Cultivating Success in Uganda: Kigezi Farmers and Colonial Policies - By Grace Carswell

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© 2008 The AuthorsJournal compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing LtdJournal of Agrarian Change, Vol. 8 No. 4, October 2008, pp. 618–646.

global fresh-cut flower industry, at least so far, despite several attempts that Zieglerdescribes. This accounts for the power of intermediaries in the FCFGCC, by contrastwith the ‘producer-driven’ and ‘buyer-driven’ models prevalent in the wider literatureon commodity/value chain governance. It is also interesting that, compared with thekeen interest in much recent research on FFVs (as well as coffee and tea commoditychains), the ‘branding’ of flowers by country, let alone specific site, of origin is virtuallynon-existent. What matters above all at the point of sale is the combination of appearance(aesthetic quality) and price.

Finally, as the list of main sources of supply of fresh-cut flowers to the NYMA shows(above), this is not a commodity of necessarily tropical or sub-tropical provenance likemany others featured in studies of horticultural global commodity chains. Flowergrowers and exporters in Central and South America, as in sub-Saharan Africa (predom-inantly Kenya, also Zimbabwe), compete in the US market with producers in California(and other US states) and in the US and European markets with the Dutch system andits uniquely formidable co-ordination of plant breeding, significantly automated produc-tion, marketing and promotion.

MICHAEL JENNINGS

Cultivating Success in Uganda: Kigezi Farmers and Colonial Policies, by Grace Carswell.Oxford: British Institute in East Africa and James Currey, 2007. Pp. xii+258. £50.00 (hb);£16.95 (pb). ISBN 978-1-84701-600-3 and 978-1-84701-601-0

‘Development’ as a process inherently tends to look forwards – planning for and predict-ing the outcome of interventions two, five, ten years into the future. In as much as the‘past’ is important to development discourse, it has generally been as the benchmark againstwhich policies and programmes are judged. The past, in short, is to be escaped from, notturned to as a source for answers. Yet increasingly ‘histories’ of rural development areproviding new ways of examining current processes of rural change and agriculturaldevelopment. Through detailed, focused studies of how colonial rural development policieshave impacted on African communities, and been changed themselves through that contactand interaction, the history of rural development has much to contribute to current debates.

Grace Carswell’s eminently readable and interesting book is a history of rural devel-opment policy and social change in southwest Uganda. Its study of a century of ruraldevelopment in Kigezi, and reaction to such interventions, examines shifts in rural devel-opment policy, and efforts to impose particular agricultural practices upon farmers. Indoing so, it raises important questions about the construction of rural development pol-icy: how ‘development problems’ were manufactured in the analysis of administratorsand planners (both colonial and independent era); how these fed into policy creation andimplementation; how outcomes were interpreted and assessed; and how those beingdeveloped reacted and interacted with the interventions of the state. By considering bothcolonial and post-colonial periods it emphasizes the significant continuity that hasinformed policy as implemented in Kigezi. It shows through detailed and careful analysishow development myths have been manufactured and sustained. Carswell challengesassumptions about land-use, and questions how ‘evidence’ of environmental collapse is

Michael Jennings, Department of Development Studies, School of Oriental and African Studies,Thornhaugh St, Russell Square, London WC1H 0XG, UK. e-mail: [email protected]

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created and justified. She also examines what is meant by ‘success’ and ‘failure’, andissues of power that inform who judges success, and by what standards are used inthat assessment.

The book covers several important themes in rural development policy in this area:the attempts to introduce cash crops by colonial authorities; concern, turning to almostpanic, over the state of the environment in Kigezi – an issue that exercised both colonialand post-colonial (even international) officials; customary understandings of land-ownership and tenure, and efforts to introduce modern, individual property rights; andshifts in income and labour diversification, and how these have reflected social changes.

In her examination of the attempts to introduce cash-crops into Kigezi from the 1920s,Carswell argues that colonial depictions of such efforts as a ‘failure’ reflected theirown priorities and efforts to transform agricultural production away from food toexport-oriented crops, especially tobacco, flax and coffee. But the real failure was perhapsthe government’s lack of recognition of existing regional food markets, labour demands(particularly on women) that might conflict with growing export-crops, and the unwill-ingness of Ugandan farmers to function within the restrictive regime of official marketingstructures. This conceptual lacunae ultimately undermined the government’s efforts topromote agricultural change. But in choosing to define its efforts as a ‘failure’, questionsare raised about the process of evaluation itself: who decides what is a failure? Whoseagenda is reflected in such judgements? And what is the impact of such a judgement onfuture policy decisions? Tobacco, for example, was a popular crop, but one that increasinglywas sold through informal channels rather than the official marketing structure (so afailure for colonial authorities, but a ‘success’ for tobacco farmers).

