Zambia’s contemporary experience of recession without resolution is, alas, quite typical of the majority of African states over the decade; for since the celebration of ten years of independence in 1974, its national income has been in almost continuous decline. But this economic decay has had an uneven impact, between both time periods and social groups: occasional injections of foreign aid or loans have been permissive of relative affluence for elements in the bourgeoisie and labor aristocracy along the line-of-rail. The full impact of negative growth has been felt in the more distant rural areas and among the peasantry and the unemployed.

The literature on political and administrative behavior in sub-Saharan Africa has proliferated at an unprecedented rate in the past decade. But notwithstanding an impressive output, Africanist political scientists of all persuasions—“institutionalists,” “behavioralists,” and so forth--have tended to ignore or treat lightly various methodological problems confronting the social sciences in general and their own discipline in particular. It is appropriate here to distinguish between methodology and preocedure. Methodology refers to the philosophy of science, to problems associated with the logic of systematic social inquiry; among the problems which are essentially methodological are classification, comparison, concept formation, theory construction, and nomothetic vs. idiographic inquiry. (Various methodological probems are examined by Brodbeck 1968, Hempel 1965, Kaplan 1964, Nagel 1961, and Natanson 1963.) Procedure, in contrast, refers to the application of specific techniques in research. While research techniques inform the day-to-day activity of systematic social inquiry, they are extraneous to the logic of that inquiry (Fleron 1968, p. 316).

The extent to which political scientists are attentive to methodology is often reflected in the quality of their research, Not surprisingly, therefore, the quality of research on political and administrative behavior in sub-Saharan Africa has been negatively affected by the tendency to dismiss or de-emphasize methodological considerations. For example, there appears to be little awareness of a cardinal principle of logical classification: that there must be “a mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive set of classes for the domain under consideration” (Kalleberg 1966, p. 72; Hempel 1952, p. 51).

President Eisenhower's timely proposal for aid to African education through the family of United Nations organizations is potentially one of the great ideas of the twentieth century. It comes at a point in history when the need for mutual understanding between the United States and Africa has never been greater.

Aware of this growing need, the United States National Commission for UNESCO decided two years ago to devote its Eighth National Conference in 1961 to the vital task of fostering better relations between the United States and Africa. The National Commission was established by Act of Congress in 1946 to further the aims of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural organization. It is composed of 100 members, 60 of whom represent national organizations having a total membership of over 30,000,000. The Commission believes that the Eighth National Conference can best achieve its objectives by concentrating on relevant educational, scientific, and cultural issues, with emphasis on education. The Conference will focus primarily on Africa of the Sahara.

The examination of the role of local government in agricultural development in Africa, the subject of this paper, requires inputs from economics and agricultural economics, the technical aspects of agriculture, political science and politics, and administrative and bureaucratic studies. To begin with, should one survey the literature of economists and of agricultural economists, one finds few, if any, examinations of the functional and operational relationships between these subjects and local government. At best, there are rather negative references to the local politics, politicians, and bureaucrats. To many an economist and agricultural economist, particularly those conducting farm-level and project research and those involved in the planning and implementation of agricultural projects, the local political and administrative scene is normally viewed as disruptive, and indeed even “irrational.” Book after book, article after article, report after report written by this group fail to identify these relationships in any meaningful way.

Then turn to the literature of agronomists, veterinarians, forestry and water-development experts, and so on. How frequently do such development professionals recognize the economic, political, and administrative parameters of their research and their policy proposals, particularly at the local level? Their policies and procedures, based on technical considerations, are often matters of should be this way, should happen, should be done, should be desirable. Yet historically the technical men have been in charge of rural development, particularly agronomists and veterinarians. Their almost exclusively technical orientation has rather consistently in so many ways and places led to results far less favourable than would otherwise have been the case had the political, economic, and administrative dimensions been identified and incorporated.

A literary scholar runs a certain risk when he ventures into the troubled waters of African politics. But a poet—whether it is Shakespeare carefully plotting his historical plays to conform to and support the Tudor position on the Wars of the Roses or Wordsworth confusing the atmosphere of the French Revolution with the air of heaven or Ginsberg howling with rage and existential despair at the sight of democracy betrayed—makes political statements. Sometimes these statements are only subtly and indirectly political; at other times they are specific and topical. In either case, they are part of the milieu in which a political culture flourishes. They are, in fact, part of the political culture itself.

I want to examine several of the ways in which indigenous poets of West Africa have functioned as part of the developing political culture. And I want to address myself specifically to political culture—a term of some exactness which nevertheless allows considerable latitude for analysis and speculation. The political culture of a society might be described as the political system internalized in the perceptions, judgments, feelings, and attitudes of its people. In their important study, Civic Culture, Almond and Verba (1966: 15-16) have this to say about the “orientation” which constitutes political culture:

Jan Vansina's history of the Nyiginya kingdom joins the long list of works, both essays and novels, that have proliferated since the Rwanda Patriotic Front gained power in 1994. The rigorous application of historical criticism distinguishes this from other works that give voice primarily to passions and speculations. Vansina's work is remarkable for the author's ability to bridge past and present by placing himself downstream rather than upstream in the flow of history. This important emphasis on ancient Rwanda contributes to the understanding of today's events. Vansina was ahead of those whose project it was to reread the history of Rwanda, which began in Butare in December 1998. Nonetheless, he emphasizes that it is up to Rwandan historians themselves to compile, on the basis of the facts accepted by everyone, a history that is as impartial as possible and that might offer some guidelines for the future.

In 1962, when Vansina was writing L'évolution du royaume rwanda des origines à 1900 (The Evolution of the Rwandan Kingdom from Its Origins to 1900), his work was already marked by a rigorous exploration of historical facts. In Le Rwanda ancien (Ancient Rwanda), he proposes a new chronology of the Nyiginya kingdom, whose foundation he places around the middle of the seventeenth century. In so doing, Vansina definitively separates himself from Alexis Kagame—who situates its beginnings six centuries earlier—and thereby puts to rest the argument of historians and anthropologists, and challenges those politicians who, in the pursuit of legitimacy, have based their ideologies of the Rwandan reconquest and territorial revindication on the writings of Kagame.