The principal and recurrent failure of development planning in Africa lies in its lack of organic relationship with our cultural heritage. There is a sad joke about why the faculties of agriculture in our universities do not seem to be doing well in their attempts at solving our chronic problems or recurrent food shortages. It is alleged that within the same faculty, the crop scientists pursue elaborate and often expensive projects aimed at pest control, but because they neglect to compare notes with the soil scientist, after some two pest-free and reasonably good harvests, the soil is rendered useless by the otherwise wonderful pesticides. Hopefully, there is a clear exaggeration here for dramatic effect. But too often it is the case that our policy planners and the executing agencies are guilty of such lack of coordination. Instead of integrated planning, what we see is a planning for development in which agriculture is the center of all our concerns, with culture being treated as a footnote — if indeed it ever receives attention.

In an important FESTAC Colloquium lecture titled "Culture, Education and Development in Africa," Professor J. Ki-Zerbo reminds us that "every authentic culture has the tang of the soil. In [its] beginning every culture is more or less based on agriculture. . . . In the Africa of old, land was almost always at once landed property, object of social appropriation and an entity linked with the gods" (1977:105). We must, in fact, reverse Ki-Zerbo’s argument and insist that every authentic agriculture is or should be based on culture. It is within this context that we can fully appreciate the fact that within our cultural heritage, the calendar of events that may begin with propitiatory rites in honor of the Earth Goddess and move into the successive periods of clearing the soil, planting, making sacrifices to the rain god, observing "the Week of Peace, gathering the harvest home and finally celebrating the rice or yam festival" (Achebe 1958) all these constitute an organic approach to development planning. In the final section of this paper, we shall see how an imported `hi-tech’ agricultural project was once imposed upon a particular community with arrogant disregard for the community’s total way of life, how that community still suffers severe disruptions introduced by this alleged `development project’.

We may also take note of the organic link between health and our arts and culture. As pointed out by one of our cultural experts:

[A] nation, after it is well fed, must learn how to relax. The beer bar is our national theatre where we drink till the wee hours of the morning. As a result, we are rapidly becoming a nation of incipient alcoholics. The tragedy is that we have no well nourished bodies to carry the burden of eternal drunkenness. So our workers and rural people kill themselves on bad liquor. Leisure cannot be the preserve of only the rulers. (Awoonor 1972:20).

 

The query here points to the lack of provision for healthy ways of relaxation. It is rare to find in our development projects any considerations for leisure facilities. Indeed, hardly any of our modern housing projects feature so much as a little space for even a children’s playground and we are shocked to find our children in the city trying to play soccer in the street. Yet, it is common knowledge that every little African village allows space for leisure activities by both children and adults. The traditional ‘village square’ is a cultural institution often overlooked by so-called modern town planners.

It is crucial that we be clear in our minds about what culture really means. Perhaps our sad attitude to issues of culture is partly a result of our lack of a full understanding of the term:

Even today our Ministers of Culture, with very few exceptions, are finding it hard to demonstrate the fact that African culture is not the artificial flower which adorns our hat, but the very blood which flows in our veins. Our Ministers of Education work relentlessly towards the promotion of the quantitative and qualitative elements of the structures that come under their departments. Our Ministers of Economy go on harping on the imperative need for ‘modernization’. Our Heads of State often consider culture as that additional element that is added to the budget when the latter is more or less in balanced. (Ki-Zerbo 1977:105)

 

A direct consequence of this lack of understanding of culture as an integral or organic part of all our programs of education and development, may be seen clearly in what we can describe as the festival approach to cultural programming. The festival approach has many good sides to it, but we must not lose sight of its hidden dangers. The festival approach tends to isolate culture from the mainstream of educational and development programs; it removes culture from the curriculum or essential programs of development and treats it as an extra-curricular and extra-budgetary activity. Something you do, but only when you have finished your main program. You pay attention to it only when you have the time and, above all, the resources to spare.

But it is a mistake to treat culture this way and the mistake takes on serious, even tragic dimensions when culture for too many of us means little more than drumming and dancing. There is a great deal more about culture that we do not seem to understand or fully appreciate. Our culture is certainly there in our music, our dance, our handicraft. But that cannot be all there is. Our culture must be there in all the books we give our children and youth to read; it must be there in all our language education, our science and mathematics, as well as agricultural education and it certainly must be there in our religious education.