As concern over the state of the environment, in particular soil erosion and desertifi-cation, began to take hold in 1930s East Africa, protection measures based upon Europeanunderstandings of ‘scientific’ farming began to be imposed across the region. These oftenmet resistance, in many cases serious, ultimately contributing to the undermining ofcolonial legitimacy by the 1950s. Yet, as the book shows, whilst colonial demandsthat terracing, benching and other labour-intensive and time-consuming activities beundertaken by farmers were strongly opposed in much of East Africa, in Kigezi, suchmeasures (or elements of them) were adopted relatively successfully. Unlike in those areaswhich offered resistance (whether passive through inaction, or active through destructionof works, disruption of meetings, etc.), Carswell demonstrates the similarities betweenalready existing traditional agricultural practices and colonial measures which appeared asmodified forms of those practices. Moreover, she suggests, colonial authorities putgreater efforts into educational and propaganda activities than elsewhere; and the use oflocal chiefs to drive the policy forwards perhaps gave greater local ownership. This makesKigezi an interesting case-study in reactions to colonial policy, suggesting responses tosuch impositions were highly localized.

Of particular interest is the argument the book presents as to whether soil erosion anddegradation has been a major factor in Kigezi agriculture. Despite the image of a districtin a perpetual environmental crisis, from initial concerns in the 1930s, through post-colonial reports about the area, dire predictions of the imminent collapse of the ecologicalsystem did not happen. Local farmers were able to manage their land in a way that bothmaintained production and avoided serious widespread degradation. The book demon-strates how myths and neo-Malthusian theories have shaped policy, often in contradictionwith the empirical data. Carswell uses a 1945 study of the land and land-use conductedby the District Agricultural Officer, and repeats the survey in the same area in 1996. Thefindings are startling, and raise questions about the manufacture of ‘knowledge’ upon

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which rural development policy is based. Carswell and her team found little evidence ofserious erosion, production levels being maintained, plots of similar size, and (in contraryto almost all reports since 1945) fallow periods in fields increased. This book challengesneo-Malthusian theories, and provides a very effective demonstration of how communitiescan effectively respond to challenges and pressures such as increased population. Theoverall positive picture is, though, more nuanced when examined in closer detail, as thebook makes clear, reflecting shifts in security, and access to land and labour in Kigezi.Whilst fallow periods increased amongst richer households, and to a lesser extent inpoorer ones (reflecting strength in the one case, weakness in the other), middle-rankinghouseholds tended to fallow the least.

The book presents agricultural production and land use in Kigezi as a flexible system:capable of responding to new challenges and opportunities; absorbing new ideas andsystems where appropriate, and rejecting those which do not fit the ambitions, constraintsand opportunities available to regional farmers. However, options are being increasinglylimited, social stratification is increasing, enabling some to prosper, but leaving othersmore vulnerable. The book suggests that whilst the poor have not become poorer, theyhave become more numerous. Meanwhile richer households have become more-so,gaining control over an increasing proportion of land through an active land-market.

Cultivating Success in Uganda is an important historical account of the impact of devel-opment policy and practice on, and rural change in, African communities. Its longue-duréeperspective allows the multifaceted and ever-shifting lives of the people of Kigezi, theopportunities and constraints they face, to be brought to the fore. But in its questioningof the nature of success and failure in development, its exploration of the power of themyth and assumptions in shaping policy and distorting reality, it offers important insightsinto how development policy is created, implemented, evaluated and propagated. Asdevelopment in Africa continues to dominate the international agenda, and with debatesover the extent and impact of environmental degradation and the resurgence of neo-Malthusian discourse in certain sections of the development international, this is a timelyand important book.

NEIL HARVEY

Intimate Enemies: Landowners, Power, and Violence in Chiapas, by Aaron Bobrow-Strain.Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2007. Pp. xv+272. £57.00 (hb),£13.99 (pb). ISBN 978-0-8223-3987-8 and 978-0-8223-4004-1

The large literature on the Chiapas rebellion and Zapatista movement has, until now,been marked by the absence of in-depth analysis of the area’s landed elites. Bobrow-Strain’sethnographic study not only capably fills this gap, but also provides insights that will beuseful for students of rural class relations beyond Chiapas and Mexico.

Intimate Enemies is an apt title for understanding local power relations stretching backto the mid-nineteenth century. It immediately conveys the close but exploitative relationsbetween ladino elites with indigenous workers who, for generations, supplied cheap labourfor Chiapas’s commercial estates of sugar, coffee and cattle. The author’s use of both historicalarchives and detailed interviews allows the reader to appreciate the rise and fall of landed

Neil Harvey, Department of Government, New Mexico State University, Box 30001/Dept 3BN LasCruces, NM 88003-0001, USA. e-mail: [email protected]

Documents

Cultivating Success in Uganda: Kigezi Farmers and Colonial Policies - By Grace Carswell