The histories of pre-colonial states in the Great Lakes region of Central Africa have engaged scholars for more than a century. First encountered by Europeans in the 1860s during the search for the source of the Nile, these states and their rulers inspired both admiration and frustration in their visitors. On the one hand, explorers were impressed by the power of the rulers and the complexities of their bureaucracies, but on the other, they were annoyed by the apparent vacillation of the monarchs in responding to their demands. From the historian's perspective, these initial encounters soon led to questions about the origins and longevity of these states. Stories of origins were encapsulated in myths and legends that missionaries began to record around the turn of the twentieth century, while efforts to elicit lists of kings who had ruled each state introduced African leaders to European-style historiography.

The post-World-War-II period has typically been seen as the beginning of the ‘development era’. As global power relations shifted and nationalist and international pressure to liberalize and end colonial rule mounted, the colonial powers sought to revise their rationales for the legitimacy of the colonial endeavor. Longstanding dichotomies such as metropole/colony and civilized/primitive were reworked into the categories of developed/underdeveloped. The scale and intensity of development interventions increased dramatically, and a language of planned development, undergirded by ‘science’, came to frame the policy debates of colonial administrators and the technical experts they relied on, as well as nationalists and local elites. But development had been a central feature of encounters between the West and Africa since at least the early twentieth century, so that by the 1950s, all parties involved in the encounter had substantial experience of its policies and practices. Using detailed ethnohistorical and archival data, the papers in this special issue examine development programs in the late colonial period from across the continent in order to analyze how such historical experiences contributed to the conceptualization, implementation and outcomes of these programs.

These papers, like much recent research on development, explore development discourses and the ways in which experts and government officials defined particular development problems and conceptualized solutions. But in examining particular development programs across Africa, these papers seek to bring development practice into the analysis of development discourse. Rather than situating persistence and change in development discourses largely within dominant international and government institutions, these papers argue that such discourses were inevitably intertwined with development practice. In considering the local configurations within which experts and officials sought to implement their ambitious master plans, these papers show that few if any plans remained uninfluenced by local struggles over land, labor or agricultural and environmental expertise. Neither hegemonic nor unchanging, late colonial development agendas were in fact rooted in the experiences of earlier colonial efforts to manage rural livelihoods and tied to both the global changes and local realities of the late colonial era.

Concern about desiccation – the effects of deforestation on climate and soils – was an early and pervasive theme in colonial science, present at the onset of West Africa's colonial era and with roots in previous centuries. As a set of scientists' ideas linked to soil and forest conservation policy, the impact of desiccationism was initially muted, struggling unsuccessfully in nascent administrations with more pressing political and administrative agendas. But by the end of the colonial period it can be argued that anxiety about desiccation had become a cornerstone of development practice and state penetration. This article uses a case study to consider the transformation of the status of the ‘science’ of desiccation within colonial development agendas, the responses this transformation eventually provoked and its enduring legacy.

Our reflections here complement what has, in West African studies, become a general consensus about shifts in colonial forest policy. From the outset, many colonial administrations – both francophone and anglophone – were concerned both about the effects of forest loss on climate, hydrology and soils, and about the effects of ‘irrational and wasteful’ exploitation of forest as an economic resource. But early policy imperatives to establish reserves either failed to reach the implementation stage or could not be implemented due to the resistance they engendered, both from populations and indeed from agricultural or political administrations. A significant phase of reservation, at least in West Africa's humid forest and transition zones, began only in the late 1920s and early 1930s, and was pursued until the mid 1950s by colonial states which increasingly gained the strength to impose unpopular policy despite resistance. From this perspective, and given that nationalist sentiments in pre-independence struggles were often pitted against repressive colonial forest services, it could be hypothesized that independence would bring regimes more responsive to local concerns and more likely to heed resistance. Yet such a view, focusing simply on state capacity in changing political contexts, overlooks qualitative changes in the configuration of science-policy relationships within the state, a reconfiguration that it is necessary to grasp if we are to understand how post-colonial forest policy was less a rupture than a continuation or, indeed, reinforcement.

