In his seminal text, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, Walter Rodney's economic and political analysis reveals that the colonial project cannot simply be named as “underdevelopment,” but intentional overexploitation and extraction. The colonial project is all-encompassing, relying on brutality and violence as well as the domination of ideology. As Rodney points out, “The most striking feature is undoubtedly the rise of racism as a widespread and deeply rooted element in European thought.” 

With this in mind, we cannot arrive at the current world with a perspective of accident or battles of moral good versus evil. Rather, we benefit from an antagonistic and complex understanding that white supremacy and, specifically, anti-Blackness dominate much of our landscapes, systems, industries, nation-states and their interests. These frameworks inform notions of freedom, democracy, and justice. As Christina Sharpe asserts, we are in the wake of the horrors and transformation of slavery and colonialism. These sentiments are particularly useful when we examine industries that are positioned as “do-good-ers” or attempting to “aid” problems instated by structural violence. In other words, non-governmental organisations—NGOs. 

NGOs have a complex relationship with the continent of Africa. Some NGOs function in a more community-based way, where those who manage and work in the organisation are directly impacted or familiar with the issue being addressed. Some NGOs function as development initiatives to aid their former colonies, while others resemble a more homegrown neoliberalism, where structurally privileged settlers or immigrants establish NGOs locally that tend to exclusively address the realities they often don't experience. Administrations commonly tackle issues such as lack of access to health infrastructures, reliable food sources and cooking materials, media and technology, waste management, and broadly, education. 

In their academic piece, “The Missionary Position: NGOs and Development in Africa,” Firoze Manji and Carl O'Coill trace the rise of NGOs in Africa and suggest that “their role represents a continuation of the work of their precursors, the missionaries and voluntary organisations that cooperated in Europe's colonisation and control of Africa.” Additionally, they note that NGOs have had a place in promoting imperialism by directly opposing and suppressing anti-colonial struggles, citing specific examples in Kenya.

NGOs gain legitimacy through the support of international conglomerates that undoubtedly dictate the direction and range of the world flow of currency. This western hand, embodied by the IMF and World Bank, not only maintain the structures of colonialism by entrenching overexploited and formerly colonised countries in extreme debt, but they’re self-appointed legitimacy can function as a powerful stamp of approval to an NGO, making funding proposals, partnerships, and award recognition all the more accessible. 

Take the American Red Cross, for example — a tax exempt, American and international NGO. In 2010, the American Red Cross raised over $500 million in relief efforts for the country of Haiti after an immense earthquake that devastated much of the island. However, NPR and ProPublica had a hard time accounting for this money and how, and if, it was distributed to relief efforts. Perhaps the most astounding part of their investigation revealed: “The Red Cross says it has provided homes to more than 130,000 people, but the number of permanent homes the charity has built is six.” 

Against the backdrop of the sustained growth and legitimacy of development and aid efforts of the charity sector, there has also been a sustained growth and development of a critique of this industry. Rwandan scholar Olivia U. Rutazibwa has examined the discursive colonialism that the development and aid sector engage in, or rather, the ways this sector of work and study entrench narratives of paternalism, savorism, and overall, white supremacy. She says that it is fundamental to demythologise knowledge around this topic; that those in the fields on international relations must abandon the proponents of development and rather focus on reparation efforts as well as interrogating root causes of “underdevelopment.” 

Chandra Mohanty also usefully points out the NGO sector in the west that is considered “feminist” creates a great deal of harm. For example, she points out how white American “feminists,” whose work focuses on the “injustices” against women in the Global South, such as FGM, actually create the category of a “third world woman.” This group is characterised as being constant victims of male violence and underdevelopment of progression and democracy. This kind of Global North feminism not only compounds ideas of the gender binary, normative sexual identities, and paternalism, but also fuels imperialism when these reports of ‘female oppression’ by ‘primitive’ societies is used as justification for military intervention from nations like the US. Look at how voluntourism flourishes, where several agencies encourage Global North citizens to volunteer their time in infrastructurally and economically immature nations that could benefit from their unskilled labour. 

As a Black person from the U.S. who’s based in Cape Town, and someone who has worked in the NGO sector in South Africa, I’ve had to navigate cognitive dissonance surrounding my work, where the need for a paycheck outweighs the disagreements I may have with the work. I have produced research about climate change where the brief is to encourage young South Africans in under-resourced communities, who also possess an incredibly small carbon footprint, to start initiatives in their own communities. This is with the knowledge that the United States military is one of the world's greatest polluters, and the lack of climate action or even sanitation services in young peoples communities is a result of corruption influenced by colonialism and pronounced patriarchy. Not to mention, many funders of the work have mandates to include their research in the final product, revealing the insular, narrative authority NGOs establish. Overall, it begs the question of who really needs to be a part of the conversation of “action” entirely. 

