Mugabe’s Ashes

Zimbabwe’s president, Robert Mugabe, made a number of trips to Britain in the 1990s. Most attracted significant attention. In May 1994, for instance, he collected an honorary knighthood while on an official state visit. He returned on several other occasions, each proving more controversial as his government targeted a white settler minority community that had only belatedly ceded power in 1980. In 1995, though, Mugabe made one visit that received hardly a mention at all in the press. He came to collect the ashes of a British missionary and charity worker, Guy Clutton-Brock.¹

Clutton-Brock had died on 29 January of that year. Two days later, Mugabe declared him a ‘National Hero’ in recognition of the role that he and his wife, Molly, had played in supporting African nationalism.² They had organised a series of multi-racial farms run as grassroots development cooperatives supported by a number of British charities such as Oxfam and Christian Aid. The Clutton-Brocks were based in Southern Rhodesia and neighbouring countries for over two decades from 1949 until 1971. At that point, Guy was deported by Ian Smith’s pro-apartheid, Rhodesian Front, government.

In March 1995, Mugabe spoke at the memorial service for Guy at St Martin-in-the-Fields in Trafalgar Square. He paid tribute to Clutton-Brock’s ‘selfless dedication and sacrifices for the cause of freedom and justice in Zimbabwe’. Guy was a ‘a man of rare and noble deeds’, one of the ‘very few Zimbabwean whites who put their moral principles before any material benefits’. Together with Molly he was a ‘beacon in the midst of settler forces of reaction’ who had ‘contributed immensely to the liberation of our country’.³ Returning to Harare, in a quiet, sparsely attended ceremony, Mugabe scattered Guy’s ashes at National Heroes’ Acre on the outskirts of the city. To this day Guy Clutton-Brock remains the only white person buried at this shrine to the struggle for African liberation.⁴

To appreciate why Mugabe made such an effort to pay his respects to a Christian missionary backed by private charity requires an understanding of British humanitarianism in Africa over several decades of decolonisation. This book argues that charity has been central to how Britain has approached overseas aid. The relationship between Mugabe and Clutton-Brock does not typify the broader history of charity, decolonisation and development. Theirs is only one of many dozens of varied interactions between British humanitarians and numerous communities and societies across Africa covered in this book. Yet Mugabe believed that the charitable relationship established between the Clutton-Brocks and the people of Zimbabwe was an ideal one. It represented the exchange of a gift, given between equals, which Mugabe willingly reciprocated through Clutton-Brock’s national memorialisation many decades later.

The history of Charity After Empire involved many thousands of humanitarian ‘gifts’ transferred from Britain to Africa. They constituted encounters of aid and development that produced diverse results and which were triggered by a whole range of ideals and motivations. They included both the progressive and the reactionary. Many were well-meaning but not always well-thought out. Aid was given and received in some instances with an intention to support an independent, postcolonial future. At other times it reinforced the dynamics of a colonial past. Mugabe’s gesture brought to a close several decades of decolonisation in which charitable interventions in aid and development steadily assumed a permanent presence. Not all the exchanges, however, resulted in such symbolic acts of reciprocation. But from tiny beginnings at the moment of formal decolonisation, by the end of the twentieth century, charitable – or private, voluntary, non-profit – humanitarianism had become a universally recognised feature of the international machinery of global development.

A Nation of Givers?

The United Kingdom has been, and remains, a nation of givers. For all the effects of a global pandemic, the politics of austerity and a cost-of-living crisis, up to three-quarters of Britons donate often considerable shares of their incomes to charitable causes. The public voluntarily gave a record £13.9 billion in 2023. Twenty-nine million people donated cash, 28 million gave goods, 12.6 million took part in sponsored events, 7.1 million volunteered their time and 4.4 million were directly involved in fundraising.⁵ These figures are not exceptional. Surveys of giving across Europe have persistently found that public donations in the UK have been the highest, whether measured in absolute terms or as a proportion of GDP.⁶ The World Giving Index, which takes into account the donations of time, money and direct assistance to strangers, has likewise found Britain among the ‘most charitable’ countries, ranked only below those of North America and Australasia.⁷

One explanation for all this giving has been the popularity of charitable humanitarianism. Along with religious organisations and medical charities, for several decades the British public has directed its cash to agencies focussed on overseas aid and emergency relief. Charitable humanitarianism has consistently attracted more financial support than other good causes, be they children, animal welfare, disability or homelessness. Charity After Empire is a history of what all this support for humanitarianism meant, especially that directed towards Africa, as well as a history of the role of charity in modern Britain. It traces the rise of household names such as Oxfam, Save the Children, War on Want and Christian Aid, explains how they came to have a permanent presence in the alleviation of poverty, why they were supported by the public and how they were embraced by governments at home and abroad. It is an examination of the function and purpose of charity and its position within the welfare regimes that have tackled poverty, both in Britain and across Africa.

Formed in the aftermath of war and at the end of empire, charities such as Save the Children (established in 1919), Oxfam (1942), Christian Aid (1945) and War on Want (1951) became massive international nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) devoted to long-term aid and development. By the turn of the millennium, the income of the six largest humanitarian agencies (Oxfam, Save the Children, Christian Aid, the British Red Cross, Tearfund and CAFOD) amounted to 10% of the total income of the top 500 charities in the UK. By 2004, annual public donations to UK humanitarian organisations as a whole reached £1 billion.⁸

Particularly since the Live Aid/Band Aid phenomenon of the mid-1980s, commentators have spoken of a ‘mass movement’ of humanitarian giving.⁹ Perennial fears over ‘aid fatigue’ have proved unfounded. At times, the global enthusiasm for philanthropic and charitable humanitarianism has appeared even ideological. Philosophers and ethicists have urged us to ‘give well’ for ‘the life you can save’.¹⁰ Former presidents, billionaire CEOs and ‘philanthrocapitalists’ have announced that their giving ‘can change the world’.¹¹ And notwithstanding a series of individual scandals, ‘effective altruism’ has created something akin to either a social movement of the super-rich or a tech start-up firm devoted to facilitating ‘strategic giving’.¹² It seems the moral legitimacy of philanthropists is today as secure as the political legitimacy of the global free market within which they seem the natural corollary.

Humanitarianism has played a central role in the legitimation of charity in modern Britain. To make sense of this assertion it is necessary to acknowledge that the rise of voluntary humanitarianism and the support for charity in general, either financial or rhetorical, was not inevitable. Indeed, for much of the twentieth century the responsibility for dealing with poverty was felt to lie with the state rather than charity. The previous ‘golden age’ of philanthropy, in Britain as elsewhere, was that of the late-nineteenth century.¹³ Thereafter, charity proved less attractive to the public, politicians and policy makers alike. From the turn of the twentieth century, gentle parodies such as Mrs Jellyby’s ‘telescopic philanthropy’ and Mrs Pardiggle’s ‘rapacious benevolence’, both in Charles Dickens’ Bleak House, were replaced with more acerbic critiques.¹⁴ In The Soul of Man under Socialism, Oscar Wilde charged that charity ‘degrades and demoralises’, it ‘creates a multitude of sins’.¹⁵ He was followed by writers such as George Bernard Shaw who wrote of the ‘the bread o charity … sickenin in our stummicks’.¹⁶ Politicians such as the future Labour Prime Minister Clement Attlee believed that charity provoked ‘condescension on the part of the benefactor’ and ‘an expectation of gratitude from the recipient’.¹⁷

These attitudes help explain the turn away from voluntary beneficence and towards statutory measures for the relief of poverty. The gradual expansion of the welfare state, especially the reforms of the social services during the post-war Labour government, rendered charity, if not quite obsolete, then at least potentially, superfluous. According to one widely cited social survey of 1948, ‘as many as 149 in every 150’ of those interviewed thought charity was unnecessary.¹⁸ Just at the point when charities were established to deal with the alleviation of poverty and suffering overseas, the British public was welcoming either the eclipse or the marginalisation of charity’s role in the relief of poverty at home.

