Small Urban Centers in Rural Development: What Else Is Development Other Than Helping Your Own Home Town?

Abstract

In our original perspectives and hypotheses on Small Urban Centers in Rural Development in Africa, we stated that these small centers are “the most strategic key to problems of Rural Development…points of articulation between the national systems of marketing, distribution and policy development on the one hand and the interests and productivity of the rural poor on the other.” They are “points of articulation of incentives for greater productivity…at which local rural interests are aggregated and expressed to government and party…sources of new ideas and belief systems…what some would call ‘modernizing centers,’ sources of innovation, politicization, mobilization and national integration” (Southall, 1979: 371). As knowledge grew, our hopeful optimism was punctured and this rosy, positive picture faded. We had recognized the stagnation of the rural sector, the over-centralization and over-bureaucratization of goverments, increasing the fiscal burden, weakening popular local institutions, benefiting mainly elites and even resorting to counterproductive coercion (Southall, 1979b: 375-7). In short, we had recognized that rural development efforts so far have been disappointing and that hypotheses on rural development “must take the form of assuming conditions which do not now prevail.” None the less, with hindsight, we see that our propositions tended to state aspirations as facts, in the wrong tense and the wrong mood. We now recognize in them the same flaws that we still recognize in many other grant-seeking documents. We had also entertained the hypothesis that a three-tiered structure of local points of concentration, somewhat analogous to the Chinese three-tiered commune-production brigade-production team hierarchy, was likely to emerge if positive small center development took place; it was a valid model even without the Maoist ideology (Southall, 1979:377).