MODERNIZATION & ITS DISCONTENTS: STRUGGLES OVER STATE INTERVENTION IN ZIMBABWE'S COMMUNAL AREAS

Alexander & Jeater (eds): Modernization & its discontents

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MODERNIZATION & ITS DISCONTENTS:

STRUGGLES OVER STATE INTERVENTION IN ZIMBABWE'S COMMUNAL AREAS1

Jocelyn Alexander & Diana Jeater

State modernization policies are not always popular among the people they ostensibly benefit.

Contestation over state intervention, particularly land and agricultural reform, is a major issue

for both politicians and developers. It is clear that rural poverty and ecological degradation are

vital issues for all African states, which rural intervention policies are supposed to address. The

fact that such policies are frequently contested at a local level is cause for real concern. In this

book, we demonstrate that a fundamental rethinking of the modernization project is required if

this problem is to be addressed.

The focus of this book is on the history of struggles over state intervention in Zimbabwe's

communal areas since the original white occupation of the region in 1890. These struggles are a

constant theme in the history of twentieth century Zimbabwe. Contributors to the book all

carried out detailed field research in Zimbabwe in the mid- to late-1980s. Our work therefore

predates the advent of the ESAP and the further calamitous drought of 1991/92, but its analysis

of the social and environmental change and government policies in these areas is now, as Mike

Drinkwater's final contribution demonstrates, all the more relevant for the future. These studies

look at the actions - and the associated rhetorics - to which attempts both to implement and to

resist state policies gave rise. Our contributions are united by a common concern to explore the

interactions of state and society through an actor-oriented approach, which stresses the

perspectives of different individuals and groups, and sees them as active political and economic

agents. In looking at these struggles, we see that state intervention provided a critical

battleground in which various groups' responses to social, economic and political change were

forged and defined.

1 Mike Drinkwater contributed some of the original ideas to this chapter.


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Two themes run through the contributions: the nature of legitimate authority, and the nature of

social and environmental knowledge. We argue that neither can be understood without a

detailed exploration of the material and ideological interests of the state, and of the people of

Zimbabwe's communal areas. We are concerned to break down notions of a monolithic state

and a united, homogenous peasantry. It seems important to stress not so much the opposition of

state to peasant society, as the continual negotiation of that relationship and the way in which it

produces contested understandings of legitimacy and of the material world.

A question of perspective

This stress on negotiation and on multiple understandings of state intervention policies, at every

level, has both theoretical and methodological implications for the researcher. We all began our

research with a commitment to seeing all the participants in these contestations as social actors,

making complex choices. We were thereby reacting against the structuralist approaches of the

1970s. We did not want to present peasants or state bureaucrats as simply reacting to a set of

political-economic structures, but as actively creating and altering those structures. This did not

mean that we denied the importance of political-economic structures; but we saw them only as

defining the parameters within which struggles took place, rather than defining the content or

outcome of such struggles. This led us to look beyond political economy, and to address a range

of other issues too, including gender, cosmology and the fluidity of political authority.

Such a theoretical approach required a specific methodological approach. We were not looking

for empirical 'truths', but a deeper understanding of the different perspectives various actors

have when defining their own 'truths'.

This sensitivity to questions of perspective also required a degree of self-reflexive awareness of

our own perspectives. Most of us are non-Zimbabwean, and our intention was to understand

rather than prescribe state intervention policies. This does not mean that we felt that our work

was in some sense 'value-free', or that we could remain as 'invisible' researchers. We wanted to

be close enough to people to understand their perspectives, but at the same time we needed to

maintain enough distance to avoid being expected to share their lifeworlds and aspirations,


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drawing us into partisan stances (Drinkwater 1991: 159). In other words, we were seeking a

'hermeneutic distance', a perspective both intimate and removed.

A realistic sensitivity to the methodological challenges of this inside/outside approach forced us

to examine how our own perspectives and methods would influence what we found, and the

uses that could be made of our findings. In examining perspective, we wanted to understand

people at all levels. Nonetheless, this approach actually gave us a particular interest in the

people at grassroots level, whose perspectives are often overlooked or distorted by those with

more power, whose voices are more easily heard.

Rather than attempting to develop a major new theoretical paradigm for studies of state

intervention, we have tried simply to return to - or in fact continue - the thorough and solid

ethnographic field research tradition which began in the Southern African region with the

Manchester School. In Zimbabwe, this tradition has continued sporadically through the work of

A. K. H. Weinrich (1971, 1975), Terence Ranger (1967, 1985), and David Beach (1971, 1977,

1986). The latter two, being historians, together with Robin Palmer, added a strong archival

element to their work, which we have continued. It is only by this attention to detail that the

significance of various perspectives can be fully understood.

What we have also added to this tradition, however, is a sensitivity to the interrelations of

knowledge and power involved in the construction of various perspectives. This sensitivity has,

of course, been influenced by the post-structuralist theories of Michel Foucault and Jacques

Derrida, among others. We recognise that a concentration on questions of perspective is not

simply a matter of observing that different actors describe a situation in different ways, which

support their interests in that situation. It also involves an attention to the way in which social

discourses are themselves part of the mechanism by which the interests of the various actors are

maintained or contested. This is why arguments over legitimate authority - who has power to

command - and arguments over the status of scientific or indigenous knowledge - what will

work and what won't - are examined here not as dualistic contests between opposed worldviews,

but as strategic arguments in which positions may shift even where fundamental interests


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remain broadly unchanged.