Accounting for these discrepancies in attitudes and practices between domestic poverty and poverty overseas is the purpose of this book. The approaches to poverty within Britain and around the world were discrete, yet they were also interconnected. A key argument in what follows is that over the course of the latter half of the twentieth century the perceived success of charity abroad was an important factor in the subsequent acceptability of charity as a solution for dealing with poverty at home. Modern Britain can only be understood through its relationship with the wider world. In particular, the politics of Southern and Central Africa profoundly shaped not only the operations of charitable humanitarianism, but also how it spoke, acted and campaigned in Britain too. Organisations such as War on Want, Christian Aid and Oxfam wanted to defend the ‘Front Line States’ that neighboured the Republic of South Africa and which feared the spread of the racist polities of apartheid. But as will be seen, that Southern African context was influential too on the support for, and regulation of, private and voluntary activity within the mixed economy of welfare back in Britain. The factors that shaped the affinities between Mugabe and the Clutton-Brocks also, in many other ways, influenced the general history of humanitarianism and charity too.

The Gift

To understand the role of charity after empire it is necessary to begin with some consideration of the meaning of the charitable gift and of the relationship between donor and recipient. As with Mugabe and the Clutton-Brocks, when the participants in the exchange regard one another as equals, it is easy to see how the acts of giving, receiving and reciprocating can reinforce social bonds and solidarities. Such instances of mutualism form the basis for some of the most robust defences of charity.¹⁹ But all too rarely is the gift given between equals. As the French sociologist, Marcel Mauss, put it in 1925, ‘to give is to show one’s superiority’.²⁰ His analysis has proved enduring. Anthropologists, ethnologists and many other social scientists have pointed further to the ‘wounds’ arising from the ‘violence’ of charity when deployed in the development encounter.²¹ Popular accounts continue to target the ‘toxic’ nature of social relations based upon charity.²²

If the charitable exchange favours the donor, there still has to be a relationship with those who receive the gift such that the opportunity for reciprocation can at least occur. The symbolic power of charity works through the personal connections it reinforces, the social relations it strengthens, the institutional alliances it forges. When the focus is on these wider social relations, the motives and feelings of either the donor or the recipient are of lesser interest than the interconnections between the two. It is their relationship that uncovers the overall ‘logic’ or function of charity in any given time and place.²³

Charity has functioned as an effective bridge and bond between the rich and the poor when both parties have fulfilled ‘their respective parts in an exchange which fed and sustained the act’.²⁴ When societal change breaks down the trust that either party to the exchange has in the other to give or to reciprocate, then a ‘moral dissonance’ can set in whereby neither behaves or believes in the roles the charitable relationship expected of them. At various times charity has bolstered social relations and served as a conservative force for the maintenance of tradition. But when the terms of the exchange have been disputed, and both parties have not participated in the act in a manner the other expected of them, then dissatisfaction with charity has also been the basis for subsequent social and political unrest.²⁵

In British history, most is known about the role and function of charity in the nineteenth century. It was then that the logic of charity was reasonably clear, in principle if not always in practice. Charity existed to help the ‘deserving’ poor; the state picked up those deemed ‘undeserving’.²⁶ Victorian liberalism assumed that individuals were self-reliant and responsible for themselves. They were free to make provision for their own misfortune through individual or collective voluntary initiative. This explains the massive expansion of self-help, cooperative and mutual benefit associations which provided various forms of social insurance to cover sickness, old age and unemployment. The role of the state in social welfare was restricted to assisting only the most destitute. The workhouse of the 1834 Poor Law was both safety net and disincentive for those who found no alternative means of support. Between the individual and this institution of last resort were the charities. They administered relief on a moral basis to those deemed of sound, ‘respectable’, character: that is, those who were not to blame for their involuntary circumstances and hence were worthy of the gift.²⁷

Discriminatory and discretionary assistance imposed expectations of behaviour upon both recipients and donors. The vast machinery of aid that developed through bodies such as the Charity Organisation Society (COS, established in 1869) created work for the charitable as they had to administer the conditions of generosity. As well as offering ‘a morally approved vehicle for self-aggrandisement’, the work also served a wider societal purpose.²⁸ It provided opportunities for women philanthropists to play a public role, for urban elites to bolster their reputations in other walks of life and for the dynamics of social interaction to be confirmed when the poor encountered their otherwise distant, occasionally ‘slumming’, social superiors.²⁹ If the poor were to be helped they likewise had to satisfy their part of the bargain. They had to demonstrate and perform their worthiness and respectability, hence the COS sobriquet, ‘Cringe or Starve’.³⁰ And practice did not always match prescription. ‘Clever paupers’ exploited the system, especially when the ‘indiscriminate alms-giver’ did not check whether the recipient had obtained gifts elsewhere.³¹ At times, the benevolent were said to ‘stand aghast at the Pauper Frankenstein’ they had created.³²

The relationship was also dynamic. The ‘mixed economy’ of welfare might have been broadly understood, but it was always in flux.³³ Moreover, ‘at no point did the forms in which charity was offered match the forms in which it was needed’.³⁴ New gaps in welfare emerged and charity did not always step in to meet them.³⁵ Nevertheless, this broad logic of charity was sustained at least until the end of the century. Victorian liberals spoke with some validity when they claimed that philanthropy was a part of the national character.³⁶

It is more difficult to delineate the role and function of humanitarianism and charity in the latter half of the twentieth century. Domestically, there has been less consensus on the relationship between the voluntary and statutory services. After the extension of the welfare state by the post-war Labour government there was some initial agreement that charity’s role was to pioneer new forms of provision, to identify changing needs and to serve as a vocal, if ultimately friendly, critic of public provision.³⁷ Charity was said to operate at the ‘moving frontier’ of welfare, to ‘supplement’ and ‘to goad’ the statutory sector, but not to replace it.³⁸ But as the mixed economy of welfare became ever more complex so too did the role of charity. Some charities, such as Shelter and the Child Poverty Action Group, radicalised and adopted more confrontational tactics.³⁹ Others proved more compliant, willing to contract for service provision by local authorities run by parties from across the political spectrum.⁴⁰ Organisations pushed the moving frontier both forwards and backwards, depending on their preferences for a minimalist or maximalist state.⁴¹

Amidst this complexity and expansion, social scientists have struggled to provide precision about the nature of the ‘mix’ in the mixed economy of welfare. In one of the most recent studies of the ‘logic of charity’ two of its most prominent scholars concluded by noting ‘idiosyncrasy and particularism’, ‘variation’ and ‘complexity’: ‘multiple logics’ in fact.⁴² Perhaps the sector defies categorisation. With around 170,000 organisations formally registered with the regulatory body, the Charity Commissioners, diversity and variety may well be all that can be observed about what has been described as ‘a loose and baggy monster’.⁴³

If humanitarianism overseas is included within this charitable landscape then matters become still more complex. British overseas charities have operated in an incredible array of diverse societies. They have undertaken many types of aid project. And they have entered into a range of partnerships with national and international governments. If aid work is examined in detail, as it is in Chapters 5–8, then it will be seen that there has been no standardised role for charity in practice.

In addition, in an era of mass public giving to distant strangers in distant lands, it is difficult to recreate the social relationships and opportunities for reciprocity so fundamental to the gift relationship. Humanitarianism instead relies on the altruism of the gift of the comparatively better off. But, unlike with the voluntary donation of blood, the subject of Richard Titmuss’ famous and convincing advocacy of altruistic giving over market-based contractual pricing, humanitarian giving lacks the organisational mechanisms to integrate principles of equality and justice with charitable assistance.⁴⁴ Operating across borders and restrained by rules and regulations at home and abroad, unlike Mugabe and the Clutton-Brocks, charities have not generally constructed the gift relationship along equal lines, even when that has been their goal. It is therefore difficult to determine the purpose behind the transfer of money from the pockets of the British public to various aid projects in, particularly, late-colonial and postcolonial Africa. Unlike those of Clutton-Brock, the ashes of the public donation could never be requested to express the gratitude of the recipients of the gift.

