Corporate Social Responsibility In Postcolonial Africa: Another Civilizing Mission?

Abstract

The civilizing mission during colonial rule consisted of humanizing indigenous people, redeeming them from backwardness. Projects such as school and hospital construction, that were intended to improve living standards, contributed to the implementation of this Western mandate. There is a fair amount of evidence that such a colonial mandate has survived in the postcolonial era, as its rationale still shapes some of the CSR trends in contemporary Africa. This colonial legacy reinforces the continuity thesis in the assessment of foreign-led development issues. However, a case study in the Ghanaian mining sector reveals that there has also been a break with this colonial pattern. In a changing context, actors frame a local norm much attuned to their concerns, and negotiate the corporate narrative and practices. Such negotiation was not possible under the colonial regime of forced labour. Nonetheless, the change that would really matter and would ensure social justice for all has to take place beyond this opposition between conflicting interest groups, in which workers are pitted against the local community. Taking into account the status of the marginalized, who are not always the local community but dispossessed workers, the article suggests that the postcolonial principle of otherness should be supplemented by the principle of difference, whereby preference is given to the least favoured in the discussion of the role of business in postcolonial societies.

Keywords:

• CSR
• postcolonialism
• civilizing mission
• development
• Ghana

Acknowledgements

The research for this article was financed by grants from the International Development Research Centre (IDRC, Canada) and the Inter-University Research Centre on Globalization and Work (CRIMT, Canada). I thank Christian Levesque and anonymous reviewers for their comments on earlier version of this article.