The festival approach takes culture out of the curriculum, out of the books, out of the classrooms, out of project planning and implementation and puts it on display for only a few days of excitement and jubilation. We must wonder what happens during the rest of the year. We must wonder what our children continue to read or listen to. We must reflect on what religion we believe in and teach our children and practice with them outside the festival period. And in a situation of constant shortage of development capital, probably the greatest argument against the festival approach is the fact that much of the investment goes to profit all kinds of people except the artists or other cultural experts (Armah 1985).

There is, however, an important lesson from our traditional festivals that must not be lost on us. Behind many a one-day or seven-day festival, there is often a whole year of careful and sustained planning and hard work. There can be no Yam Festival unless there are yams to harvest. Clearing the land, finding and planting the seed yams, tending them, even the harvesting, these are all dimensions of the culture without which there can be no agriculture. But clearly they are not festive occasions. The festival is possible and makes sense only because it follows a long period of hard, fruitful labor.

We need to pay such attention to our culture that it can mature to a point where the seeds are carefully chosen, sown early and taken care of on a daily basis. Then and only then may we harvest the full creative potential of our children and our society. Until then, we remain shadows of our true selves, or worse, shadows of other people’s images.

Of the countless formal definitions of culture that come to us from various sources, there is one by the Latin American Nobel Prize novelist, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, for whom "culture is the totalizing force of creativity, the social utilization of human intelligence." The implications of this definition are many, but we may dwell here on only two dimensions: creativity and intelligence.

First of all, we must focus on the intellectual factor in culture. It seems that we do not give due recognition to all the elements of creativity, especially in our truncated view of culture as the domain of oral, performing and plastic arts. The missing element is often the intellectual-philosophical factor. Perhaps this is not surprising, since we tend to credit our people and their traditional practices with little intelligence or wisdom, largely on account of their not being associated with written record. Indeed, for many of us, illiteracy is almost synonymous with ignorance. Thus our adult literacy campaigns are invariably dedicated to ‘the eradication of illiteracy, disease and ignorance,’ suggesting an inevitable and organic link between these three deadly sins. Yet, the irony of it all is that it is rather we who approach our people with undue presumption and arrogance. It is rather we who are the ones so deficient in knowledge of the true conditions and motivations of life in our societies. Precisely because of this lack of ‘native intelligence’ and because much of our presumed learning has no organic relationship with our people’s values and aspirations, our so-called development projects — based as they often are on alien values — have yielded such meager social benefits. Individually, many of us have demonstrated remarkable human intelligence. But until we can collectively mobilize and utilize such intelligence for social transformation, we cannot claim to have developed an intellectual culture worth boasting about. In a sad way, what we have so far done is to project our own failures and lack of imagination and understanding on an alleged backwardness of African societies.

The quiet but very determined manner in which our people often reject some of our imported and badly coordinated ‘development projects’ and various structures of adjustment may indeed be a barrier to sustainable progress. But it could also very well be their only way of maintaining some reasonable balance, however precarious, in a confused and dizzy world.

Our people’s traditional approach to socio-cultural problems suggests that they conceive the social collective as they do the individual human being: there is the physical or material essence; there is the mental/emotional or psychological essence; and there is the spiritual essence as well. Just as ailments of the human being may sometimes best be tackled at all three levels, so also may we deal with social ailments.

It will be inaccurate to say that contemporary development neglects matters of the mind and of the spirit. We certainly do attempt to develop body, mind and spirit. The critical error is that there is little or no coordination among the three areas of development. In fact, in some cases, they tend to work against one another. We have, for example, embraced an alien religion that actually assures us that material well-being is an almost insurmountable obstacle to spiritual bliss. And we embrace such teaching against the glaring evidence that the messengers of this doctrine of ‘blessed poverty’ are themselves invariably so full of material prosperity that they can afford to demonstrate their love by sending us generous gifts of their left over meals and discarded clothing. And when it comes to matters of the intellect, we seem too ready to put our own minds on hold and make our heads ready to receive borrowed or donated ideas.

