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Solidarity is in; justice is out?
The UK’s Minister for International Development and Africa, Kirsty McNeill, recently declared that “the era of development is over and the era of mutual interest and shared resilience is upon us”. In her telling, international development has been justified as justice, not charity, but that narrative in now outdated. “The old story – of a rich world colluding to exploit and extract from the poor world – is still a story of ‘us’ (the subject) doing something to ‘them’ (the object),” she says. “If this narrative held together 20 or 30 years ago, it cannot keep up with where the world is now”, where 50 countries have “graduated from aid" and “power is more widely distributed”. Instead, she proposes a narrative of solidarity and cooperation – “neither charity offered nor justice owed” – but rather “a common solution to problems in our common life”.
However, McNeill is attempting to appropriate the language of solidarity to escape the requirements of justice. Climate change may impact both Ethiopia and the UK, but that does not say anything about who is culpable. Countries in the Global South may have grown and gained power, but that is despite the international order, not because former colonial powers settled their accounts. McNeill herself lists what the justice movement fought: poor countries paying more in debt than they received in aid, patent laws that kept medicines from the dying, and trade rules rigged against African producers. She describes these in the past tense, then promises “a new deal on debt”, conceding that the problem is still live.
Acknowledgment of “mutual interest” and “shared resilience” does not erase responsibility for past harms nor should it paper over their legacy. Caribbean governments, for example, are intensifying demands for reparations for slavery and colonialism: demands that Britain continues to reject. And just because some African nations want what McNeill calls a “business-like” conversation, it doesn’t mean they’ve automatically waived their claims.
The timing, as the UK is cutting aid from 0.5% to 0.3% of national income to fund higher defence spending (even as McNeill talks of restoring 0.7%), shows that the language is being repurposed to suit British interests. McNeill says her speech was about “what we owe the stranger because they are human too”. But human beings are also owed justice, and a solidarity that attempts to replace it with either charity or mutual concern is no solidarity at all.
In the Spotlight
What is sub-Saharan Africa?
When Moroccan police broke up an attempt by hundreds of people to cross into the Spanish enclave of Ceuta. El País repeatedly described those impacted as “sub-Saharan”. The BBC, citing Moroccan security sources, reported that most of those detained were “from sub-Saharan Africa”. How was that established? Partly, it came from Moroccan security sources. But El País also applies the label to a group huddled in a hollow, and to “hundreds of sub-Saharan migrants” tracked by a police helicopter in the hills. But nobody checks passports from a helicopter. Notice, too, who doesn’t get the label. Two weeks earlier, nearly 80,000 people swam into Ceuta, and most have since gone back to Morocco. Neither report calls them sub-Saharan or attempts to decipher their origins; they are simply migrants. As geography, the term makes little sense. Morocco is in Africa and has Black citizens of its own, and the Sahara runs through Mauritania, Mali, Niger, Chad and Sudan. The label only works as a polite code for race.
A racialised practice is observed through a racialised lens, then presented as a geographical distinction. I am often asked: “What should we say instead? What’s the right term for these countries?” The better question is: “What exactly am I trying to say?“ If the migrants’ nationalities are known, name them. If they aren’t known, say so. If what matters is that police picked people out by race, report that. Countries can be grouped in all manner of sets for all manner of reasons, and asking why you want these particular people in this particular set forces precision. Decolonisation is not about maintaining an ever-expanding list of forbidden words. It is about questioning the frameworks we use to describe the world, and being deliberate about how we use our words.
Who needs to be told that rape is a crime?
In August, the Home Office published a booklet explaining UK law on consent, harassment, and domestic abuse, and addressed it to asylum seekers. The BBC’s headline read: “Asylum seekers told rape and harassment illegal in UK”. Every word is accurate. But the headline only works as news because of what it leaves the reader to fill in. Nobody would run: “Britons told rape is illegal”. The story lies in the implication that asylum seekers are unaware that rape and sexual harassment are bad. But is there any data showing asylum seekers commit these offences at higher rates than anyone else? The rest of the coverage followed the same framing. Reports cast it as a political row: the government defending the booklet as clarifying the law, and the opposition saying such men should be deported rather than taught to behave “in a civilised way towards women”. The two sides disagreed only about what to do with the suspicion. They agreed on the suspicion itself, and so the reporting presented a debate in which no one challenged the premise. The challenge came later, from outside that frame. Women’s organisations, including Southall Black Sisters and Women for Refugee Women, warned that the guide would fuel “harmful myths” about gendered violence, and that women seeking asylum often lack basic information about where to get help.
