THE fall of colonial regimes across Africa in the 1950s and 1960s was accompanied by the rise of popular expectations for rapid and inclusive economic progress. Alongside came bold new ideas for the transformation of ‘underdeveloped’ rural societies, infused with the optimism of early postcolonial politics, and carrying the weight of promises made by nationalist leaders during the independence struggle.Footnote 1 In Zambia there was, as a Times of Zambia commentator opined, ‘a rising tide of rising expectations’, particularly in the townships ‘infested with an ever growing multitude of destitute people’.Footnote 2 Reaching out to the expectant urban poor, on 17 January 1965 President Kenneth Kaunda addressed 35,000 people at Ndola's Chifubu township in the first official mass rally held since independence. His speech emphasized the United National Independence Party's (UNIP) new development agenda, centred around the creation of producer cooperatives. To the unemployed he announced, ‘the money is here … the know-how is here. Step forward now – next week – and help us work towards a common goal.’Footnote 3
The location of the rally was no accident; the perceived problem of urban surplus-population, it was hoped, could be relieved with rural development.Footnote 4 Cooperative registrations doubled that year.Footnote 5 From 200 marketing cooperatives at independence, numbers rose to 1000 comprehensive producer cooperatives by 1969. This represented, as the political scientist Robert Bates put it, ‘a commitment to the development of the countryside which was unprecedented in the history of this nation.’Footnote 6 Flush with copper revenue and enjoying double-digit growth in GNP, there was reason to believe UNIP could deliver its promised agrarian revolution. In Zambia's Transitional Development Plan (TDP) agriculture received the biggest allocation of funds, £9,500,000.Footnote 7 Following Rhodesia's Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) agricultural production had to guarantee national self-sufficiency, feed the growing towns, and alleviate economic reliance upon copper mining. Heightening the challenge was the feared exodus of expatriate farmers who comprised 0.25 per cent of farming families but produced 72 per cent of commercial grain.Footnote 8
The cooperative drive was one of two key rural development initiatives. The other was the widespread distribution of tractors through cooperative farms and hire pools, backed by £600,000 of TDP funding.Footnote 9 Both expressed a political and an economic logic. Cooperatives would, theoretically, include small-scale producers in economic activities otherwise beyond their means, thereby absorbing surplus labour. This was particularly important to Kaunda and proponents of his humanist doctrines, which were most influential immediately after independence. Kaunda's humanism blended nationalism, liberalism and socialism with a reification of ‘traditional’ culture, and although flexible enough to incorporate many different development strategies, in early articulations it emphasized egalitarian, communal schemes targeted at the poorest. Cooperatives were in this sense about much more than economics. Rather, they were expected to support nation-building by curbing corrosive individualism and winning the support of the peasantry.Footnote 10 Likewise, while tractors promised to intensify agriculture, they were also potent symbols of modernization. By following the cooperative mechanization initiative from its inception to its abandonment by the end of the decade, this article provides a history of the politics of rural development in early postcolonial Zambia.
As is the case for many other African nations, most studies of postcolonial Zambia have been penned by contemporary observers and analysts.Footnote 11 Compared to the colonial era, these years remain relatively under-explored by historians, and the consequence is a tendency to evoke the period with romanticism or exaggerated negativity.Footnote 12 In particular, rural development efforts in the early postcolonial ‘moment of ambiguity’ have been subject to little scrutiny.Footnote 13 As Frederick Cooper notes, ‘the history of development is a history of changing expectations’.Footnote 14 In the immediate post-independence period possibilities for progress seemed almost limitless. However, optimism was mixed with anxiety concerning the government's ability to fulfil promises and maintain its rule. The development path chosen by Zambian leaders was not as inevitable as it might now appear. Instead, it emerged through the contestation of markedly different potential strategies in a development endeavour that was conspicuously cosmopolitan rather than simply ‘national’.Footnote 15 Significantly, the peasantry as well as the urban working class exerted significant redistributive pressures upon the state during this period.
Many prominent accounts of development history employ an over-simplified representation of development experts as a powerful, unified group engineering a ‘development machine’ with predictable outputs – the extension of state power and market relations.Footnote 16 However as demonstrated here, development expertise can also be a site of intense conflict with divisions resulting not only from differing theories, but also disputes over race, nationality, and political affiliation. Consequently ‘experts’ can also become marginal figures, out of sync with government priorities. The colonial/postcolonial transition in Africa was a period of considerable continuity in development; colonial development workers frequently remained in important state jobs or joined increasingly important international development agencies.Footnote 17 Development logic still favoured large, technocratic schemes implemented through the ‘developmental state’.Footnote 18 In Zambia's case, however, postcolonial development planning and implementation was far from harmonious; cooperative mechanization created intense arguments over the appropriate pace and direction of change, dividing ex-colonial civil servants, nationalist politicians and international experts.
