“Development” has become a magic word throughout Africa in this decade. And, in a great rush disturbingly reminiscent of the early days of European colonialism, national and foreign agencies are scrambling for a role in this or that project. “Consultant” and “management” offices are appearing in former storefronts in many of the larger cities; these, for a fee, will magically produce plans for any conceivable development scheme. (In 1976 I saw one thick and lavishly bound and illustrated plan for a new industrial town produced by one such firm for a project in a rural area in Nigeria; the volume envisioned in minute detail a plan for living, and for dying—several pages were devoted to plans for the town cemetery, even listing the projected costs of variously located and appointed burial plots!) A great many are playing the development game. The overall result is something like a Hydra, but the heads of the Development serpent often seem to grow randomly and independently of each other. “Development” has become a magic word, but like all things magical, no one is quite certain how it works.

Projects are being undertaken and completed, to be sure, and many of them successfully. But nearly all of them are executed quite rapidly, if not precipitously; time, after all, is money. And in the process, people are being affected.

Development problems, to paraphrase Lerner (1958: viii), are people problems, and this is the level at which social scientists should be able to play a role. From our training in social and cultural systems we think we are uniquely equipped to assess the social impact and implications of projects which seem likely to precipitate rapid social change. But social scientists, even those with extensive African field experience, most often play minor roles in African development. Why?

African Studies, as a body of knowledge, is continental in its geographical focus, multi-disciplinary in structure, and interdisciplinary in its intellectual pursuits. The materials which inform this body of knowledge are so vast in time, space, and scope, and almost unlimited in detail, that Africanists are compelled to specialize either in terms of African regions or in terms of problem areas. Although our interests are divergent within one geographical area, we are all nourished by an interdisciplinary frame of reference which governs our training and our research. Our membership is increasing. Most Africanists are in the social sciences; but the challenge of African development is attracting various technical-science based disciplines into African Studies.

African Studies defies the usual criteria for isolating the traditional disciplines. This particular attribute has often raised the question as to whether this body of new knowledge can be usefully applied. This question is not new. It has been asked of every new body of knowledge. In attempting an answer, we must make our assumptions clear. First, African Studies is not just a body of knowledge; it is a body of useful knowledge which must be shared. Second, Africa is no longer the “laboratory” for the world, but rather a consumer of useful knowledge. She consumes the knowledge required in her development process and demands knowledge that can help her avoid costly mistakes. As an active participant and consumer of useful knowledge, Africa will continue to demand an increased output of. Africanist research in the future. Third, there is no neutral African Studies. African Studies has relevance beyond the continent of Africa which nourishes it. It is the duty of the Africanist to make African Studies the relevant body of knowledge which we claim it to be. Finally, African Studies is nothing if it provides no service to the world. It served the interests of the colonial government; it serves the professional growth and development of its adherents, and it has a responsibility to serve the world, the ultimate consumer and audience of African Studies.

Water must be rationed in the chronically overcrowded hospital because there is insufficient pressure in the inner-city system. A few blocks away, local elites cavort around an azure swimming pool, its olympian form brimming with thousands of gallons of water. … A key person in a planning ministry reports to his town planning consultants that a decision must be made regarding the site of a major development project. He gives them a few days to make the decision in spite of their protests that it will require several weeks of study to produce a recommendation that will fit with the needs of all who will be affected by the decision. The ministry official is under pressure from others further up in the government hierarchy and insists on a quick decision. After many hours of overtime work, the town planners provide a site, complete with justifications which include such diverse factors as soil conditions and basic principles of the master plan which they were hired to develop for the area in question. Later, the town planners are told that the project has been sited by others superior to the ministry in a way that runs counter to virtually every factor noted by the planners when they justified their decision. … Small change is hoarded for months by people as they seek to accumulate enough money to buy one of the few modern technical necessities the average peasant family can afford-a portable radio.

This paper reviews the appropriateness of a development intervention celebrated for its direct benefits to the rural poor: small farmer credit. It will focus on the degree of inappropriateness that results from a contradiction between the convenience of directing the credit to discrete compound units and the dependence of small farmers' success on the coordination of production activities among larger groupings. The case to be looked at is from the West African savannah of Central Mali.

The economic posture of Malian savannah farmers develops within the context of these larger groups of producers. Unlike peasant coalitions in Latin America (Ortiz, 1972), the Malian groupings have not arisen to provide mutual security by spreading market risk among a wider group. This occurs where peasants are dependent on returns from a commercial crop the demand for which leaves them uncertain about how much to produce at any given time. If this were the case, subsidized credit inasmuch as it improved the peasant's marketing options might be able to circumvent such coalitions in attracting the small farmer. But the Malian peasant's coalitions are organized to confront production rather than marketing constraints. As long as these production constraints remain, his loyalty will be to his coalitions rather than to a marketing opportunity should these conflict.

The Malian peasant is not limited by land scarcity in the amount he cultivates. Therefore, he is not dependent on income from commercial crops to buy food; he will increase cash crop production only when its marketing situation is stable. Dry season migrant labor opportunities have long been available to him as an alternative for raising money for the colonial and post-colonial head taxes. Migrant laborers come home to grow unmarketed, subsistence crops. The money uses of their labor are often better served elsewhere.

The majority of East African pastoralists, unlike the pastoral societies of the Middle East which have been exposed to and have dealt with central state organizations for millennia, have fallen sway to centralized governments only at the beginning of this century. The process of integration and encapsulation of nomadic pastoralists in centralized polities and economies is now well under way in Africa and is given much attention by the local African governments.

