Abstract
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.