In the only other academic study of the scheme, the political scientist Stephen Quick identified these arguments as a political rift between ‘humanism’ and ‘technocracy’ – the former being Kaunda's development vision, the latter the conventional state-capitalist approaches favoured by expatriates and bureaucratic senior party members. Similar to other contemporary commentaries, Quick presents ideological contest and ‘irrational’ government policy as explanations for subsequent events.Footnote 19 This article argues instead that the difficulties arising from the cooperative mechanization scheme were a manifestation of a wider contradiction arising from the development of agrarian societies. Whilst development involves the reconfiguration of existing social relationships to exploit labour and natural resources, it also involves conscious countervailing efforts to mitigate the impacts of these changes. Michael Cowen and Robert Shenton call this the palliative doctrine of development – ‘the means to compensate for the destructive propensities of immanent change’.Footnote 20
At issue in Zambia was whether rural development should prioritise mass production of commodity-crops – by concentrating resources into state-capitalist ventures while pursuing a gradualist approach to peasant farming – or whether it should seek production by the masses through cooperative mechanization. By initially favouring the latter, humanism was more focused upon palliative aims. Zambia was one of several African nations experimenting with communal production, resettlement, and mechanization, and such considerations were pertinent elsewhere.Footnote 21 In Zambia's case the imperatives of simultaneously establishing economic independence in the wake of the UDI, stemming destabilizing rural-urban migration flows, and distributing the fruits of independence to an expectant rural population, heightened the difficulties of negotiating this contradiction.
DEVELOPMENT EXPERTISE IN TRANSITION
The turbulent anti-colonial struggle and frantic electioneering preceding independence gave UNIP leaders little opportunity to formulate policy. There followed a proliferation of offers of international assistance. Britain believed technical assistance would foster ‘mutual cooperation’ with independent African states, but its efforts were eclipsed by organizations from the United States, the United Nations (UN), and the Eastern Bloc.Footnote 22 Two UN bodies, the Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) and the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), were particularly influential.Footnote 23 Though its staff and funding came principally from Western powers, the FAO represented an internationalist future – Nyerere called it an expression of the ‘worldwide recognition of the common humanity of man’.Footnote 24 It viewed ‘unproductive’ peasant agriculture as Africa's ‘major problem’, and posited continent-wide solutions.Footnote 25 The 1963 World Food Congress called for ‘radical change’ to avoid ‘political and economic cataclysm’ resulting from ‘staggering population forecasts’.Footnote 26 At the September 1964 Regional Conference delegates were implored to ‘broadcast … an invitation to the agricultural scientists of the outside world to rally to Africa's help in the next few critical years’.Footnote 27 With staff shortages caused by departing expatriates and low colonial educational investment, Zambia was particularly receptive.Footnote 28
In September 1963 an FAO-ECA team was sent to Zambia to create an interim development plan. The Seers report, named after its lead author the controversial economist Dudley Seers, would provide the foundations of Zambia's subsequent development policies.Footnote 29 A true ‘technocratic internationale’, its authors hailed from around the globe, most spending only a few weeks in Zambia conducting research – the universality of economics compensating for brevity of local experience.Footnote 30 Their task was considerable:
The great majority of the people of Zambia are poor, under-educated … and unhealthy. This is certainly true of those living in the country districts scattered over vast expanses of land, where there are almost no industries, few schools or hospitals, and agriculture itself is extremely backward … In every town there are Europeans enjoying in plain view vastly superior standards of living … [they run] the most prosperous farms and own nearly all the financial wealth …. Since the great majority are impatient for economic and social change this dichotomy could prove dangerous.Footnote 31
The Seers report echoed UNIP's authoritarian nationalist rhetoric, urging the ‘subordinating [of] self-interest to national goals’.Footnote 32 As a planned economy freed from colonial impediments, Zambia could expect, they said, ‘a surge forward [toward] agricultural revolution’.Footnote 33 Although this would take ‘decades not years’, an advocated agricultural spending of £20m – third after mines and manufacturing – would make doubling the average villager's maize yield ‘a conservative assessment of what is possible’.Footnote 34 First and foremost, they urged, ploughs and tractors must replace hand-hoes.Footnote 35 Animal-draft had been virtually eliminated in Western Europe and the United States by farm mechanization between the wars, and the developing world was expected to follow.Footnote 36 A huge programme of cooperative farm mechanization was suggested as the basis for rural development. Comprising three thousand tractors distributed evenly around the country, it was lauded as the most ambitious of such plans in Africa.Footnote 37
‘SALVATION FOR THE MASS OF OUR PEOPLE’: THE ORIGINS OF COOPERATIVE MECHANIZATION
Ostensibly, the inspiration for mechanization came from the colonial Department of Agriculture (DOA). Their experimental farm at Chombwa begun in 1961 facilitated full mechanical production by eliminating plot boundaries and harmonizing production patterns.Footnote 38 Output volumes were impressive but technical officers were sceptical of its merits.Footnote 39 Though ‘politically attractive’, it was, according to one assessor simply ‘a state farm under another name’.Footnote 40 Most participants were ‘contributing casual labour or minor operations which could if necessary be mechanized anyway. The present farmers of the scheme probably delight in the fact that demands on their time are so minimal.’Footnote 41 The DOA working-party concluded that the scheme had confused priorities.Footnote 42 It was intended to both absorb surplus labour – thereby slowing rural-urban migration – and simultaneously produce efficiently. However, in increasing labour productivity, technological advances also repel labour from production.Footnote 43 For the scheme's colonial architects and postcolonial adopters, conflicting imperatives of mass-production and mass-participation sat uncomfortably together.