Perhaps, more importantly, is the need to centre the experience of Black people who are in this work. While theory and research help identify the superstructure, there is also deep knowledge in holding the complexity of Black people, particularly, Black women and gender non-conforming people, who work in this field. These experiences are useful to simply relate to one another as people who find themselves at an unending series of contradictions of wanting to address these problems, but knowing they cannot be fully realised through an NGO. I spoke with two Black South Africans about this, about how they manage the contradictions they identify and how they negotiate those contradictions, as well as their motivations and their passions . 

Working in the NGO sector 

Mamello Sejake (they/them) is a gender non-conforming sexual health advocate from Johannesburg, whose work and passion focus on the avenues that pleasure and kink offer to Black people. They have been working in the NGO sector for just under a few months, after many years in the corporate space. Currently, they work for an NGO that advocates for gender equity in HIV intervention and gender equity in sexual and reproductive health care and rights on the continent. It also offers capacity building and institutional support to other organisations and collectives.

Q is Cape Town-born and has over ten years of experience in the NGO sector. They wished to remain anonymous so as to speak more candidly about their experiences across the NGO space in Cape Town and South Africa broadly. Their work has spanned across community organising, HIV intervention, environmental advocacy, and youth media. 

I asked them both about their motivations for getting into NGO work, what the good parts were and when the good parts started to shape shift, as well as how the work has affected them personally and how they negotiate their work now.

Why the NGO sector?

Q’s passion to be in the third sector derives from their lived reality. They first entered the NGO space as a teenager, volunteering for the Treatment Action Campaign, an initiative aimed at reducing the spread of HIV in South Africa. Q said they stayed because the work felt like it had the capacity to potentially make a difference, especially in the areas they, their family, and the community they grew up in were directly affected by. 

“What kept me in the NGO space, is that you learn that a lot of the people representing the causes are not very far from you or your family. They are not things that you can take off, you know. So, it was just wanting to do something about my own reality; so no longer just being about other people who are in, you know, around the community or in my city, but just like how immediate some of these things are. And so, that's what kept me going.”

Sejake got into this field through what they now consider a romanticisation of the industry, which they had had for a long time. While their experience starkly contrasts their ideals, they said their interest in joining an NGO was underpinned by the passion to affirm people, as well as teach comprehensive sexual education with the prioritisation of pleasure.

When the good parts go bad 

When I asked Sejake about their work and their experiences, they spoke prominently about the oversaturation of pain in the sector: “I think that the work that the organisation is doing is really dope. And I think that they are, as humanly possible as much as each person can, they speak to them. It's a feminist organisation and everybody practices that, I think, you know, with all of our flaws. My problem is not with the organisation. My problem is with the sector.” They emphasised: “So many people are working from a place of hurt and also the lack of resources means that people are overworked and underpaid and that also just breeds its own problems.”

Sejake noted that collaborative action between NGOs is often not possible because there is a competition for pain, where the more pronounced the suffering is, the more likelihood there is for funding. 

This reality diverged from Sejake’s idea of NGO work in the sexual and reproductive health sector, which has been their dream since 2013. NGOs tend to have an allure where you can enter into the space to do meaningful work. This appeal tends to sour immediately when the meaningful work one anticipates ends up looking like selling a struggle to garner sympathy and resources. 

When I asked Sejake when this moment of souring happened, they said: “The moment I arrived.” 

In their reflections, Sejake underscored the lack of space for their pleasure and fun and that neither of these praxises are perceived as serious. According to them, these frameworks are not as “arousing” as “people dying, or people in pain.” They noted that the centering of suffering was unproductive as well as unmoving; it seems unfathomable to the non-profit sector to work in different ways. 

Having been in the NGO sector for over ten years, Q has seen the pitfalls as well as the rewards of their time in their work. Q said they see the payoff of the work that NGOs can do to pressure and change the government and can affect people's intimate lives. They also said that some of their work has reflected a more community-based structure, where everyone involved looks like them. 

“I learned so much from the communities we work with about the history of our country, about the spiritual meaning of the work that we do. We're dealing with spiritual things here. And so, that's really, you know, about land. We talk about mining and [we] talk about the inequalities. Those things are not just physical…we were doing some work to address the change that we had hoped to see in our lifetime.”