The ideology of modernization

Struggles over state intervention policies in Zimbabwe's communal areas seem always to return

to the concept of 'modernization'. This theme remains a constant even as the policies themselves

change. The claim to be modernizing is a claim to particular kinds of power, authority and

knowledge. This volume questions why the state returns again and again to a claim to be acting

in the interests of modernization, despite the failures of this claim to win popular support in the

past.

'Modernization' is the post-1945 manifestation of an ideology that has roots stretching back to

the earliest days of white occupation in Zimbabwe. In those days, the state claimed to be

bringing, not modernization, but 'civilization'. Like modernization, civilization was about

introducing into African communities a set of cultural and scientific ideas that had their roots in

Europe, and which were deemed to be self-evidently superior to African culture and knowledge.

The umbrella rhetoric of civilization marshalled by the early white occupiers was primarily an

assertion of superiority over Africans, rather than a commitment to behaving in ways dignified

in the ideology as 'civilized'. However, by defining civilization as 'not-barbarism' and thereby

'not-African', gross acts of violence against Africans could be carried out in the name of

civilization. Indeed, the entire colonial project could be justified because the 'civilizers' were

bringing the benighted Africans out of their backwardness into the light of European

rationalism, international trade and industrial progress. Civilization was the obverse of

barbarism; without a putative barbarism against which it could be defined, the project of

civilization lost much of its essential meaning and political significance (Jeater 1993: 35-63).

The essentials of this ideology were a profound paternalism; a strong belief in African

incompetence; a total commitment to European cultural values; an unshakeable faith in rational

or scientific solutions to socio-economic problems and an unchallenged assumption that

civilization would make things better. Those with access to civilization had a duty to introduce

it to those trapped in barbarism; this would improve conditions for all concerned. There was no


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room for consultation or partnership here: if Africans had had any competence to offer, they

would not have needed 'civilizing' in the first place. Everything that was done, was therefore

done for the good of the Africans, and it was only their irrational culture that prevented them

from appreciating this.

The attractions of this simplistic ideology were manifold, but one its greatest advantages was its

incredible flexibility. For, although it was largely agreed that Africans were 'uncivilized', there

was far less agreement about what this meant in practice. It would be highly misleading to

assume that, simply because the occupiers were all talking in terms of the distinction between

'civilized' and 'uncivilized', they should all be in accord over which particular aspects of African

behaviour constituted evidence of barbarity; nor, indeed, that they should all agree about what

aspects of whites' behaviour provided evidence of their civilization. From the start, the state

(and other elements in the white communities) were able to change their policies towards

Africans, but still hold on to the fundamental claim to be furthering the interests of civilization,

against the forces pulling Africans back into barbarism. Both sides of the equation - civilization

and barbarism -were required to give legitimacy to this ideology of paternalist improvement.

By the 1920s, the term 'civilization' was losing its popularity in white discourse. This was no

doubt in part because the slaughter of the Somme had made a mockery of European claims to

higher standards of 'civilization'. What remained, however, was a continuing belief in the

inherent superiority of European science and technology. The term 'modernization' began to

creep into state discourse; a tendency that was reinforced in the post-1945 period, when

considerations of geo-politics lent the term an additional authority. The international rhetoric of

modernization grew out of the global politics of the Cold War. Modernization of African

economies, it was argued, would alleviate social tensions and undermine Communist influence

in the Third World. Modernizing nations stood to benefit from the patronage of the 'western

world', while the assumption that modernization was a good, definable and achievable goal was

barely challenged in the international arena. This championing of modernization by World Bank

and wealthy nations has continued beyond the end of the Cold War, and still influences the

Zimbabwe state today. This point is amply illustrated in Mike Drinkwater's final contribution to


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this volume, where he demonstrates that World Bank recommendations perpetuate many of the

assumptions of previous modernization policies.

The new word carried the same essential ideological implications as the old word. The 'modern'

state knew best, and its interventions would counteract the worst abuses caused by African

incompetence. The superiority of state policies over local practices was guaranteed by their

basis in scientific and technical knowledge, which had grown out of superior 'Western' research.

As civilization had its counterpart in barbarism, so modernization had its counterparts in

backwardness, superstition and tradition.

In the climate of the 1950s, a particular set of state policies were identified as 'modernizing'

policies, which would lead to a modern Rhodesian state. They were intended to produce

urbanization, proletarianization, centralization, increased rural productivity and increased

efficiency. As modernizing policies, these were by definition legitimate policies, which it was

the duty of the government to introduce, and impose if necessary, in the interests of the country

as a whole. Opposition to such policies was evidence of backwardness and had no legitimacy.

This, in brief, was the ideology of modernization. It provided no room for meaningful political

debate over state intervention policies. However, this does not mean that it went unopposed. As

well as constant challenge at a grassroots level, it met a strong challenge from the nationalist

movements, which argued forcefully and rationally that modernization was not self-evidently in

the interests of the country as a whole, but seemed to privilege a small sector of the society,

namely the white communities.

