AFRICANUS Vol 31 No 1 ISSN 0304-615X - University of South Africa

AFRICANUS
Vol 31 No 1 ISSN 0304-615X

AFRICANUS is an annual journal published for the Department of Development Administration by the
University of South Africa. It seeks to publish articles, research reports, book reviews and bibliographies
on subjects relating to developmental problems and strategies in the Third World.
The attention of contributors is drawn to the Note to contributors printed on page 101.
Copies of AFRICANUS can be ordered from the Business Section, Unisa Press, Unisa, PO Box 392,
Unisa, 0003, at R15,00 (VAT inclusive) or ($5,00) each. Cheques or postal orders should be made out in
favour of the University of South Africa.
The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in any article, book review or research note are
those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views and policies of Unisa or the Department of
Development Administration. Neither the University nor the Department guarantees the accuracy of the
data included in AFRICANUS or accepts any responsibility whatsoever for any consequences of its use.
Research notes present preliminary and unpublished results of the author's research and are published
to afford the opportunity of gaining information and feedback from fellow researchers; citation from these
should take account of their provisional character.
The material in this publication is protected by copyright. Requests for permission to reproduce portions of
it should be sent to the Editor or to the Head: Unisa Press of the University.
Set, printed and published by the University of South Africa, 2001.
INDEXED IN: SOCIAL SCIENCES INDEX; ULRICH'S INTERNATIONAL PERIODICALS DIRECTORY;
AFRICAN URBAN & REGIONAL SCIENCE INDEX.
# All rights reserved.
STATEMENT BY THE DEPARTMENT OF DEVELOPMENT
ADMINISTRATION
The values underlying our teaching of
our subject are as follows:
. We are dedicated to upholding human
rights, an open society and
social justice.
. We want to move our subject to a
relevant position abreast of the contemporary
sociopolitical situation in
South Africa and the rest of the Third
World.
. We affirm a pragmatic and human
view of development administration
and we reject a technicist approach
to development.
. We want to direct attention to the
sociopolitical climate for change and
the rules of the game within which
development at the local level takes
place.
. We affirm that development occurs
when social forces are generated at
the bottom of society.
. We see development as a popular
process not under the control of
external structures.
. We want to engage with the popular
development process in the larger
society and, within that framework,
with administration-related topics.
With the above values, we wish to
approach our subject of development
administration primarily through the
study of the dynamics of society in its
sociopolitical context.

Journal of Development Administration
Vol 31 No 1 2001
EDITOR
Naas du Plessis
GUEST EDITOR
Kees van der Waal
EDITORIAL COMMITTEE
Linda Cornwell
Frik de Beer
Moipone Rakolojane
Peter Stewart
EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD
Jan K Coetzee ± Rhodes University
Richard Cornwell ± Institute for Security Studies
Cristo de Coning ± University of the Witwatersrand (P & DM)
O P Dwivedi ± University of Guelph
Des Gasper ± Institute of Social Studies (The Hague)
Pieter le Roux ± University of the Western Cape
Tom Lodge ± University of the Witwatersrand
Johny Matshabaphalo ± University of the North
Tsitse Monaheng ± University of North-West
Aubrey Redlinghuis ± Rand Afrikaans University
Michael Stocking ± University of East Anglia
Francois Theron ± University of Stellenbosch
Kees van der Waal ± Rand Afrikaans University
Malcolm Wallis ± University of Durban-Westville

Contents
Editorial ± Introduction 4
Kees van der Waal
Engaging with development: confessions of an anthropologist in
the Eastern Cape
Chris de Wet
Facilitating ``participatory community consultation'': consulting
anthropologists at work in Swaziland
At Fisher
Anthropological perspectives on rural institutional development
in the Northern Province
Kees van der Waal
Anthropology and epidemiology: a case study of health and
environment in Alexandra, Johannesburg
Thea de Wet et al
8
26
48
75
3

Editorial
Ð Introduction
Kees van der Waal
Development studies, as an interdisciplinary study field, has strong linkages
with several disciplines, including anthropology. In this issue, the relationship
between anthropology and development is taken as the focus. In several universities
in South Africa and internationally there is close co-operation between
anthropologists and the students or facilitators of development. Many anthropologists
have found a professional niche in the research and facilitation work
which is generated by processes of planning and institutional development. In
this way, the field of development has become a fertile domain for anthropologists
to work in, both for professional and academic reasons. Although this
anthropological work in the field of development is usually seen as a contribution
made by the anthropologist to the process of development planning or
implementation, there are two traditions in anthropology in this regard. The less
controversial is the approach known as development anthropology, similar to
applied anthropology, in which the framework of the development intervention is
more or less accepted as a given. The second approach, that of the anthropology
of development, is a more critical engagement with the assumptions and
practices of development. Despite this polarity, the relationship between anthropology
and development should be seen as a continuum of positions, with
many gradations, depending on political, theoretical and situational dynamics.
The field of development is diverse and so is the engagement of anthropologists
with this field.
In the highly politicised South African circumstances of the 1980s a schism
arose between those anthropologists who were supporting separate development
and those who were highly critical of that policy. It is only in this year that
the two associations of anthropology in this country are amalgamating. In the
4 Africanus 31(1)2001

present conditions of the country there are endless possibilities for anthropologists
to be engaged with the many problems of development, having to do
with poverty and inequality, which continue to pose enormous challenges of
analysis, interpretation and action.
What are the specific points of articulation between anthropology and development?
Firstly, anthropology contributes by applying its methods to the social
and cultural contexts in which development interventions need to be understood.
Secondly, the anthropological approach is strongly holistic and humanistic,
interpreting social phenomena in their relevant contexts as processes
characterised by fluidity and diversity. Thirdly, its main methodology, depending
on long-term intensive fieldwork, equips the anthropologist to question assumptions
and to interpret the practice of development with reference to the
rhetoric that is used. Dealing mainly with the social and cultural dimensions of
human life, anthropology is often at its best in interpreting the ideas, symbols
and ideology of development in conjunction with the action, relationships and
events that are based on these assumptions. Given that the development
planning context is constrained by limitations of time and other resources, anthropologists
who have become development advisers and consultants have
had to adapt their research methods to suit the demands of the development
context. The articles in this number of Africanus reflect the issues discussed
above in various ways. All of them refer to case material from the Southern
African region where the anthropological work reported here has fed into, or
commented upon, development interventions.
Chris de Wet discusses various perspectives and roles of the anthropologist
in the field of development, based on his long-term engagement with especially
land and resettlement issues in the Eastern Cape. He first focused on development
in terms of the detrimental effects of homeland betterment planning by
prioritising problems concerning a lack of resources and choice. In subsequent
studies he focused on problems of regional integration, rights and conflicts,
and complexity. The anthropologist can have several roles in developmental
situations: doing pure research, acting as a consultant, being a broker between
various interest groups, being an advocate, being a facilitator, or becoming a
development implementer. Each role has its ethical implications.
At Fischer provides a case study of consultation work done by anthropologistconsultants
in the context of a large irrigation project in Swaziland, financed by
international funders. The task of the consultants was to collect socio-economic
information and to facilitate a process of community consultation and partici-
5

