We do not see people as they are anymore. Instead, we see – or learn to believe that we see – those ghostly entities we call “relationships.” There’s me, there’s you – and, somewhere in the middle, there’s our relationship. And of all the relationships that there are, none is more problematic or contentious than that between the rich and the poor, the developed and the underdeveloped, the advanced and the backward, the “North” and the “South.” Or, to employ one of the most entrenched buzzwords of our time, there is no relationship more problematic or contentious than that posed by those hundreds of millions of human beings lumped together by the term “Third World.”
The idea of a Third World, despite its congenial simplicity, is too shadowy to be of any use
I have always had trouble with the concept. To be candid, I consider it distasteful. In search of guidance, I turned to my menagerie of up-to-date dictionaries. The notion being of comparatively recent coinage, there was no point in looking in any of the more traditional compilations. According to my American dictionary, the Third World is “a group of nations, especially in Africa and Asia, that are not aligned with either the communist or the non-communist blocs.” It further adds that the Third World can be construed as “the aggregate of the underdeveloped nations of the world.” My British dictionary, extending the geographical sweep, defined the Third World as comprising “the countries of Africa, Asia and Latin America especially when viewed as underdeveloped and as neutral in the East-West alignment.” My Australian dictionary was even more expansive – to the point of being chatty. For it, the Third World signified the “developing countries especially in Africa, South America and Southeast Asia, which are not heavily industrialized, have a low standard of living and are usually not politically aligned with either the communist or the non-communist blocs.”
One, I suppose, gets the general drift of the idea intended to be conveyed. Yet, even in these elementary sketches, there are obvious discrepancies. Why the Americans should omit Latin America from their list and the Australians should point the finger at Southeast Asia is, to me at any rate, slightly puzzling. The South and Central American states are not, by all accounts, heavens on earth. Nicaragua is trying hard to be non-aligned but is experiencing some difficulty. Singapore, on the other hand, is a model of East Asian assiduity. I was there not long ago and marveled at the tall buildings, the troughs of flowers adorning the highway from the airport, the cleanliness of the streets, the traffic regulations. No one in his right mind would accuse Singapore of being a Third World country. You’d probably be deported if you had the boldness to imply anything of the kind. Alas, there is no doubt about Africa. From the desert shores of the Mediterranean to the jungly banks of the Limpopo, from Somalia to Sierra Leone, the continent is a showcase of despair. Indeed, if it weren’t for Africa, it’s just conceivable that the whole concept of a Third World reality might collapse into disrepute.
And what about the other apparently essential attribute of Third Worldhood – non-alignment? It presents us with one of those dilemmas which, one imagines, would delight an Oxford linguistic philosopher. We could put the question this way: how many different varieties of alignment can you accommodate within the ideal of non-alignment without robbing it of meaning altogether? The answer hasn’t yet been found, and – perhaps – never will be. Non-alignment, in practice if not in theory, displays some truly remarkable properties. It is as puzzling as the nature of light which – so quantum mechanics tells us – sometimes behaves as though it were composed of discrete particles; and sometimes as though it were composed of waves. A similar bewilderment descends when we contemplate the non-aligned. Some are non-aligned toward Moscow, some are non-aligned toward Washington; some, fluctuating between wave and particle, smile at Washington, frown at Moscow, and gratefully accept pandas from Peking; some are unashamedly capitalist, some are quasi-Marxist; some offer hospitality to communist soldiery, some have American “advisers” – the Americans, since Vietnam, confining themselves to advice; some are socialist democracies, some are free-enterprise dictatorships; some interfere in the internal affairs of others and some don’t; some only surface at conference time. The possibilities are infinite. What I’ve just said only scratches the surface.