Despite this, charitable humanitarianism provides a powerful lens to analyse the logic of charity more generally. The equality of the gift exchange assumed by Mugabe and the Clutton-Brocks represents a useful gauge from which to assess other relationships. It is one that African leaders identified well in advance of Mugabe’s gesture. Writing of the French empire in 1957, the Senegalese poet, politician and theorist, Léopold Sédar Senghor, argued that attention must be paid to the form rather than the content of any gift that originated in the metropole. For true decolonisation to occur, both parties to the gift must be allowed to discuss it as partners on an equal footing.⁴⁵ It is for this reason that Burkina Faso’s President, Thomas Sankara, for instance, argued against accepting the gift of international aid. He claimed it obliged the recipient nation to sign up to international priorities determined in advance by the donor.⁴⁶ Likewise, in a much-quoted piece of advice, President Julius Nyerere suggested an alternative use of the gift for his country. He told Oxfam to ‘take every penny you have set aside for aid for Tanzania and spend it in the UK, explaining to people the facts and causes of poverty’.

These African leaders’ insights resonate with some of the sharpest criticisms of humanitarian charity. The combative columnist, Christopher Hitchens, undertook a hatchet job on the now canonised missionary, Mother Theresa, whom he identified as the world’s leading exponent of the ‘false consolation’ of humanitarianism.⁴⁷ The critical theorist, Slavoj Žižek, condemned charity as ‘the humanitarian mask hiding the face of economic exploitation’.⁴⁸ The problem, a more sympathetic observer has noted, is that fundamentally ‘the politics of compassion is a politics of inequality’.⁴⁹

Between these two poles of idealised equality and the excoriation of exploitation has been the work of the humanitarians. Their recognition of the dilemma has been implicit in their rhetoric. As they moved, from the 1960s, beyond emergency relief towards the alleviation of poverty over the long-term, they claimed a role that went ‘beyond charity’. In this oft-repeated refrain, agencies like Oxfam and Christian Aid proclaimed they gave ‘more than philanthropy’ and offered instead ‘justice’ and ‘solidarity’ with the world’s poor. It was an attempt to create a space for charity in which the relationship between donor and recipient was defined on more respectful lines. But as will be seen, limits were placed on how they moved ‘beyond’. It is as charities that they continued to exist and, also, how they thrived. It is their operations as charities – legally and institutionally – that are explored in the pages that follow.

Understanding their growth and work is to uncover the logic of humanitarian charity over several decades of decolonisation and development. But because of the connections humanitarianism fostered between Britain and the wider world – politically, economically and emotionally – it is also a vital entry point into understanding the logic of charity in the political economy of Britain more generally. Due to the limits placed on charity’s remit – by legislation, by external and internal governance, by organised interests and by the wider supporting public – humanitarian charity has largely occupied a position that confirms rather than undermines the existing social relations from which it emerged. Going ‘beyond charity’ would have meant becoming something they were not. Instead, they have operated in a space tolerated by wider society and which, in turn, charities have tolerated themselves.

Humanitarian Chronologies

Humanitarianism is always a product of its times. How humanitarian sensibility manifests itself in any given period is a result of the economic and social circumstances from which it emerged. Marx and Engels famously identified philanthropists, humanitarians and organisers of charity as those parts of the bourgeoisie ‘desirous of redressing social grievances in order to secure the continued existence of bourgeois society’.⁵⁰ That is, the altruism of the Victorian liberal middle class stretched only to ‘the sporadic enthusiasm for good causes abroad’.⁵¹ It did not go so far as to unsettle the conditions that gave rise to their affluence in the first place. For subsequent periods, the argument does not need reducing to class interest. The point still stands that the market and the economy shaped the ways in which people regarded the suffering of strangers in distant lands.⁵² It is this insight which has lain behind the various attempts to set out the distinctive periods and moments in the history of humanitarianism.⁵³

Humanitarianism first flourished in an age of expanding capital and empire in the eighteenth century. New markets and forms of exchange made men and women aware of the connections that tied humanity across far flung places while medical advances opened up new ways of caring for others.⁵⁴ Humanitarianism, its advocates contended, could be reconciled with ethical capitalism and the philanthropy of colonialism’s civilising mission. This liberal imperial sentiment only stretched so far. Those humanitarians who advocated for the abolition of slavery, for instance, did not seek full equality through emancipation. As one of its foremost historians has put it, England’s progressives ‘hated slavery … but they also hated slaves’: ‘their enthusiasm for racialised others was strictly limited’; ‘hatred and contempt were always potentially the other side of pity’.⁵⁵ Similarly, relief for the victims of famine encouraged interventions which, at the same time, further extended colonial control. Rescuing the refugee from foreign persecution also drew attention to the supposed superior liberal ideals of domestic government.⁵⁶

Humanitarianism later accompanied international war, most notably with the Red Cross movement. The history of humanitarianism from the late-nineteenth century through to the mid-twentieth was one of its incorporation into international laws that governed military conflict, culminating in the Geneva Conventions of 1949. In World War One, humanitarianism became more secular, more expert-driven and more firmly established within transnational networks. It also embraced both the rights of the victims and the rights of states to intervene, thereby ensuring an ethos of internationalism was also tied in to the interests and actions of nation states and their ongoing imperialist commitments.⁵⁷ World War Two confirmed the incorporation of philanthropic humanitarianism into the international governance of emergency relief. The United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) was a worldwide effort from 1943 to ameliorate the suffering of the victims of war. In Britain, the voluntary humanitarians came together in the Council of British Societies for Relief Abroad to coordinate their relief work in line with the work and priorities of UNRRA.⁵⁸ If increased government income to assist relief work is a measure of success, then Save the Children had a good war.⁵⁹

UNRRA presaged the massive mobilisation of official aid and development of the Cold War era. US resident Harry S. Truman’s ‘Point Four’ speech of his inaugural address of January 1949 ushered in the ‘invention of development’ committed to long-term assistance rather than emergency relief.⁶⁰ It was followed by huge top-down, technocratic, modernisation theory-inflected developmentalism associated with the UN agencies through which ‘technocratic authority replaced religious authority’.⁶¹ By 1969, in his report for the World Bank, Lester Pearson estimated that $12.8 billion was transferred annually from non-Communist countries to the developing world.⁶² The Eastern bloc also directed funds and resources in a global aid industry constructed around geopolitical interests.⁶³

It is against such official aid and development that the modern charitable humanitarian sector positioned itself as the alternative. In Britain, from the start of the 1960s, the likes of Oxfam and Christian Aid suggested they offered a bottom up, locally based, grassroots approach to development similar to that which the Clutton-Brocks practised in Southern Rhodesia from 1949. It is one claimed to have been more committed, more flexible, more pragmatic, more experimental and better at preserving mutual self-respect between donor and recipient. This was an exaggeration. For their part, official development donors had also been practising small-scale development since the interwar period.⁶⁴ Furthermore, humanitarian charities were factored into the intergovernmental machinery of aid from the very beginnings of the first international development decade in the 1960s. They were imagined more as appendages or auxiliaries, rather than alternatives, to mainstream development. In the same report for the World Bank, Pearson noted that already $1 billion was annually channelled through NGOs, of which $700 million came from private sources.⁶⁵

Thereafter, humanitarian agencies were to have their ‘moment’ all over the world.⁶⁶ They witnessed exponential growth in the latter decades of the twentieth century. By the 1990s, at the end of the Cold War, private voluntary organisations were firmly embedded within what has been variously termed ‘the humanitarian international’ or the ‘humanitarian-development-complex’.⁶⁷ They had participated as one of the key drivers of global history – the ‘development century’ – and were positioned at the turn of the millennium at the forefront of modern humanitarianism.⁶⁸ This included not only long-term development and the ‘NGOisation of Africa’, but also the international system of liberal interventionism. Based on the ‘responsibility to protect’, charities were given an enhanced role in emergency situations and in assisting unstable, or destabilised, regimes.⁶⁹