pative institutional development. He discusses the comprehensive technical
planning, the process of consultation and the changing perceptions of the local
stakeholders with regard to the project, based on their level of knowledge and
the resources they would have access to.
Kees van der Waal looks at the emerging field of institutional development and
the anthropological study of the complexity of local dynamics. The contribution
of anthropology to the study and development of rural institutions is related to
the methodology and approach used in the anthropology of development.
Ethnographic fieldwork in the Northern Province is discussed in relation to the
context of government policy on local government and rural development
planning. Three levels of third sector organisations are discussed in terms of
their dynamics and their impact as institutions for development.
Thea de Wet, Angela Mathee and Brendon Barnes provide an interesting
example of collaborative work between an anthropologist and epidemiologists
on the quality of life in a specific urban environment. They focus their attention
on Alexandra, a township area to the north of central Johannesburg. In their
collaboration, the anthropologist (Thea de Wet) contributed the more qualitative
methodology and interpretation, which complemented the use of statistics and
health indicators by her co-authors. The article indicates the extremely dangerous
conditions, from a health point of view, of the Alexandra township living
environment. This article is a good indication of the kind of contribution that
anthropologists can make in fields, such as epidemiology, that are basic to
quality of life and the Human Development Index.
A note on the contributors
Chris de Wet (C.deWet@ru.ac.za) teaches anthropology at the University of
Rhodes. After a Master's study in Oxford, he did his doctoral studies at Rhodes
on the consequences of relocation in a rural Ciskei settlement. His extended
research in the Eastern Cape rural areas led to the publication of numerous
articles and three books, mainly on the effects of relocation, land issues and the
anthropological analysis of development planning. As a former president of the
Association for Anthropology in Southern Africa and a frequent visitor to African
and overseas universities, he maintains a large network of research and academic
co-operation.
At Fischer (atf@mweb.co.za) was teaching anthropology at the University of
the North and Rand Afrikaans University, before moving into development
6

planning and implementation. His doctoral studies were done at RAU, based on
extended fieldwork in a settlement in the former Gazankulu. He subsequently
became a development consultant, doing anthropological research for the
Development Bank of Southern Africa, mainly on emerging farmers in Mpumalanga.
In the last few years he has become involved in consultancy work
focusing on the resettlement and mitigation caused by the building of large
dams and irrigation projects in and near Swaziland.
Kees van der Waal (csvdw@lw.rau.ac.za) teaches anthropology and development
studies at RAU. His doctoral studies, done at RAU, focused on informal
sector production and distribution of craft products. A longitudinal study in a
settlement in the Northern Province in recent years was focused on a series of
themes: residential fluidity, gender violence, development planning, public
participation and institutional development. At RAU, he was instrumental in
reintroducing anthropology as a subject in the Faculty of Arts, where it has been
placed in the Department of Development Studies. One of his interests is to
build up the complementary relationship between the two subjects.
Thea de Wet (tdw@lw.rau.ac.za) teaches anthropology and development
studies at RAU. After a Masters study on childhood malnutrition at the University
of the Free State, she completed her doctoral studies at the University of
Florida, USA. Her dissertation focused on over-the-counter products aimed at
the African infant market. She worked for the South African Medical Research
Council from 1992 to 2000 in Johannesburg as project manager of the Birth to
Ten longitudinal child health and development study. Angela Mathee has a
BSc Hons in microbiology from the University of Cape Town and an MSc in
Environmental Epidemiology and Policy from the London School of Hygiene
and Tropical Medicine, UK. She is a Senior Specialist Scientist in the Health
and Development Group of the South African Medical Research Council and
the leader of the Environmental Health Initiative of the MRC. Her research
interests include environmental health conditions of people living in inner cities.
Brendon Barnes has a Masters degree in Research Psychology from the
University of Natal and is a scientist with the Environmental Health Initiative of
the South African Medical Research Council.
7

Engaging with development:
Confessions of an anthropologist
in the Eastern Cape
Chris de Wet
1 INTRODUCTION
`Development' is one of those nice-warm-feeling, politically-correct, must-begood
items that every self-respecting social scientist should have in their conceptual
armoury and in the list of projects accomplished on their CV. It is also a
Humpty-Dumpty kind of word, as when Humpty says: ``when I use a word, it
means exactly what I want it to mean''. A heavily ideologically and morally
loaded term, it can be used to sort out the goodies from the baddies: if you don't
agree with the way I see development, then you are anti-democratic, antigrowth,
anti-sustainability, anti-whatever I am in favour of. We may all know that
we want it, but we are not always too clear about what exactly it is that we want,
or whether we want some of the more tricky things that go with development.
So, in this paper, I am not going to sidetrack you with theoretical debates about
the alleged merits or pitfalls of particular approaches to development. Let me
rather discuss some of the ways in which I have found myself thinking about
`development' in the course of my career thus far as an anthropologist, and then
look at some of the issues facing anthropologists who involve themselves in
development in the South African context. Much of this paper is thus of a fairly
personal, biographical nature, as the editor of this number of Africanus asked
me to make it.
But first, allow me a general definition of development, in order to locate what
follows. I would say that for something to be development, it should ideally
provide the people affected by it with an enhancement of three things:
8 Africanus 31(1)2001

