The Commonwealth, ‘development’ and post-colonial responsibility Marcus Power Department of Geography, University of Durham, Science Site, South Road, Durham DH1 3LE, United Kingdom article info Article history: Received 30 March 2007 Received in revised form 29 April 2008 Keywords: Mozambique Commonwealth Development Partnership Post-colonial Responsibility abstract One important (though often neglected) part of the ‘development business’ committed to principles of partnership is the Commonwealth, a voluntary association of 54 independent countries, almost all of which were formerly under British rule. This paper focuses on the Commonwealth’s contemporary sense of ‘responsibility’ for shaping African development through ‘partnership’ and by promoting ‘good gover- nance’ and examines the particular example of Mozambique, which joined the Commonwealth in 1995. In exploring exactly what membership of this post-colonial ‘family’ has meant for Mozambique the paper explores the neocolonial paternalism and sense of trusteeship that the Commonwealth has articulated in its often very apolitical vision of African development which seems to lock the continent into a perma- nent stage of tutelage and to repetitively reduce Africa to a set of core deficiencies for which externally generated ‘solutions’ must be devised. More generally, the paper also examines the wider context of the Commonwealth’s involvement in Africa by looking at the connections it has made to British industry, British charities and the British Department for International Development (DFID). The paper concludes with an assessment of the ‘showcase’ potential of Mozambique and its importance to Commonwealth and DFID narrations of an African ‘success’ story of peace, stability and growth since the end of the coun- try’s devastating civil war in 1992. Ó 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction: morality, responsibility and Britain’s Africa policy ‘‘The vanished empire is essentially unmourned. The mean- ing of its loss remains pending. The chronic, nagging pain of its absence feeds a melancholic attachment. This is...to a resolutely air-brushed version of colonial history in which gunboat diplomacy was moral uplift, civilising missions were completed, the trains ran on time and the natives appreciated the value of stability. These dream worlds are revisited compulsively. They saturate the cultural landscape of contemporary Britain. The distinctive mix of revisionist history and moral superiority offers pleasures and distrac- tions that defer...”(Gilroy, 2005, p. 1). When he took up office in mid-1997 few could have anticipated that former British Prime Minister Tony Blair would become more heavily involved in African politics than any British leader since decolonisation with an ‘‘almost missionary zeal to change the UK and the world” (Porteous, 2005, p. 286). Outlining Britain’s ambi- tions for moral leadership on the international stage Blair claimed that the new Labour government would make Britain a ‘‘model”, a ‘‘beacon to the world”. Following the military intervention in Sierra Leone in 2000 authorised by Blair, ‘Africa’ became an explicit prior- ity for New Labour’s much-trumpeted ‘ethical’ foreign policy that sought a sharper focus on issues like governance and human rights. For Blair the state of Africa was ‘‘a scar on the conscience of the world”, a scar that would become ‘‘angrier and deeper” if suppos- edly ‘responsible’ western leaders did not intervene to ‘heal’ it (Blair, 2001). Africa was thus positioned as a moral imperative whilst Blair claimed that Britain would seek to work in ‘partnership’ with African states and regional organisations to ensure that there was African ‘ownership’ of reform and development processes. Key to this notion of Britain as a ‘beacon’ or ‘model’ was the cre- ation of the Department of International Development (DFID) in 1997 (Power, 2000). Independent of the Foreign and Common- wealth Office (FCO) and under the stewardship of Clare Short MP, ‘Africa’ became the top policy priority for the new Ministry. In a multi-faceted shift then in the UK government’s vocabulary around poverty, DFID policies were increasingly cloaked in a lan- guage of morality, ethics and responsibility with Short defining DFID’s approach as constituting a ‘‘new humanitarianism”, where every Briton recognised the ‘‘moral responsibility to help the poor” and where DFID would dispense ‘‘principled aid”. Thus, the labour government, vis-à-vis the discourse of development, set about nar- rating itself as leading a metropolitan nation that is ‘civil’, devel- oped, modern and morally ‘advanced’ but in ways that exhibit 0016-7185/$ - see front matter Ó 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.geoforum.2008.04.008 E-mail address: Marcus.power@dur.ac.uk Geoforum 40 (2009) 14–24 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Geoforum journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/geoforum