Race, class, and gender politics in workplace

Q spoke about the kind of debilitating gaslighting that can happen in NGOs, especially towards young Black women. White managers and owners often stress how grateful one should be to not only work for that NGO but to work at all in a country with notoriously high youth unemployment rates. This kind of trivialising can stagnate the opinions of young people who are excited to enrich the workforce. Usually for Q, their bosses never account for the time needed to commute, about the kinds of mornings one could have before a 9:00 a.m. start to the workday. Whether it be experiencing harassment on public transportation, or experiencing delays from one connecting vehicle to the next, or overcrowding, a lot can take place before you even sit down for work. Additionally, the workspace is always exaggerating who is and who isn't qualified by creating pay scales based on university degrees, certain accents and certain kinds of English. These, in turn, entrench classist and racist scales of value. 

“If you (a person with resources, namely a white person in South Africa) have an idea, well it's not an idea, it's my lived experience. So you're the guy with the idea. You make a lot of money by it, and for it to happen, I have to be here because I know the context, I am the context. So I’m doing all this work and I'm also having to dig very deeply to do the work because for me, it's not a joke. And this is not something that I put on.” 

Q came to the conclusion that many NGOs mostly financially benefit those that run them, staunchly keeping in place the divide of economic opportunity between Black and white. 

They also discuss how the management of the organisations can encourage in-fighting. When organisations reward being palatable for Black people, whether it be job perks, salary raises, or less hostility directed towards you, this can create disputes amongst Black employees about how to speak up. Q noted that oftentimes white upper management can see these tensions, yet do not step in. This can make raising issues of hierarchical violence, abuse, or lack of adequate pay all the more difficult. Q also said that it becomes difficult to approach this with nuance and compassion because there is also undermining, blackballing, and violence that is perpetuated by Black men against Black women and gender-nonconforming people in the name of a socio-economic advancment or just plain spite.

Sejake’s observations rhyme with Q’s.The most funding and resources are allocated to white people, who exploit the experiences of Black people, in addition to their labour.

Cost of speaking up 

Q notes that the cost of speaking up is a severe one: “So the cost is mental health, the cost is the guilt [of not speaking up, of doing work you don’t believe in]. The cost is being possibly caught between your bread and speaking up.” 

They talked intimately about the threat of being labelled a “troublemaker” or “agitator” that comes with speaking up. Such identification can result in one being blackballed not only within an organisation, but in the wider charity sector, which is effectively controlled by a handful of white people.This can also cost or limit one’s potential relationships with other Black people, because the environment usually doesn’t allow for straightforward camaraderie — not when pay hierarchies, patriarchy, and gaslighting are at play. Q poignantly followed up by saying that even choosing not to speak up comes at a price: your mental health. 

Sejake says that their ideas and voice have been sharpened because they are challenged regularly, and they've gained clarity from that.

“I know exactly what it is that I want to do and what I don't want to do. It just reinforces to me how important it is generally and how important it is to me to see pleasure into effect, because I see what happens when we do it on an institutional level in a space that is supposed to heal.” 

So while pushback and rigidity are present in their work, they’ve used the opportunity to positively refine their own praxis of imagining better solutions. 

How to negotiate the everyday

At the end of both of these interviews, I asked Q and Sejake how they negotiate the everyday: the daily politics, work pressure and job insecurity. Q passionately affirms, “No one should leave their house to be broken at work.” Q goes on to detail how their mental health and that of their friends and colleagues have been severely impacted by the nature of work, leading to newfound, adulthood diagnoses of anxiety and depression. Now, Q says that they show up to work every day and manage their boundaries. While these boundaries aren't always respected, this practice does provide a much clearer sense of how to mediate their desire to enact impactful work and negotiate their worth in the midst of that. 

Sejake’s conclusion on their day-to-day navigation of the NGO space is to find a way to do the work you want to do without depending entirely on the money of someone else, whether that work can happen inside or outside of the workplace. They said their politics have been sharpened and they've been pushed to walk their walk when it comes to seeing through the change they want to implement. 

Overarchingly, the NGO sector is deeply complicated in structure and who peoples it. There are the clear neo-colonial structures many NGOs take on that inform more ambiguous and nuanced manifestations in daily practice, leading to burn out for those routinely exposed. It becomes useful to find the overlaps between a clear sense of antagonism against conceptions of work that mirror exploitation while generously holding our current realities in our hands.