Historical evidence is showing that, prior to colonial encroachment, East African pastoral societies, commonly depicted as highly resistant to change and strictly bound to tradition and culture, have at times undergone drastic and swift transformations in response to altered ecological conditions and/or to new opportunities. The Turkana, for instance, separated from the Jie to become nearly pure pastoralists; the Maasai, at Njiemps and Arusha, settled down to become farmers; the Pokot and Kamba developed a dual economic sector with heavy reliance on both agriculture and pastoralism (Goldschmidt, 1974: 298). The Nilo-Hamitic Samburu entered an intimate symbiotic (socio-political and economic) relationship with the contiguous Cushitic Rendille (Spencer, 1973).

From the beginning of this century, colonial powers by elaborating particular policies and measures and introducing certain development projects have often struck at the very core of pastoral subsistence without regard to or appreciation of the pastoralists' mode of life. In so doing, they have laid down the foundation of far reaching changes in the economic sector, in the social fabric and in the political organization of East African pastoralists.

The goal of improving the economic lot of the poorest (the “worst-off”) has become important both in public discussions of the Third World development and in technical discussions among economists. In this essay, I shall focus upon the difficulties of implementing such concerns as they are expressed in two major documents on the economy of Kenya. The first of the two was prepared by the International Labour Office and financed by the United Nations Development Programme (and will henceforth be called the ILO/UNDP Report): ILO/UNDP, Employment, Incomes and Equality (Geneva: ILO, 1972). The second study was prepared by the World Bank as part of its series of country economic reports (and will henceforth be called the World Bank Report): International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, Kenya: Into the Second Decade (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press for the World Bank, 1975). That the two reports largely agree on formulation of goals is evidenced by the following lines from the World Bank's 1975 report:

Recent literature on rural development planning emphasizes the importance of a multidisciplinary approach in the preparation, formulation, and execution of development plans (Chambers, 1974; Whyte, 1975). This argument has been based on the assumption that for development planning to be successful, there needs to be an integrated knowledge of ideas of various disciplines, such as the physical and biological sciences (agriculture, engineering, etc.) and the social sciences (sociology, political science, economics, anthropology).

However, for the last few years, social scientists, with the exception of economists, have played a peripheral role in agricultural development planning. Program design and the implementation of development plans have been conducted mainly by technical scientists. In most cases, social scientists have been invited to justify the decisions of the technical scientists after the selection and the designing of the projects.

Such development projects have usually had unanticipated consequences because of this lack of input from social scientists. At present there is a growing concern by international funding agencies and other research institutes to involve social scientists not only in the evaluation and appraisal of development projects, but also in the planning and formulation of these projects. The rationale behind this is that social scientists can contribute to the understanding of social, political, and economic problems in a society and help to plan development projects in such a way that they address basic developmental needs.

The purpose of this paper is to indicate how one area of social science research may contribute to social and economic development in the Third World. International aid and technical assistance programs for less developed nations began in the late 40s shortly after World War II. The interest of scholars in the study of such programs also dates from this time (Opler, 1954). Ever since the early days, we, the social scientists, have been called upon to explain the failure of many assistance efforts or to discern why new ideas and practices caused chaos in the societies into which they were introduced. An example of an early program failure was documented in Peru when village women failed to use the “good” public health practice of boiling contaminated water before drinking it after the method had been advocated in an extensive education campaign by public health personnel (Wellin, 1955: 71-103). The disorganization of a society in the face of what appeared to be a relatively minor technological improvement of an existing tool, was reported in 1952 after missionaries gave steel axes to Australian aborigines (Sharp, 1952: 66-92). The determination of the adverse social consequences of innovation was an important aspect of the early studies done by social scientists, especially anthropologists (Rogers, 1962: 27). Though there were reports of cross-cultural diffusion which did not affect societies adversely, for example, the adoption of potato growing by a Pacific Northwest Indian tribe (Suttles, 1951: 272-88), many reports appear to concentrate upon the damage done by technical assistance programs (Dobyns, 1951;Bliss, 1952;Mead, 1955; Erasmus, 1961).

When we begin to talk about planning in any society, we are immediately confronted with a whole range of ambiguities. First, are we talking about persuasion or prescription about the future allocation of resources in the society? Are we considering the operation of a technical sector where all issues will be decided by equations and empirical studies? Do we have adequate information about the present, much less the past and its trends or the future? Who will be actually planning for whom? These questions and many others are endemic to any consideration of the social and political environment of the polity under consideration but will also demand clear judgments about what values are important for that society as well as about the dynamics of history and change which will guide what is actually likely to happen.

The conceptual difficulties involved in any sort of planning and the complexity of all societies within which one might undertake planning have combined to make me quite skeptical of most planning procedures outside of a few areas of human concern where there is no dispute about the measures of value, although even there (the market place and/or military body count) one finds room for great dispute about the values measured in relation to the goals of the larger society. This general skepticism about planning has led me to cast a cold eye on the planning processes I have observed in developing countries as well as those in which I have participated in this country. Therefore, I propose in this brief paper to raise the questions of the skeptic about planning as they apply to the particular area with which I have had some experience, that is, education, and as the processes have been manifested in countries with which I have some familiarity, in this case in Africa, particularly Kenya and Tanzania. However, before raising these questions within the context of developing societies, I believe it is a useful exercise to see that the questions all emerge in post-industrial settings as well. Therefore, I shall begin by raising the questions in quite general terms and putting these questions in the context of one developed society—our own. Then, I shall move to a consideration of how the questions themselves might be affected by the institutional context of the developing country, and, in particular, two developing countries with very different conceptions of their present and future—Kenya and Tanzania.