(i) their material circumstances;
(ii) their range of options and choices; and
(iii) their control over their day-to-day affairs.
Note that this general orienting definition does not specify what kind of political
or economic approach needs to be followed; it rather tries to provide some
broad outcomes in terms of which such economically, ideologically or politically
specific development initiatives should be evaluated. If something does not
result in an enhancement of those three aspects of people's lives, then can we
really call it development?
2 ONE ANTHROPOLOGIST'S VARYING VIEWS OVER TIME OF
DEVELOPMENT
In the 23 years that I have been involved in teaching and researching Anthropology
at Rhodes University, I have found myself looking at the issue of development
in a number of ways. Why have I found myself shifting emphasis in
my views of development? While a significant part of our task as social scientists
is to stand back and look at the way in which circumstances and economic,
political and social trends and policies affect the way other people see
the world and behave in it ± we are ourselves not exempt from such influences.
Indeed, we would scarcely be human if we were. So, as an anthropologist
making (his) way through a Pilgrim's Progress of personal and intellectual development
within the theoretical, institutional, cultural and political opportunities
and constraints of being an anthropologist in South Africa in the late twentieth
century, I have been influenced by circumstances around me, responding accordingly.
One of the most profound ways in which anthropologists are affected by circumstances
around them, is through the experience of fieldwork. We typically
try to go and spend extended periods of time (i e as extended as other job and
social commitments and funding will allow) staying with a group of people, and
try to understand them from close up, from their perspective, in terms of the
circumstances they live under. This is often an emotionally intense experience,
and influences the way we think about matters such as development ± particularly
if the group of people we stay with is very poor, or if the gap between rich
and poor within the group is very noticeable. So, one's fieldwork experience
affects one's more theoretical views of human society and development, and
the more diverse one's fieldwork experiences are, the richer one's view of the
9

complexities of human society is likely to be. It is with such enrichment in mind
that I am currently (January 2001) finalising arrangements to do research in
India in 2001.
Another way in which anthropologists, like other social scientists, are affected
by circumstances around them, is by the prevailing social theories of the time.
In South Africa, this has been particularly important in terms of the way anthropologists
have looked at apartheid, and its effects upon communities in
South Africa; and our analyses have been deeply coloured by this.
To give just one example: it is calculated that from 1960 to the early 1980s at
least 3.5 million people were effectively forcibly removed from one part of the
country to another to make the racial and ethnic pieces of the apartheid jigsaw
puzzle fit (Surplus People Project 1985:9).
The 1980s saw a lot of research into this forced resettlement ± a fair amount of
which was openly aimed at showing how the apartheid system had created the
terrible circumstances in which such relocated people found themselves. While
nobody would want to deny that apartheid (with the collusion of capitalist interests,
as some analysts have argued: Surplus People Project 1982, Vol 2:4±6)
was the principal cause of such removals, the interesting thing was that most
analysts tended to take the apartheid system as the total framework of analysis
within which to document and analyse the consequences and outcomes of
these removals. Of course, such forced removals have been taking place all
over the world for a long time, and there is an impressive body of ethnographic
and theoretical literature which could have been, but which was not used, to
help make sense of apartheid removals in South Africa. The irony was that the
apartheid system had effectively colonised the thinking of anti-apartheid academics
and activists. So, we as anthropologists have been influenced by our
views of our own political system (something which also applies in the post-
1994 situation), as well as by prevailing social theories. Within the Englishspeaking
universities in South Africa, there has been a shift from an emphasis
on a broadly marxian political economy approach in the 1980s to an emphasis
on issues of culture and identity in the 1990s, and within the Afrikaans-speaking
universities there has been a shift away from the volkekunde model, and we
need to ask ourselves how this may be affecting the way we approach development.
I started fieldwork in the rural settlement of Chatha in the Keiskammahoek
magisterial district of what was then the Ciskei homeland in late 1978. Like most
10

ural settlements in the Ciskei, the people of Chatha had been moved in the
1960s in terms of a government scheme known rather inappropriately as
`betterment planning'. This involved people having to move from their scattered
small, kinship based, residential and political clusters to a few large, central
residential areas, with the rest of the area being divided up into fenced off
arable and grazing areas. For a range of reasons, this move (which became the
subject of my 1987 PhD and subsequent (1995) book Moving Together, Drifting
Apart) has been disastrous for this and other communities. In the 1980s,
agriculture was in a parlous state in Chatha and in similar settlements, including
the Amatola Basin, near Alice, where I also worked in the early 1980s. Why was
this the case?
The evidence I found in the field, in terms of what people told me and what I
saw, led me to my first view of development, as being about problems concerning
a lack of resources and choice. People had choice taken away from
them by having had to move with betterment, which had coincided with tighter
control of their settlements by the magistracy, by the Ciskei homeland system,
and by the Tribal Authority system. They had effectively lost control of land
allocation and land use in their own area, with a weakening of internal political
structures within the settlement. Not only had they lost such choice, but in
Chatha they had also actually lost something like 60 per cent of their arable land
to the betterment exercise. In any year, up to half of the now smaller fields lay
uncultivated in the 1980s. When I asked people why they did not cultivate their
fields, the standard reply related to a question of shortages: of land, seed,
fertiliser, cattle, labour, tractors, extension services, markets, credit; in short, of
everything, including, perhaps the will to cultivate. (This last factor may well
have been related, not so much to absolute shortages, as to the fact that, for
various macro-economic reasons, the real income of villagers had increased
significantly between 1950 and the 1980s. While fields were now smaller, cash
incomes were higher.) I got similar answers about shortages in the Amatola
Basin, which had been much less messed around by betterment, and where
fields were up to five times larger than in Chatha (de Wet 1985). While people
everywhere love to complain and to pass the buck of responsibility, the Ciskei
homeland did not have the necessary institutional and financial capacity to
deliver agricultural services effectively, and for a complex combination of reasons,
many people did not cultivate. So, at that time, I tended to see the
development problem as one of shortages, and exercised my mind as to what
kinds of longer-term facilitating inputs, such as improved roads, water supply,
11

