Dilemmas of Development: Conflicts of Interest and Their Resolutions in Modernizing Africa Abbink, G.J.; Dokkum, A

Dilemmas of development: conflicts of interest and their resolutions in modernizing Africa Abbink, G.J.; Dokkum, A. van Citation Abbink, G. J., & Dokkum, A. van. (2008). Dilemmas of development: conflicts of interest and their resolutions in modernizing Africa. Leiden: African Studies Centre. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/1887/13060 Version: Not Applicable (or Unknown) License: Leiden University Non-exclusive license Downloaded from: https://hdl.handle.net/1887/13060 Note: To cite this publication please use the final published version (if applicable). Dilemmas of development African Studies Centre African Studies Collection, vol. 12 Dilemmas of development Conflicts of interest and their resolutions in modernizing Africa Jon Abbink & André van Dokkum (editors) Published by: African Studies Centre P.O. Box 9555 2300 RB Leiden [email protected] www.ascleiden.nl Cover photo: Tuareg in the Aïr Mountains, Niger, using an irrigation device (Photo by Swiatek Wojtkowiak) Printed by PrintPartners Ipskamp BV, Enschede ISSN 1876-018X ISBN 978-90-5448-081-5 © African Studies Centre, 2008 Contents Boxes, figures, tables vii Acknowledgements viii 1 INTRODUCTION 1 Jon Abbink & André van Dokkum PART I: THE STRUGGLE FOR THE EXTRACTION AND MANAGEMENT OF NATURAL RESOURCES 2 CONSERVATION OF NATURE AND RURAL DEVELOPMENT IN SOUTH-EASTERN SENEGAL 19 Hans P.M. van den Breemer 3 LAND AND EMBEDDED RIGHTS: AN ANALYSIS OF LAND CONFLICTS IN LUOLAND, WESTERN KENYA 39 Paul Hebinck & Nelson Mango 4 “FRIVOLOUS SQUANDERING”: CONSUMPTION AND REDISTRIBUTION IN MINING CAMPS 60 Katja Werthmann PART II: STRUGGLE AS POLITICS WITHIN LOCAL AND NATIONAL COMMUNITIES 5 THE CONSTRUCTION AND DE-COMPOSITION OF “VIOLENCE” AND PEACE: THE ANYUAA EXPERIENCE, WESTERN ETHIOPIA 79 Bayleyegn Tasew 6 MAINTAINING AN ELITE POSITION: HOW FRANCO-MAURITIANS SUSTAIN THEIR LEADING ROLE IN POST-COLONIAL MAURITIUS 93 Tijo Salverda v 7 “THESE DREAD-LOCKED GANGSTERS”. THE MUNGIKI AS DRAMATIC ACTORS IN KENYA’S PUBLIC ARENA: FROM POLITICAL PROTEST TO POLITICAL PARTICIPATION? 115 Anna Betsy Kanneworff 8 THE ROLE OF THE INFORMAL SECTOR TO SPREAD DEVELOPMENT BEYOND DAR ES SALAAM: FLOWS OF PEOPLE, GOODS AND MONEY 131 Meine Pieter van Dijk 9 MOCKING THE STATE: COMIC STRIPS IN THE ZIMBABWEAN PRESS 151 Wendy Willems 10 A TALE OF TWO WARS: THE MILITARIZATION OF DINKA AND NUER IDENTITIES IN SOUTH SUDAN 164 Naglaa Elhag PART III: INTERNATIONAL ISSUES IN AFRICA 11 GOLD MINING IN SANMATENGA, BURKINA FASO: GOVERNING SITES, APPROPRIATING WEALTH 189 Sabine Luning 12 PEACE PARKS AS THE CURE FOR BOUNDARY CONFLICTS? CREATING THE NAMIBIAN-SOUTH AFRICAN AI- AIS/RICHTERSVELD PARK ALONG THE CONTESTED ORANGE RIVER BOUNDARY 206 Marloes van Amerom 13 DEVELOPMENT ENCOUNTERS: WESTERNERS AND CHIEFTAINCY IN SOUTHERN GHANA 228 Marijke Steegstra 14 AFRICAN WRITERS IN THE GLOBAL WORLD: TIERNO MONÉNEMBO 242 Elisa Diallo Contributors 253 vi vii Boxes 8.1 Global cities 132 8.2 BRELA reasons to register your business 145 Figures 3.1 Spatial ecology of a Luo homestead 44 3.2 The descendants of Olum 50 3.3 The descendants of Ogonda I 53 3.4 The descendants of Opiyo Naki 55 9.1 Comics by T. Namate, W. Mukutirwa, N. Pomo and B. Maliki 157 9.2 Chikwama and his aunt 158 9.3 Marriage and lobola 159 9.4 Assessing a funeral 159 9.5 Two membership cards 160 9.6 Independence day celebrations 161 11.1 Location of Liliga within High River Gold’s Bissa project 196 12.1 Disputed boundaries in Africa 207 12.2 Peace Parks and contested boundaries in Southern Africa 210 12.3 Map of the Ai-Ais/Richtersveld 214 Tables 8.1 How flows are affected in different locations in Tanzania 138 8.2 Most important rural informal sector activities in Tanzania 138 8.3 Most important informal sector activities in Dar es Salaam 139 8.4 Urbanization trend in Tanzania over 1967-2002 141 8.5 Positive and negative factors for the urban informal sector 148 12.1 Overview of announced expected opening dates/time frames of the Sendelingsdrift Pontoon Border Post 220 viii Acknowledgements The editors are grateful to Swiatek Wojtkowiak for permission to reprint the photo on the cover, and to Marieke van Winden (ASC) for her help in finding it. Our thanks are also due to Mieke Zwart (ASC) for her work on the lay-out. This book is based on a conference of the Netherlands Association for African Studies held in November 2005. We thank the chapter contributors for their patience in the preparation of this volume. ix 1 Introduction Jon Abbink & André van Dokkum The struggle for development in Africa - The culture of politics and the rooting of culture This book unites studies on the contemporary dynamics of Africa. The chapters reflect new developments in the arenas of politics, economics and cultural struggle. These domains look far apart but are not. In their widest definition, culture – as the symbolic universe of shared meanings and of behavioural repertoires used by people – and politics – as the public struggle of interests and of attaining power and influencing others – intermingle and recombine in surprising and sometimes disturbing ways. They always have