is indeed one of complimentarity or competition, of mutual help or mutual hindrance and of divergence or convergence. For me that is as it should be. In part, I argue, this is mainly due to the different lenses the two parties wear; I have conveniently called these the yang and yin approaches although it should be self evident that this categorisation cannot be so neat because we are talking about situations of heterogeneity, complex development scenarios and deep issues at every level. I end by a plea, "come back Africa".

The north has always been in conflict with the south. We all know that in the famous North-South NGO partnership the relationship remains in many cases, a dominator/dominated relationship, the former obviously being the one who has the money while the latter is the `beneficiary, placed under supervision. Of course where people are involved those who colonise others always see themselves as the purveyors of some transcendental moral, spiritual, political or social worth. "Those who have questioned this myth of self-righteousness or white haughtiness have been lucky to be considered merely wrong; far more often they have been thought unpatriotic or traitorous", notes one writer. President George Bush’s aggression is the best example this year, "you are either with us or you’re one of them". This is not to say that MS Kenya are colonists, but development Aid as a political weapon is not always covert, indeed, it could be argued that all official aid is simply an extension of foreign policy and a means of entrenching economic dependency. The role Aid plays depends largely on how the donor defines his national or international interest. We know from the authority of a person of no less a standing than the Danish Ambassador himself that Denmark is interested in development co-operation with Kenya in as long as the conditions suit their foreign policy "as long as Denmark sets the rules". This subject however is not within the scope of this paper whose purpose really is just to offer some signposts, generate heat on this subject to enable debate without offering full answers.

So let us look back at history; Change had always occurred in Africa before the coming of the Europeans. Whether the pre-European age was golden or one of unredeemed barbarity is not helpful to useful scholarship - and neither is it true. It was clearly logical for the colonialists to try and supplant the traditional values of the persons they colonized. One - way of going about this was to derogate indigenous cultures as the pit of darkness of itself - something irredeemably barbaric and congenitally evil. A sample here by one colonial governor in Kenya will do.

Sir Philip Mitchell, secretary of State for the Colonies in his note the British Parliament in 1955 titled "The Agrarian Problem in Kenya" describes what, without so much as a twitch of the eyelid, he perceives to be "the extraordinary backwardness and ignorance of the African people of East and Central Africa at the time when the European entered these regions towards the end of the nineteenth century". He wrote:

So that is black and white for you! Declaring whole communities "underdeveloped" and going ahead to destroy local values, know-how, social organization and worst of all local self-esteem. Much as it tried, the said report found it an extremely uphill task to demolish all things "native". For example; it was constrained to state the following when referring to the Local Nature of the Administration of Customary Land Tenure:

The foregoing paragraphs exemplify the manner in which the white administration set upon the path of the desecration and assault on indigenous knowledge and culture. We were thus tied to a set of goals by accepting British democracy. The consequence here and which relates to our debate is the hope that acceptance of development partnership or inter-cultural co-operation with MS Kenya does not tie our communities to any set of goals. We should see such co-operation as providing the framework for the achievement of aims decided upon by the partner. But is that the case? Colonialism, neo-colonialism and ill-conceived development are for me one and the same thing particularly if development work insists only on the state, bureaucracy, planning, material production and experts. These things are important but when they pale people’s spiritual and psychological needs then this is suicide. The development ‘adviser’ then should be best advised to join the savage Africa and all the representatives of lower civilisations in following the leading strings and mandates of nature.

What the statement above elucidates is that Africa has had industry and civilisation since time immemorial; that Africa, the world’s second largest continent after Asia, and the cradle of earliest humans on earth, continues to fall from precipice to precipice and there is no reason why this should be an accepted state of things - after all, the continent is the home of such colourful civilisations and kingdoms - the Egyptian and Abyssinian civilizations, all established many years before Christ, and the kingdoms of Ghana, Mali and Songhai. There is therefore nothing peculiar about radio being operated by illiterate women who have no idea what the technical aspects of this gadget are or even that women in Kilgoris though spectacularly silent and intimidated can accompany themselves in a process of self-realisation, flourishing and dignity-which is what genuine development should be about anyway.

At this stage, let me make two postulations as relates to the African condition, if the development adviser is still listening. First, the inhabitants of the continent (derisively referred to as the "Dark Continent") must define themselves on the basis of their experience and indigenous knowledge. Second, if traditional mores have been upheld generation after generation, it is logical to assume they have something positive and beneficial in them. Africa and Africans however have still to be freed from the thralldom, which Western civilization had imposed on them. English law, mainstream education modelled on western values, individualism, unfair trade/exploitation, wage labour/bondage etc.