African leaders are very anxious to defend the integrity of their boundaries and their sovereign rights over mineral reserves. But the minds of Africans remain no-man’s lands protected by no boundary and constantly subjected to invasion. But then, do mental values not prepare the ground for values that are assessed in terms of cash? (Ki-Zerbo 1977: 107)

 

This fundamental lack of appreciation for the intellectual content of African culture may partly explain why our development planners rarely consult with those for whom they claim to be planning. The tendency is to assume that once we can import sufficient foreign technology, our projects should yield expected profits. We never seem to learn anything from the repeated failures of most development projects that look perfect as blueprints but collapse soon after they are initiated. Even for agricultural projects based on imported technology, it is not enough to cite lack of spare parts and technical expertise as the major causes of failure. More than mechanical and technical shortcomings, we must look to the human factor. For a specific and representative case study, we shall consider the case of Wheta versus Imported Development Planning.

The town of Wheta is located in the Ketu District of Ghana, some two miles away from the Keta Lagoon and two miles off the Accra-Aflao trunk road that runs into Togo. Wheta is a typical farming community, until recently focusing mainly on the production of such staples as corn, cassava, potatoes, tomatoes, palm trees and okra. In the past, sugar cane was an important cash crop. The weaving of Kente, the most important traditional textile of Ghana, was also a major economic activity.

In a significant display of traditional wisdom, the single most fertile stretch of land in the Wheta area was protected from private and individual ownership and could not be claimed by even the Paramount Chief as ‘Stool Land’. It was available for any citizen to cultivate for as long as possible. But any farmer who left his or her plot fallow for more than a couple of years could lose it to a new user. With its rich, clayey soil and the seasonal flooding from the Kplipka River, this stretch of land was particularly suited to the cultivation of sugar cane and other important staples such as okra and tomatoes. It also supported a culture of fish-farming in fishponds. It was the favorite ground for the hunting of a variety of wild game. It provided ebe, the special grass thatch with which most houses were roofed. Most important, it was also the main source of water for the entire population. But ‘national development’ policy soon caught up with Wheta and deprived the people of what was in many ways the very nerve center of their economic life.

In the early 1960s, the Government of Ghana unilaterally took over the entire stretch, without consultation and with no compensation. Indeed, armed police were brought in to be on guard as the almost ready-for-harvest sugar canes were taken down by heavy agricultural machinery. For a few years the area became one of the most successful projects in the nationwide system of State Farms. It specialized in rice cultivation and in poultry farming. The impact of this event is inscribed for us in poetry by a citizen of Wheta, then a teenager whose schooling was hampered by this tragic episode:

Our roof is now a sieve — Atsu

The rains beat us. — Beat us.

Even in our dreams.

And the Gods — they say — are not to blame.

The State Farms have burnt the thatch and dug its roots.

They grow rice. — And cane sugar.

But oh! — Atsu

My Twin Brother — Atsu!

Our bowels are not made for the tasty things of life.

The rice — the sugar — all go to Accra

For people with clean stomach and silver teeth

To eat and expand in their borrowed glory.

(Anyidoho 1984:54)

For the people of Wheta, then, development — especially as it has been planned and implemented from the national level — has not been a pleasant experience. For instance, the single borehole that was dug as an alternative source of water, was not only inadequate for the population; it quickly broke down from lack of maintenance and the people have had to go back to their old source of water. Except that the water is now mostly collected from small canals prepared for rice cultivation and is therefore invariably saturated with chemicals from the crops.

The original State Farms program collapsed many years ago, but the rice cultivation project was revived a few years ago under a technical cooperation agreement with the Chinese and under the management of the Irrigation Development Authority, another central government organization. This time, however, the project land was divided into small holdings and allocated to individual farmers, mostly from the Wheta area, who are expected to cultivate their plots, with the IDA providing technical and some financial support. The farmers in turn must sell their produce and at government-determined prices, to the State Food Distribution Corporation. These farmers used to work this same land in a labor-intensive economy. But rice cultivation is both capital and labor intensive. The result is that, with bad judgement by several farmers not used to the peculiar demands of this new system of farming, coupled with very poor management by the IDA, most of the farmers have gone bankrupt and have abandoned their plots or have had their plots taken away from them. The jubilation that greeted what was initially seen as a return of the land to the people has been short-lived.

