In May 1977, the Foreign Ministry of South Korea received an unusual request from one Mamadou Samfo. As Minister of Defense for the Upper Volta, now Burkina Faso, Samfo had written to ask the South Koreans for judo and taekwondo instructors to be dispatched to the West African nation. By August of the same year, the two countries had signed a two-year contract for martial arts masters to work with the Upper Volta’s Ministry of National Defense, and secondarily with its Ministry of Youth and Sports. The program would be paid for entirely by the South Korean government.
What might otherwise appear to be a minor episode of sports exchange was treated, on both sides, as anything but. Martial arts coaches selected from the Korean army’s reserves were to work with military training divisions while seeking out further opportunities for sports diplomacy in the civilian sector. When recruiting these coaches, everything from weight class and age to possession of a referee certification was considered. The Korean Central Intelligence Agency was consulted for the top selections. In the final contract, signed just three months later, the instructors were described not as teachers or masters, but as techniciens (technicians) under a bilateral agreement. Martial arts, in other words, was made legible as technical cooperation: a form of foreign aid in which one government provides expertise, training, or services to another.
Technical cooperation became an important instrument of foreign aid as post-war recovery and decolonization reshaped the international order. Billions of dollars in financial and technical assistance flowed to Europe, Africa, Asia, and Latin America through initiatives such as the Point Four Program, the Colombo Plan, USAID and the Peace Corps. Its flexibility allowed states to classify a wide range of services as aid, and to present geopolitical projects as development work. By classifying martial arts instructors as technicians, alongside industrial planners and agricultural experts, the Upper Volta agreement unsettles both conventional expectations of what foreign aid should contain and who constitutes a donor or a recipient.
Particularly striking in this case is the fact that the donor was itself, at the time of the exchange, a major recipient of international aid. The Korean War of 1950-1953 had devastated South Korea’s economy and population, and the country teetered through a series of unstable governments and military coups. Even as the developmental “miracle on the Han River” unfolded, the country continued to receive billions of foreign aid. Between 1946 and 1978, South Korea received $6 billion in U.S. economic grants and loans. By comparison, $6.9 billion was earmarked for all of Africa and $14.9 billion for the entirety of Latin America.
Why, then, did Korea insist on moving forward with development missions abroad despite its continuing dependence on aid? After the 1953 armistice, the burning “question of Korea” remained unresolved: did the peninsula’s legitimate government reside in Seoul or Pyongyang? At that time, South Korea’s claim to leadership had yet to be backed by a concrete demonstration of capitalist progress. North Korea, by contrast, recovered relatively rapidly with an emphasis on industrial revival, and was well on its way to achieving its goal of creating “modern” living standards for its citizens.
To bolster its claim to sovereignty on the international stage, Seoul increasingly looked beyond Washington. American support had been sufficient throughout the immediate postwar years, when the UN was dominated by the US and its allies. Under their leadership, the UN had reliably supported reunification under Seoul’s government, and provided hundreds of millions in economic relief to the South. As dozens of African states decolonized and joined the UN, however, this hold became increasingly tenuous. The growing “Third World” bloc was reluctant to support former colonial powers, while North Korea courted African states with appeals to national self-determination, a message bolstered by the country’s record of rapid postwar growth.
Impelled by its northern neighbor, South Korea’s initial diplomatic efforts to Africa were a series of cost-effective goodwill missions. By 1965, however, Seoul realized that more was needed to convert diplomatic contact into more durable relationships. “[South Korea] has been having trouble in Africa as a result of North Korean penetration,” US officials noted. “The Communists are promising everything and many African countries believe their promises … goodwill missions are not enough.” Technical assistance promised to allow South Korea to compete with the North as an autonomous state capable of providing concrete, material aid.
Given South Korea’s dependence on American assistance, it is tempting to read these missions as work performed on behalf of the United States. American officials certainly saw the value of using South Korean diplomacy to extend anticommunist influence into Africa. At the same time, they typically expressed ambivalence about subsidizing South Korean ambitions abroad, believing that the United States, with “some years of African experience,” was better equipped to provide assistance itself. “[Except] possibly in the field of medicine,” they argued, “Korea is not well endowed with personnel qualified for technical assistance work.”
By 1977, Seoul had formally retreated from its effort to exclude North Korea from international institutions. It no longer opposed North Korean participation in international organizations and conditionally accepted the possibility of both Koreas entering the United Nations. Institutional accommodation, however, did not end diplomatic rivalry. South Korea could accept inter-Korean coexistence at the institutional level while still treating particular bilateral relationships as competitive terrain. Its officials continued to monitor North Korean activity in Africa well into the 1980s.
Programs such as the taekwondo mission reflected this uneasy position within the US-led aid order. Taekwondo was recognizably “Korean” yet could still be presented as useful in much the same way as medical expertise. Unable to compete with wealthier powers through major infrastructure projects or large-scale loans, South Korea found in martial arts a modest alternative: portable expertise that was relatively inexpensive to send abroad but could still be classified as technical assistance.
From South Korea’s perspective, therefore, the strategic value of Mamadou Samfo’s request was clear. It created an opportunity to outmaneuver North Korea by appearing the more responsive and generous of the two Korean governments, capable of marshaling the requested resources and concluding an agreement within three months. The aid politics of the Cold War often turned on a simple premise—who gave what first—and South Korean officials made this logic explicit. Dispatching taekwondo instructors, they argued, would help prevent the North Korean “puppet state” from further “infiltrating” Africa.
Yet Upper Volta was not just terrain on which the inter-Korean rivalry played out. Samfo had initiated parallel requests to both governments, actively exploiting their rivalry in his country’s effort to secure resources. If the three-month interval between the initial request and the signing of the technical agreement seems remarkably short, the achievement belongs as much to Samfo as to either Korean ministry. His efforts produced substantial commitments: South Korea promised the services of one judo master and one taekwondo master and agreed to cover their salaries and all related expenses, including student uniforms, competition prizes, and training equipment. The surviving documents do not establish whether North Korea also fulfilled Samfo’s request, leaving open the possibility that Upper Volta secured assistance from both governments.
The discussion of South Korea’s dual position as a recipient and donor of aid reminds us that claiming the status of a donor is never an entirely altruistic one. As Liisa Malkki has observed, the act of giving aid responds to the needs of those who give as well as those who receive it. At the level of states, donorhood likewise served needs that were not reducible to the material welfare of recipients. For South Korea, providing technical assistance offered a way to assert autonomy and international standing even as it remained dependent on foreign aid. Just as the subjects deserving of aid are made, donorship is not a passive economic condition but a political status that must be performed and recognized.
Reflecting on this history helps clarify what is at stake in contemporary debates over foreign aid. When Donald Trump dismantled USAID in 2025, he argued that it is an illogical subsidy to countries whose interests do not align with those of the donor. European donors, notably Britain, followed suit with cuts in the name of fiscal necessity. “Grown-up choices about the future of Europe require grown-up decisions and choices, and that is what we have done,” Keir Starmer remarked in Parliament. Opposing MPs questioned whether it is right to “[balance] the books on the backs of the poorest people in the world”.
Liberal or illiberal, then, these politicians all share an understanding of aid as a one-way transfer, from an active donor superpower to a passive recipient. Yet we repeatedly see how aid can equally be an object of contestation, even manipulation, for those beyond the so-called superpowers to maneuver. This does not erase the profound inequalities that have and continue to structure foreign aid. But it does mean that such states could work within the confines of the global order, and sometimes make them serve their own ends. And they could decenter, if not completely displace, the West by using aid packages to form relations with each other.