This is hardly a specifically British story. In the latter half of the twentieth century humanitarian organisations – not necessarily charitable, but certainly voluntary and private – flourished across Europe, North America and Australasia. Many of these received government funding, especially in the United States, where development aid was tied more directly to foreign policy objectives. The Dutch and Scandinavian countries also directed state funds through private organisations. Its agencies acquired something of a reputation as the ‘global good Samaritans’.⁷⁰ Even smaller states, and those without a long-standing tradition of promoting development through either imperialism or internationalism, participated in the global aid industry. Ireland was a notable example of mass public giving and many others, including from the global South, subsequently emerged.⁷¹

Two factors add to the distinctiveness of the British case. The first is the legal registration of humanitarianism as charity. The second is the legacy of colonialism on modern humanitarian history. As with France (though there voluntarist traditions were not as strong) and Germany, Britain’s formal and informal imperial obligations both continued after decolonisation and built on the activities of generations of missionary activity.⁷² There were important crossovers which call into question the notion of a sharp break in the history of humanitarianism after 1945 that Truman’s speech seemed to indicate. There were continuities in forms of expertise from the colonial state to the international organisations.⁷³ Faith-based organisations remained present throughout, and charity both eased the transition from, and blurred the lines between, mission and NGO. The types of emergency intervention practised after 1945 often had longer histories that stretched back to the techniques of famine relief in the nineteenth century.⁷⁴ Even the visual representation of suffering proved remarkably resilient in the transition from a religious to a supposedly more secular world.⁷⁵

All this calls into question the notion of an imperial and post-imperial divide in the history of humanitarianism.⁷⁶ Instead, it offers what one historian of Africa has regarded as a ‘development era’.⁷⁷ It begins with the turn to development by the late-colonial state in the 1930s and ends with ‘the shock of the global’ symbolised by the oil crisis of 1973.⁷⁸ Such a periodisation facilitates an appreciation of the expansion of colonial knowledge, learned in the ‘living laboratory’ of Africa, and its subsequent application to both late-colonial and postcolonial development policy.⁷⁹ In this book, the period is stretched further still. It covers the history of charitable humanitarianism during Britain’s decades of decolonisation from the 1940s through to the 1990s when charity became firmly entrenched in the development mainstream and the mixed economy of overseas welfare. The history of British humanitarianism is inseparable from the broader global history of aid. But its charitable definition, and the long shadow of colonial intervention, provide a particularly national aspect to this story.

A periodisation which begins in the second third of the twentieth century and ends in the final decade highlights a number of themes to be explored in the pages that follow. The fact that it covers the moment from when the Clutton-Brocks first arrived in Southern Africa in 1949 to Guy’s memorialisation in 1995 is not coincidental. These were the decades of development that were shaped by the geo-political considerations of the global Cold War. They began with the participation of charity in the emergency relief effort after World War Two and finished with the post-1989 era of economic globalisation and liberal governance and the associated permanent emergency of humanitarian intervention. Between times, charities became players in overseas aid and development, thereby redefining humanitarianism to include relief over the long-term as well as the immediate. They brought with them a range of hopes and aspirations of how western publics might relate to the imagined recipients of their generosity. As the practices of humanitarianism expanded, the role of the agencies was rarely defined in the decades of development, thereby allowing charity to never reach a potential that knew no ends. The period begins with a domestic charitable sector worried that it would be marginalised by a triumphant welfare state and by a fledgling humanitarian sector responding only to crisis. Fifty years later, both had grown beyond all expectations and both were configured as essential components of a mixed economy of welfare targeted at the perennial and permanent alleviation of poverty, whether at home or overseas.

But the second half of the twentieth century was also shaped by considerations beyond the context of the Cold War. The decades of development were also the extended decades of decolonisation. While the period of formal decolonisation was relatively short, taking place mainly in the late-1950s and 1960s, the period under consideration here was bookended by the introduction of apartheid in the Republic of South Africa in 1948 and its delayed dismantling in 1994.⁸⁰ This was a Southern African context to decolonisation as important to British humanitarianism as the Cold War was to international development. It overshadowed the politics of a generation of African nationalist in Front Line States who rose to prominence from the 1940s but whose Third Worldism had come to its end by the 1990s (notwithstanding Mugabe’s own determination to be the last man standing and stay in power for another two decades).⁸¹ Those who sympathised with their cause in the metropole were the anti-colonial and anti-apartheid liberal internationalists of organisations such as the Africa Bureau and the Movement for Colonial Freedom.⁸² These networks spilled over into fellow travelling humanitarian agencies such as the radical War on Want, as well as influencing the agendas and choice of projects of mainstream agencies such as Oxfam and Christian Aid.

As will be seen, because they were charities, the humanitarians were unable and unwilling to adopt the related language of human rights to tackle the structural inequalities determined by apartheid’s racism. The wording of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 did not inform their publicity materials until the 1990s. By then, the meaning of rights had evolved and, following the ‘right to development’ pronounced in the Vienna Declaration of the World Conference on Human Rights in 1993, all the UK charities adopted the ‘rights-based approach’ to development from 1993. The myth of their aid ‘alternative’ was dropped as they shared in the language of the developmental mainstream. The politics of charity from this decade were expressed from within, rather than beyond, the discursive norms of the international aid system.

The purpose of concentrating on these connected decades of decolonisation and development is not to condemn charity for adopting a modern day ‘missionary position’.⁸³ Several chapters scrutinise the effectiveness of humanitarian aid as practised by the charities in Africa. But they do so in an attempt to be critical rather than cynical. This is better to understand the complex relationships between decolonisation and development and the intricate relationships humanitarian charities created between donors and recipients. As one study of charity in Uganda has shown, ‘doing good’ cannot be reducible to self-interest over altruism or the symbolic violence of the unreciprocated gift.⁸⁴ The charities operated with genuine intent to forge solidarities with the world’s poor. But, likewise, they were never free to operate as independently as they wished or claimed. They found themselves as intertwined with the logics of formal decolonisation and official development as much as they sought to distance themselves from them.

To a great extent this was because of the competing dynamics of decolonisation in modern Britain. Historians now generally agree on the long shadow empire has left on British culture and society to this day.⁸⁵ Yet empire was both remembered and forgotten.⁸⁶ A post-imperial Britain had to find a new international role if it was to avoid accusations of economic and political decline.⁸⁷ Aid and development offered a means of engaging with that wider world. Both official assistance and charitable humanitarianism allowed governments and the public to reimagine their responsibilities and their relationships to those who had once been imperial subjects but who were now independent peoples.

Yet everywhere humanitarianism remained locked into the legacies of empire: in the networks of faith that identified aid projects to fund; in the formal and informal introductions of experts and professionals in the former colonies; in the ongoing ties and commitment the British government had to its former possessions and protectorates; and in the racialised differentiation of donor and recipient in the iconography of suffering sold to the public. Britain emerged from decolonisation a more discrete and stronger nation state, not simply a weakened imperial one. But it was one that relied on global inequalities sustained by financial regimes that had their origin in empire.⁸⁸ And it was one in which the persistence of a form of racial capitalism practised in Southern Africa influenced what charity could do both across the region and back in Britain too.