health services and training could help overcome the sorts of shortages I have
been discussing.
After finishing my PhD thesis on Chatha, I thought I would like to look at another
village in the Keiskammahoek area which had a different land tenure system,
and which had therefore been differently affected by betterment. So, I started
work in the settlement of Rabula, which is characterised by a freehold tenure
system. (Betterment provisions did not apply in freehold areas, so only those
people living on the commonage and Trust tenure areas of Rabula, which were
under government control, were affected by betterment.) But, Rabula was different
from Chatha in perhaps a more crucial respect. Whereas Chatha was
inaccessibly tucked up against the Amatola mountains at the end of a bad road,
Rabula straddled the road between the town of Keiskammahoek and the administrative
and trading centre of King William's Town. Rabula was thus closer
to key educational institutions, such as Lovedale and other schools ± and closer
to centres of employment. People in Rabula worked closer to home, whereas
Chatha was characterised by long-range labour migration; people in Rabula
were better educated, and in more skilled and semi-skilled jobs than people in
Chatha, more of whom were essentially manual labourers; and there was a
much higher incidence of people in Rabula marrying outside of the settlement
than in Chatha. Rabula was thus much better integrated into the local regional
system.
This gave Rabula a massive jump start in the 1970s and 1980s when the Ciskei
bureaucracy provided many opportunities for skilled and semi-skilled employment
at what were then good salaries. Rabula's favourable situation was even
further enhanced when the road between King William's Town and the town of
Keiskammahoek was tarred in the late 1980s. Incomes in Rabula in the 1980s
were significantly higher, as were material standards of living. Rabula's relative
prosperity was, to my mind, to be explained by its favourable location, which
had enabled its people to be better educated and to become better integrated
into the region than Chatha (de Wet and Leibbrandt 1994; Leibbrandt and
Sperber 1997). I was now thinking of development in terms of problems of
regional integration. Hence the title of a multi-disciplinary (1997) set of essays
on processes of change in the Keiskammahoek district was entitled From Reserve
to Region.
After the more fieldwork-intensive periods in Chatha and Rabula, I became
involved in looking at issues relating to development at a more general level, in
two ways: firstly, with regard to land reform, and secondly, with regard to re-
12

settlement. In the case of land reform, I found myself wrestling with questions
which led me to think of development in terms of problems of rights and of
conflict ( de Wet 1997). If land is a scarce resource, and we are seeking to
overcome the injustices and conflicts of the past through a more just redistribution
of land, then, it seemed to me, there is a real likelihood that the very
process of redistribution can in itself become a source of potential injustice and
conflict. I was concerned that there might develop what I termed a `hierarchy of
beneficiaries'. If there is a high political priority on the restitution of land to those
who were turned off it during the apartheid years, then the available resources
in terms of money and manpower would tend to be focused on restitution cases,
to the possible detriment of people claiming land reform benefits under the land
redistribution or land tenure reform components of the government's post-1994
land reform programme. Similarly, female-headed households would enjoy
preferential treatment over male-headed households which might be in worse
straits.
The hierarchy of beneficiaries would also benefit those people with the necessary
resources such as literacy, money, transport and political contacts to
enable them to submit and to keep pressing their claims for land and to raise
collateral. Those people already on the land, such as labour tenants and farm
workers, would be in a more favourable position to land their claims. The upgrading
of land tenure rights would be likely, as has been the case elsewhere in
Africa, to harden the distinction between the landed and the landless, with
renters and squatters tending to lose access to land. Until issues of customary
law are reconciled with the egalitarian emphasis of the South African constitution,
as in other parts of Africa, men would be likely to be able to manipulate
the interface between customary law and the formalisation of land rights to their
benefit.
Where a resource becomes available, there are usually competing claims upon
it. I was concerned that the land reform process, by making such new resources,
or new rights to existing resources, available, might create conflict
between different interest groups, e g:
Ð neighbouring communities, competing for grazing land;
Ð communities and institutions (such as forestry companies, nature reserves
and tourism developers) that have encroached upon what local communities
see as their land;
Ð those who have been awarded new sites or houses, and land invaders;
Ð groups such as township dwellers and farmers, who are competing for ac-
13

cess to municipal commonage for residential or grazing or commercial
purposes.
I was now seeing development in terms of the problems involved in achieving a
just distribution of resources, and of avoiding conflict in the process.
My next field work experience, on land reform, took me a bit further down the
road of the problem what achieving justice involved, and how this related to
development (de Wet 1999). Trust One (a pseudonym) is a land redistribution
project in the Eastern Cape. A number of black families clubbed together, as a
communal property association, and the government bought them two formerly
white-owned farms, in terms of the Land Acquisition Grant system which has
been part of the government's post-1994 land reform programme. The 110
members of Trust One decided to run the two farms (several kilometres apart)
as a collective. This has, however, created all sorts of problems when it comes
to decisionmaking, as less than a quarter of the families or their representatives
are actually living on the farm. People do not arrive for meetings, and decisions
are put off. Decisions which are likely to be divisive have tended to be fudged or
delayed. This has seriously impacted on productivity on the farms, as equipment
is in need of repair, and some members do not want to borrow money
from the banks for fear that their prized land will be repossessed. Accounts
have not always been properly kept. Forward planning is not a strong point, not
least because of the fear of creating disunity among members. In this and
similar cases, I came to see development as about problems of institutional
capacity.
The problem of institutional capacity, of course, extends beyond local community
level. In land reform situations, lack of institutional and decision-making
capacity and co-ordination is also a problem in and between the various government
departments and tiers of government, and between these departments
and the affected people. In considering the case of Riemvasmaak in the northwestern
Cape, Lund (1998:15) points to the need to `manage the contradiction'
involved in the fact that the delivery of products such as land, housing and water
must take place simultaneously with ``participants learning to make informed
decisions about, and taking ownership and control, of the products''.
My more recent research on policy issues in resettlement has led me to explore
another perspective on development, as being about problems of complexity.
This is not about complexity in the sense of a change of scale, as immortalised
14

