THE WATER OF AYOLÉ (VC1341)
This film tells you about both the physical-economic conditions and the social relationships underlying underdevelopment. It is set in Togo, but the problems - of water particularly and of social relationships more generally - are present all over the Third World.
As far as water is concerned, note how it has become an issue in international (and often domestic) politics:
Notice how the lack of good water causes multiple problems in Ayolé: the bad water causes illness, and the daily trek to get water takes up a tremendous amount of time. The problems cascade from there: illness will cause certain social problems, and the loss of time means that people are less able to attend to them. (Joel Aronoff's masterful studies [cited in my book, Defining Political Development] show that the disruption of a society by illness creates subsequent problems for the children, whose lives no longer feel secure.) You might also note that it is women who do the work of carrying water; this is one facet of the last fifteen or so years' focus on the role of women in development.
Notice that while the pumps and their delivery of water are an enormous help to the villagers, their help is limited by the pumps breaking down. All mechanical things break down, of course, so drilling wells and providing pumps are not by themselves a solution to the villagers' water problems. These problems could be solved if the Togolese government were wealthy enough to have an ongoing program of well repair, but of course it isn't wealthy enough, and so (as usual) the people most affected are left to deal with the consequences on their own.
I show this video to show (among other things) the difficulty of looking for purely technological (or technological know-how) solutions to problems. Without its change in culture, Ayolé would have no water; the pump does not fix itself. So why don't the villagers fix the pumps themselves? There are multiple reasons, but the reasons I want you to pay attention to are the social/cultural ones; pay special attention to what limits on social organization inhibit the people of Ayolé from repairing the pump.
In a world of limited wealth, our problems have to be solved by getting along better. Here are two relevant quotations:
Even more than a crisis with failing oxygen or the participants' average loss of almost 14 percent of body weight, she said, "human group dynamics" emerged as their / biggest challenge.Only the knowledge that they were mutually interdependent in the fragile ecological system held them together, despite tensions and incompatibilities that she said were worse than any she had experienced on seagoing voyages as a marine biologist
— Abigail Alling, one of the members of the "Biosphere 8" experiment, as reported in the Duluth News-Tribune, September 27, 1993, pp.1A, 5A
and
[If the form of life reflected in such system-conforming rewards as money, free time, and security {i.e., the rewards of wealth} can no longer be convincingly legitimated,] the "pursuit of happiness" might one day mean something different--for example, not accumulating material objects of which one disposes privately, but bringing about social relations in which mutuality predominates and satisfaction does not mean the triumph of one over the repressed need of the other.
— Jürgen Habermas, Communication and the Evolution of Society, pp.198-199
Remember, however, that we are in the section of the course where development is held to be internal to the country. Nowhere in this film does it say what external forces might have caused the villagers to be so dependent on specifically Western aid and Western technology; nowhere does it show what international economic or political relations have left a country with so much wealth so poor.
Let me also note the paternalistic view of the video. Even though it points out that the development experts made some mistakes in drilling wells without thinking about how they would be maintained, the video's overall message is about how outside experts were required to drill the wells in the first place and later to tell the village how to develop. There are some unspoken assumptions here that outside help is required for development and that outside views of development are the correct ones. Is there any harm to this missionary view of things? After all, the villagers did want the pump and did appreciate having the water, whatever other changes in their society came about as a result. I will simply leave this as a question.
Well, these things make Ayolé poor, certainly, but poverty by itself is not the same as backwardness, even though development makes people wealthier. So if these things aren't backwardness, on what basis can we judge Ayolé? What is the backwardness? Is there any?
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