Despite the DOA's scepticism, tractors were at the centre of the 1966 First National Development Plan (FNDP).Footnote 44 Farm mechanization was an intoxicating prospect for many postcolonial governments, and in Zambia the potential economic benefits were particularly appealing: the scarce factor in agriculture was labour, particularly during land preparation at the onset of the rains. In addition, much land remained uncultivated, and tsetse fly made many fertile areas unsuitable for oxen.Footnote 45 Tractors were also politically attractive as prominent symbols of progress.Footnote 46 As the MP for Serenje put it, ‘rural areas are starving not through their own fault but because, for a long time, they have been forgotten’.Footnote 47 Mechanization represented proof of UNIP's desire to remedy the situation.Footnote 48 As another UNIP MP commented, ‘anyone who visits the country will see that the African government can do better than during the colonial days.’Footnote 49
The status of economic planners may also explain why mechanization was fast-tracked. Encouraged by the FAO's Regional Economics Taskforce, the 1960s were a highpoint for planning, now disassociated from Soviet repression and based around neoclassical foundations.Footnote 50 Independence from colonial rule begat a wave of ‘bold plans and fresh approaches’ across Africa, with planning documents symbolizing the emancipation by outlining an ideal future.Footnote 51 In Zambia, plans were intended to demonstrate how ‘the government is developing the country … and exercising social control [their italics], the government steers the economy along a path that corresponds to popular wishes’.Footnote 52 The TDP and FNDP's strategy to satiate these ‘popular wishes’ was cooperative production. Colonial administrators had used cooperatives to provide marketing support to more prosperous African farmers, but now cooperatives were presented as a tool of inclusive development, and were enthusiastically promoted by international development experts.Footnote 53
UNIP, like kindred African socialist governments, portrayed cooperatives as a distinctly African development strategy evoking a harmonious precolonial past: ‘The cooperative way of life’, the Department of Cooperatives (DOC) said, was not ‘brought to Zambia by Europeans. The people are used to doing things communally.’Footnote 54 Cooperatives were proclaimed, as two MPs put it, ‘a sort of salvation for the mass of our people’, a ‘revolution against the capitalist mode of production’ that would enable the unemployed to ‘go back to the land and dig for victory’.Footnote 55 By resettling, as Kaunda called them, the ‘spivs and habitual criminals’ and ‘Copperbelt wives’, ‘[urban] overcrowding and all its evils will completely disappear’.Footnote 56 They would also, as demonstrated below, become a means of consolidating party influence in rural areas.
For the Zambian DOA and other delegates to UN conferences on mechanization, cooperatives were viewed as a means of adapting peasants to new technologies rather than a vehicle of cultural transformation. Family farms were considered ‘incompatible with efficient tractor use’, which required grouping dispersed communities and ‘regimentation’ of plots.Footnote 57 The imperative of slowing rural-urban migration was shared by all, and cooperatives were expected to alleviate the increased unemployment otherwise resulting from technological advances.Footnote 58 Africa was, for the FAO, a ‘special case’ for cooperatives; they would maintain ‘traditional’ land tenure systems, thus preventing the emergence of a landless peasantry which had accompanied agrarian capitalism elsewhere.Footnote 59
Initial orders for Provincial Cooperative Officers (PCO) stressed new cooperatives should involve ‘as many people as the project can carry’.Footnote 60 At the same time, commercial farmers were imploring the government, as they had its colonial predecessor, to create cheap labour.Footnote 61 This lingering bastion of European power held only limited influence though – it was the DOA, dominated by generally conservative former colonial staff which was the major obstacle for UNIP modernizers. Their subsequent disputes expressed not only the contradictions of agrarian development, but the racial and political frictions of postcolonial transition: where African nationalists saw possibility, remaining state functionaries largely saw constraint.Footnote 62
The DOA dismissed the Seers Report, calling it ‘relatively short and [not of] the high standard expected in a document of such major importance’.Footnote 63 The ECA/FAO mission members were portrayed as ignorant outsiders ‘strongly influenced by knowledge and experience of more advanced conditions elsewhere’.Footnote 64 The DOA's approach to peasant agriculture since 1962 had been ‘development without reorganisation’. Adhering to a more conventional liberal capitalist approach, they accused the mission of overlooking family farms, and claimed mechanized farms were ‘most likely to be successful in the hands of private enterprise, with the workers under full control: under government control and with the workers as participants the prospects of success will be reduced.’Footnote 65 When the mission's advice prevailed the director claimed, demonstrating a different expectation of the temporality of development, that ‘political pressure was forcing events ahead of logical progression’.Footnote 66