a definite economic logic as well, informing value commitments and behaviour in the wider sense. Politics and economic life in Africa have, perhaps more visibly than elsewhere, influential cultural aspects and referents, such as religion and ethnicity, that often play a constitutive role. Also, “culture” and its symbolism are used as an instrument in the political, economic and social struggles in today’s African societies, marked by a preoccupation with “development”, a notion increasingly problematic be- cause not easily definable in a purely material sense and having normative over- tones. What is at play are of course new hegemonic struggles of a material but also ideological nature. The recent literature on Africa is replete with discussions of this subject of cultural innovation, adaptation and instrumental use of “culture” in conflicts of interest, and indeed also in those of previous generations the theme is already found (a nice illustration is J. Clyde Mitchell 1956 on the Kalela dance). This 2 Abbink & van Dokkum observation is a reminder that today’s developments within African societies know dynamics of their own and are not fully understandable from the shocks of colonialism, decolonization and global inequalities alone. Neither is a dominant focus on politico-economic development issues helpful to understand what occurs at the grassroots levels, or the ways external influences and transnational interactions are locally and culturally appropriated by African actors. If, for instance, some 20 years ago people would have talked about an impending phenomenal rise of religious (often “fundamentalist” and militant) movements of both a Christian and Muslim nature, dominant Africanist and developmentalist opinion would perhaps have dismissed such predictions. Since people’s actions are inherently constrained not only by social and physi- cal environments but also depend on how they interpret these environments, explaining people’s behaviour and belief can rarely be deterministic. This is a challenge for social scientists, for they have to accommodate multiple outcomes of theories that are themselves based on singular fieldwork experiences, subject to often multiple interpretations. The problems of “computational intractability” that John Barrow (1998: 221-230) summarizes for physics could well have their counterparts within social science. Specifically reflexivity, people’s capability to assess their own social life, poses difficulties in setting up deterministic social scientific theories (van Dokkum 2005). Nevertheless, it can safely be assumed that a minimally coherent factor to be dealt with here is the commonly acknowledged adverse distribution of well-being and economic opportunities for most of the African populace. This relative empirical coherence enables social scientists to write about people’s constraints in life (including social and cultural constraints) and how they cope with these. Social scientists can also, in varying degrees, assess to what extent people are in a position to analyse their own situation, and in this book several examples are provided concerning such self-analysis and the consequences thereof. Since issues of distribution of resources and power often occurs in terms of collective categorizations of people, it is to be expected that such distribution is a contrib- uting factor to the dynamics of social identity, and therefore some of the chapters in this book will also delve into this topic. To actually predict future developments is intrinsically fraught with difficulties, but social-scientific studies can certainly help in giving directions where to look for solutions of developmental problems. Indeterminacy is to be distinguished from deconstructionism, of which Clifford & Marcus’s (1986) provided the classic early reference within anthropology. The bundle of chapters in that book dealt mainly with issues of reflexivity performed on and by the scientific observers. The “participants’ view on their own situation” played a less decisive role in the book. The participants’ view Introduction 3 performs a double role in ethnographic research, going beyond the classical emic/etic distinction within anthropology: on the one hand, it provides assess- ments which may be compared with researchers’ views; on the other, it is itself object of research. This makes any social-scientific assessment subject to a degree of ambiguity. However, this ambiguity – and this is a difference with deconstructionist approaches – does not prohibit the production of ethnographi- cally real statements or knowledge claims on social situations. In this book, descriptions are given of social situations in three different orders of delineation: first, local; second, national; and third, international. In all three, however, the struggle of Africans for “development”, in its various forms, is obvious. This is where social science analysis can make a contribution, exploring its empirical ramifications and its theoretical status. The venture poses challenges notably for non-African analysts, to who need to as identifiable actors in specific contexts and avoid Eurocentric approaches.

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