Summary of Dr Thandi Dodo Sidzumo-Mazibuko interview (1986) 1. Any forms and levels of material aid from foreign donors must be limited to what African people themselves have requested. 2. Aid terms and conditions must comme from the people. Communities must determine their most pressing needs and only then can well meaning aid givers come to the party. 3. Most agencies are interested in getting quick results while overlooking the human element in development projects. When you work with human beings you cannot operate in technical and systematic cold fashion. 4. We must look into who creates hunger and who sustains that hunger, the national and International forces with a negative impact on different communities. 5. Assistance must be given on our own terms, we must determine that kind of help we need. 6. Before participating in a community development project, we must first understand that community's perceptions of its needs. 7. On the basis of the community's description of its needs we can use our communication and technical expertise only for the purposes of complementing existing capabilities. 8. We must be clear that development highlights a community's struggle to develop itself. Development is community participation in breaking away from all kinds of dependency, economically or otherwise to attain self reliance. The role of the expert is to increase capability of the focus group. 9. Education is divided between education for LIBERATION and education for DOMINATION. In the case of the latter, self proclaimed development experts like IMF are divorced from the realities of communities where thy they impose their aid programmes. The communities are always left poor ,disempowered and more prone to continued domination. 10. The role of tbe researcher is to provide social analysis, make people aware that when a certain area or community is underdeveloped it is not always because the community members are lazy. Due to historical colonization of Africa by Europe, the question of monocultures has been created such as in Senegal where people were forced to produce rubber while they were experiencing a problem of hunger. 11. There are national forces and international forces that impact lives. International forces like IMF and World Bank impose themselves on governments and enforce anti-development loan or aid conditions. Loans from IMF and World Bank must be rejected as they are not meant to support the livelihoods of our people especially the poorer classes. 12. Researchers have a duty to bring this information to communities so that they develop an understanding of the machinations of different forces with regards to development, how the world functions,and how that affects our situation. 13. Researchers must present data to communities, allow those communities to evaluate the data and give their input so that they don't become objects of research. That is the only effective way of mobilizing for the material and intellectual development of people. Anything else opposite to that will render the researcher an agent of imperialism. 14. The structural cause of hunger in Africa is land pressure which is a product of white colonizers taking all the productive arable land and pushing our people to the dry reserves. Colonizers did not come with civilization, even when you go to the most remote of areas where people have to access to modern sources of agriculture information, in their own rudimentary ways the people know about the differences in soil types and their suitability for certain kinds of crops. The view that Africans don't understand their land is an ugly lie. 15. The role of the researcher is to compliment existing knowledge and share information on organisations that control our lives such as IMF and World Bank. 16. There must be a balance between monetary inputs and communication inputs bearing in mind that in all development projects, our people must attain intellectual development too. 17. Part of the struggle for social and economic justice is say NO to any forms of outside dominance.