y the Wilsons in their 1945 monograph The Analysis of Social Change. Let me
briefly sketch in the context.
Development projects such as dams, irrigation schemes, urban renewal,
transport, water supply and sewerage systems, and open cast mining lead to
the resettlement of some ten million people per year world-wide. Overwhelmingly,
the socio-economic consequences for those who have to move,
have been disastrous, often leaving them permanently economically worse-off
and socially fractured (Cernea 2000). The World Bank and other development
funders have sought to develop resettlement guidelines which borrower countries
must respect (World Bank 1990). However, the record has still not improved
significantly. Why not? The World Bank argues that borrower countries
do not have the proper legal provisions, policy instruments or administrative
structures to protect the rights and welfare of the displaced. Resettlement
projects are almost always underfinanced, and result in impoverishment, instead
of development, for the affected people. With proper inputs, the problems
in resettlement can in principle be overcome. At bottom, however, (so the argument
goes) it is a question of political will, which is lacking in the case of
many borrower countries, with predictably negative results (Cernea 2000).
My more recent thinking about resettlement (stimulated by a project in which I
and colleagues in the USA and England are involved, which seeks to identify
ways to improve the outcomes of resettlement projects) leads me to suspect
that getting the inputs (including the political will) lined up will, however, not
necessarily be enough to turn the dismal record around. There seems to me to
be a complexity inherent in the resettlement process, which creates sets of
interrelated problems that are not readily amenable to operationalisation and
rational planning, procedures and provision ± and which tend to weight resettlement
projects towards failure, leaving the affected people worse off than
before (de Wet 2000).
Some of these factors include:
Ð that involuntary resettlement further marginalises already marginalised
people, who are able to be moved against their will because they are poor
and politically weak in the first place;
Ð that the political and ideological agendas behind many development projects
introduce a potentially irrational element into projects, such that they have to
go ahead regardless of their (lack of) development merits;
Ð that the state, which is supposed to uphold the rights of those people it
15

actually is moving against their will, is both player and referee in the situation;
Ð that the resettlement component usually has to adjust its time frames and
budget to the demands of what are perceived as the more important aspects
of the overall development project, such as dam construction;
Ð that there are usually competing visions of what constitutes development,
with a struggle between different interest groups to make their vision prevail
(Oliver-Smith 1991;1996); and
Ð that policy becomes fundamentally transformed, and its goals often subverted,
in the very process of implementation (Rew et al 2000).
In combination, these problems constitute a formidable set of obstacles, and it
seems to me that, unless we understand the dynamics of that complexity (which
would be somewhat different for projects not involving resettlement) development
projects are prone to flounder upon it. In the words of the Scottish poet,
Robert Burns: ``The best laid plans of mice and men, gang aft aglay''.
So, while consciously not wanting to reduce `the development problem' to any
one focus ± precisely because of my overriding sense of the complexities of
development projects- I have over the years found myself emphasising different
aspects, and problems, as requiring attention, in response to my fieldwork
experiences and my exposure to wider theoretical issues and debates.
3 WHAT IS THE ROLE OF ANTHROPOLOGY IN DEVELOPMENT IN
SOUTH AFRICA?
Anthropology has always had to deal with the authorities, the political masters
of the day. The fact that we are now officially a non-racial democracy, does not
remove that imperative. The authorities are important, for several reasons.
Government bodies, such as the Human Sciences Research Council (now the
National Research Foundation) provide research funding, which many anthropologists
± including both those who supported and who opposed the political
system during the apartheid years ± have relied upon. This has raised ethical
problems for some anthropologists: there were some cases where government
funding bodies did try to intervene in the research process, and for some anthropologists,
any government money was dirty money ± in the same way as
colleagues of mine in the USA will not take research money from various USA
and international funding bodies; but mostly, this type of interference did not
happen, and one could use government funding to do research to show up the
16

failings of the apartheid system. One also needed to do research to publish in
order to advance one's career ± for all sorts of ethically above board reasons!
The authorities also in many instances controlled, or sought to control, entry to
areas such as the former homelands and townships Ð a practice which was
continued in the officially `independent' homelands in the 1980s. This was potentially
more of a problem for anthropologists, who usually wanted to spend
extended periods of time in what were the `black areas'. What did you want to
do there in the first place? Some anthropologists applied for permits to give
them permission to enter these areas, while others simply went in `illegally'. This
again raised tricky ethical issues: to ask for a permit was tantamount to legitimising
the apartheid system; not to ask for a permit could spell trouble for the
communities offering one hospitality, or for their leaders. One might also get
thrown out half way during one's research, and be left high and dry, and unable
to fulfil commitments to funders, researchers whom one was employing, etc. On
the whole however, as long as one was not seen to be a `trouble maker', i e if
one's research was sufficiently `irrelevant' or harmless, one was allowed to
proceed ± although it was at times made difficult for such supposed `trouble
makers', who were researching more controversial issues.
The post-1994 situation similarly raises issues of funding, access and relevance
± if of a somewhat different kind. Both government and other sources
increasingly seem to be calling for `relevant' research, in the sense that it should
be related to government policy or programmes, or clearly be of a developmental
nature if it is to attract funding. One increasingly needs to show evidence
of involving colleagues from historically disadvantaged universities and students
from historically disadvantaged groups, of capacity-building and training,
of consultation with the to-be-researched communities in the design of the
research proposal, of research techniques that involve the community, such as
Rapid Rural Appraisal (RRA) and Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA). Research
thus needs to be seen to be both developmentally, as well as transformationally,
relevant.
The gate-keeper function still obtains, but it is no longer the Bantu Affairs
Commissioner and/or the magistrate and/or the officer in charge of the local
police station who gives one permission to go and do one's fieldwork and reside
in the area. It now tends to be the local civic organisation or residents' association
and/or branch of the political party that gives one permission. One's
research agenda may need to be negotiated with these office-bearers, and they
17