A quick sampling from the conference of the non-aligned held in Delhi in 1983 will help to illustrate the point. Venezuela, because of its border dispute with neighboring, non-aligned Guyana, held aloof. Burma too seemed to be displeased – though I am not sure why. Still, despite these defections, 99 countries were represented. Afghanistan was present, as was that other vocal champion of non-alignment, Cuba. A Cambodian delegation showed up, though whether it represented the non-aligned Vietnamese-backed faction or the non-aligned freedom-fighting faction I cannot say. Iran came – and Iraq came. Ethiopia, which used to be non-aligned with Washington but is now non-aligned with Moscow, turned up; Somalia, which used to be non-aligned with Moscow but is now non-aligned with Washington, did not turn up – I can see no reason why it shouldn’t have done. Lebanon, whose internal alignments baffle us all, managed to put together a delegation. Sri Lanka, ignoring the civil war between its Tamil minority and its Singhalese majority, demonstrated its solidarity: whether it would do so now that its relations have cooled with non-aligned India – which it accuses of collaboration with the non-aligned Tamil separatists – is a matter of conjecture. Statehood, as was made evident at the conference, is not a necessary prerequisite. Both the Palestine Liberation Organization and the South-West Africa People’s Organization attended. Nor is it necessary to be an acknowledged Third World country, as is demonstrated by the perennial prominence of Yugoslavia and the ambiguous pretensions of the flirtatious Swedes. Neither of the Chinas was there – Taiwan because its existence isn’t recognized by most of the non-aligned states, and the People’s Republic because it is an alignment in itself.
Still, whatever the confusions, we do, I believe, have a picture of the exemplary Third World denizen: he lives a hand-to-mouth existence, he is indifferent to the power struggles of the mighty ones and he is dark-skinned. I will, however, return later to the vexed question of his color. That such people do exist – and that there are unnumbered millions of them – no one can deny. We live in a fantastical world; a world in which the divergences between different groups of men have become so great, have been so magnified, that there seems no possibility of bridging the abyss between those who can land men on the moon and those who would be hard put to it to invent a tin opener. African famine, dramatic and horrifying, is today the preeminent symbol of Third Worldhood. Those slow-moving files of refugees in stony landscapes, those motionless babies with flies clustered round the eyes – images like these belong to the realm of nightmare. They simultaneously arouse our compassion and debase our conception of the victim, who is seen as passive, dependent – the skeletal receptacle of what our charity can provide. I do not decry charity. If a man is drowning we must rescue him. But charity has its dangers. Chief among them is condescension. We have been kind, we congratulate ourselves, to the “starving millions.” But who are they, these emblematic multitudes? Is it not possible that the abstractions in which we deal end, despite all our kindnesses, in further diminishing those whom we sincerely wish to help?
The Third World is a form of bloodless universality that robs individuals and societies of their particularity. In the spirit of charity we go forth and denude them. Adapting the opening sentence of Anna Karenina, we might say that each society, like each family, is unhappy in its own way. Even Ethiopia, despite the almost abstract extremity of its condition, has its own unique tale to tell – a story of feudal monarchy, coup d’état, civil war. Blandly to subsume, say, Ethiopia, India and Brazil under the one banner of Third Worldhood is as absurd and as denigrating as the old assertion that all Chinese look alike. People only look alike when you can’t be bothered to look at them closely.
The promiscuous idea of a Third World does not stand up to close examination. Rather like Count Dracula confronted by the Cross, it crumbles away. Lacking particularity, it delineates nothing that really exists. It is a flabby Western concept lacking the flesh and blood of the actual. And that flesh-and-blood actuality, rising up out of dark recesses, frequently overrides and mocks what is apparently reasonable. We impute to the “starving millions” the elementary physical desires suggested by their elementary physical needs. But it is also important to understand the dreams of men, for their dreams may transcend the provision of unpolluted water supplies, decent roads and hospitals. More regularly than we would like, other obscurer needs and impulsions surface into the outer air as bats do from their roosts at twilight. Yet again, Moscow and Washington are forced to look on impotently as the Third World created by their imaginations puts on the exotic robes suited to multifarious and unsuspected fantasies of redemption and self-expression; yet again they watch as carefully wrought foreign policies melt away into oblivion, as favored leaders fly off into exile or are killed in their palaces.
The Third World is a form of bloodless universality that robs individuals and societies of their particularity
Men do not live by bread alone. In the Central African Republic, Jean Bokassa transforms his state into an empire and declares himself its emperor. He orders a golden crown, a jeweled throne; he adorns himself in velvets. The French laugh, but they supply the goods. In the First World business is business. Nevertheless, are we entirely certain that Bokassa’s subjects shared our sense of absurdity? Not all that far away from the Central African Empire – in Uganda – Idi Amin’s staying power amounted to something more than just a freakish run of luck. The British, like the French, also laughed – and they also supplied the goods. Amin’s genial obliviousness to what is sometimes called civilized opinion aroused admiration. He echoed needs and instincts to which it is not always easy to give names, but nonetheless real for all that. For many blacks, this one-time President of the Organization of African Unity became something of an alter ego. And this was so not only in Africa. I have met devotees of his as far afield as the Caribbean and the United States. For such as these, the relentless ruination of Uganda – the breakdown of water supplies, the decay of roads and hospitals – was neither here nor there. Economic indices were of no special interest to his admirers. Amin offered release to pent-up emotions and fantasies; he transformed his sinister buffoonery into an intensely experienced spectator sport.