Supporters of the nationalists, both within and outside the country, believed that after

independence, there would be a radically new approach to the question of state intervention in

the communal areas. However, what we, as researchers, all witnessed in the mid-1980s, was the

same search by the state for technocratic solutions to the problems faced in the communal areas.

The content of the solutions may have changed (although in a depressingly large number of

cases it has not) but the ideology of modernization remains - as do the struggles associated with


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this kind of state intervention. It seems to us that the ideology of modernization leads to no more

than an endless quest for utopian policy. Instead of searching for a 'better' policy to impose on

'incompetent' peasants, these contributions suggest that it may be more fruitful to challenge the

dual concepts of modernization and backwardness themselves.

The Practice of Modernization

One of the reasons why the ideology of modernization has been so persistent a feature of state

intervention policies is that specific policies defined as 'modernizing' can be altered without

altering the commitment to modernization itself. In practice, modernization (and civilization)

policies have constantly failed to achieve their objectives. Diana Jeater's contribution to this

collection demonstrates how, as early as the 1920s, the Southern Rhodesian state responded to

failure by simply redefining the policies gathered under the 'civilization' umbrella. In the 1910s,

the British South Africa Company failed in its project to establish 'civilized' urban nuclear

families in the African communities. However, when another faction of the white communities

gained control of the state in 1923, it put in motion a new 'civilizing' programme, which did not

see interference in rural African family relationships as a central part of the civilizing project,

positively discouraging Africans from establishing nuclear family relationships in towns.

However, redefinitions of civilization or modernization cannot only be understood as responses

to failure. They were also necessary because the ideology of modernization was itself fraught

with internal contradictions, giving rise to inconsistent policies. When the policies were put into

practice, the inconsistencies became manifest. The ideology of modernization was glib and

brooked no opposition; the practice was complex, and was forced into constant compromises

with its opposition. A flexible definition of modernization allowed a range of contradictory

policies and beliefs to be maintained simultaneously, without the contradictions being

acknowledged, or even recognised.

One of the biggest tensions within the ideology of modernization was the question of how

'modern' Africans were, and how 'modern' they might become. If Africans were inherently

'traditional', then attempts at modernization must be doomed to failure. If, on the other hand,

Africans could become modern people, rejecting tradition and superstition in favour of science


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and modernization, then how was their resistance to modernizing policies to be explained?

There was not a single state position on this issue. Different elements within the state argued

both for the potential modernity and for the inherent traditionalism of Africans at different

times, depending on the context.

An example of this tension in modernization policy can be seen in the problems of dealing with

'modern' Africans. Educated, suit-wearing professionals provided a ready audience for

nationalist arguments. These Africans seemed to be 'modern', yet they rejected the

modernization projects of the state. One solution to this dilemma was to deny that they were

'really' modern. Again, this response had a long pedigree. In the early decades of the century,

mission educated Africans were accused in some quarters of having only the 'veneer' of

civilization, and of actually posing a greater impediment to the civilizing project than the 'raw'

natives, who did not presume an equality with the 'real' civilizers (Jeater 1993: 58-62;92;236).

The consistent failures of modernization policy gave a great incentive for administrators to insist

on the inherent traditionalism of Africans. The assertion that Africans were simply 'not ready'

for modernization obviated the need for any detailed examination of what had gone wrong with

the policy. If Africans were inherently backward, their attachment to tradition would always

undermine attempts at modernization. This excuse was not a peculiar feature of the post-1945

modernization era; the appeal to inherent characteristics was a feature of much earlier debate

over policy failures. All over colonial Africa, the failure to meet labour shortages was constantly

explained by reference to a presumed 'laziness' among Africans, rather than on economic

policies (Cooper 1987: 1). Similarly, in Southern Rhodesia, African women's refusal to obey

state officers was blamed on their 'immorality', rather than on a failure to assert political

authority (Jeater 1993: 257). Blaming 'tradition' for the failure of modernization policies did

more than just excuse failure: the insistence on the inherent traditionalism of Africans also

underlined claims about their technical incompetence, and urged the modernizers to further

efforts.

This ambivalence about the 'modernizability' of Africans can be seen in perhaps its most


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dramatic form in the government u-turn over the implementation of the most comprehensive

and authoritarian of modernizing policies, the Native Land Husbandry Act of 1951. As Jocelyn

Alexander discusses here, the policy was suspended in response to widespread rural resistance,

the spread of nationalism and, critically, the threat the Act posed to administrators' ability to

retain the cooperation of chiefs and headmen. This humiliating suspension of the flagship

modernization policy was not explained as a failure of the policy per se. Rather, the problem

was that the Africans of Rhodesia had turned out to be less modern than was hoped. They were

not yet 'ready' for modernization, and were to be left under the sway of their traditional leaders,

for the time being.

This turnabout is interesting not just because it highlights the state's ambivalence about whether

Africans were ready for modernization, but also because it shows how modernization policies

could actually not be implemented at all without the co-operation of authorities who were

typified, in modernization ideology, as the very antithesis of modernization. The policy had to

be abandoned because, like most modernization policies, it depended upon the co-operation of

chiefs for its implementation, and in this case that co-operation was withheld: hence the excuse

that the problem was the inherent 'traditionalism' of the Africans.