As Tom Mboya, one of the greatest stars ever to rise from the continent of Africa, observed at the Africa Freedom Day rally in New York in April, 1959: this rediscovery of Africa by Africans was "in complete contrast to the discovery of Africa by Europeans in the nineteenth century". (Tom Mboya, Freedom and After). Whether we can say the same thing about the notions held by the ms development workers about the African personality, negritude, our relationship with time, love as it is practised here, marriage, sexuality and the politics that attach to this remains a matter of conjecture. Our dynamo of self-discovery draws its rationale from the experience of subjugation to alien hegemony. For a century and more, Africans had been dominated, exploited, and enslaved by outsiders; only by coming together and presenting a united front to the rest of the world could we guarantee our own freedom and integrity. So it is not by accident that we live in a hard world, where political power and domination are the dominant currency, a world that does not respect meekness with its twin brother, powerlessness. For Africans immurement in particularism or dispersion in the universal are two signs of losing ones way.

Those are Africa’s lenses, what about the Dane’s? When I had occasion to interact with development workers it was interesting to see the kind of lenses we each wear. To begin with, is Denmark in Europe? I could not find it on any map. For me one development worker was the personification of modern 18th century Europe (the age of enlightenment). This period has led to a particular vision of life and society, of nature and of the economy, which is called modernity. This by itself is a culture and has positive and negative aspects; it is the culture of the secularised, materialistic, control-oriented contemporary western world. It is not universal but has reached its limits. I compared this development worker to another I met at MS’s annual meeting from Uganda and I said to myself; why should European roots be reduced to European modernity? I saw in that old man roots that go beyond the 18th century, a heritage that does not start with Descartes, Adam Smith or Jeremy Bentham and Issac Newton! Europe is also indebted to Socrates, Dante, Francis of Assisi, Meister Eckhart, Theresa of Avila, Hildegard von Bingen. Europe too has wise women and men, mystics, revolutionaries, poets and just simple people who can celebrate life. The partners are best placed to say whether they have experienced this side of Europe in the MS partnerships, development workers who can engage in self criticism without being masochistic, who are curious to explore the world without exploiting it, who favour humanity that is free from bondage, attachment or exploitation. People who posses a healthy personalism but not a narrow individualism, people who believe in social solidarity, equality and democracy.

If that is Europe, the begging question is what will happen to Africa on the world stage, twenty-five years from today? What will become of its economy, its politics, its cultural identity, collective self-confirmation, the feeling of belonging to one and the same history, and the will to shape history together with one another? What will come of the demand for true self-determination? In Africa, the established reflexes (good conscience, pre-historic roots, creativity, critical thinking, indigenous knowledge etc) are losing their way. Demands (just trade, recompense and reparations, enough food, free democratic elections, literacy), which hardly 40 years ago were obvious to independence fighters, must today long-windedly be explained, justified and defended. We exist less and less as a collective held together by tradition and common values. On the contrary, we accept with few reservations our dispersion in the world market. The desire to be ourselves has been replaced by impersonal concern about efficiency and economic success. The clasp of sisterhood and brotherhood that Africa was envied for is on the decline. In two workshops that I facilitated in Mtito and Kilgoris two dichotomies were apparent in the discussions: false dichotomies between the rational and the intuitive, between thinking and feeling. There was both an aggressive, competitive and exclusive approach on the one hand and a life sustaining co-operative and inclusive approach on the other hand. The difficulty was essentially around inability of many to recognise the me in the you and the other way around, and within and amidst us - transcendence, the reason for which we are inspired to do development in the first place, spirituality. That is detachment as much as persistence. Many went into the debates as a land man would go into the sea with all their land man’s prejudices. They sometimes forgot that once in the sea one could not breathe as they did normally or that once they got the fish out of the sea it lost even its ability to put up a fight and therefore just died in convulsions to make a very clean corpse. The development worker didn’t seem to acknowledge fully that they were in Africa in some instances or that Africans were Africans or that what is development here might not be development in the North. Some partners also thought that MS’s contribution to them was something they needed to pay next to nothing for, that they were just recipients and that Africa had no business determining its destiny.

Emphasis by the development worker, country office and the programme officer would mainly revolve around planning, controlling, calculating and strategising. This showed a ‘yang’ quality that relates to domination and one track minded rationality. But the communities/partners exhibited a ‘yin’ approach, which is open to the unforeseen, the still unknown, the uncontrollable, the non-measurable, and the simple things of life. As the Hindu Gita teaches, the yin approach has a let go receptive, quality to it, which is not to be confused with fatalism, rather it has to do with detachment from the little ego. With power within rather than power over. It has to do with waiting with what wants to come. Without idealising African cultures wholesomely these paradigms struck me in the black/white relationships in the MS context but they also exist among African men and women, schooled and unschooled, rural and urban.