ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on combination of post-colonial narratives and prose, in order to critically examine the orientalism of the infrastructure that underpins the political economy of the spectacle of development. It also focuses on contribution to development theory and practice, due to the increasing demand by civil society groups and communities to exercise their agency in planning and implementing interventions. The chapter discusses some of the most arrogant, self-aggrandizing, self-centred, egotistical, ideologically myopic, culturally insensitive, and intellectually orientalist development experts and researchers. It expresses that to encounter poverty, the expert must break her links with the ideologies, networks and institutional structures that have educated and employed her through engaging with reflexive and critical pedagogy. What the narrative shows, using illuminations from Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, is that development practitioners might have the best of intentions.