The affluent society heightened a culture of individualism at home, but it was one that relied on a sense of the ‘collective attributes’ of peoples abroad.⁸⁹ Myths of decolonisation emerged that emphasised the orderly transfer of power. Yet from Malaya to Mau Mau the reality was often brutal and violent. Humanitarianism played into the mythology of well-planned transition. Its approach to empire was neither to deny its past or disown a postcolonial future.⁹⁰ Progressive liberal sentiment was expressed through humanitarianism, critiquing what imperialism had left behind and pointing to a new relationship with the world. But such were the inheritances of institutions, and of ways of seeing and knowing, that they extended yet further the ‘afterlife of empire’.⁹¹ British humanitarianism was a product of an elongated history of decolonisation overshadowed by apartheid in South Africa. For half a century, the issues addressed through humanitarianism remained stubbornly consistent. New problems and agendas appeared around the word – from Chile to Cambodia, from Nicaragua to the Middle East – that re-shaped the international humanitarian order. But the political context of Southern Africa that motivated the Clutton-Brocks’ move to Rhodesia in 1949 was still determining charity’s role in Britain over four decades later.

Messy Methodologies

There are four main overarching explanations that account for the characteristics of British charitable humanitarianism during the decades of decolonisation and development. The first relates to the pluralism of charity’s definition. It has already been observed that the British voluntary sector defied categorisation and scholars have struggled to clarify its multiple logics. But rather than this being the conclusion of the analysis, it is in fact the starting point. For international aid and development charities, operating in a far more complex range of local scenarios and within a broader network of an ill-defined and always contested official development industry, the lack of precision has been even more apparent. In practice there never was a settled model of charitable humanitarianism. It was the indeterminacy of the role and function of charity that lay behind its popularity and growth. As the agencies redirected their efforts from emergency relief to long-term development they entered uncharted terrain. With no concrete notions of what they should be or what they should do (and, indeed, what they should not be and what they should not do) charities have expanded over time and proved so popular because they have been so many things to so many people.

This diversity of views as to their role and function is explored in several of the following chapters. For the donating public, they were a route through which liberal internationalist sympathies and decolonising responsibilities were channelled. For aid workers, they became a new way to realize age-old desires to act constructively and immediately. For late-colonial officials, they were the agents that stepped in where the state retreated, providing vital lessons in self-help for the future leaders of a country. For newly independent governments, they were both suppliers of Western funds and props to impoverished social service departments. For those missionaries and colonial officials who stayed on, they were a means to give something back to the country they had come to love, and a means by which older forms of imperial knowledge, expertise, and belief were re-used. For all these reasons it was the Labour Party, usually the source of some of the harshest critics of charity, that first explored how charity might be mobilised to tackle poverty, both at home and overseas. The Conservative Party likewise eventually came to recognise that charity had a role in domestic and international welfare.

If charity meant so many things to so many people, this was only ever heightened by the immense complexities of delivering both decolonisation and development. A second explanation of charity’s growth arises out of the extraordinary levels of ‘messiness’ scholars have observed. The frequency of the conclusions about complexity and mess are remarkable. In a classic account of the workings of race and empire, the ‘disjunctures’ between imperial prescription and the ‘messier practices’ of everyday lived experience were key to understanding how colonial subjects forged spaces and opportunities for themselves. Colonial constructions of rule were unbound by the ‘unruly’ behaviours of those who refused to conform. The rigid criteria of those who claimed to ‘know the native’ were often only a myth.⁹² As has been argued of the League of Nations Mandates, the ‘system’ of international governance ‘bumped up against the aims, claims and interests of the powers and peoples with which it was involved’.⁹³ Out of such contradictions change occurred and frequently not according to prescription.

The decades of decolonisation were even ‘messier’ still.⁹⁴ The replacement of empire with international government was ‘complicated’.⁹⁵ Decolonisation involved a ‘messy give-and-take process between people with different expectations’.⁹⁶ The path to independence involved ‘a messy, contingent and contested constellation of intersecting and competing processes’.⁹⁷ When the history of aid and development is added to the analysis then further complexity is found. Technological initiatives had ‘unpredictable and muddied’ outcomes, there were ‘messy, multifarious and fissured workings of power’ and there existed a multitude of ‘locally specific configurations’.⁹⁸ Where grassroots charitable projects were involved an even ‘messier process’ was said to be at work.⁹⁹ As a more recent assessment of a development scheme concluded, ‘Africa is chaotic and messy and unpredictable’.¹⁰⁰ The history of NGOs in general has been one of ‘stumbling, fumbling, fudging and nudging’.¹⁰¹ The phrase can be applied equally to many of the charitable projects that form the case studies of aid on the ground in Chapters 5–8. Examined in detail, all aid interventions are ultimately messy and unique.

Amidst such complexity it was difficult to argue what actually worked. That was true, but the opposite was also the case. What did not work was also little understood. It meant that failure could just as easily be denied or explained away as much as success could be proclaimed. In the absence of objective forms of assessment of development projects the ‘Oxfam bias’ stepped in, as one aid assessor termed it. That is, all those with an immediate stake in the success of any one intervention – or even an optimistic hope for the general mission of humanitarianism – could argue that through lessons learned, better knowledge obtained, further amendments made and adaptations implemented, the next aid project was sure to succeed. Something of value was always retrievable from the messiness of the past.

Repackaged, revised and recast, charitable humanitarianism was then sold once more to both donating publics and the official aid agencies. Failure did not stand in the way of growth or expansion. In ‘cultivating development’, what remained key for the agencies, was ‘the control over the interpretation of events’.¹⁰² Success was ‘measured in many different ways’.¹⁰³ The sector demonstrated an extraordinary capacity to ‘absorb criticism, not reform itself and yet emerge strengthened’.¹⁰⁴ Charities even turned ambiguity into a virtue, attracting praise for their willingness to ‘finance small “messy” projects, unpopular with other donors’.¹⁰⁵ Benevolence worked because of its ‘conceptual elasticity’.¹⁰⁶

Amidst such messiness a methodology emerges. If so many were able to project onto charity’s indeterminacy their own agendas and aspirations then it follows that charity’s history must be examined from all of their perspectives. A third shaping force was the deliberate choices made by various actors, from powerful institutions to individual givers. What charity became by the end of the twentieth century was the multi-causal product of many agents’ interventions. The international agencies, governments, politicians and publics (that is, everyone who ever made a donation) that, on the one hand, embraced charity’s growth, also, on the other, attempted to define what it should do. Many welcomed charity’s role in the delivery of services, but they also discouraged the extension of its remit into the public sphere of advocacy, campaigning and political influence.

This takes the analysis towards organised interests and away from a dominant, interpretative paradigm that has treated development as a discursive form of governance. Rather than pinpointing the power of any one person, institution or interest behind any particular development initiative, scholars of development have focussed instead on examining how all were locked into a discourse of development. The messiness of aid prevented the reasons for its success or failure to be determined. The explanation therefore shifted from the intentions of agents and on to the logics of development that resulted in development’s continued existence. The real effects of aid were less on the supposed recipient beneficiaries and more on the normalisation of categories such as poverty, hunger and the economy that ensured development must necessarily continue, now sufficiently depoliticised so all agents remained legitimate players in the game.¹⁰⁷

Yet while this might explain the overall expansion of the development industry, as both discourse and practice, it overlooks the very real structures of power that contained charity’s role and function. Aid was a ‘politics machine’ with gears and levers pulled by agents with interests.¹⁰⁸ Some of these were highly organized and were variously successful in delivering on their intentions. The most important of all were the official aid agencies which welcomed charity into the development fold from the 1960s, pumping millions of pounds into grassroots development that assisted hard-to-reach, rural communities that large-scale projects too often bypassed or ignored.