may allocate one a `research assistant', with an attempt being made to incorporate
the research project for their own purposes.
To give an example: in 1995, a group of researchers was busy looking into land
reform-related issues in the former Ciskei homeland. One of the settlements in
which we worked was characterised by various land tenure systems, and by
considerable tensions around land issues. In September 1995, I was to discuss
the possibility of a plan for improved access to water with members of the
`community', and had gone to some trouble to liaise with all the important
interest groups. I subsequently arrived for the meeting on the planned day, to
find that the discussion on land and water issues had been incorporated as part
of the agenda of a meeting that the local civic organisation had called ± planned
for the same time! The civic organisation clearly represented specific interest
groups in the settlement, and by co-opting the discussion on land and water,
was able to exercise a greater degree of control over the proceedings than
would otherwise have been the case.
As before 1994, so after 1994, if anthropologists wish to get involved in the kind
of long term contact with communities that is required for effective collaboration
around developmental initiatives, they cannot escape from the politics that is
involved ± both in obtaining state funding and in obtaining the permission of
gatekeepers. They will have to be prepared to make trade-offs at both levels ±
or get out of the kitchen.
But anthropologists are increasingly acquiring funding and getting involved in
development work from a different angle ± as consultants to government departments,
or private firms. Here again there are trade-offs: the pay is often
good, but you are usually told pretty much what you must do, and are usually
given a fairly short time within which to do it. You may be told how your report is
to be structured, and sometimes even what research methods to use. Time
constraints imposed by the funder usually result in `quick and dirty' type projects,
where a team goes in for a short period, uses `quick-yield' techniques,
writes a quick report with an executive summary and several recommendations,
and waits for the cheque. The use of such a `helicopter anthropology' approach
can be particularly dangerous in a situation where new projects are making
available new resources in a political context where long-standing socio-political
constraints are either being lifted or lessened. This raises the distinct possibility
of competition for new resources, and thus of conflict. If the researcher does not
correctly understand the prevailing socio-political situation and tensions in a
18

community, the use of a technique such as PRA can serve to create expectations,
heighten such tensions and obstruct successful project outcomes.
The challenge for anthropologists involved in development work is to avoid the
danger of becoming highly paid rapid-report producers at the cost of no longer
remaining anthropologists, and to experiment with and adapt these rapid appraisal
techniques, so as to try to reconcile the conflicting claims of rapid-report
production and real, in-depth, qualitative research. Development is not only
about needs assessment and community workshops, important as those are. If
development is about affecting changes that enhance the quality of lives of
people over time in a way sustainable by the people concerned, then it is about
transforming ongoing social and economic processes. That takes time ± both to
understand those processes, and then to work with people in transforming
them. Otherwise we may land up being neither agents of development nor
worthwhile anthropologists.
4 POSSIBLE ROLES FOR ANTHROPOLOGISTS IN
DEVELOPMENTAL SITUATIONS
There are a number of roles that an anthropologist can play in relation to
development initiatives, each of which has its advantages and disadvantages.
We can simply do our research and publish it, hoping that it will one day be used
for the benefit of mankind. That way one keeps one's autonomy, keeps out of
the limelight and out of trouble, avoids difficult situations and decisions ± and is
usually condemned to having one's work gather dust on the shelf.
Or we can act as consultants for a private sector or government organisation for
short periods, such as a specific stage of a project, to work on a specific issue.
The scope of our role is then determined by the organisation concerned, which
may place restrictions upon the nature of our interaction with members of the
project community. Unless the consultancy is of a longer-term and more
comprehensive nature, relating to the project as a whole, the anthropologist
typically has very little say over matters such as project design or policy issues.
Another role option is that of broker between various interest groups involved in
the development project. This allows the anthropologist to exercise a measure
of influence in the situation, as long as he/she is able to maintain impartiality,
and does not fall foul of the temptation to choose sides (and so adopt the role of
advocate). This mediation role also carries the danger that your clients may
19

ecome dependent upon your continued balancing of interests in the situation,
with a resultant weakening of their capacity to negotiate for themselves, leaving
them vulnerable without your continued involvement.
As an advocate, the anthropologist openly chooses sides, and accepts all the
political and ethical implications that go with that stance. Hard politics is often
unfamiliar territory to social scientists. This, together with the fact that we will
usually be acting on the basis of incomplete knowledge, means that there is a
real possibility of misreading situations, which may cost our clients dearly, both
politically, and in terms of the outcomes of the project. The authorities may find
an outsider's direct involvement threatening, and forbid the anthropologist any
further involvement in the project. This again raises the sort of dependency
issues discussed under the mediator role.
A role that combines attributes of consultant, mediator and advocate, is that of
facilitator. Here the anthropologist makes her/his knowledge, skills and wider
contacts available to a group of people that is trying to get a development
initiative off the ground. He/she gets involved in drawing up plans, obtaining
funds, and in the organisation and implementation of the project. This role
carries the risk of falling foul of local divisions and conflicts of interest, and of
loss of credibility among certain sections of the group. There is also the risk of
giving in to the temptation of telling people what to do, blunting their initiative
and creating dependency, as well as that the authorities or local politicians or
warlords may see our involvement as political interference or incitement.
Another role option relates to getting involved through `joining the system', at
the planning or policy level, with a development or funding or implementing or
government agency. One thinks here of the role that anthropologists played in
the former Department of Native/Bantu Affairs in apartheid South Africa, or that
anthropologists are currently playing in the World Bank. At this level, we have
the actual power to influence the course of events to a significant degree. The
cost is that we will probably have to forego autonomy in the process, inasmuch
as we will have to reconcile ourselves to the broad goals, procedures and
framework of operation of the organisation for which we choose to work.
Each role thus has its prize and its price, and the anthropologist needs to think
carefully about the nature of her/his involvement, and to consider the balance of
implications on strategic, financial and ethical grounds (for another analysis of
these issues, see Whisson 1984).
20