In 1951, British colonial administrators in Tanganyika initiated the Masai Development Plan (MDP), a five-year plan whose seemingly innocuous objectives were to build more water supplies, clear tsetse infested bush and experiment with grazing controls and fodder production in a small pilot scheme. But the project was the product of broader British agendas to reassert the legitimacy of empire and rebuild the post-war economy at home and abroad. These modernization agendas reflected a shift in the racialized ethnic premises undergirding the colonial project. Whereas early colonial rule and development had depended on the creation, maintenance and exploitation of ethnic distinctions to institute indirect rule, ethnic differences were now perceived as barriers to modernization. Ethnic groups like Maasai, who had been the target of protectionist sentiments in prior years, were now the focus of heightened attempts by the state to coerce them to adopt modern economic ways. Ironically, however, ethnic differences were both disavowed and reinforced by the plan, for although it was designed to overcome cultural barriers by economic means, it was framed, as its title suggests, by ethnic assumptions about what problems ‘the Maasai’ (as opposed to other ethnic groups) faced in terms of their development.

Despite its claims to merely address technical problems, the MDP was therefore deeply intertwined with colonial imperatives to order, control and compel the progress of their most unruly subjects. At issue were the land, labor, livestock and livelihoods of Maasai people, as well as contested visions of poverty, prosperity and progress. As such, the project served to facilitate, justify and consolidate the expansion of state control into numerous realms of Maasai life and its implementation became the site of deep contestation between administrators and Maasai. Designed in part to build confidence among Maasai in government and development, the project backfired, failing to meet its own objectives and, more ominously, fueling anti-colonial mobilization.

In the introduction to their edited volume International Development and the Social Sciences: Essays on the History and Politics of Knowledge, Frederick Cooper and Randall Packard take on the thorny question of why development policies change and why they sometimes persist or reappear after a period of dormancy. Much recent scholarship has located the reasons for persistence or change in development approaches within international institutions such as multilateral and bilateral aid agencies and Western scientific and social scientific disciplines. Both Arturo Escobar and James Ferguson argue for the existence of a hegemonic development discourse with standardized interventions aimed at ‘solving’ homogenized ‘problems’. Grounded in Western institutions such as the World Bank, this development discourse is maintained by an interlocked network of experts and expertise. In their analyses, development approaches and interventions are minimally affected by the particularities of locale. Other scholars concerned with identifying and understanding significant change in development policy have also focused their studies on Western organizations and disciplines and excluded from their analysis the role that development practice might play in change. But Cooper and Packard challenge scholars to consider the ways in which development policies might be molded by the practice of development, when they note ‘it is not clear that the determinants of these policies are as independent of what goes on at the grassroots as they appear to their authors or their critics to be’.

In 1941, Prime Minister Godfrey Huggins of Southern Rhodesia presented a prescription for his colony's survival under white stewardship. ‘It is essential for the preservation of the European civilization,’ he wrote, ‘that the African should be advanced’. A decade later, the variables in this explicitly racial equation had been fleshed out, and black Southern Rhodesians were subjected to a revised and actively interventionist regime of governance – a regime that we would immediately recognize today as one of ‘development’. As such, it had much in common with the forms and strategies through which ‘development’ was pursued elsewhere in the late colonial world: its local theorists sought justification in the sciences of nature and society, while its political apologists claimed to be twinning moral uplift with the material improvement of those ‘natives’ supposedly entrusted to their civilized care.

The four papers in this collection bring a varied set of perspectives as well as examples to bear on several common themes. The authors describe continuities and changes in colonial policies toward Africans' access to and use of land and natural resources and discuss some of the sources of knowledge that informed colonial officials' thinking about African land use practices. Implicitly if not directly, each poses the question of whether colonial officials learned anything from their interactions with African farmers and/or herders? By bringing together evidence from different though overlapping periods of time (all of them cover the late 1940s and 1950s) and a variety of colonial contexts (colonies under French and British rule, with and without European settlers), as a group these papers invite reflection on the circumstances that led colonial officials to acknowledge, or deny, that Africans might know something about their environments and that such knowledge ought to inform the design of conservation and development schemes.