Independent tropical African regimes face essentially the same dilemma that increasingly occupied the European colonial governments during their last years: to achieve rapid and widespread techno-economic development by using as a principal instrument the subsistence farmer. African elites, to a far greater extent than their colonial predecessors, are also subject to the immediate demands of political legitimacy. The occupational survival of bureaucrats, technocrats, and politicians depends significantly upon their ability to produce expanding social and economic benefits for the mass of their clienteles at costs in human effort and other deprivations which the majority of local minorities does not consider prohibitive. An eloquent expression is given to this dual challenge by the Tanzanian statesman and intellectual, Amir Jamal (1965, p. 5):

The relationship between the leaders and the

masses requires to be recast fundamentally so

that the dialogue between them becomes continuous

as well as politically and economically

productive. Once the sanctions.… in support

of colonial rule are withdrawn, a government

can only govern…if it…undertakes immediately

the critical task, of building up an almost

monolithic dialogue with the masses. This is

a task of a real magnitude, demanding as it

does a two-way communication between the technological,

social and administrative sophistication

of the executive at the centre on the one

hand and the realities of the amorphous or

tribally conditioned eager and aspiring masses

in the country still contending with age-old

environment and equipment, on the other hand.…

This…in effect means the bridging of the gap

on a day-to-day basis, not between technology

and subsistence economy but between those

leaders who become compulsively aware of

their total dependence on technology which

would take some generations' efforts to

become home-based and the masses who inevitably

simplify brutally by asking in

constant refrain--why can't we have the

hospitals, the schools, and roads and the tractors today!

The now nearly unanimous acceptance of the importance of the study of local politics in understanding the processes of political development, modernization, and change in Africa poses a challenge to contemporary Africanists which is at once both perplexing and stimulating. A central focus of this study is on the fusing of the old and new at the local level and the concomitant necessity of analyzing the nature and impact of the surviving residue from traditional societies on the roles and institutions of more recent constitutional government. One of the most perplexing aspects of this challenge is the plethora of tools, models, vocabularies, and methodologies with which we have to work. In attempting to construct a useful and informative, not to mention reasonably accurate, research model, one often finds that his initial inquiry into which framework to use is the most formidible task. One writer has likened this effort to that of knights errant seeking the Holy Grail.

The examination of the role of local government in agricultural development in Africa, the subject of this paper, requires inputs from economics and agricultural economics, the technical aspects of agriculture, political science and politics, and administrative and bureaucratic studies. To begin with, should one survey the literature of economists and of agricultural economists, one finds few, if any, examinations of the functional and operational relationships between these subjects and local government. At best, there are rather negative references to the local politics, politicians, and bureaucrats. To many an economist and agricultural economist, particularly those conducting farm-level and project research and those involved in the planning and implementation of agricultural projects, the local political and administrative scene is normally viewed as disruptive, and indeed even “irrational.” Book after book, article after article, report after report written by this group fail to identify these relationships in any meaningful way.

Then turn to the literature of agronomists, veterinarians, forestry and water-development experts, and so on. How frequently do such development professionals recognize the economic, political, and administrative parameters of their research and their policy proposals, particularly at the local level? Their policies and procedures, based on technical considerations, are often matters of should be this way, should happen, should be done, should be desirable. Yet historically the technical men have been in charge of rural development, particularly agronomists and veterinarians. Their almost exclusively technical orientation has rather consistently in so many ways and places led to results far less favourable than would otherwise have been the case had the political, economic, and administrative dimensions been identified and incorporated.

Tanzania has been experimenting with numerous changes in its political administration since it gained independence in 1961 (see Dryden 1968, Tordoff 1967). One of these changes is the introduction of the cell system in 1965 (Bienen 1967). This paper focuses on the people elected as cell leaders, who they are and what they do, and on the way in which the behavior of the present incumbents shapes the role of cell leader. Data were collected during an eighteen-month period in 1967-1968 as part of a comparative study of micropolitics in Pare District. While the findings apply specifically to cell leaders in two wards of Pare District, they have general implications for the cell system throughout Tanzania.

The paper proceeds as follows. The first section explains the place of cells in Tanzania's political system, introduces the two communities under scrutiny and gives a profile of the cell-leader sample. The next three sections discuss in detail the following set of propositions about the activities of cell leaders: (1) Although cell leaders actively participate in many aspects of local politics, many incumbents are not innovative in fulfilling their envisioned role. (2) Cell leaders are most effective when dealing with issues which can be resolved within the cell. When they interact with the larger political infrastructure, cell leaders tend to transmit information downward from the hierarchy more effectively than they represent their constituents to other levels.

We are less prone today than we were a few years ago to designate education as the prime mover in development--be the latter political, economic, or “social.” We are finding it both possible and more imperative to explore just how and when education becomes linked into development. No longer does it suffice to conclude that education is “necessary but not sufficient” to generate development and then supply anecdotes about correspondence between general plans and educational plans in this or that set of countries. We have perhaps become even overly cautious in assuming manpower plans to be useful guides for policies to turn out “high-level manpower.” While we may be little more capable than a decade ago to quantify the contribution of education to one or more aspects of development, we see more clearly how education is drawn into many conflicts that are aroused by the drive by national leaders for “modernization.” We observe also the reluctance of local groups or tribes to subordinate passively their own ideas of how to get ahead to some remote official's notions of which peasants must sacrifice how much in order that “the national plan” will be fulfilled. National officials are finding it less easy, however, to praise their local plans in international forums while rejecting the complaints of local citizens whose activities are the substance of development.

Dividing my discussion into a half-dozen sections, I will treat education as the topic of central-local relationships and conflicts, as an influence upon the balance of central and local weight in policy decisions, and as an element in many sorts of activities that bring forth latent central-local parallel as well as opposed interests.

One of the main purposes of much recent work in subnational politics in Africa has teen to find levels and categories of action that are both meaningful and persistent. The study of politics at the local level may avoid some analytical difficulties associated with earlier macro-level studies (for a critique of earlier work, see Zolberg 1966), hut the problem of nonreproducibility begins where macro-analysis leaves off. One result of this dilemma is that few of the increasing number of local studies in African politics either build on previous research or relate theoretically to other work. While this random quality in the literature may be partially overcome as more local research is undertaken, for the moment one of the safest generalizations we can make about local politics in Africa is that there is great variety in social formation and political process in local political arenas.

This suggests that the problem of focus in the study of contemporary African politics cannot easily be resolved merely by shifting the research effort from the national to the subnational level. Both macro- and micro-level studies present their own challenges of validity and interpretation. What both approaches have tended to share, however, is an almost exclusive orientation to politics as the influences on, and the processes of authoritative decision-making. In fact, this orientation largely characterizes political science as a discipline; it is not confined to the study of African politics. But it is equally as important for political scientists to develop categories to analyze the substantive performance of African political systems as it is for them to analyze how the systems operate. Such categories will certainly involve the notion of public policy, to which we now turn our attention.