This dependence upon traditional authorities to enact modernizing policies is the major

contradiction which confronts modernization policy in practice. Despite being a crucial aspect

of modernization, it is frequently overlooked. Modernization policies always depend for their

implementation on the already established - so-called 'traditional' - authorities. In practice, those

whose job it is to implement modernization policies have routinely had to negotiate

compromises with powerful people in African society if the policies are to be at all effective on

the ground. In the same way that 'modernization' as a concept has no meaning if there is no

'traditionalism', so modernization policies in practice had no reality except where there was co-

operation from the existing, 'traditional' authorities.

The interdependence of the 'modern' and the 'traditional' is one of the central themes of this

book. There was no 'pure' modernization programme which escaped unaffected by the influence


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and input of tradition at a local level. This is a very different point from saying that

modernization policies were distorted by resistance from traditionalists. Even where there was

co-operation, a dilution or 'traditionalizing' of modernization policies could take place. Rather

than concentrating only on confrontations between traditional and modern, we are suggesting

that it is equally important to look at the long histories of negotiation and accommodation

between the representatives of modernization and the representatives of tradition. This also

reminds us that the state has not, historically, had a monopoly on the modernization project, nor

has the opposition to state intervention policies had a monopoly on the claim to traditional

authority.

The issue of authority

The question of who has authority to command is at the heart of struggles over state intervention

policies in Zimbabwe's communal areas. There is no single source of legitimate authority. We

have seen how the state tended to justify its authority in the name of modernization (and

previously civilization, latterly nationalism); but in specific circumstances, it would utilize

claims to traditional authority for itself. Indeed, Jocelyn Alexander has demonstrated that a

theme running throughout the territory's political history is the determination of administrative

sections of the state to bolster traditional authority, in defiance of modernization directives, in

order to underpin their own legitimacy (Alexander 1993). The circumstances where the state

makes use of the claim to traditional authority include those where the state needs the

collaboration of relatively autonomous local leaders, as in the uses made by the Rhodesian state

of salaried chiefs to underline their legitimacy.

However, the state may also make use of claims to traditional authority in an attempt to

outmanoeuvre successful claims to modern authority by people opposing state authority.

The question of legitimate authority is not simply an issue at the level of state policy-making. It

is equally an issue at the local level, where disputes over state intervention can revolve around

the question of whether the intervenors have authority in the sphere they claim, such as land

allocation or the felling of sacred woodlands. Again, it is important to recognise that such

debates need not fall out along state/modern, peasant/traditional lines.


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Effective authority at a local level can be claimed as deriving from tradition, or from the

modernizing state, or from a mixture of the two. The effectiveness of any claim to wield power

will depend on the historical context and the contemporary political situation. The historical

context includes, of course, reactions to previous state intervention policies. Previous

intervention on the one hand has shaped contemporary structures of authority, and on the other

hand has produced local arguments and contestations about who has power to command in

particular spheres. In such struggles, the claim to traditional authority may be a recent

innovation. Both Billy Mukamuri & Ken Wilson's and JoAnn McGregor's contributions here

discuss situations where absolute assertions about authority over sacred areas developed as

responses to state intervention, and were not a reflection of a unanimously recognised ancient

tradition. Moreover, the claim to traditional authority may not necessarily be invoked in order to

oppose modernization, but to further it. Alexander, for example, demonstrates how in

Chimanimani District in the 1980s, the authority of Chief Mutambara was invoked in Guhune

ward to aid state land redistribution policies, while the authority of 'Chief' Chiesa was

specifically denied in the neighbouring Mhandarume ward.

Similarly, because modernization is not a fixed programme, different aspects of modernization

could be, and still are, claimed by different interest groups at the local level. Although the state

has frequently presented itself as the agent of modernization, this has not prevented other groups

from adopting or adapting the claim in furtherance of their own interests. What these claims

have in common is an attempt to derive legitimacy for their projects because they are said to be

furthering modernization. Alexander, for example, demonstrates how claims by Chief

Mutambara to farmland adjacent to Guhune communal area land were presented as part of the

state's land redistribution scheme, rather than as a return to ancestral landholdings. In the local

context, a claim to modernization tells us little about the content of a project, only that those

pushing it are seeking the support of the state. Conversely, in an attempt to win local support,

elements within the state may abandon claims to modernization and attempt to legitimate their

interventions by reference to traditional authority instead.


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However, although it is important to recognise that state intervention has, and continues to,

shape the discourses and structures of authority at a local level, it is equally important to

recognise that much local debate about legitimate authority has a trajectory of its own, defined

by local agendas and histories. In such cases, struggles over state intervention may provide only

a marginal note in an ongoing struggle whose main focus is elsewhere. This is clearly

demonstrated in Mukamuri & Wilson's contribution, where state intervention over trees and

water in Mazvihwa stimulated political struggles whose concerns and terms of reference were

primarily ongoing wrangles about traditional spiritual authority over the health of the land. The

state intervention provided the occasion, not the reason, for the struggles.

Broadly, then, claims on a particular kind of authority reflect strategic political choices rather

than a commitment to specific programmes or visions of rural change. Claims to traditional

authority often reflect claims on support at a local level; claims to have the authority of modern

science and technology at a local level often express claims for support from the state. However,

specific strategic choices about whose authority should be asserted or obeyed in struggles over

state intervention are always rooted in local histories and agendas. They reflect local political

choices in which state intervention may have provided the occasion rather than the cause of

confrontation. When considering who has legitimate authority to carry out policies at a local

level, we cannot usefully understand challenges to authority as simple ideological battles

between a modernizing state and a traditional local authority.