An influential but unrecognised influence on these arguments came from farm machinery manufacturers, who bombarded the Zambian government with offers of assistance. Zambian receptiveness incited a curious Cold War tussle. Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia offered tractor factories and technical support in return for contracts.Footnote 67 Americans promised Kaunda their machines would ‘do for Africa what the Model-T did for America’.Footnote 68 The president of Canadian farm machinery manufacturer Massey-Ferguson toured Zambia claiming mechanization was the only means of defusing a ticking population bomb.Footnote 69 Technical officers requested a homogenized order-book, but their seniors played suppliers against one another.Footnote 70 The result was a mixed batch of machinery – including 150 Czech vehicles soon deemed unsuitable for Zambian conditions. Control over the precious machinery went to the newly-formed Ministry of Mines and Cooperatives (MMC). Within the ministry, S. B. Mwamba, a noted political activist, directed the Department of Cooperatives (DOC). The DOA was ordered to provide technical advice.Footnote 71 However, jealously protective of its independence, the DOA's research orientations remained focused upon bio-chemical sciences, disregarding mechanization. Attempts to alter the situation were rebuffed, and entrenchment set in.Footnote 72
‘COLONIALISTS WILL ALWAYS TRY TO COME IN THROUGH THE BACK DOOR’: DEVELOPMENT AND FRAGILE INDEPENDENCE
The mechanization scheme initially involved only 200 tractors distributed to selected cooperatives and provincial hire pools. Nonetheless, government ramped up expectations, with minister of agriculture E. H. K. Mudenda promising Zambia's transition from subsistence agriculture would be ‘among the most rapid on the continent’.Footnote 73 Disputes soon arose over distribution. 94 per cent of the 257 tractors already in use were in the prosperous grain-belt districts of Southern and Central Province, which produced most of the nation's maize crop.Footnote 74 Government now demanded provincial maize self-sufficiency, asserting that ‘if we neglect any part of Zambia we shall [be] sacrificing Zambia as a whole.’Footnote 75 Kaunda apparently took a personal interest in ensuring the vehicles were distributed appropriately, underlining their political importance.Footnote 76 The DOA, however, maintained that although ‘politically essential’ to have tractors in every province, they could only be profitably used in the grain-belt. Elsewhere farmers would be ‘launched into the competitive treadmill of commercial agriculture … required to accept a discipline foreign to them, and provide skills they did not possess’.Footnote 77 In this case, it was the technocrats who lacked faith in the transformative power of technology, and they were again sidelined.
In the agriculturally marginal North-Western Province, the provincial agricultural officer (PAO) described Mudenda as ‘repeatedly and publicly’ claiming tractors were easily available, and pleaded ‘that the enthusiasm of prospective farmers be contained’.Footnote 78 In Northern and Luapula Provinces, poor infrastructure and adverse agro-ecological conditions also advised against rapid mechanization in the DOA's eyes. Here in the politically powerful Bemba's territory, farmers were reportedly abandoning citemene, the prevalent system of shifting cultivation, to form cooperatives in expectation of tractors.Footnote 79 UNIP's reputation depended upon satisfying the demand, but the DOA obstructed. Complaining of ‘high level’ interference, they insisted that cooperatives receive no special attention over other agricultural projects.Footnote 80 The Projects Division – the ministry's most conservative and expatriate-dominated grouping – demanded no more vehicles be sent north, and no new equipment be ordered prior to exhaustive tests.Footnote 81 ‘To force the pace [of development] as a result of political expediency’, said chief agricultural officer P. Greening, ‘is courting disaster.’ Rather than inspirational exemplars, they referred to Ghana's and Tanzania's ambitious agricultural modernization programmes as a ‘fiasco [that] could happen all too easily in Zambia’.Footnote 82
Their obstinacy angered UNIP's modernizers. Minister of cooperatives A. G. Zulu labelled DOA concerns ‘an excuse for delaying the ordering of tractors’, while planners chastised them for a ‘paucity of new ideas even in the face of the tremendous challenge’.Footnote 83 Failure to hit FNDP targets was blamed on ‘inherited structures, procedures and attitudes’.Footnote 84 The allegations were infused with anxiety over Zambia's reliance on the remnants of the colonial state, its frontline position in the fight against racial rule in Africa, bordered to the south, east and west by hostile colonial societies, and the fear that, as one MP put it, ‘colonialists will always try to come in through the back door’.Footnote 85 As the remaining white MPs asserted Africa was unready for modern agriculture, UNIP members evoked the all too recent past: ‘Remember what our colonial officers used to say, perhaps because they were not interested in expanding activities and services … they condemned straight away certain [rural] areas’.Footnote 86 Seen in such a light, the DOA's reticence was construed as ‘colonial espionage’.Footnote 87
Mudenda, a former plant breeder and one of the first African staff members at the Central Agricultural Research Station, was more sympathetic to expatriate staff and their development philosophy. But with Kaunda ‘gravely concerned’ about the FNDP's slow progress he overruled DOA objections to mechanization stating, ‘my farmers need the tools. We must have the tools.’Footnote 88 Purchases of new Czech tractors proceeded alongside £800,000 of loans to agricultural cooperatives, which the MMC ordered be spent quickly.Footnote 89 Administrative arrangements for land, credit, and machinery were ‘streamlined’, with applications filled in ‘on the spot’. As one MMC official explained, ‘the collective pride of extra societies thus entitled would be both valuable to themselves and to the government image.’Footnote 90 The role of technical experts in the development process here contrasts sharply with the common image of the all-powerful technocrat.Footnote 91 Instead differences in professional opinion, political and economic ideology, and racial and national status, made many expatriate experts marginalized, dissenting figures.