The examples derived from Africa could be multiplied. Still, it is far from my intention to suggest that Africa monopolizes the grotesque. Resurgent – one might also say “insurgent” – Islam has provided us with another contemporary evolution of behavior that seems to repudiate conventional interpretations of rationality, to obey standards other than those subscribed to by development economics. Limbs are being amputated in many parts of the Muslim world in the pursuit of Islamic justice and righteousness. The holy war has come back into fashion.
I was in Iran when the Shah’s “White Revolution” was coming to its end. Now there was nothing intrinsically wrong with the Shah’s ambitions for his country. One might argue with the details – the use of torture and so on – but not with the overall intention. Who would criticize agricultural reform? industrialization? technical training? the attempted reassertion of Iran’s long-dormant power and influence? Iran, with its long and glorious past, had every reason to cradle a grandiloquent set of expectations about its destiny. Up to a point, with Persepolis providing the background, one could even sympathize with the Shah’s Napoleonic vision of himself. The Shah, however exotic he might occasionally appear to be, however archaic the symbolisms he exploited (the Iranian calendar, for example, included dim antiquity in its sweep) was – finally – a comprehensible figure. This Light of the Aryans, this King of Kings, to use only two of his pseudonyms, was tied to the theories and hopes spawned by development economics.
Not so the adversaries with whom he had to contend. The messianic mullahs who would bring his throne toppling down had never read an economics textbook and had no wish to read one. I remember the mosque I visited on the outskirts of Tehran one afternoon. Within its precincts, as if in deliberate defiance of the White Revolution supposed to be going on outside, were crowds of black-robed, black-veiled women, their eyes barely registering the existence of the external world. Some were crouched against the walls; others were prostrated in attitudes of devotional ecstasy. Today, their sons and brothers and husbands, holy warriors courting martyrdom on the battlefields of the Persian Gulf, are dying by the hundred. In the gardens of Paradise, who needs filtered water, good roads, well-equipped hospitals?
All poverty may look alike from a comfortable armchair, may seem susceptible to the same remedies
What I am trying to show is that a Third World does not exist as such, that it has no collective and consistent identity except in the newspapers and amid the pomp and splendor of international conferences. Human beings don’t come conveniently packaged in oven-ready Identikit format. Islamic resurgence is one thing; the excesses of Idi Amin are another; a Marxist coup d’état in Grenada is yet another. A Sri Lankan massacre is a Sri Lankan massacre – nobody else’s. It is not some vague Third World happening to be fitted into the off-the-peg categories manufactured by the Third World ideological rag trade. Matters have indeed reached a ridiculous pass. The other day I was looking at a biography, written by a French scholar, of one of the most illustrious philosophers of the Muslim world. The man about whom the French scholar was writing lived in the 14th century – a period of cultural splendor for Islam. The book is worth a little quotation. The thought of this 14th-century philosopher, it tells us, “can now be seen as a major contribution to the study of the underlying causes of underdevelopment.” Mind you, he adds, the analysis has to be tackled with care – if only because, in the 14th century, Islamic North Africa could not be remotely regarded as underdeveloped. The blurb is less restrained. The book, it says, concerns “the birth of history and the past of the Third World.” Well… well… There is no hiding from this Third World business. Down the ages we clank about like felons. Would the Grenadian be pleased to know that he has his Third World roots in the Islamic North Africa of 600 years ago? That would be a most intriguing self-discovery for him.
The longer I live, the more convinced I become that one of the greatest honors we can confer on other people is to see them as they are; to recognize not only that they exist but that they exist in specific ways and have specific realities. Clearly, it’s harder than you might think to do that. If a clever French scholar can’t manage it – what hope is there for the rest of us? I am reliably informed that in order to understand the sectarian killings in Northern Ireland one should become acquainted with Irish history and the sentiments to which its convolutions have given rise. That sounds reasonable enough to me; though the same man who gave me that advice looked somewhat shocked when I made mention of Sri Lanka. “But that’s the Third World,” he said. What is true for Ireland should also be true for Sri Lanka and everywhere else. Why have these double standards? We must cast off the rag-trade mythologies with which we clothe our perceptions of mental and spiritual worlds unfamiliar to us. It is said that when the Jesuits first went to China they were appalled by Buddhist rites. They were appalled because they were struck by certain superficial resemblances these bore to certain of the rites of the Roman Church. They concluded that Buddhism was the work of the Devil. The Third World ideologues, clutching their Marxist texts, detecting devilish parallels between Islamic North Africa of the Middle Ages and Grenada, remind me of those early Jesuit missionaries.