Who knows best?

Struggles over state intervention do not always revolve around the question of authority,

however, even though the issue of who has the right to command will always be relevant in

such struggles. In many cases, the struggles revolve around the question of whether a policy is

sensible or not, rather than whether an appropriate authority is involved in its implementation.

The question of who knows best what is beneficial for communal areas lands is one of the most

hotly debated issues in development circles.

What emerges clearly from a comparison of the contributions here by Alexander and


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Drinkwater is that the state is far readier to compromise over issues of authority than it is over

issues of knowledge. The state's continual return to the claim to be modernizing can largely be

understood in this context. Modernization policies entail central directives and tight

administrative control at all levels. The state's power is founded on top-down centralized

structures. Traditional authorities can be invoked and utilized, but the modernizing policy itself

must remain intact. Scientific and technical arguments are invoked to demonstrate that disaster

will ensue if the correct policies are not implemented. At the level of policy-making, the state

insists that it alone knows best.

Both colonial and post-colonial authorities have continuously distrusted people's ability to be

aware of how they use the land and its resources, and therefore their ability to use these

resources non-destructively. It has constantly been assumed, for instance, that individual cattle

owners will allow the environment to be degraded as it is against their independent interests to

act collectively to regulate grazing. As Routley & Routley (1980: 30-1) point out, the theory

assumes not a system of communal usufruct, but rather 'the operation of private individuals in

no-man's land' (in Drinkwater 1991: 320). This view, that people in the communal areas are

wholly to blame for the poverty of their environmental circumstances, still persists among state

policy makers today.

Placing the blame on the incompetence of people in the communal areas is, as we have seen, a

prominent theme in modernization ideology. It allows the policy makers to wash their hands of

responsibility for creating the present difficulties. Blaming conservation problems on 'the land

tenure system of communal ownership of land' (Ministry of Lands, Agriculture and Rural

Resettlement 1992: 14) or insisting that 'The most pressing priority of this nation is, without

question, to develop a policy which allows the better farmers in the communal areas to take over

land being misused by less effective farmers'2 assumes that farmers in communal areas have

been solely respnsible for what is happening to their environment. It disregards the fact that the

communal areas are not areas where people have naturally chosen to live, in the densities in

2 Mr Duncan Hale, senior manager of Standard Bank of Zimbabwe (Agricultural Management Division), in

The Financial Gazette, 4th June 1992.


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which they are now living. The communal areas are constructs of state intervention policy, and

so are the present land use systems.

This presumption of local incompetence produces a stubborn insistence among policy makers

on the necessity for the state to determine the best strategy for development in the communal

areas. This, in turn, allows them to disregard local statements about what is viable for their area,

and to rely instead upon centrally-assessed formulas about, for example, cattle-carrying

capacities or wood-fuel levels. Drinkwater, McGregor, Scoones and Mukamuri & Wilson all

provide detailed accounts here of the problems that arise when such technical solutions are

applied in areas where there has not been proper consultation about local conditions. The

disasters that may be produced by centrally-directed policies are now fairly well recognized

throughout development circles. Scoones and Drinkwater are among a growing body of

development researchers whose work has supported the argument that modernizing initiatives

are frequently not in the best interests of local people, and may actually be damaging. This is a

criticism which all the contributors to this volume support.

However, many such critiques of the modernizing state tend to take the argument on a further

step, which seems to us to be illegitimate: namely that recording and utilizing the knowledge of

local people provides a solution to development problems. Because modern scientific

knowledge is claimed as the preserve of the state, traditional knowledge is presented as the

preserve of the local communities. 'Traditional' knowledge, specifically knowledge about local

conditions, is posited as the primary motive for local people to contest state intervention.

Superior understanding of local conditions leads to opposition to state policies, because the

policies are known to be unworkable in those conditions. The solution to contestation, it is

argued, would seem to lie simply in harnessing local knowledge for the modernizing strategies

of the state. The state's central objectives, which are broadly thought to be rational and

pragmatic, would thereby be achieved more efficiently, effectively and with full local co-

operation. Local knowledge thus appears as a mysterious panacea to all ills3.

3 For a clear and detailed critique of the uses made of the concept of 'indigenous technical knowledge', and

its extended counterpart, 'rural people's knowledge', see Ian Scoones & John Thompson, 1993, "Beyond

Farmer First - Rural People's Knowledge, Agricultural Research and Extension Practice: Towards a


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The contributions here demonstrate the errors of this argument, and attempt to demystify local

knowledge. However, we should first make clear that we would not dispute that local farmers

have much detailed local knowledge, especially about the historical background to

contemporary problems, to which state policy makers would be wise to pay heed. Very often,

local people know from bitter experience that a policy simply does not work. Wilson (1988: 6)

provides an example where people contend that the removal of watershed forests to clear land

for implementation of the Land Husbandry Act in the Mazvihwa communal area in 1960 led to

erosion. People had originally opened up the area by farming the alluvial soils along the rivers,

but this was outlawed by the government with the modernizing centralization policy of the

1930s and 1940s. One old man asked by Wilson how farming toplands rather than lowlands

affected erosion responded:

If I fall from where I'm sitting now, I won't hurt myself. But if I fall from the top

of my house I will be bruised. Just the same is the effect of making people farm

far from the rivers: the run-off builds up and has got power to erode, carrying a

lot of soil. (1988: 6)

This type of argument about historical processes of erosion is not an isolated one. In a group

meeting held in Shurugwi communal area in 1989, villagers identified the centralization policy

of the 1930s and people's removal from riverside fields to newly cleared topland areas as the

time when the rivers started carrying soil4. The contributions from Scoones and McGregor here

provide further demonstration that local people do have an incisive understanding of how state

intervention policies have damaged and undermined established farming methods.