‘CENTRAL CONTROL MUST PREVAIL’: DEVELOPMENT AND THE CREATION OF STATE AUTHORITY
The immediate post-independence years are unique in Zambian history for the relative openness of the political process, and the relative abundance of money available for development projects.Footnote 92 A means of governing access to resources had to be devised. Because fitting tractors to existing farming systems was considered impossible, applicants were required to start farms on newly cleared land sufficient to make production economical – initially 160 acres. Technical staff intended this to limit incentives, but Kaunda subsequently announced cooperatives would be paid £15 per acre cleared for cultivation, with no strings attached.Footnote 93 Prospective cooperatives set upon vast expanses of the countryside. The easiest land to clear was the least fertile, and as crops failed many participants were left ‘literally starving’, using subsidies to purchase food.Footnote 94 Tightened conditions attracted immediate criticism as a breach of Kaunda's promises, and credit provision became entwined with the maintenance of UNIP's authority.Footnote 95
Although enacted under the banner of socialism, the cooperative mechanization scheme relied on credit for providing incentives, enforcing discipline, and measuring efficiency.Footnote 96 Credit was also a means of rewarding loyalty under the slogan ‘it pays to belong to UNIP.’Footnote 97 The existing credit apparatus was deemed inadequate for these tasks. Reform blueprints came from another UN consultant, whose recommendation for centralization was welcomed by UNIP leaders seeking ministerial control over quasi-independent colonial facilities regarded as institutionally racist. The Credit Organization of Zambia (COZ) was formed in April 1965 to ensure, as one official put it, that ‘the old camp [will] be dissolved and absorbed into the new camp’.Footnote 98 Controversy followed it from the outset.
Fearing ‘discontent and complete disregard for government effort’ in rural areas, the COZ sought to enhance UNIP's ‘propaganda machinery’, reasoning that,
if the new organization is more dynamic and radical, it [will] put the effort of the independent government on the map … a phobia expressed in the language ‘it would be too big to manage’ … is inherited from the colonial era.Footnote 99
Under the justification that ‘economic activity based on individual effort … has resulted in many failures’, the COZ was intended to predominantly support cooperatives.Footnote 100 A Ministry of Finance working party criticizing its expansive remit was over-ruled by the cabinet as the COZ insisted ‘the idea of central control is a vital one which must prevail.’ This central control would ensure that, unlike previously where ‘thousands of pounds were sunk in the country amongst the [government's] very bitter enemies’, credit now augmented political control.Footnote 101 Credit supervisors selected from UNIP membership lists were vetted for political affiliation.Footnote 102 Such moves would ensure, as one UNIP regional secretary asserted, that ‘Doubting Thomases should begin seeing, hearing and feel [sic] that UNIP is the governing party.’Footnote 103
The COZ was immediately responsible for providing two thirds of all loans to Zambia's farmers. Though later notorious for largesse, initially many COZ officers were reluctant to disburse money to unprofitable cooperatives. Between May and September 1966, agricultural producer cooperatives requested credit to pay for 10,175 hours of tractor hire, but only 2186 hours worth was granted. ‘The net result’, Greening remarked, ‘is that most of our machines have done very little work despite enormous demand … the general public are thoroughly irritated.’ ‘The word “cooperative” ’, it was warned, ‘will stink in the nostrils of the people.’Footnote 104 Distributing money quickly was prioritized, with the deliberate blurring of the distinction between credit and grants leading many farmers to view loans as income.Footnote 105 Those urging restraint were again likened by UNIP MPs to colonial authorities.Footnote 106
Even under an egalitarian development programme capital would drift towards areas where it could be most productively employed, in this case the grain-belt districts. However, this was the heartland of the main opposition party, the African National Congress (ANC), backed by wealthy farmers in the Bantu-Botatwe ethnic grouping who favoured liberal-capitalist development. Southern Province received generally the lowest allocations of rural development resources, while UNIP's key support base in Luapula received the most.Footnote 107 M. M. Sakubita, the under-minister for Southern Province blamed the ANC's incitement of ‘resistance and non-cooperation’, and warned they would not ‘tolerate anything that will hinder planned development’.Footnote 108 ‘Party structures’ would ‘educate’ away tendencies toward individual enterprise.Footnote 109 Labelled ‘aspiring capitalists’ and ‘running dogs’ for ‘imperialists and colonialists’, it was made clear to the ANC that opposition – labelled ‘troublemaking’ – entailed diminished development resources, and thereby an unsatisfied rural population.Footnote 110
ANC MPs complained persistently about the political distribution of rural development resources, calling the COZ ‘communism’ and a giver of ‘independence gifts’. ‘Only the Bemba benefit’, alleged one.Footnote 111 Luapula's partisan MPs meanwhile proclaimed their success.Footnote 112 Once an ‘economic slum’ that was ‘completely forgotten during the federal government’, their province had been ‘reopened’ by the cooperative movement.Footnote 113 Only Central Province received comparable government support. It was also an ANC support base in certain districts, but a swing province in which generosity seems to have been used to tip the balance of power. As the MP for Chisamba complained, ‘when some government members visit certain areas they tell the people there is plenty of money for loans and [that] no matter how many people apply for loans they will not be refused.’Footnote 114 Development had clearly become a political battleground.Footnote 115 Rather than being a population entirely marginalized by the greater power of the urban working class, the claim-making power of the peasantry was still significant.Footnote 116 With the emergence of new concentrations of social power and new expectations of the government providing progress, UNIP attempted to use the development apparatus as a stabilization mechanism.
