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Abstract:
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"Widespread assumptions about the extractive and self-serving nature of African elites have resulted in the relative neglect of questions concerning their personal ethics and morality. Using life-history interviews undertaken with a range of Ghanaian development workers, this article explores some of the different personal aspirations, ideologies and beliefs that such narratives express. The self-identification of many of those interviewed as activists is examined in terms of the related concepts of ideology, commitment and sacrifice. Much recent work within history and anthropology uses the life-history as a way of introducing agency that is purported to be missing in accounts focusing on larger social abstractions. Yet it is the very opposition between abstractions such as history and society and their own more personal lives that such narratives themselves enact. The article thus interrogates the various ways in which development workers variously imagine their lives in relation to broader social and historical processes."
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