To account for the failure of state-driven development projects, policy makers and planners have tended to blame communal farmers for adhering to outmoded traditional values and practices. Ethnographic data from fieldwork in Matabeleland during 1990-1992 shows that far from being trapped within the straightjacket of tradition, villagers opposing the project were intimately enmeshed within modern discourses and practices. They were by no means trapped within a pristine traditional worldview, even though at times they drew on such discourse to challenge disruptive and unpopular state interventions. The findings challenge the ways in which an imaginary "great divide" between tradition and modernity has functioned in development discourses to account for local opposition to top-down, centralized bureaucratic state planning and development.
Journal articles from the Grassland Society of Southern Africa (GSSA) African Journal of Range and Forage Science as well as related articles and reports from throughout the southern African region.