5 SOME ETHICAL ISSUES
In addition to the ethical tensions involved in the various roles mentioned above,
I would here like to mention a few other ethical issues confronting anthropologists
seeking to do research. As discussed earlier, researchers will increasingly
come under pressure, from officials as well as sponsors, to do
`relevant' research, to do it within the desired duration of a specific project,
rather than in a slower, more qualitative fashion, and to plan their research in
terms of the needs of particular projects, rather than of academic priorities.
Research agendas are likely to be increasingly decided upon and defined from
outside of academe. Each researcher will have to make his or her decision as to
what may go through as `acceptable interference', and where the line is to be
drawn.
Gate-keeping issues, reflecting the changing power relationship between researcher
and researched, and the accompanying shift in control over the focus
and the process of the research initiative and what is done with the data, again
raise the question of `acceptable interference'. Here we are going to have to
make decisions as to how to strike the balance between the `democratisation of
the research process' and the researcher's autonomy as an academic value.
Getting involved in more participatory, project-oriented research ventures with a
`community' (which is often deeply divided), makes for a radical change in the
anthropologist's relationship with her/his subjects. A detached, academic relationship
will be difficult to maintain, as the anthropologist will now increasingly
be involved with the potential beneficiaries in development initiatives, and will
actively be promoting a process of change. In what measure does this give the
anthropologist the right, or even the obligation, to provide leadership or direction
if he/she feels that people are taking the wrong course of action ± whether
strategically or ethically? To what extent should the anthropologist, as a kind of
expert in the situation (which is basically why he/she is being hired by the
funders or taken on board by the community), be held responsible if things go
wrong? And the chances of things going wrong are heightened if we use rapidresults
methods which may increase the chances of misunderstanding the situation,
creating expectations and heightening conflict. Participation in a conscious
effort to bring about change, and conscious use of one's research to that
end, implies a new set of political relationships with one's co-activists/research
subjects: a new set of power relations, expectations, rights and obligations,
which each anthropologist will have to negotiate for her/himself.
21

6 ARE THE PROBLEMS CONFRONTING DEVELOPMENT
ANTHROPOLOGISTS UNIQUE IN SOUTH AFRICA?
For many years, many South Africans have tended to see the situation in South
Africa as unique, because of the history of apartheid. This has often led us to be
inward-turning and myopic, as is evidenced by the way academics thought
about and analysed forced resettlement, and more recently by the way we are
trying to square the sometimes competing demands of reconciliation, justice
and development, looking for `South African solutions to South African problems'.
We now seem to be doing the same sort of thing, but on a continental
scale, with talk about `African' renaissance and `African' solutions. The nation
state and the continent do not hold any quasi-umbilical or mystical power, either
to drag us down, or to deliver us. To accord these constructs and particular
periods of their history such power, is to abdicate our own autonomy and responsibility.
While national level policies do of course create both facilitating
and frustrating contexts for development, some development projects will
succeed and others will fail within the same over-arching national or even
provincial context. As Sandra Wallman so effectively shows us in her now
classic comparison of two development projects in Lesotho (Take Out Hunger,
1969), projects take place at the local level, and largely succeed or fail because
of local level factors, such as (in one of her cases) the leadership qualities of the
project manager, or local level politics, or social and resource patterns, etc. In
the case of Chatha mentioned earlier, one of the key reasons for the debilitating
factionalism that developed after betterment planning was implemented, related
to matters as local and interrelated as the lie of the land, and the fact that two
large new residential areas were demarcated by the planners. Between these
two new areas is a steepish ravine. This meant that new resources such as the
clinic and the high school, could not be located equitably between the two
areas, but only in, or closer to, either one of them. Such resources thus became
sources of division and conflict between the two new areas. The fact that only
two (rather than more than two) new areas were designated, also sharpened
the potential for factionalism, which has had a negative impact upon development
initiatives in the settlement.
A development project may be seen as a small-scale society in formation,
involving decisionmakers, funders, planners, implementers, labourers, and the
`receiving' groups (Colson 1982). For the purposes of the project, these different
players have to form a short-term society, to develop a common set of
goals, rules and norms, and patterns of relationships. This is made more difficult
by the fact that all the players know that the exercise is only of short
22

duration, and therefore will often seek to minimise commitment and maximise
own gain from participation in the project.
We as anthropologists are uniquely placed in terms of our training to stand back
and observe the dynamics of small-scale communities, with their cross-cutting
ties and lines of cleavage, strategies of competition and rituals of cohesion. We
know where to look for possible fault lines in such situations, and can use this
understanding to help keep the delicate relations within these short-term smallscale
societies on track, and communication lines as open as possible.
But we also need to be comparative in our approach to the local in thinking
about development problems and projects in South Africa. The basic issues
development projects have to deal with, such as different agendas, competition
for resources, resolution of conflict, dealing with local and regional government,
shifting budgetary allocations and priorities, training, etc, are pretty much the
same the world over. There is nothing uniquely South African or even African
about these problems in the context of planned change at the local level. We
can only enrich our understanding of, and contribution to, development initiatives
in South Africa by seeking to learn from the experiences of human
beings trying to grapple with the same issues elsewhere in the world.
7 EPILOGUE
Let me end on a positive note, with an example that emphasises the value of
the long-term, in-depth, qualitative research that is one of anthropology's main
strengths. To do this, let me end where I started: with Chatha, where I spent
some 16 months over a period of six years, and had the benefit of an historical
base-line provided by the research done by the members of the Keiskammahoek
Rural Survey team from 1948 to 1950, i e before betterment was implemented
in Chatha. My work concentrated, in as much detail as possible, on
documenting the agricultural, economic, political, ritual and social impacts of
betterment. I spent time walking the old areas, drawing maps of who had lived
where in the pre-betterment residential areas, counting the number of huts per
household before betterment, the distance between huts, the amount of land
lost; observing the changes in patterns of economic co-operation and association,
etc. I interviewed the officials who were responsible for moving the
people in the 1960s, and tracked down all the planning documents involved. I
then tried to contextualise these impacts in terms of the theoretical literature on
resettlement and the accounts of villagisation schemes elsewhere in Africa.
23