But others disliked the critical campaigning of charity that increasingly accompanied this work. When the World Bank announced its commitment to meeting the ‘basic needs’ of the world’s poorest in the 1970s, it seemed the perfect confluence of the agendas of both international government and charitable humanitarianism. It further acknowledged the demands of the New International Economic Order, that collection of proposals put to the United Nations by the ‘non-aligned’ movement of countries of the global South. They aimed to reform international trade and economic relations to put the South on a more equal footing with the North. But the ‘real’ new international economic order that eventually won out was marked not by the correction of structural injustice but by the enforcement of structural adjustment.¹⁰⁹

If charities believed they offered an alternative, their vision was pushed to one side. Instead, the hegemony of corporate and United States interests were promoted through the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT) and the ‘strings attached’ development assistance programs of the International Monetary Fund (IMF).¹¹⁰ As economies were reformed in the interests of global finance, the role of charity was often left, in a subtle difference from the role it undertook in partnership with the state in the Victorian poor law, to cater to the most destitute. The voice of the charities rarely dominated the corridors of power. Collective basic needs and arguments for society-wide economic equality were overshadowed by an emphasis on a more individualised notion of basic ‘rights’. Global civil society, which had gradually expanded in fora such as the UN’s Economic and Social Council, was increasingly sidelined by the more influential IMF, GATT and eventually the World Trade Organisation.¹¹¹

Domestically, too, the voice of charity was channelled and constrained. Charity found its advocates across all political parties, especially among those Labour MPs who travelled to Front Line States to witness for themselves the types of aid project run by the Clutton-Brocks and others. The Labour Government’s Ministry of Overseas Development resourced the Joint Funding Scheme for the humanitarian charities from 1975. But such formal relationships often came with further strings attached. Charitable humanitarianism also raised the suspicions of an increasing number of freedom-loving, pro-market, anti-communist, neoconservative pressure groups that found natural allies on the backbenches of the Conservative Party. Through the lobbying of the Charity Commissioners, the regulators of the sector, any public campaigns and interventions by the charities were consistently policed. Politics, it was insisted, lay beyond the charitable remit, a point frequently reinforced by the Commissioners. Oxfam, War on Want and Christian Aid found themselves the primary targets of a sustained attack on charity’s campaigning role. The investigations into their activities in the late-1980s and early-1990s had a profound impact on the charitable sector as a whole. It came precisely at the moment when both domestic and overseas charities became the recipients of massive injections of cash to assist in the retreating frontier of the welfare state.

Charities themselves made active choices about where and how they worked. The sector was by no means united. At one end of the political spectrum were organisations such as War on Want with its ties to the Labour Party and the Prime Minister, Harold Wilson. At the other end was Save the Children with its affinities to aristocrats who owed their status to empire. At all times, the charities had to bear in mind the preferences of their donating publics and the power of the purse. The millions of individually tiny, but collectively influential, routine donations served as approvals and choices for certain types of charitable intervention. Emergencies were more popular than development, the relief of suffering more so than the encouragement of comfort. Projects were packaged as neatly contained, controllable interventions, divorced from the messy realities of conflicts and contexts. In so doing, the public chose and encouraged a type of humanitarianism that held in check many of the political ambitions of the agency staff. The agency of a penny from a pay packet, alongside the actions of global institutions, national governments, host societies and charity staff, also helped shape the logic of charitable humanitarianism.

Finally, the one factor that underpinned so much of this post-war history was the politics of race. Racial injustice remained an ever-present causal presence. The racial capitalism practised in apartheid South Africa impoverished communities well beyond its borders and the effects of its politics were felt all over the world. It shaped not only humanitarianism overseas, but also the domestic governance of charity in Britain. It was liberal internationalist concerns about the influence of the Republic across Southern Africa as a whole that inspired many of the first generation of aid workers and many of the initial aid interventions. The charities were eager to offer practical support to South Africa’s neighbours in the ill-fated Central African Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland (later, Zimbabwe, Zambia and Malawi). Likewise, the fate of the High Commission Territories of Bechuanaland, Basutoland and Swaziland (Botswana, Lesotho, Eswatini) were at the forefront of the UN’s Special Committee on Decolonization which encouraged so much of the work of the first Development Decade in the 1960s. It determined also the initial development activities of the charities. Oxfam especially became a long-term aid agency primarily through its commitments to Southern and Central Africa.

Tackling the causes rather than the consequences of poverty motivated many staff in the sector. As the charities took on more radical agendas, however, they feared the watchful eyes of the regulators at the Charity Commission. Even by the 1980s, this body was still insisting that human rights, and their deliberate denial to entire cohorts of the population, were a political issue. The charities worried too about the complicated attitudes to race held by their donating publics, often attracted to the cause through questionable images of suffering. As a result, they shied away from tackling racial injustice head on.

In the 1970s, the larger charities such as Oxfam aligned themselves politically with the liberation theology emanating from Latin America. Its focus on the very poorest in society resonated with the agenda of the New International Economic Order. What the charities did not do was associate themselves with the Programme to Combat Racism of the World Council of Churches. This was launched in 1969 in direct opposition to apartheid in South Africa and other racist policies across the region. Although the Programme enjoyed the respectable backing of the world ecumenical movement, even Christian Aid felt the need to distance itself from the global body. It knew the Programme brought it more directly into confrontation with South Africa and sympathisers in organisations such as the Conservative Party’s Monday Club, the body which had originally been formed by Parliamentary backbenchers to lobby for the ‘kith and kin’ of white Rhodesia. Indeed, it was the South African-backed International Freedom Foundation which led the most successful charge against the campaigning role of charities towards the end of apartheid.

These decisions not to confront racism as publicly as they would have liked had important consequences for how race was discussed in Britain. There are, of course, two principal mechanisms for dealing with poverty overseas. One involves assistance to those who remain at the sites of their suffering. The other is migration. But the humanitarian charities, just like many in the anti-apartheid movement, were unable to, or either chose not to, articulate a politics of race that connected poverty at home and poverty abroad. Neither did they cooperate with the burgeoning voluntary sector that guided immigrants through the intricacies of Britain’s social services, even when the WCC invited them to do so.¹¹² Some historians have suggested there was a connecting thread between decolonisation, development, race and the alleviation of poverty at the metropole and the periphery. Popular welfare states were unaffordable if their provisions were extended to all subjects of empire.¹¹³ Decolonisation was accompanied by redefinitions of citizenship that not only restricted immigration but ensured the benefits of social democracy did not extend beyond post-imperial, greater Britain’s shrinking borders.¹¹⁴ If race is ‘the prism’ through which to understand modern Britain, then the silences of the humanitarian sector were just as significant as the causes it did choose to campaign on.¹¹⁵

What emerged from all four of these drivers of change was a charitable sector at the turn of the millennium with a newly defined remit and a vastly expanded role. In the 1990s, the humanitarian agencies entered the mainstream of global development just as their domestic counterparts were welcomed into the delivery of social services to alleviate poverty at home. Charity and the voluntary sector no longer operated at the vanguard of either statutory social services in the UK or official aid and development overseas. Instead, they operated as key players within the mixed economy of welfare of both. Humanitarianism’s perceived successes illuminated the opportunities for charity to play in the domestic welfare state. The sector as a whole massively expanded, the opportunities to ‘do good’ increased exponentially, and, for all the intermittent scandals trumpeted by an occasionally ill-disposed media, the charitable ‘gift’ continued to reach millions.

