Kamal Laldas Singh

Kamal Laldas Singh (also known as Kamal Singh) is a South African development activist who has become known internationally for his work on participatory methodologies.
Early life
Born to working class parents in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa, he became a student leader and activist at age of 14. For his efforts he was expelled from his school, only for the school to invite him back as a student later. He joined the United Democratic Front, a mass movement against apartheid, at age 17, and worked as a paid full-time activist for a decade. During this time he was constantly persecuted by the South African government, with detentions and interrogations, and had to live incognito away from home for a period of years. As an activist he was involved in the creation of institutions of resistance that needed to be resilient enough to withstand arrests and attacks on its leadership. " We searched far and wide for inspiration," he says, "including as diverse a range of sources as the Sandinistas of Nicaragua, the struggles in the Philippines, Vietnamese military Generals (Giap and Le Duan), the Brazilian pedagogist Paulo Freire etc. We were thirsty for knowledge and with restricted access to literature we used whatever we could find." He credits these restrictions for his lifelong passion for learning which has led him to teach himself. "We had nothing but suspicion for the educators who worked the Apartheid system. My final year economics thesis was turned down by my (supposedly liberal) university (UKZN) as it was a Marxist critique of conventional capitalist economics." The challenges of working as social activists under a repressive system, were matched by the rewards. "We once launched a campaign for state housing to be given free of charge to people. This was inspired by extensive consultations with working class people who occupied state owned houses for decades. The leadership of the political movement objected to this, as they considered it ludicrous and impossible. We persisted with the people, and through discovery of an almost unknown legal basis in English common law we eventually triumphed over a repressive Apartheid government". These lessons in social change, its complexity and unpredictability, its long years of toil, the contradictions and differences between people and the movements that claim them, and reliance on building and retaining the trust of people, left indelible marks on the young activist.
Rebel with a new cause
In 1992 Singh quit the political movement. He cites the Stalinist nature of the returned ANC political movement as a primary reason for doing so. "We were not fortunate in my region with the leadership we inherited on return of political exiles etc. Harry Gwala the regional leader of the ANC was completely unaware of the value of the social movements we had toiled to build, instead his archaic interpretations of Marxist-Leninism, led him to the belief that we were a threat to the Party, and that we had to be systematically dismantled. In this, he proved more effective than the Apartheid government." For Singh, this were the first signs of things to come and he summarily quit the political movement to work in civil society formations. With his enduring quest for participatory and empowering ways of working with people, he began experimenting with tools and techniques in rural KwaZulu that he later discovered belonged to an emerging international methodology known as Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA). His first experience of people mapping their area (using the ground, seed, sticks and garbage to represent homes, numbers of people, cattle, women headed households, disabled people etc.) moved him to commit the next period of his life to working to learn and spread these techniques, initially in South Africa but later, internationally. "I saw what I thought was a real democratic process in motion. It struck me that this was a powerful weapon in the struggles against poverty, and for peoples' rights." He contrasted it to the new political work of building a party that his erstwhile colleagues were engaging in, and celebrated his liberation from the liberation movements.
The Internationalist
While a young political activist, he became an avowed internationalist. "For me there were never boundaries to people's struggles, their situations and the addressing of these. We made conscious efforts to educate ourselves on the world, its issues, its cultures and music." His new discoveries in participatory methodologies originated all over the world - India, Kenya, Brazil, etc. In contrast to the growing nationalism in the politics of South Africa, Singh soon found himself working at the University of Sussex with Prof Robert Chambers, on an international networking project to bring together people using PRA/PLA techniques at national, regional and international levels. Despite the excitement of the work, his new institutional home, Institute of Development Studies (IDS), proved a bit of a challenge. "I was not blessed," he says, "in that I had to exchange Stalinism for crusty colonialism." Nevertheless, he worked with renewed energy on a project that he had dreamt of. "For me, it was internationalism in its most exciting form - with the potential to effect positive social change across the world."