‘UNLIKELY TO SUCCEED IF LEFT TO THE PEOPLE’
Far from revolutionizing agricultural production and bolstering UNIP's authority, the severe material and technical barriers hindering cooperative mechanization meant the initiative soon became a liability. ‘Talk of agricultural development’, lamented the DOA's Permanent Secretary in June 1966, ‘remains inversely proportional to the services available to bring it about.’Footnote 117 Even as rural investment rose to unprecedented levels, cooperative mechanization required technical support beyond the state's capacity. Trained staff were scarce, particularly in less prestigious and remunerative rural jobs, meaning that despite the suspicions of neo-colonial intent, British staff remained crucial.
Rural administration in late colonial Zambia was integrated with the government of the Central African Federation – comprising Northern and Southern Rhodesia alongside Nyasaland – which ended in 1963. Ties with administrative staff in Rhodesia, the dominant partner in the Federation and the administrative centre, during the transition period were abruptly cut after UDI, leaving rural administration in Zambia in disarray. In these circumstances, the material requirements of the tractors worked against their users.Footnote 118 UDI had also created chronic shortages of fuel and tractor components, and neither could be reliably delivered on time across the expanses of rural Zambia.
Harsh field conditions caused frequent breakdowns and there was a shortage of mechanics.Footnote 119 ‘Unless we have a route to the sea’, Mudenda said, ‘we may as well stop development in the whole country.’Footnote 120 Managing the tractors required rapid and detailed information exchanges concerning the machines' performance. However, the paper circulars used by central planners to instruct district and provincial cooperative officers were almost all apparently lost, ignored, or never delivered. Few PCOs ever submitted monthly reports, making performance evaluations almost impossible.Footnote 121 The only thing clear was the mounting expense.
While cooperatives were presented as ‘more than a mere profit making enterprise’, the financial metrics used to assess performance were not.Footnote 122 Humanism's equation of capitalism with individualism and wage-labour – ‘the exploitation of man by man’ – obscured the reality that cooperatives faced similar challenges to any other business in a capitalist economy.Footnote 123 As cooperative members were pressed to repay debts and improve productivity, the potential for political disquiet grew.Footnote 124
Publicly UNIP continued to laud their ‘agrarian revolution which has involved the masses of our people’, but privately questions were being raised over a change of direction.Footnote 125 With urban surveys showing near 100 per cent of informants had no intention of returning to rural areas, even with incentives, attempts to slow the migration through rural development were deemed a ‘symbolic gesture’.Footnote 126 However with Kaunda reviving his ‘back to the land’ programme, the damage caused by abandoning development commitments was initially assumed to be greater than their impending implosion.Footnote 127 Development promises had, after all, been the means by which UNIP believed they had ‘gained the mandate of the people’.Footnote 128 Orders were made to increase the number of operational tractors by 50 per cent during the 1968–9 season, and a further 50 per cent during 1969–70. Zulu told staff, ‘the signing of application forms can be done on the spot as we deliver tractors’.Footnote 129
The controversy became increasingly difficult to contain though, particularly regarding the COZ. The body only entered legal existence in 1967, and had been intended to run at a loss with Mudenda guaranteeing all loans.Footnote 130 ANC leader Harry Nkumbula accused Mudenda of spending money first – mostly in Northern and Luapula Province – and retrospectively asking parliament for permission.Footnote 131 This was not without its benefits. As one UNIP MP explained,
Without COZ … definitely some honourable members of parliament would not be sitting here for there would be a coup by now … Eighty percent of the population of Zambia is rural. If you do not satisfy 80 percent there would be no government. [Through the COZ] we have managed to pacify the rural areas.Footnote 132
Zambia's new FAO planning advisor recommended an immediate policy reversal, claiming that far from development for the masses, cooperative mechanization was creating the destabilizing rural class divisions UNIP supposedly wished to avoid.Footnote 133 Those best placed to exploit the opportunities cooperatives presented were the nascent rural elite, persons with strong pre-existing links to the party and higher levels of literacy and managerial ability. Significant additional criticism followed later in 1967 from the famous French agronomist Rene Dumont. Upon the advice of Julius Nyerere, Dumont was hired by Kaunda to assess rural development efforts, and he subsequently wrote a damning indictment of UNIP development policy – so damning the cabinet attempted, unsuccessfully, to block its publication.Footnote 134 Dumont, himself a professed socialist, concluded that tractors had been introduced prematurely, cooperatives were barely functional, corruption was rife and exacerbating class divisions, and the programme was unaffordable.Footnote 135