Nonetheless, to state that people at the local level have useful knowledge about the impact of

state intervention policies on their environment is not at all the same thing as stating that there is

useful, applicable knowledge about land use circulating in the communal areas, just waiting to

be collected and used by development workers in preference to their inadequate technical

Theoretical Framework", IIED Sustainable Agriculture Programme Research Series, vol 1, no.1, IIED,

London.

4 Mike Drinkwater, Fieldnotes, 12/3/88, during a training exercise in rapid appraisal for agroforestry

research and extension in Shurugwi communal area, under the auspices of the Commonwealth Science

Council (Abel et al 1989)


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knowledge. As McGregor (1992) has argued, indigenous technical knowledge is not a discrete

body of applied science, comparable but superior to the technical knowledge of the state.

Instead, as the studies collected here demonstrate, conceptions of how the environment

functions at a local level are political constructs, rooted in past struggles and reflecting various

local interests - and the same holds true for the 'modern' knowledge of the state.

A full understanding of the nature of indigenous technical knowledge includes a recognition that

it is not a bundle of facts, but a bundle of perspectives. Production decisions and environmental

knowledge are socially contextualized. Explanations for certain practices or trends do not lie on

the surface; people do not necessarily have articulated explanations at the ready. This means that

so-called 'local' knowledge cannot easily be understood as 'facts' abstracted from their social

environment. Social analysis is thus required to understand the 'technical' components of

production strategies.

One of the main reasons why it is misguided to search for a coherent body of indigenous

technical knowledge is that rural communities are not monolithic. There are various opinions at

local level, both about what is 'correct' knowledge, and about how local knowledge relates to the

technical knowledge of the state. There is no single set of facts or explanations which can be

taken out of their context and applied 'scientifically'. With questions of land use, for example,

conflict over resources - who has access to what - is a frequent factor behind competing views.

However, even with apparently 'objective' and value-free subjects such as rainfall decline

(Wilson 1988: 3) and time of crop planting (Drinkwater 1991: 197-99) local politics and social

conflicts may still underlie the different perspectives. Understanding the relationship of

informants to the village level political process, as well as to the means of production, is

therefore part of the social analysis required to interpret the knowledge they articulate.

Furthermore, such knowledge is not a static set of technical acts used to formulate an ideal

production strategy, in the way in which agricultural research and extension institutions tend to

present information. Farmers are preoccupied with the constant need to cope with, and respond

effectively to, the vagaries of their natural and social environment. Their knowledge, which they


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are more or less able to articulate - albeit only ever partially - therefore has a different form as

well as content to the technical recommendations of the state's agriculturalists (Rap 1992).

Local knowledge, then, bears a complex relationship to struggles over state intervention. The

studies collected here demonstrate a wide variety of ways in which indigenous technical

knowledge is used in contestations over state intervention policies. None of the studies found

simple examples of entire local communities simply knowing 'better' than the state what should

be done. In every case, arguments based on local knowledge are revealed as products of the

complex political and ideological context in which confrontation takes place.

Four basic points about the uses of indigenous technical knowledge in confrontations with

modernizing policies emerge from these studies. Firstly, not all resistance to state intervention is

based on indigenous knowledge, even when it is couched in those terms. Scoones, for example,

shows how debates over cattle-carrying capacity of land are intimately linked to local political

struggles over centralization of authority. The resistance to cattle-grazing schemes in

Zvishavane District included complaints about the impracticality of the schemes, but those

utilizing these arguments were also motivated by resource interests and an unhappiness about

the centralization of policy-making by the state. Secondly, not all local people with indigenous

knowledge are opposed to state intervention policies, as is clearly highlighted in the

contributions from Alexander, McGregor and Scoones.

Thirdly, not all disagreements about how to minimise environmental impact in farming arise as

responses to potentially damaging state policies. Mukamuri & Wilson demonstrate clearly here

that disputes about the value of technical rather than traditional knowledge in Mazvihwa

provided a symbolic language for underlying struggles over life-styles and production strategies,

and the resources needed for their continuity. Arguments over the spiritual preconditions for

healthy land have a history which precedes and subsumes struggles about state intervention

policies. In such struggles, it is not simply the relative merits of technical versus traditional

knowledge that are disputed, but also the relative merits of different local 'knowledges'. This

theme is also found in McGregor's paper, where different views on sacred woodlands, as well as


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on strategies of wood use and claims about 'traditional' methods of making effective use of

wood resources, have reflected a range of different perspectives within the Shurugwi

community, rather than a state/peasant conflict.

