizons. Development as a

236 practice and development as an idea have indelible impacts on development workers and on Angola, demarcating the nation, as for others elsewhere, developing, not developed; a have-not, rather than a have; a becoming, rather than an is; and as a striving-for, rather than an arrived. The divide represented in these dichotomies is arguably the most salient differentiation in the world today. Angolans think of themselves as “from a developing country,” just as each of us in the world today knows if we come from a developed country or a developing country, characterizing ourselves and our experiences this way.

Development professionals, by design, work in developing countries. Despite dramatic differences within countries which would often place an individual, elite “developing country” citizen well above a poor, “developed country” citizen in terms of income, education, and privilege, the marker of development remains, indicating a nation’s place in the global hierarchy, the global status of each citizen, and the direction one must move in order to improve (Ferguson 2006; Herzfeld 2004).

A companion to the arguments on development cosmopolitans – what characteristics they share, how they are made, what effects this specific type of cosmopolitanism has for the work of development – was an argument about other effects development work has on its middle figures. I found through following development workers in their daily lives and examining closely the serial interactions they have with development’s varied interlocutors, that administrative and field staff workers alike are disciplined to become governing agents for development. Both the increased but defined internationalism (development cosmopolitanism) and the training or discipline to shape others’ comportment – to govern, in the Foucauldian sense – are subjective effects of

237 development work on development workers, which goes on to shape the larger, global practice and theory of development as a social field world-wide.

A focus on development and governmentality has been a hallmark of the globalization literature which argues that, in part, development programs shape the subjectivities of their recipients. Analysts of globalization and critics of development who engage with the globalization literature demonstrate how the recipients of development programs emerge from their interactions with different notions about gender and sexuality (Adams and Pigg 2005; Sharma 2008), behaving differently as regards the state and its agents (Ferguson and Gupta 2002), and asking for different goods and services

(Elyachar 2005; Mosse 2005) in different ways (Li 2007; Rivkin-Fish 2006), than they might otherwise. In many analyses these differences in recipient behaviors, desires, and self-conceptions are held up as symptomatic of globalization’s homogenizing or westernizing effects. These questions of power, governmentality, development, and the modern recall my earlier concerns with movement, mobility, and hierarchy among development cosmopolitans in Angola, and tie the dissertation together with larger arguments about globalization and lives lived in a global era.

Development intervention, of course, intends to address global inequality through certain kinds of mobilities and certain kinds of transfers – bringing technology, know- how, inputs and activities from the richest countries to the poorest communities in an effort to make them less poor, give them more opportunities, and ultimately move developing countries along a trajectory of growth and improvement until they reach equality with developed countries. James Ferguson, continuing his attention to the

African experience of development begun with his The Anti-Politics Machine (1994),

238 writes of the power of the development narrative and its underlying presumptions in

Global Shadows (2006). He describes the development narrative as one that emerges, in

part, with the Enlightenment shift from a concept of the world and its inhabitants ordered

through a God-given, perfect and permanent hierarchy to a concept of the world as

constantly changing and moving forward along an axis of continual, historical, scientific

improvement (2006: 176-193). He uses this change of emphasis from rigidly hierarchical

permanency to changeable impermanency to evaluate and critique newer concepts of

modernity.

“The modern,” he points out, is intricately intertwined in development, being

practically synonymous with the idea of “developed.” Ferguson acknowledges decades of

anthropological critique that successfully argue that underdevelopment, poverty, limited

opportunities, and political repression are just as modern as their antitheses are generally

taken to be. He further disentangles modernity from development by arguing that

anthropologists have failed to critique the parallel underlying presumption of

developmentalist thinking, which is one of the movement ever upwards, from less

developed to more developed. In shattering the idea of a God-given, permanent

inferiority, Ferguson charges, the Enlightenment put in its place an unquestionable

presumption of upward – perhaps slow, perhaps generational, but ever upward –

movement and change. Anthropologists worked hard to point out that poor countries

were just as modern, if just not yet as developed as their richer counterparts.

Development interventions, in this rubric, intend to jump-start, or accelerate movement

upwards for modern, but still poor, countries. Ferguson “decomposes” the presumption

on the parts of both anthropologists and development workers to point out that in many

239

African contexts, and I would include much of Angola among them, modernity (and development) has been composed of movement, yes, but movement downward rather than upward.

Ferguson’s conceptual dissection of development, history, global hierarchy and how these are all intertwined with one another is important theoretical work for understanding action and aspiration in the contemporary world, and for understanding limitation and restraint. My more empirical study of development work complements and expands his critique by providing some insights into how development creates aspiration and reinforces global hierarchies in practice, beginning with development workers themselves as essential “middle figures” in the movements, transfers, negotiations and mobilities of social improvement and social hierarchies in the contemporary world. My perspective from inside an intervention led me to examine the governmentality of development one stage upstream from the end-recipients.