The DOC questioned the veracity of Dumont's criticisms, playing down their severity as ‘teething problems’.Footnote 136 However, the DOC's Israeli consultants concurred with Dumont, and advised Mwamba to change course.Footnote 137 The furore came as public accounts dipped into deficit and challenges to Kaunda's position were mounting. He too began to acknowledge publicly that cooperative mechanization might be creating a new rural upper class through abuse of public funds – neglecting of course the political utility this might, in fact, have for UNIP.Footnote 138 By 1968, even the newly titled Ministry of Cooperatives Youth and Social Development (MCYSD) was admitting the need for change. As opinion approached unanimity, the programme was halted.Footnote 139
Cooperatives of less than 200 acres – all but the largest – were barred from going into production and no new cooperatives were permitted unless part of a union, a move intended to limit autonomy, facilitate professional management, and achieve economies of scale.Footnote 140 From UNIP's perspective, although ‘government ministers have gone to great lengths in preaching cooperatives to the people … these ventures are unlikely to succeed if left to the people themselves.’ ‘Disciplinary management’ would now be used to dispel the popular notion that cooperatives were an ‘open sesame to wealth and good living without too much effort’.Footnote 141 The negative political repercussions, officials worried, would be ‘terrific’.Footnote 142
Southern Province remained unwinnable for UNIP, with DOA staff withdrawing support to even the most proficient farmers found to be ANC supporters.Footnote 143 Luapula and Northern Province were hit particularly hard by the belt-tightening, creating a lingering sense of disappointment.Footnote 144 By 1969, Luapula's provincial UNIP representatives declared themselves to be ‘totally opposed to cooperative farms which have been a dismal failure’. The provinces' major cooperatives were handed to a joint FAO – Swedish International Development Agency (SIDA) mission, which set about removing obstacles to individual production and encouraging ‘business-like’ principles.Footnote 145 It was a microcosm of wider changes afoot in the Zambian development endeavour.
MASS PARTICIPATION TO MASS PRODUCTION
The rural development efforts of the First National Development Plan were subsequently judged by the government to be unsuccessful: Agricultural growth was a ‘disappointing’ 3.3 per cent average compared to the planned 9 per cent – how much of the growth resulted from cooperative production is difficult to know due to the aforementioned breakdown of evaluation systems, but the reports produced by Dumont and the ministry suggest it was negligible. Rural-urban migration continued apace as farming remained an economically unrewarding activity.Footnote 146
Maize production had fluctuated wildly, and targets for most major commodities were missed because ‘the extent of the exodus of expatriate commercial farmers was not fully realised.’ Demand for maize was now expected to grow at 7.5 per cent per annum, making mere self sufficiency a struggle. Most importantly perhaps, as stated in the Second National Development Plan (SNDP) published in 1971, ‘expectations were raised that could not be satisfied’.Footnote 147 Awareness of increasing rural disappointment saw an invigorated rhetorical commitment to agriculture after the 1968 elections. However, urban workers were the unspoken priority and rural development tilted ever more to supporting emerging rural elites capable of manipulating relationships with the state.Footnote 148 Though blame for the FNDP's shortcomings was publicly attributed mostly to external factors – particularly the UDI – the eventual reaction was a swing away from its participatory rural development approach, and toward the technocratic, state-capitalist strategies incubated within the DOA.
The eminent heterodox economist E. F. Schumacher, author of Small is Beautiful and a champion of intermediate technology, was another rural development advisor to Zambia during this period.Footnote 149 Writing with Julia Porter – his collaborator at the influential Intermediate Technology Development Group – he correctly identified development problems faced by Zambia and other nations as in part stemming from the conflicting imperatives of ‘mass production’ and ‘production by the masses’. The difficulties encountered with cooperative mechanization, they advised, did not warrant the abandonment of the notion that inclusive, technology-driven social change could radically improve the lives of the rural poor.Footnote 150 Their advice to maintain development programmes targeting the rural masses, as they acknowledged, went against ‘the drift of things’, and indeed UNIP was now reformulating their development policy. Recognizing that ‘the strategy of widespread rural development is not quite the same as a policy of increased agricultural production’, the goal of mass participation was quietly jettisoned by UNIP for mass production.Footnote 151 Following Kaunda's 1968 Mulungushi declaration that laid out plans for part-nationalization of most major businesses in the Zambian economy, the state assumed greater control over agricultural production. The subsequent compulsory unionization of cooperatives eventually rendered them little different to state farms.Footnote 152 The COZ was abolished in 1970, with rural investment diminishing as public finances deteriorated.