Finally, people do not always use indigenous technical knowledge to argue that a policy is not

viable. Resistance can be couched in technical terms, with arguments that the policy will not

work for technical reasons, which broadly reflect the language used by the state agriculturalists

themselves. Scoones demonstrates here that such arguments may actually receive considerable

support at the grassroots from the state's technical staff, who have their own reasons for being

reluctant to implement schemes handed down from the centre.

What we have concluded, then, is that the state does not usually know best, but it does not

follow from that this that local people know better, when it comes to formulating state policy.

Indigenous technical knowledge cannot simply be harnessed to modernizing projects, and so

eradicate state/farmer conflict, however appropriate and useful that knowledge may be in its

proper context. The ecological and political order have become so connected in the ideology of

local societies, that the knowledge of how the environment functions has itself become political.

There is no identifiable body of knowledge which can be extracted and depoliticized so that it

meets the environmental needs of all elements in the local communities - let alone meeting the

technical and centralizing needs of the modern state as well.

Rhetoric and reality

Struggles over authority and over knowledge, then, operate at the level of ideology as well as at

the level of practice. For state employees, the ideology of modernization provides a set of ideas

which justify centralist intervention. Central to the ideology is the dichotomy between tradition

and modernization. However, as we have seen, in practice tradition and modernization cannot

be neatly divided into opposing camps. Consequently, when people actually debate the relative

merits of state intervention policies, the rhetorics which they use to argue their case do not fall

into simple state/peasant, modernization/tradition oppositions. Arguments on all sides carry

within them a range of hidden messages and should not necessarily be interpreted only at the


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level of their surface content.

Historical and socio-political factors lead people to invoke different aspects of claims to

tradition or modernization. As we have seen, rhetoric often reflects strategic political choices.

The essays here by Alexander, McGregor, Scoones and Mukamuri & Wilson all illustrate cases

where the uses of rhetoric are influenced by knowing what it is that is likely to carry authority

with the intended audience. An appeal to ancestral spirits, for example, is not likely to move a

hard-bitten technocrat to a change of heart, but may be effective in mobilizing a local

community. Moreover, a skilled political actor, such as Chief Mutambara in Alexander's

contribution, may make an appeal to tradition in one context and modernization in another.

Here, the choice of rhetoric is also part of a strategy of alliance-building, a process that is well-

illustrated in Scoones' contribution.

However, it must also be remembered that most of the people involved in the frequently heated

arguments and contestations over state intervention policies are not seasoned political operators,

but simply want to protect their own interests. A state extension worker in fear of losing her job

will be inspired to propose and defend the government's programmes just as passionately and

eloquently as a farmer in fear of losing her grazing rights may be inspired to oppose them. They

do not muster their arguments to suit their audiences or to build alliances, but because their

material interests encourage them to adopt these positions. Their rhetorics reflect, not political

strategies, but a genuine commitment.

The fact that people have a genuine commitment to the position they defend does not, however,

necessarily mean that they believe in that position. This is an important, if subtle, point to

understand. Scoones describes clearly how representatives of the state may be ambivalent about

what they are doing, but will defend the policy vigorously in order to protect their own

positions. This disjunction between passionately-held argument and actual belief is not confined

to technocrats. As Mukamuri & Wilson demonstrate, a genuine commitment to the argument

that the spiritual health of the land must be maintained does not always entail a total faith that

land degradation is the outcome of poor relationships with the shrines. People will claim with


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utter commitment that the problem arises from continual disrespect for the spirits by

representatives of the state. At the same time, there is a healthy cynicism towards the actual

efficacy of rain-making ceremonies or the claims made by spiritual leaders. In blaming land

degradation on lack of respect for the spirits, people in Mazvihwa are making accusations about

who is responsible, rather than betraying an excessive spirituality. It is the subtext of the

argument that has force, and attracts a passionate partisan commitment, rather than its overt

content.

Subtexts in arguments do not arise randomly. Rhetoric is shaped historically, both through

interactions with and within the state, and through local struggles. The rhetorics mobilized to

suppport various positions have developed to serve specific purposes. In Mazvihwa, for

example, the rhetoric connected with guarding the spiritual health of the land arose out of local

struggles but then found application in a struggle with the state. Unsurprisingly, therefore,

rhetorics carry obscured within them a range of other agendas and motives, beyond the outward

messages of the rhetoric.

The rhetoric adopted by the state policy-makers carries as many hidden agendas, and is as much

the product of previous struggles, as the rhetoric adopted by the executors and enemies of those

policies. As we have demonstrated, the umbrella rhetorics of civilization and modernization

could carry a huge range of implications, while broadly representing a commitment to importing

elements of European society into Africa. Jeater's essay demonstrates how the concept of

civilization in Southern Rhodesia in the first decades of the century included a commitment to

introducing European models of gender relationships. However, the aspect of relations between

African men and women which was deemed to be at fault and in need of civilizing varied from

time to time, and depended as much upon gender struggles in the UK as upon anything directly

under the administrators' noses. Similarly, McGregor shows how the state's rigorous

conservation policies, and panic about wood fuel shortages, which began in Southern Rhodesia

in the 1920s but continue in contemporary Zimbabwe, were part of an Empire-wide panic. The

fear that resources were about to disappear was not based on any close observation of actual

wood resource management in Southern Rhodesia's communal areas. Rather, it was connected


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with a desire to apply 'modern' land-management policies, developed in completely different

circumstances in the exhausted cotton regions of the USA. In both cases, the rhetorics used by

the state policy-makers were deeply rooted, in both form and content, in struggles that were

taking place elsewhere.