Charitable humanitarianism helps to explain how ‘decolonising’ Britain became ‘neoliberal’ Britain. When the charities emerged and then shifted their focus from emergency relief to long term development they did so at a time when Britain’s economy and society was marked by social democracy and its relations with the world were heavily influenced by its retreat from empire. By the end of the period covered in this volume, the frontiers of that welfare state had been pushed back and Britain’s relationship with the world was strongly shaped instead by a globalised market liberalism its government had done much to promote.¹¹⁶

Whether in the 1940s or the 1990s, Britain’s economy, society and politics were the product of what was happening both within and beyond its borders. The unravelling of the social democratic settlement was ‘the consequences of many determinations’ rather than a single overarching cause, leaving legacies and contingencies within which a role for charity was envisioned.¹¹⁷ But none of this was inevitable and the sector was welcomed, promoted, buffeted, rocked and restrained by a range of actors. They included the institutions of global governance as well as the attendees of a charity jumble sale. It was a politics that stretched across the Atlantic and below the Sahel. Ultimately, charity came to occupy – or re-occupy since it never truly went away – the ‘common sense’ position it had held in Victorian Britain. Such an outcome suggests the persistence and adaptability of charity to ‘the long life of market culture’.¹¹⁸ It emphasises too that the ‘moral world’ of humanitarianism was crucial to how Britain found ever new roles for itself across the globe and how the political economy of charity at home was also determined by that which was practised abroad.¹¹⁹

From the perspective of the humanitarians, they knew that in this reconfigured logic of charity, the problems associated with a previous ‘golden age of philanthropy’ remained or else re-emerged. Huge inequalities persisted in the gift relationship and donations were not disbursed and received on an equal footing. For all that they wished to address the inequities that structured the experience and reach of poverty, they knew too that their abilities to do so were limited: by the donations they received; by the funds they administered; by the rules that governed them; and by the restrictions promoted by other, more powerful, bodies. The role of charity in modern Britain appeared as prominent as it was during the late-Victorian period. But the charitable embrace a century later was not only cordial and welcoming. It was also restrictive and tight. The gift might have been generous but the caveats and constraints remained ever in place.

Organisation of the Book

The history of Charity After Empire covers what have become vast organisations with long histories and extensive archives. Although their incomes and disbursements were dwarfed by the hundreds of millions of pounds of official British aid – and, indeed, the hundreds of billions of dollars of multilateral aid associated with the institutions of international government – their significance reaches beyond such quantitative indicators. As Oxfam’s Council of Management, in a not untypical moment of self-confidence, told itself in 1971: ‘when the world history of the twentieth-century comes to be written it will reveal that Oxfam has played a leading part in the field of development and overseas aid’.¹²⁰

There is some truth to the Council’s claim. Where this book agrees with it is that it cannot be proven by quantitative over qualitative assessments. It means that what follows is not the sort of institutional history that many might argue is needed. Nor is it a detailed account of all the main charities, their dealings with the official agencies and their workings on the ground all over the world. Were a former employee or volunteer from one of the charities to read this book, they would be shocked at the absence of many of what the charities themselves considered the most important programmes, policies and projects. They will be puzzled too by the focus on Africa at the expense of other regions of the world. The intention here is not to downplay the vital role that operations in Latin America and Asia played in the history of international aid and development. But the British version of this history presented here requires greater attention to Africa. The connections between charity at home and charity overseas are better elaborated through a focus on Southern Africa because of the consequences for the history of all charities in Britain.

Charity After Empire is arranged thematically, rather than chronologically or organisationally. It concentrates on specific issues and select examples to draw out the arguments highlighted above. Only partial aspects of each organisation’s history are brought into the narrative to illuminate the ongoing interconnections between humanitarian charity, British decolonisation and development in Africa. It also means that some themes get more attention than others. Gender, for instance, is crucial to grassroots development, as the charities themselves knew. It helps explain how funds were raised, administered, disbursed and to whom, as well as how effective aid was. But here race is also foregrounded. It is race that draws out the linkages between charity overseas and charity at home. Likewise, while the religious background of many charities is usually acknowledged, the history of humanitarianism is largely written in secular terms. In this book, faith appears throughout. It is recognised as a motivating factor for donors, for aid workers and for recipients of the charitable gift. But it is also a political force too, not least through the Protestant – if not always Anglican – churches’ willingness to confront the racism that persisted in Southern Africa.

The themes of the chapters are addressed by zooming in on the lives of some often complex and charismatic individuals. What all these characters shared was an ability to write with a certain style or to express an opinion with an acute clarity or idiosyncratic perspective. It means Charity After Empire relies as much on personal papers, autobiographies, unpublished memoirs, private correspondence and personal testimony, as it does on the comprehensive institutional records of Save the Children, Christian Aid, Oxfam and War on Want. Their stories are followed through the national archives of not only the UK, but also Botswana, Zimbabwe and Kenya. And an array of smaller archives and printed ephemera are drawn on to emphasise the importance of human experience, action and decision-making in an ever-expanding anonymous bureaucracy of aid and development. On occasion, novels and novelists enter the narrative too. Tsitsi Dangarembga, Bessie Head and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o are all drawn on for their incisive commentary on, respectively, Zimbabwe, Botswana and Kenya. But the latter two have walk-on parts in the actual history as well.

The individuals who appear in the following pages, and especially those engaged in aid work on the ground, might come across as unique and atypical. But they are not exceptions from what, in any case, is a non-existent humanitarian norm. They have been selected because they were pioneers and archetypes, exemplars and embodiments, of different types of humanitarian action. Some were often dissenting voices that cast light on wider attitudes. Some were pawns in a game played by more powerful forces. And others still were significant protagonists in their own right. Their life stories permeate every chapter, on many occasions intersecting, and collectively emphasising the agency and interests of individuals and institutions in bringing about the modern mixed economy of welfare at home and overseas. Whenever they do appear exceptional, it is the contention of this book that were any other, seemingly typical, aid project selected too for detailed analysis, then the complexities of its objectives and outcomes, the messy realities of its practices and purposes, and the peculiarities of its principal personalities, would be rendered exceptional too.

The book is divided into three sections. The first four chapters focus on the rise of charitable humanitarianism in the decades through to the late-1970s. Chapter 1 examines the continuation of colonial attitudes and practices and the transformation of mission into the modern NGO. The competing and contrasting imperial legacies are embodied through the case studies of Lieutenant-Commander A. R. Y. Irvine Neave, a former naval officer working for Save the Children, and Guy and Molly Clutton-Brock, initially based in Southern Rhodesia and associated with Rev Michael Collins’ Africa Bureau. Neave saw poverty as the consequence of individual ignorance. The Clutton-Brocks’ came to recognise it as one of racial injustice. They represent two ends of a spectrum of attitudes to development during decolonisation between which the fledgling charitable humanitarian sector soon positioned itself.

Chapter 2 examines the welcoming embrace of charity into the official development industry at the end of empire and from the start of the UN’s first Development Decade, particularly through the Freedom from Hunger Campaign. The transfer of technocratic expertise was epitomised by Tristram ‘Jimmy’ Betts, a former colonial civil servant in Nigeria, Fabian socialist, friend of Tanzania’s Julius Nyerere and brother of the Labour MP and first Overseas Development Minister, Barbara Castle. His career and the projects he supported demonstrate that opposition to apartheid motivated many in the sector. But it also shows that from the very moment charity reoriented its efforts away from emergency relief to long-term aid, it was very much a part of the official development industry.

Chapter 3 shifts the focus from individuals to the collective actions of the mass donating public. It turns to public attitudes to charity, the techniques used to create a market of giving and the iconography of suffering in decolonising Britain. For all the accusations against the ‘bourgeois morality’ of humanitarianism, donations were as likely to come from the generous workers on the factory floor as they were from the cheques sent in from suburbia. Why people gave was personal and varied. Some wanted to express radical commitments to the anti-colonial cause. Others felt the ongoing responsibilities of imperial trusteeship and the need to maintain British prestige in the world. For many others, though, routinised giving demonstrated a superficial engagement with Britain’s role in a decolonising world, allowing for the alternate instances of the remembering and forgetting of empire.

Chapter 4 examines the political Left in Britain, traditionally the most sceptical towards charity. How it accommodated itself to the humanitarian sector as a partner in development is told through the political and intellectual journey of the Labour Minister, Judith Hart. She shifted from being an opponent to an advocate of humanitarian aid. She represented a broader shift in socialist attitudes to charity. It paved the way for a rethinking of the relationship between statutory and voluntary services, setting precedents for a mixed economy of welfare as relevant to charities working domestically as to those overseas.