Development logic now became more productivist than palliative. The Second National Development Plan (SNDP), amidst a flurry of participatory rhetoric, emphasized the priority ‘that government obtains a return on its investment, in the shape of a measurable increase in production’.Footnote 153 Abandoning the principle of spreading development evenly, the diffuse distribution of resources was now deemed a major cause of failure. Policy shifted to ‘intensive development zones’ in areas of ‘natural potential’ – to be run with assistance from the newly agriculture-conscious World Bank – and state production units for key commodities.Footnote 154 Extension workers were pulled out of ‘unpromising’ parts of the country.Footnote 155 The gradualist approach to peasant development was effectively re-adopted, with visions of technology-driven communal production ditched; labour-intensive as opposed to capital-intensive methods of agriculture would be employed to spur small-farmer development, the locus of which would be the family farm.Footnote 156 Kaunda informed the 1970 National Cooperative Conference that government would no longer promote ‘mechanized equipment that tends to displace family farm labour’.Footnote 157 The remaining tractors were moved to the Mechanical Services Department to ‘avoid extravagance in the use of complex material equipment’.
Although many European staff in the DOA began to leave after the Mulungushi announcements, development policy reforms meant the guiding hand of the technocrat was regaining strength.Footnote 158 In 1967, a coordinating body for scientific research was created to ensure technical staff's opinions would be better ‘transmitted into the development effort’.Footnote 159 There were ‘conflicting demands for skilled manpower’ – needed on the one hand to boost overall production, and on the other to address small farmers' needs.Footnote 160 Given the generally conservative inclinations of the DOA technical staff, unsurprisingly the former predominated. Assistance was focused upon the design and implementation of large-scale state managed schemes, and research upon the biochemical aspects of commercial agriculture.Footnote 161
If cooperative mechanization seemed to have marked a moment of rupture in the history of development, Zambia now moved closer to resembling the model of colonial/postcolonial continuity, whereby independent African states continued with the large-scale, modernist agricultural production schemes of their predecessors.Footnote 162 Humanism remained focused on individual, voluntaristic action rather than structural change, meaning state-capitalism was still the driving force of the development process. The emerging consequences reflected this. ‘Zambianization’ supplanted race with class, and this new class of state officials entrenched themselves in the one party state after 1972.Footnote 163 As in the colonial era, blame for slow rural development was now placed upon farmers' attitudes.Footnote 164 The post-independence optimism concerning peasant development subsided as oil prices rose, copper prices crashed, and recession loomed. The tractors once symbolising the fulfilment of UNIP's promises to the rural poor, now sat rusting in the fields by the dozen.
CONCLUSION
Zambia's cooperative mechanization scheme was neither externally imposed nor a simple product of hubristic national development. Rather it emerged from a confluence of competing claims over knowledge, power, and resources involving ambitious UNIP politicians, conservative ex-colonial civil servants, a cadre of international development experts, and a demanding rural population. In its implementation it created rifts within the national elite which reflected differing expectations of independence, and differing outlooks on the appropriate pace and direction of the development endeavour. The intensity of the disputes was magnified further still by that fact these rifts at times seemed to be racially aligned. However, as has been demonstrated, they also reflected a more fundamental tension in the process of economic development between the prioritization of economically efficient mass production, or inclusive development for the masses – a tension that was particularly acute in a country having to struggle simultaneously with the need to assert its economic independence in the wake of the UDI, and the need to stem destabilizing rural-urban migration flows. The finer points of these difficulties are important to understanding the unpredictable postcolonial trajectories of African states such as Zambia. The fact that in the early years after independence a variety of possible development pathways were contested, is a matter too often subsumed under the weighty narrative of inevitable and unrelenting failure and disappointment.
At a conference held at the University of Sussex in the summer of 1969, hosted by Dudley Seers and Mike Faber, both architects of Zambia's FNDP (Faber as Zambia's first director of planning, 1964–8), the topic for discussion was the ‘unreality of planning’. Seers remarked that ‘many of the plans which have survived do not have a great deal of operational relevance – some have been little better than fantasies.’ How, he pondered, had this happened given the ‘high calibre’ people working on them? Political imperatives, he said, encouraged the production of ‘pseudo-plans’, while the training of economists was based more upon elegant models than reality. ‘How often’, he asked, ‘does [the planner] get out of the capital to other cities and the countryside?’ In such circumstances, he concluded, planning played more of a ‘ceremonial role’ in independent Africa.Footnote 165 More than a mournful rumination on his own shortcomings, Seers's reflections aligned with the changing currents in development expertise. Combined with the emergence of new and powerful interests within African societies and further afield, a paradigm shift in development was taking place towards liberalization and ‘basic needs’, small-scale farmer focused interventions. Negative renderings of post-independence rural development programmes came to represent all that is supposedly wrong with planned development, African Socialism, and state intervention.Footnote 166 The implications have been profound.Footnote 167 Specific to this case, progress in agricultural mechanization in recent decades has been slow to non-existent in most parts of sub-Saharan Africa in comparison to Asia and Latin America, in no small part due to representations of the 1960s.Footnote 168 Historical arguments have played a definite role in legitimizing the course down which the development endeavour has been steered, and so historians have an obligation to engage with them. In this case, the complex problems encountered in early postcolonial development must be understood on their own terms, rather than used as a means to proscribe certain development paths in the present.