Rhetoric and reality interact in complex ways. Words and arguments have particular resonances

in particular contexts. Rhetoric can be used to make claims that can have multiple meanings.

One of the things that our interest in perspective revealed was that the surface content of

rhetorical messages could have different meanings for the various participants in struggles over

state intervention programmes, and describe different realities.

Mukamuri & Wilson's examination of arguments over the sacred rules of the mountain

demonstrate a situation where a universalist claim actually disguises a sectional interest. The

spirits of the mountain are presented as having an interest in the entire local community.

However, it is clear that this claim has historically served the interests of a sector of the

community, and that the details of the claim itself have varied in furtherance of sectional

struggles. The bit of the mountain which is actually sacred has been redefined on a number of

occasions, for political reasons, but the claim that all parts of the community have an equal

investment in respecting the spirits remains central to the rhetoric. As a result, opposition to

state intervention phrased in terms of respecting the spirits of the mountain appears as

community-wide opposition; the rhetoric embraces the entire community even while the

specific historic struggles associated with the rhetoric may have been sectarian.

Even where the rhetoric associated with state intervention openly claims to be furthering a

sectional interest, it should not necessarily be accepted at face value. The British South Africa

Company claimed in the 1900s to be protecting the interests of African women. However, as

Jeater's contribution demonstrates, it is clear that the BSACo was concerned about women

because its broader development aims required certain types of gender relationships to be

established in the region. A desire to eradicate women's oppression provided neither the original

motivation for action nor the standards by which success would be measured. The emphasis on


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the need for women's emancipation was a rhetorical claim which can be traced back to debates

over the position of women in Europe at the end of the nineteenth century, but not to any

demand for state intervention from African women themselves. As it became clear that socio-

economic transformation could be effected without female emancipation, the state's

commitment to challenging women's oppression evaporated.

Jeater's example demonstrates again how the state's commitment to civilization or

modernization is better understood as a rhetorical device than as a programme for change.

McGregor's contribution illustrates brilliantly how the state's rhetoric about wood fuel crises and

the need for modern conservation policies was actually totally divorced from its actions in

managing wood resources. The strict limitations on African wood use were introduced as part of

a programme of centralization and increased administrative control. It was only subsequently

that the rhetoric of conservation was brought in to justify and give a sense of urgency to this

programme. In fact, the biggest threat to wood resources was not the African communities, but

the mining interests, which were left to carry on business as usual. The policies which were

enforced in the communal areas ostensibly to conserve wood were useless for this purpose, and

in fact actually contributed to the disappearance of wood resources.

Finally, it should be noted that where a programme appears to be successful, as defined by the

rhetoric, this does not mean that the success is a result of the programme. It may be despite, not

because of, a state intervention programme that, for example, women can resist patriarchal

control or people in communal areas begin to restrict wood consumption. Jeater demonstrates

that, in so far as African women developed a degree of independence from patriarchal control,

this was not primarily because the state had introduced a law to limit bridewealth payments and

pledging. Rather, it was because they could take advantage of the economic conditions in urban

and mining areas to earn their own living and ignore sanctions applied by their family heads.

McGregor's doctoral research has revealed the development of contemporary strategies to

conserve wood fuel. These have been in response to the degradation of wood resources that,

ironically, has been induced by the state's so-called 'conservation' policies. The fact that these

strategies have been recently adopted, and are accompanied by various rhetorical justifications


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at the local level, is itself ample evidence that there was no real wood fuel crisis in the period

when the state was urgently insisting on the need for conservation. Now that there genuinely is a

crisis, it is not only - or even primarily - the technical solutions of forestry experts that are being

used to deal with it, but also various local responses rooted in debate about the value of wood

resources and sacred woodlands. The state's policies and rhetoric are not responsible for the

move towards conservation.

The rhetoric of modernization, then, should not be understood simply as a commitment to state

policies of change and improvement, based on scientific and technical principles. The rhetorical

force of an appeal to modernization will depend on the historical and socio-political context in

which the appeal is made. We cannot assume, from a person's socio-political position, that we

know what kind of rhetorical arguments they will use to defend their interests. Mukamuri &

Wilson provide a vivid vignette of a dispute over a proposed water programme, where the state

official uses the language of the ancestors, and the 'traditional' local opponent uses the language

of scientific geology.

Conclusion

Struggles over modernization are struggles over power, authority and knowledge, not about

whether Africans want to be 'modern' or 'traditional'. The opposition between traditional and

modern is a false distinction, for the two are intimately dependent upon each other both

conceptually and in practice. The state's commitment to modernization is best understood as an

ideological device. The state finds the rhetoric of modernization useful because it attracts World

Bank support, and justifies claims that policies are based on objective technical criteria.

Historically, however, the rhetoric has also carried the submerged message that the state knows

best what is good for the people, and has the authority to impose centrally-determined policies.

If we are to understand what state intervention programmes are really about, we should move

away from talking about modernization, and look at what the state actually does, not at what it

says.

MODERNIZATION & ITS DISCONTENTS: STRUGGLES OVER STATE INTERVENTION IN ZIMBABWE'S COMMUNAL AREAS

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