Except-Africa: Remaking Development, Rethinking Power

It is a commonplace that the problems of African rural development are becoming increasingly complex - that is, they have grown more numerous, inteerrelated, & varied. This complexity has generated a multitude of development scenarios. Such scenarios encourage decision making along rigid & narrow patterns that ignore the diversity of local situations & national cultures. Among these is the doomsday scenario, applied to every nation on the continent is best captured in the phrase "Everything works...except in Africa." The author argues that crisis scenarios generated by an expert (usually non-African) elite are self-serving & counterproductive. Despite this, they go largely unchallenged, even when they fail to explain or predict. Except-Africa takes up the challenge of devising development scenarios that do justice to the continent's variegated reality. The book begins by defining what the author means by a development narrative. The subsequent chapters provide alternate scenarios to such dominant models. Chapter 2 sketches four counter-narratives to the tragedy of the common argument, while chapter 3 constructs the most innovative challenge to conventional ways of thinking about Sub-Saharan pastorals in decades. Chapter 4 develops an alternative scenario of expatriate advising in Africa, while chapter 5 devises a counter-narrative to the all-too common views about government budgeting in Nigeria, Kenya, & Ghana. Chapter 6 presents a case study & counter-narrative from Zimbabwe of a complex local government reform. The book concludes by moving beyond case material & specific situations to answer the most imperative question in African studies & rural development: What would a politics of complexity look like in Africa if complexity were seriously engaged? Contemporary African studies are dominated by narratives about power. Yet in African rural development, power interests are by no means always clear. Development issues are frequently contingent & provisional. Surviving the tangled fusion of narrative & reality requires a politics of complexity. Except-Africa will be an essential work in meeting that challenge