A sadder aspect of this failure is the fact that the new project has greatly disrupted the community’s way of life and without offering any meaningful compensation. In order to engage in rice cultivation it was necessary for most people to abandon almost all other primary economic activities, including the cultivation of their traditional food crops. For the last eight weeks or so prior to harvest, a rice field needs to be guarded from sunrise to sundown against invading birds. Often children have to be re-deployed from the classroom and playground to help mother and father keep the birds from harvesting the crop. Even with a reasonably good harvest, the investment often surpasses the income, especially since the pricing is determined by the central government, whose main interest is in ‘political stability’ rather than fairness in prices of farm produce. And when the harvest fails, the tragedy of the family is often total.

It may be argued that a project such as this is bound to fail. Not only does it violate ‘cultural protocol’ by alienating the land from the people without due regard to custom or even federal laws; in its planning and implementation, the entire community is reduced to the level of objects. At no stage in the planning of the entire project did anyone seek the opinion, let alone the consent, of those who were eventually expected to carry it out. And in the implementation itself all critical decisions, such as the timing of harrowing, sowing, even harvesting, are made by the IDA, not the farmers, presumably because the IDA controls the technical expertise. But the real explanation is that this approach to development assumes ignorance on the part of the community. Theirs is to receive instructions and do what they are told. But it would seem that a people who have cultivated a stretch of land for several centuries, must have developed a body of knowledge about local conditions, even climatic conditions, that should serve as a useful complement to the potential efficiency of imported technology.

What we miss here is a legacy of creativity, firmly rooted in a rich soil of culturally valid orientation. The pattern is a familiar one for other parts of Ghana and, indeed, for Africa and what is now referred to as the developing world. Almost all of these regions are battling with the same legacy of their colonialism. So far, development programs, planned and implemented from the national and international levels have had little impact in releasing the creative potentials of the people. Perhaps the key lies in small-scale projects initiated and directed from the local level and closely monitored by an intimate understanding of the dynamics of culture.

The guiding philosophy here is that for any such program of development to yield the benefits desired by society, we must begin with a proper harnessing of the collective and individual knowledge and spirit of the people. Further, we must understand that the proper development of the collective and individual knowledge and spirit is more a function of a variety of cultural institutions and practices than that of development blueprints produced by distant bureaucrats and technocrats. A people who cannot trace their own footprints from the past are more likely to walk in the shadow of other people’s progress than forge their own way into a future over which they can claim a reasonable measure of control and self-determination. In short, the theory that should guide our work is one that views development as the collective fruit of a people’s creative endeavor. The emphasis on creativity is crucial if we are to avert the recurring situation in which one sees development as the product of endless assimilation of ready-made solutions devised by distant people for one’s own, if similar, problems of existence. In any case, we are reminded of the fact that no aid, however generous or even technical, is without its own cultural baggage, a baggage that may do more to undermine than it does to help develop the recipient society (Mazrui 1990: 195-207).

Finally, let me turn again to the need for an organic link between agriculture and culture. This is important for our purposes, since agriculture is often the centerpiece of our development projects, while culture is often seen as amusement for the idle and the not-so-serious. Against this background, I would propose the following: Agriculture provides sustenance for the physical and ultimately perishable or mortal body of a people; culture cultivates the mind and nurtures the soul. A people who deploy all their resources into providing food for the physical body only, shall leave nothing but a legacy of skeletons and excrement to their offspring.

1. Co-authors of the basic textbook on elementary mathematics used in schools throughout Ghana well into the 1960s.

Achebe, Chinua. (1958) Things Fall Apart. London: Heinemann.

Anyidoho, Kofi. (1984) "The Song of a Twin Brother," Earthchild. Accra: Woeli, pp.52-56.

Armah, Ayi Kwei. (1985) "The Festival Syndrome," West Africa (15 April).

Awoonor, Kofi. (1972) Come Back, Ghana.

Ki-Zerbo, Joseph. (1977) "Culture, Education and Development in Africa" FESTAC Colloquium on Black Civilization and Education Colloquium Proceedings, vol. 1. Lagos: Center for Black and African Arts and Civilization, pp. 105-113.

Mazrui, Ali A. (1990) Cultural Forces in World Politics. London: James Currey.