Contradictions
Exposure to the international development system, particularly the civil society aspects raised many issues for Singh. "Fundamental contradictions abound," he says. The colonial nature of international aid relations (including those of INGOs), with the North enjoying almost unbridled control over the South cloaked by "efficiency" factors, remains a blind spot, Singh argues. "Like the colonialists who could never trust the locals, the aid agencies trust their development investment to their own kind. Large INGOs like OXFAM persist today with a senior management teams and a Board that would make the Dutch East India Company proud. I was the first Southern-based recruit of the IDS, after decades of its existence." Further, he argues, these recurring patterns of power imbalances replicate themselves at each level, "Staff who had no power or say in INGOs, cannot possibly enable empowerment for powerless villagers." He is also of the belief that deep-seated racism and sexism permeate aid structures, to the extent that development has been held back by this: "Where there has been good leadership at global levels by people from the South - eg. Ramesh Singh at ActionAid, or by woman like Mary Robinson at the UN, the effects have been very striking." For Singh, Participatory methodologies are saddled with a serious contradiction: Despite their value and benefit, the vehicles used to deliver them, the institutions, are containers of power imbalances and dominance of the powerful. Singh believes that new models of institutional configurations are needed to fully reflect the values, behaviours and new models of leadership that truly participatory ways of working need. "My colleague Prof Robert Chambers is a great advocate for personal change, which I support completely. I do feel that in addition, we should be placing more emphasis on institutions themselves. In as much as individuals shape institutions, the inverse is also very true," says Singh. He is also concerned with the mediation of the direct voices of people through secondary research and interpretation. "While technology had already advanced to the point where peoples' voices could be heard directly, where the people could speak for themselves, in their own idiom and language, the institutions who could foster and advance this, did not. The power over the people that powerful outsiders enjoy, includes the power to interpret and mediate, collect, repackage and present the perspectives of the people. Its the for many. I have myself witnessed brazen dishonesty where people's perspectives were contorted and twisted to suit the purposes of agencies working with them. The same agencies talk of good governance." Singh became very active in the promotion of participatory video (where people themselves control the narratives) and new forms of institutions. "To be a political activist unafraid to name gnarly issues, and to remain committed to one's own beliefs, is difficult in the development industry which is largely founded on conformity, syrupy corporate branding, polite blind-spots, and glossing over of tensions and contradictions. It seeks and rewards apolitical careerists more," says Singh.
Experiments
After leaving the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) Singh lived and worked in Senegal, where he also became a student of French at the Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar. He worked on projects with the Government of Jamaica, ActionAid, CARE and others.Through these projects, he explored more the possibilities for video and Internet-based technologies to increase the ownership of people over processes that affected their lives. He writes: "The Jamaican government went further than most INGOs I had seen, in opening itself (through a shared planning knowledge base) to its communities. Similarly, ActionAid had very noble intentions in addressing participation in its governance and accountability systems. I had the privilege of working on these in parallel and learned a lot about the difference in treating people as citizens as opposed to beneficiaries." After 3 years he applied for and was successful in becoming the Executive Director of the Agency for Cooperation and Research in Development (ACORD), a pan-African INGO working in 22 countries, based in London, but relocating to Nairobi. Singh saw this as an opportunity to experiment with his ideas on institutional changes needed for participatory ways of working. ACORD was also committed to an overtly activist agenda for development which resonated well with Singh's need to be involved with a more "politicised" development process. He moved to Kenya to help the organisation remake itself, as "an Africa-led" agency working for social justice mainly in the area of social exclusion and power. Initially, ACORD presented Singh with many opportunities to challenge conventional ways of managing and leading. However, the organisational culture of the organisation was extremely conservative - e.g. he was summoned to staff meetings to discuss the effect on the organisation's image of his riding a motorcycle to work - and the governance structures (particularly the Board) poorly prepared for the changes envisaged. After a successful relocation to Africa, and the complete replacement of a UK-based and constituted senior management team with an African equivalent, Singh resigned from ACORD and moved to South Africa. He wrote: "Despite the excellent work done by ACORD, I found the contradiction of claims to higher activist moral ground, by colleagues earning more money than UN staff, a bit difficult to manage."
Currently
Singh is now CEO of Khanya-African Institute for Community-Driven Development, an organisation committed to participatory ways of working in Africa to transform the development system to improve the livelihoods of poor people. He is continuing his experiments and learning in participatory ways of working.

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