Developing Africa, the result of a workshop on development discourses in African colonialism held in Vienna in 2011, brings together fourteen essays focused on development concepts and practices across sub-Saharan Africa. Several offer rich discussions of the multiple and evolving meanings of development: développement in French Africa (Françoise Dufour), dual mandate and development (Juhani Koponen) and maendaleo (Emma Hunter) in Tanganyika, and fomento and desenvolvimento (Cláudia Castelo) and luso-tropicalism (Caio Simões de Araújo and Iolanda Vasile) in Portuguese Africa. Other essays explore changing facets of approaches to rural and agricultural development (E. Kushinga Makombe on Zimbabwe, Sven Spek on Zambia, Céline Pessis on French Africa, Billy Frank on private banks), health (Walter Bruckhausen on Tanganyika), education (Walter Schicho and Uyilawa Usuanlele), and gender (Barbara Bush). The final essay, Martina Kopf’s “Developing Africa in the Colonial Imagination: European and African Narrative Writing of the Interwar Period,” a critical literary analysis of the representation of African development in four narrative texts of the interwar period, offers an unconventional angle on development discourses.

Development is an expansive and slippery concept. As Joseph Hodge and Gerald Hödl note in their introduction, “it encompasses more aims than just achieving modernity and it refers not only to an intransitive, self-evolving process of change, but also, increasingly, to intentional practices and actions initiated most often by state agencies” (3). Moreover, as the thematic range of the essays in this collection indicates, the lens of development can potentially embrace vast aspects of colonial African history. To write about “concepts and practices” of development in colonial Africa is, then, a daunting task.

Inevitably, the editors have drawn boundaries. They note that this book “should not be read strictly or primarily as a contribution to African history. It is, rather, a history of development and how it linked the African continent to other parts of the world and to Europe in particular” (25). The editors argue that Western Europe’s central role “needs to be acknowledged” because this is where key actors, such as government officials, missionaries, and academics, “had their centres and origins” (25). This emphasis is reflected both in the introduction, which seeks to establish common trends across the colonial empires, and in many of the essays, which focus heavily on European actors and changing European concepts of development in Africa.

This approach works well in Barbara Bush’s essay, “Motherhood, Morality, and Social Order: Gender and Development Discourse and Practice in Late Colonial Africa.” Drawing on an extensive literature on British Africa that addresses colonial discourses on modernity and gender roles, marriage practices, education, migration, and urbanization, Brown highlights commonalities across British Africa such as conflicts between those who sought to preserve “traditional” cultures and those who sought to modernize “backward” practices. She shows how discourses of lack (lack of European moral values) and of difference (difference from European gender roles) characterized European understandings of women and gender. The emergence of anthropological research by European women in the 1940s, even when it challenged such notions, did little to alter colonial development discourses that would ultimately serve as the basis for postcolonial concepts of gender and development.

Keeping a European focus is also effective in illuminating conflicts and competition among various metropolitan and colonial actors. For example, Céline Pessis’s analysis of mechanized tropical agriculture in French Africa explores how, despite the failures of mechanization in the 1940s and 1950s, “the tractor became a privileged tool of development” (180). Pessis details the introduction of mechanized agriculture, its reliance on American technology, its failures in the field, and the attempts of French critics to stop it. The reader learns about global factors (e.g., shortages of oilseeds), institutions both French and international (e.g., the Office of Overseas Scientific Research, the International Union for the Protection of Nature), sources of funding (e.g., the Marshall Plan), and the positions of officials, experts, and researchers on mechanization. Pessis weaves a smooth narrative that connects all these forces to explain why mechanization emerged and persisted in spite of repeated failures.

Yet both these essays leave important questions unanswered. For example, in the case of gender discourses in British Africa, one might ask by what pathways these colonial perspectives were retained and transformed as nationalists laid claim to development. And in the case of mechanization in French Africa, one wonders how farmers, African agricultural technicians, nationalist leaders, and others contributed to this process. Even as we might note that considerable power and initiative rested with Europeans, development as a concept and practice did not emerge in a European vacuum. It emerged in the context of a colonial relationship in which Africans were as fully engaged as Europeans. To explore this, one needs to bring the focus back to the local and deploy sources that can give us insight into local views.

An especially noteworthy essay in the collection, therefore, is Emma Hunter’s “A History of Maendeleo: The Concept of ‘Development’ in Tanganyika’s Late Colonial Public Sphere.” It draws on government and nationalist Swahili language newspapers to trace changes in the way maendeleo was promoted in the early twentieth century, when it was defined as progress or change toward civilization, as compared to the 1950s and 1960s, when the term was closely associated with nation building. She focuses in particular on the ways in which the word was deployed in the 1950s by colonial officials and community organizations alike as they battled over government interventions. Among the broader lessons that Hunter draws from this case is that while we may be tempted to see the late colonial period as the moment when the “language of ‘development’” became the “new global language of politics” (103), this would be wrongheaded, because we would be missing the distinctive ways in which development resonated in local contexts. This caution is one that historians of development would be wise to heed if we wish to bring African perspectives on development concepts and practices more clearly into focus.