In my study I was able to see, instead, the “development subjectivities” of development workers themselves become different, become shaped – their conduct conducted. I was able to see how, most especially through the activities and impacts of monitoring and evaluation, as well as the lived examples of development workers higher in the organizational echelon, individual development professionals are governed – disciplined and taught – to be the governors. My clearest case of this governing of the governors was explicated in Chapter 5, where field staff from across the GGAP’s five implementation sites gathered, after working on the program together for more than a year and a half, to discuss the internal monitoring and evaluation practices of their program. I detail how, while the field staff clamored for information that would help

240 them understand why and how certain of their practices and forms had to be executed exactly so, the administrative staff of the GGAP modeled instead obedience and action- without-understanding as the proper way to move forward with development work. At the heart of governmentality is exactly this sort of conduct of conduct – to act just so, to behave just so, to carry out actions just so, despite or perhaps precisely without an understanding or rationale as to why.

Middle Figures in Angola

Surrounding the central arguments on development cosmopolitanism and the

governing discipline of development workers in Angola, I provided segments on the role

development, development organizations, and development professionals play in

Angolan culture, politics, and history. My larger point in these segments was that

development in the Angolan case and likely elsewhere is not a top-down, externally-

driven force that imposes foreign ideas or rules or priorities on a nation or a people.

Using Bayart’s (2000) arguments on extraversion I argued, for instance, that development

is one of many foreign resources available to Angolans to use for their own ends. In

Chapter 2 I demonstrated how powerful state actors manipulated development and aid

organizations for the ends of the state, while development organizations had their own

tactics for resistance from the middle. The Angolan case of international engagement

involves a unique set of allies and foes which changed over time and resulted in a

uniquely Angolan instantiation of the international. I see the GGAP – as a democracy

intervention funded by the US government and certain private corporations – not as a

break with or overlay of the past connections Angola has had with the outside world but

241 as a consequence and re-enactment of many of them. Current development work is always influenced by previous interventions in processes internal to development itself, as Chapter 2 also demonstrated. These internal processes are, however, shaped by and interconnected tightly with other historical processes. It may be a process internal to development itself, for instance, that the GGAP organizations preferred to work where they had already been working on other projects. Their original placements on those prior projects of humanitarian aid during the war years though, were themselves predicated on infrastructural development in the colonial era, and that was predicated on patterns and movements of extraction. Development has internal processes which guide future interventions to replicate prior interventions; but all of these interventions are layered on top of a pre-development era pattern of external relationships and actions.

The dissertation opened with reference to Angola’s cultural imagination about foreign connection and Agostinho Neto’s question, posed through his short story Náusea ,

about why Angolans do not flee from such connections when they have proved so often

in the past to be exploitative and dangerous. I posed a potential answer then, that while

foreign connection has been so threatening to Angolans, it is also a constant source of

potential and promise, attracting an ever hopeful Angola to its opportunities. Pointing out

the historical resonances of external connections in Angolan everyday life, I mentioned

the physical presences in Luanda of the American Embassy, just over a decade old, and

the Fortress of São Miguel, over 400 years old. While in 2008 the two imposing

structures were clearly visible to one another, my understanding is that since then as part

of the construction boom in Luanda, several new, ultra-modern high-rises now obscure

the sightline between these buildings. Most striking among them is a circular high-rise

242 with neon lights displaying impossibly large advertisements along its sides at night, often while large swaths of the urban populace have no electricity for days at a time. Many of these new buildings, and certainly this eye-catching one, are Chinese-built and owned.

While analysts of social and political change in Africa scramble to make sense of what seem to be new and unheralded China-Africa connections, the Angolan should provide fodder to remind them that this intensification of an international connection is just that – an intensification, not a new invention. Chinese support to southern African nations has been decades in the making, not least in Angola (Alden, et al. 2008; Stevens 1976).

Through my analysis of the Good Governance in Angola Program I have argued that development interventions, certainly in Angola and likely elsewhere, are guided by and replicate previous historical patterns of intervention and international connection.

This replication is done through physical, geographical, and political pressures but as well through subjectivity formation among the cadre of development workers most intensely engaged in the daily work. This is not to say, however, that there is no room for creative innovation. Historical patterns and connections create the fodder for such innovation, in fact, as when Angola is able to draw upon its historical relationships with countries, parties, and leaders in the now post-socialist world to further its own projects and goals.

Acknowledging these histories and their resonances in contemporary Angolan life and development work furthers my ultimate point that “development” in the contemporary, global world is not an externally imposed process, practice, or concept.

Development is as Angolan as mufete , or kuduru , and Angolan engagement in the world is still Angolan just as much as it is global or international. Studying Angolan relations in

243 the world, the movement of Angolans to other places, and the movement of foreigners into and through Angola, furthers knowledge of Angola. Knowledge of Angola is worthy in its own right, of course, but in this case is clearly useful on other scales and for understanding other movements, as well.

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