The idea of a Third World, despite its congenial simplicity, is too shadowy to be of any use. When, for instance, India is casually included in the unholy brood, what are we really attempting to say? That India is a hot country with many poor people? But the same India has launched satellites, has atomic power stations, has sophisticated research establishments. It is an old and complex civilization with old and complex problems. All poverty may look alike from a comfortable armchair, may seem susceptible to the same remedies. Nothing could be further from the truth. Poverty is even more varied in its causes and manifestations than wealth. Chinese and Indian poverty are not the same. What will work in omnivorous, centralized China will not work in fastidious, centrifugal India: neurotic, Brahminical sensibilities are very, very different from those engendered by a Mandarin bureaucratic tradition. The Third World is an artificial construction of the West – an ideological empire on which the sun is always setting. What images come to mind when we think of it? Sunburnt aid workers telling television interviewers how civilly they have been treated by their guerrilla captors… tempestuous confrontations with the International Monetary Fund… here a modest irrigation scheme… over there a windmill… down the road a tiny medical dispensary of unplastered brick, hailed as a triumph for the principle of self-help… and, subliminally, those slow-moving files of refugees in stony landscapes, those immobile babes-in-arms with flies clustered round closed eyes. I am not denying that people need windmills and village dispensaries and all the rest. What I do deny is that these needs adequately sum up the human condition of three-quarters of mankind.
The Third World – Blackness – found unexpected fulfillments in the Rastafarian cult
It is nice, I admit, to possess a euphemism for backwardness and – perhaps – for blackness. But, then, there are already so many of those knocking around. Of all the terms available to us – “underdeveloped,” “developing,” and so on – the idea of a Third World is the one least confined by reality and the most promiscuous in the political temptations to which it gives rise. The Caribbean – where, incidentally, I was born – provides us with rich case histories of its harmful effects. There, the discovery of Third World status had, despite the ritualistic noises that were made, comparatively little to do with economic deprivation pure and simple. Its appeal was more visceral. The idea was swiftly harnessed to racial assertion and militancy. In the Caribbean, being Third World meant being Black. To be Black was to be Oppressed: to be a constantly hurting casualty of the twin evils of slavery and colonialism. A new identity capable of expressing all this had to be found. One of the more harmless affectations was the changing of names. Some turned to Africa for inspiration, some to Islam. Unhappily, not all the transformations were so harmless. In Trinidad the army fell under the spell of American Black Power ideology and mutinied. Guyana’s black supremacist government began to contribute modest handouts to Africa’s guerrilla armies. It was in Guyana too, let us not forget, that Third Worldhood was to attain one of its more gory climaxes when, at Jonestown, nearly a thousand mainly black refugees from the United States were half-forced, half-persuaded by their revolutionary minders to swallow a cyanide-laced cocktail and so demonstrate their defiance of fascism.
But most curious, in a way, were the repercussions in Jamaica. There, the Third World – Blackness – found unexpected fulfillments in the Rastafarian cult which, among its other articles of faith, preaches the divinity of the Ethiopian Emperor and a return to Africa. Under its influence – spread largely by its reggae music – this quasi-religion, so indulgent to marijuana, was to become the opiate of the masses throughout the Caribbean – and beyond. There are now Africans in Africa who want – if, that is, we take their hairstyle at face value – to go back to Africa. In Australia, when I was there last year, I saw youths of Aboriginal descent wearing “dreadlocks.”
Third Worldhood spreads its tentacles everywhere. Now it has come back home – back, I mean, to the First World where it was invented. In London I live not much more than a mile away from a projected center for the Black Arts – not, I hasten to assure you, to be confounded with satanism and sorcery. With support from the Greater London Council, ideological Blackness threatens to engulf the life of the mind and the imagination. It is now fashionably radical to inform immigrants from India and Pakistan and Cyprus that they too, for the sake of solidarity, must simplify themselves into Blackness. This travesty unites the far left and the far right.
In the name of the Third World, we madden ourselves with untruth.
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