International African Institute

The Encyclopaedia Africana Dictionary of African Biography III, South Africa, Botswana,Lesotho, SwazilandReview by: Kevin ShillingtonAfrica: Journal of the International African Institute, Vol. 69, No. 3 (1999), pp. 475-476Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of the International African InstituteStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1161237 .

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REVIEWS OF BOOKS REVIEWS OF BOOKS

introduction to PRA. Chapters 9 and 10 add new ideas, especially regarding the primacy of the personal as having been neglected on the development map (p. 231). Moreover the eloquent, humorous and gender-sensitive language, and the illustrative case studies, accessible to both academics and practitioners, must be praised. However, there is also need for criticism. In the first place, I am uncomfortable with Chambers's oversimplified dichotomy of the realities of 'uppers' and 'lowers', which are portrayed as broadly consensual or otherwise can be matched by a sensitive facilitator (p. 148). Secondly, it remains to be proved empirically whether empowerment through PRA actually improves people's livelihoods:; an enterprise for the next stage in the author's journey? And, most of all, Chambers nowhere provides evidence that sharing knowledge and perceptions does indeed empower.

Failed PRA processes are blamed on the 'bad practice' of the individual facilitator, therewith understating political, legislative, administrative, socio-cultural or practical constraints on manoeuvre at community level. R. Hinton (Cambridge Anthropology 19 (1), 1996, 24-56) infers from her study of refugee camps in Nepal that there are important contextual constraints on the 'empowerment approach in any development context, and still more posed by the very structure of implementing institutions' (ibid., p. 47), and hence that a linear correlation between participatory projects and empowerment is unfounded. In contrast, Chambers holds that personal, professional and institutional changes, essential to the new professionalism, are already under way-not only in small and large development organisations but also in other disciplines such as the natural sciences and business management.

Chambers's book bears no exclusive relevance to African countries. However, in a recent personal conversation he singled out transformations taking place in Tanzania, where positive local field experience with PRA has inspired a dozen Permanent Secretaries to adopt participatory approaches in their Ministries. Acknowledging the 'danger of a repeat of ujamaa', Chambers thinks nonetheless that the processes will be genuine, not rhetorical. The spread of PRA is apparently unstoppable, so seems Chambers's idealism. While I agree that participatory methods may allow communities to become active agents of development policy and practice, I am sceptical whether they have the potential to revolutionise fundamental power structures and whether development institutions are really interested in, or capable of, challenging existing asymmetries of wealth, knowledge and power. Chambers himself ponders (light-heartedly) on whether he is presenting us with a circular argument, where 'there is no escape, only a willingness ... to seek and puzzle over evidence that does not fit' (p. 243).

JULIKA ROLLIN School of Oriental and African Studies, London

The Encyclopaedia Africana Dictionary of African Biography III, South Africa, Botswana, Lesotho, Swaziland. Algonac MI: Encyclopaedia Africana Project, Reference Publications, 1995, 304 pp.

The Encyclopaedia Africana's Dictionary of African Biography was the brainchild of Dr W. E. B. Du Bois, who conceived the project way back in 1909. It was to be fourteen years after Du Bois's death, however, before the project, based in Ghana, published its first volume in 1977. Volume I covered Ethiopia and Ghana and was shortly followed by Volume II on Sierra Leone and Zaire. Nearly twenty years further on, Volume III, the present book under review, appeared. The choice of countries followed more regional logic than previous volumes, being devoted to the southern African states of Botswana, Lesotho, Swaziland and South Africa. Namibia, curiously, has a volume planned all to itself, a privilege shared only by Nigeria. Twenty volumes are planned in all.

introduction to PRA. Chapters 9 and 10 add new ideas, especially regarding the primacy of the personal as having been neglected on the development map (p. 231). Moreover the eloquent, humorous and gender-sensitive language, and the illustrative case studies, accessible to both academics and practitioners, must be praised. However, there is also need for criticism. In the first place, I am uncomfortable with Chambers's oversimplified dichotomy of the realities of 'uppers' and 'lowers', which are portrayed as broadly consensual or otherwise can be matched by a sensitive facilitator (p. 148). Secondly, it remains to be proved empirically whether empowerment through PRA actually improves people's livelihoods:; an enterprise for the next stage in the author's journey? And, most of all, Chambers nowhere provides evidence that sharing knowledge and perceptions does indeed empower.

Failed PRA processes are blamed on the 'bad practice' of the individual facilitator, therewith understating political, legislative, administrative, socio-cultural or practical constraints on manoeuvre at community level. R. Hinton (Cambridge Anthropology 19 (1), 1996, 24-56) infers from her study of refugee camps in Nepal that there are important contextual constraints on the 'empowerment approach in any development context, and still more posed by the very structure of implementing institutions' (ibid., p. 47), and hence that a linear correlation between participatory projects and empowerment is unfounded. In contrast, Chambers holds that personal, professional and institutional changes, essential to the new professionalism, are already under way-not only in small and large development organisations but also in other disciplines such as the natural sciences and business management.

