Survival of the Fittest

Abstract

Unlike in the 1960s, the present-day NGO sector in Africa is booming as African NGOs have benefitted immensely from the overall increase of funding. Since the 1990s, non-African development aid agencies renewed their development policies in sub-Saharan Africa by shifting their funding objectives from governments to NGOs. Tina Wallace remarks in her essay “The Role of Non-Governmental Organizations in African Development: Critical Issues” that NGOs then were considered effective development partners “at a time when states were seen to be weak or corrupt.”¹ If shortly after independence, African literary NGO (LINGOs) like Mbari, Chemchemi, and Transition existed alongside only a few nonprofit partners, FEMRITE and Kwani Trust at present are just two of numerous other wide-ranging and diverse nonprofit ventures in the cultural sector. In order to succeed and visibly sustain themselves in such a plethora of nongovernmental activities in the twenty-first century, having power is a matter of importance for LINGOs. According to Sarah Michael, NGO power can be defined as “the ability of an NGO to set its own priorities, define its own agenda and exert influence over others even in the face of opposition from the government, donors, transnational NGOs and other development actors as to achieve its ends.”² The necessity for LINGOs to assert power in order to survive in an increasingly competitive global marketplace where funds are limited and stretched— thus my guiding hypothesis in this chapter— is vital with regard to their sustainability and influence³ in the literary sector.