In making a case for humanitarian charity’s legitimation of the voluntary sector more generally, it follows that politicians, policy makers and the public had to have some sense of its actual effectiveness on the ground. The second section of the book shifts the analysis from Britain to Africa and delves into the messy practices of development. It begins in Chapter 5 with a study of the first charity Aid Appraiser, Oxfam’s Bernard Llewellyn, a former conscientious objector and emergency relief worker in China and Asia. His dour pronouncements against many types of project across Southern, Central and East Africa stood in sharp contrast to the optimistic stories of success sold to the public. What he concluded in answer to his question, ‘does aid work?’ was that the results were mixed. There was no magic formula to successful development or any clear indicator of the conditions and contexts necessary for the replication of any one grassroots project. What is remarkable about his reports are the more generalised explanations as to why projects failed. The reasons he identified at the end of the 1960s would be repeated again and again in assessments of aid undertaken in every subsequent decade.

Measuring the success or failure of aid depends on the questions being asked. The next three chapters focus on case studies that exemplify three important questions in the history of humanitarianism: what happens when aid is directed politically at the underlying causes of poverty? Who is aid for? And, if charity is a means to an end, what, exactly, is the end imagined to be? Chapter 6 traces the Clutton-Brocks’ experiments in inter-racial cooperation across Southern and Central Africa. They included working with Tshekedi and then Seretse Khama in Bechuanaland, with Didymus Mutasa in Southern Rhodesia (the future leader of the Zimbabwean Parliament) and with Julius Nyerere in Tanzania. While aid was generally presented to the public as beyond politics, the Clutton-Brocks’ initiatives placed politics centre stage. Their cooperatives confronted racial injustice and brought Clutton-Brock, Mutasa and many of their supporters into conflict with the white settler government of the Rhodesian Front. Forced closures, arrests and deportation cannot be regarded as success in terms of the practicalities of development. But they nurtured a generation of nationalists who went on to fight the structural causes of poverty by other means.

The work of the South African anti-apartheid activist, Patrick van Rensburg, and his wife Liz, is pursued in Chapter 7. The question as to whom aid is for is explored through his advocacy of, and experiments with, ‘education with production’ at Swaneng Hill School and then with the Serowe Brigades in Botswana. Both inspired legions of western volunteers and attracted the attention of the international NGO community. But while many individual pupils and trainees undoubtedly benefitted and found a route out of their own poverty, the host government interpreted success by other criteria and pursued a different path to national development. Amidst the competing agendas of governments, charities, aid workers and volunteers, the interests of the supposed beneficiaries of development were often lost or forgotten.

Finally, a case study of Starehe school in Nairobi in Chapter 8 asks a question about the ultimate goal of charitable humanitarianism. According to the often stated aim of the domestic British voluntary services, it was to pioneer new initiatives at the frontier of welfare that the state might subsequently take over. Overseas, this was likewise the intention of many a school, a supplementary feeding scheme, a training programme, a clinic or a maternal health centre. But as charities pitched themselves as the alternative, their projects were also sold as triggers for self-reliant, self-sustaining, community development. In the case of Starehe, though, the ends of charitable intervention was charity itself. The school’s, Geoffrey Griffin, was a former British officer during Mau Mau. He had a particular genius at navigating his way through the competing agendas and demands of various charities, international donors, global celebrities, the late-colonial state and the postcolonial government. The ‘donor darling’ he established eventually became its own charity and continues to thrive to this day. It suggests the real logic of charity might not be the other forms of provision it inspires, but the permanence it creates for its own perpetual presence.

The final section explains how charity was contained and restrained. The narrative switches back to Britain. Chapter 9 examines the radicalisation of the humanitarian sector in the 1970s. Oxfam staff such as the Africa Field Director, Michael Behr, found an outlet for their reformist solidarities in the Latin American conscientisation movement associated with liberation theology. However, this diverted political campaigning away from the questions of racial injustice that impeded their work on the ground across Southern Africa. With one eye on the regulator and the other on their supporters, the charities only tentatively tackled a topic regarded as too political. Self-censorship, as much as external pressure, delayed the humanitarians from speaking out both against apartheid in South Africa and against racism in Britain.

While Chapter 4 looks to the political Left, Chapter 10 focusses on the political Right. The Conservative governments of the 1980s, especially after the phenomenon of Live Aid in 1985, identified in charity an opportunity to fill the gap left by a retreating state. But the Right’s more radical voices, notably two of Margaret Thatcher’s ‘boot boys’, Andrew Hubback and Marc Gordon, also led an attack on charities, particularly their campaigning voice. The South African funds channelled through Hubback and Gordon’s International Freedom Foundation testify to the sometimes greater neoconservative influence of Johannesburg, rather than that of Washington or London, on the regulation of charity in the UK. The consequences for charities were apparent at the time. Just as government funds poured into the sector to expand the role of the voluntary sector in the delivery of social services, restraints were placed on its advocacy role. Decolonisation and apartheid continued to influence British domestic politics into the 1990s.

The limits placed on charitable humanitarianism were not necessarily out of line with public opinion, explored again for a later period in Chapter 11. The celebrities, such as Lenny Henry, behind the fundraising telethon, Comic Relief, raised truly mass, regular giving to new heights, providing a voluntary-funded base and legitimation for charity’s enormous growth from the mid-1980s. The dynamic of Live Aid exacerbated what the charities had recognised for a long time: that disaster rather than development, starvation rather than success, was better in persuading the public to put their hands in their pockets. The logic of Comic Relief was to bring short and long-term assistance together. The regularity of what eventually became an annual fundraising event made disaster itself a permanent feature of the humanitarian calendar. It also helped charity obtain a popularity that had not been apparent in the earlier years of the post-Second World War expansion of the welfare state.

The ending of the Cold War in 1989 ushered in a new era of global governance in which human rights acted as the rationale for both military and humanitarian intervention. The amounts of official funds channelled through the charities expanded enormously during the 1990s, solidifying their presence within the development mainstream. A final, concluding chapter, argues that when all the British charities embraced a ‘rights-based’ approach to development in 1993, this was a move in line with what both governments and the majority of the donating public wanted: a more politically palatable notion of humanitarian charity that made ‘doing good’ an ever-present fixture in modern Britain. As in the nineteenth century, this was a logic of charity which also did not unsettle the structures which ultimately determined who was either the donor or the recipient of the charitable gift. Crucial to this process too was the ending of apartheid in 1994. It removed the most overt manifestation of racialised structural injustice which, for the last half century, had influenced the role, function and remit of charitable humanitarianism. The humanitarianism that therefore emerged ‘after empire’ was the product of several decades of decolonisation and development. But the agents which shaped this history – governments, international organisations, charities themselves and their recipients, plus the donating public – produced a mixed economy of welfare in which all accepted the greater prominence given to charity from the 1990s.

The centrality of human rights to this new international humanitarian order meant Robert Mugabe made the news in 1990s Britain for very different reasons than he had in the 1970s. When he visited Britain again in 1999 the campaigner, Peter Tatchell, attempted a citizen’s arrest on him for his violation of human rights. Mugabe had murdered his own people (the Gukurahundi) and had criminalised homosexuality on the grounds that it was an un-African, European import. This was the Mugabe who, later assisted by Didymus Mutasa in his role as Minister of State for National Security, Lands, Land Reform and Resettlement, violently targeted the land ownership of the white settler minority. It was not the Mugabe or Mutasa of a previous generation who had looked to the multi-racial experiments of the Clutton-Brocks as the future for an independent Africa. When he honoured Guy Clutton-Brock in 1995 it was possibly the last time Mugabe remembered the moderate nationalist politics that flourished in Rhodesia prior to the armed struggle of the 1970s. This was a historical moment when humanitarian charity worked as an ally of African nationalism and which had very much come to an end by the 1990s. It was replaced instead with a humanitarianism in which charities were more likely to be the partners of the institutions of international rather than independent government. How they arrived at such a place, however, was due to the half century of entanglements between humanitarianism, development and decolonisation that shaped the meaning of charity both across Africa and within Britain.