Chambers's book bears no exclusive relevance to African countries. However, in a recent personal conversation he singled out transformations taking place in Tanzania, where positive local field experience with PRA has inspired a dozen Permanent Secretaries to adopt participatory approaches in their Ministries. Acknowledging the 'danger of a repeat of ujamaa', Chambers thinks nonetheless that the processes will be genuine, not rhetorical. The spread of PRA is apparently unstoppable, so seems Chambers's idealism. While I agree that participatory methods may allow communities to become active agents of development policy and practice, I am sceptical whether they have the potential to revolutionise fundamental power structures and whether development institutions are really interested in, or capable of, challenging existing asymmetries of wealth, knowledge and power. Chambers himself ponders (light-heartedly) on whether he is presenting us with a circular argument, where 'there is no escape, only a willingness ... to seek and puzzle over evidence that does not fit' (p. 243).

JULIKA ROLLIN School of Oriental and African Studies, London

The Encyclopaedia Africana Dictionary of African Biography III, South Africa, Botswana, Lesotho, Swaziland. Algonac MI: Encyclopaedia Africana Project, Reference Publications, 1995, 304 pp.

The Encyclopaedia Africana's Dictionary of African Biography was the brainchild of Dr W. E. B. Du Bois, who conceived the project way back in 1909. It was to be fourteen years after Du Bois's death, however, before the project, based in Ghana, published its first volume in 1977. Volume I covered Ethiopia and Ghana and was shortly followed by Volume II on Sierra Leone and Zaire. Nearly twenty years further on, Volume III, the present book under review, appeared. The choice of countries followed more regional logic than previous volumes, being devoted to the southern African states of Botswana, Lesotho, Swaziland and South Africa. Namibia, curiously, has a volume planned all to itself, a privilege shared only by Nigeria. Twenty volumes are planned in all.

475 475

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REVIEWS OF BOOKS

Any large encyclopaedic project is bound to suffer from the complexities of scale, but this Volume III has suffered more than most. It seems to have been 'on the back burner' for most of the 1980s and, as a result, many of the essays are seriously dated. Virtually none of the bibliographical references extends beyond 1983, an almost sole exception being Mary Benson's autobiography (1989), quoted as a source for an essay on Michael Scott. The latter, who died in 1983, has the distinction of being both contributor (300 words on Khama III) and subject (700 words by the project director, Keith Irvine, who himself died, in 1994, before the volume was finally published). If Irvine had read Scott's own essay more carefully, he would have realised that Scott could not possibly have met 'Khama the Great' in 1947. Admittedly, it is easy to get one's Khamas muddled, but unfortunately many of the essays suffer these little idiosyncracies. Anything Tswana, for instance, is assumed to be historically 'Bechuana' and therefore in present-day Botswana, including Moffat's Kuruman mission.

While the project aims 'to correct the erroneous but widely held notion that African history is merely an aspect of European history, in which Africans were only passive onlookers', the introductory survey on South African history, sadly, fails this test.

The quality of the 228 biographical essays-116 on African subjects-is enormously varied. At one end of the spectrum are some elegant essays by Mary Benson, on a pair of Khamas and Bram Fischer, and a particularly perceptive essay by Tsehloane Keto on Makhanda (c. 1790-1820), Xhosa prophet and war leader, in which the author offers an incisive synthesis of Makhanda's religious beliefs and philosophy. Also of note are Steven McDonald's essays on Patrick Duncan and Percy Qoboza. At the other end of the spectrum, far too many are dependent for their sources on other dictionaries of African historical biography, published in the 1970s.

The Afrikaner biographies are heavily subscribed by the history department of UNISA, Pretoria, and the result is a triumphalist Afrikaner historiography for the nineteenth-century 'founding fathers' and bland, even evasive, essays for the leaders of the apartheid era-a phenomenon alive and well in F. W. de Klerk's autobiography, currently being hawked around review editors' desks. Thus Verwoerd's ideals are portrayed as purely republican in intent-an ideal achieved in May 1961 when South Africa was refused readmission to the Commonwealth. The most attention that apartheid gets is a quote from Verwoerd about equal rights for all the people of South Africa, separately, while his predecessor, D. F. Malan, was engaged in little more than a Christian-motivated slum clearance project.

The dictionary is restricted to biographies of dead subjects. The extended deadline for last-minute entries was apparently December 1993, so Chris Hani and Oliver Tambo made it but Joe Slovo did not. The result is a very lopsided view of the late twentieth century. A principle of 'no live subjects' for a dictionary of biography is reasonable if the volumes are regularly updated. But the history of this project offers little hope of that: at the present rate of progress it is likely to be into the twenty- second century before a revision of Volume III can incorporate major figures of the twentieth such as Nelson Mandela. No matter how noble in intent, the continent-wide scope of the Encyclopaedia Africana appears to have been too ambitious for the resources available to it.

KEVIN SHILLINGTON London

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