That by itself was unexceptional, in the sense that any other anthropologist
would have done much the same.
But then, enterprise and good fortune intervened, and the exceptional happened.
An Eastern Cape NGO, the Border Rural Committee, saw the opportunity
of using my research and my lists of householders and landholders, to
make a claim for restitution compensation for Chatha. I was able to hand all the
documents, lists, interviews and analyses to the lawyer preparing the brief, and
I wrote an `expert witness' affidavit. My PhD and my book on betterment in
Chatha and Rabula served as documents in the claim. The NGO, together with
the people of Chatha, drew up a development plan in terms of a calculation
made by an agricultural and land survey specialist, based on my lists, hut
counts and maps. Towards the end of 2000, Chatha was awarded the sum of
approximately eleven million Rand as compensation for the losses incurred as a
result of betterment. I plan to continue my association with the settlement of
Chatha, documenting the process of what happens to the development plan,
the way in which that money is used for the development of the settlement, and
its social consequences. If the community wishes me to provide them with an
analysis of these issues, I will be very happy to do so.
Good fortune, and the enterprise of others, together with detailed fieldwork, has
enabled me to plough back something into the development of the settlement
that set me on my development path, by providing me with the hospitality and
information that gave me what I needed to build a career as an anthropologist.
REFERENCES
Cernea, M M 2000, `Risks, Safeguards and Reconstruction: a Model for Population
Displacement and Resettlement'. In Cernea, M M and McDowell, C. (eds) Risks
and Reconstruction-Experiences of Resettlers and Refugees. Washington: The
World Bank.
Colson, E 1982. Planned Change ± the Creation of a New Community. Berkeley: University
of California, Institute of International Studies.
De Wet, C 1985. `Cultivation'. In De Wet, C and Bekker, S B (eds) Rural Development in
South Africa: a Case-Study. Pietermaritzburg: Shuter and Shooter.
De Wet, C 1995. Moving Together, Drifting Apart: Betterment Planning and Villagisation
in a South African Homeland. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press.
De Wet, C 1997. `Land Reform in South Africa: a Vehicle for Justice and Reconciliation,
or a Further Source of Inequality and Conflict?' Development Southern Africa
14(3):355±362.
24

De Wet, C 1999. `Managing Togetherness: Establishing a Collective-Ownership Farm in
the Eastern Cape', Journal of Social Sciences (India) 3(4):279±286.
De Wet, C 2000. `Can Everybody Win? Economic Development and Population Displacement'.
Unpublished conference paper, Workshop on Involuntary Resettlement:
Risks, Reconstruction and Development, Rio de Janeiro, August 2000.
De Wet, C and Leibbrandt, M V 1994. `Separate Developments: the Differential Impact
of Homeland Policy on Two Rural Ciskei Villages', Development Southern Africa
11(2):159±176.
Leibbrandt, M V and Sperber, F 1997. `Income and Economic Welfare'. In De Wet, C and
Whisson, M (eds) From Reserve to Region: Apartheid and Social Change in the
Keiskammahoek District of (former) Ciskei. Grahamstown: Institute of Social and
Economic Research. Occasional Paper no 35.
Lund, S 1998. Lessons from Riemvasmaak for Land Reform Policies and Programmes
in South Africa. Volume Two: Background Study. Bellville: University of the
Western Cape. Programme for Land and Agrarian Studies, Research Report no 2.
Oliver-Smith, A 1991. `Involuntary Resettlement, Resistance and Political Empowerment',
Journal of Refugee Studies 4(2):132±149.
Oliver-Smith, A 1996. `Fighting for a Place: the Policy Implications of Resistance to
Development-Induced Displacement'. In McDowell, C. (ed.) Understanding Impoverishment
± the Consequences of Development-Induced Displacement. Oxford:
Berghahn Books.
Rew, A, Fisher, E and Pandey, B 2000. Addressing Policy Constraints and Improving
Outcomes in Development-Induced Resettlement Projects. Refugee Studies
Centre, University of Oxford. Report prepared for the Department for International
Development, U K.
Surplus People Project 1982. Forced Removals in South Africa (5 Vols). Cape Town:
Surplus People Project and Pietermaritzburg: Association for Rural Advancement.
Surplus People Project 1985. The Surplus People. Johannesburg: Ravan Press.
Wallman, S 1969. Take Out Hunger: Two Case Studies of Rural Development in Basutoland.
London: Athlone Press.
Whisson, M 1984. `Advocates, Brokers and Collaborators: anthropologists in the real
world.' In Grillo, R and Rew, A (eds) Social Anthropology and Development Policy.
London: Tavistock. ASA Monographs No 23.
Wilson, G and Wilson, M 1945. The Analysis of Social Change. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
World Bank 1990. Operational Directive 4.30: Involuntary Resettlement. Washington:
The World Bank.
25

Facilitating ``participatory
community consultation'':
consulting anthropologists
at work in Swaziland
At Fischer
1 INTRODUCTION
Development studies and anthropology are distinct academic disciplines.
However, development is a subject of anthropological study; the planning and
implementation of development interventions in rural livelihoods create livelihoods
for consulting anthropologists, and at the same time provide opportunities
for anthropologists to contribute to development. This article reflects upon
anthropologists' participation in pre-appraisal work required for a smallholder
irrigation development project planned in Swaziland, and it considers their
contribution to the project in particular and development in general in terms of
their participation in and their experience of the project.
The project, the Lower Usuthu Smallholder Irrigation Project (LUSIP) planned
for smallholder irrigation development along the Usuthu river between Siphofaneni
and Big Bend in the south-eastern corner of the Kingdom of Swaziland
(See Map 1), proposes to capture part of the peak flow of the Usuthu River in
the summer wet season for storage in an off channel storage in order to release
water throughout the year for the provision of irrigation of Swazi Nation Land
(SNL). The project is set to cover approximately 11 500 hectares of irrigated
land, to be used by smallholders for productive, diversified high value agriculture
in the south-east of Swaziland.
26 Africanus 31(1)2001

27
Map 1

The project, planned as a two-phase development over ten years, includes:
. The construction of the Bulungapoort Weir on the Usuthu River, to extract
surplus water during peak flows in summer;
. A Feeder Canal of 23 km to convey the water for storage in the Bovane
Reservoir off channel storage;
. The construction of the Bovane Reservoir on the Mhlathuzane and Golome
Rivers; and
. The Main Canal North (MCN) of 5.7 km and the Main Canal South (MCS) of
75 km and a network of secondary canals and pipelines with balancing
reservoirs and lifting stations, to command 1 the Bovane Block between Siphofaneni
and the Mhlatuze River (phase 1); and the Matata Block south of
the Mhlatuze River (phase 2).
The construction of the Bovane Reservoir and bulk infrastructure will displace
some homesteads for the benefit of others, as it will also command large areas
for irrigation development. The chiefdoms that will be affected by the implementation
of Phase 1 are Dlamini, Shongwe, Mamba, Gamedze, and
Ngcamphalala. The boundaries of these chieftancies, determined by means of
a population census in the project area are shown on Map 2. In the Dlamini
chiefdom the Mphaphati area will be affected by construction of the weir and a
portion of the Feeder Canal; the Mamba area will be affected by a small portion
of the Bovane Reservoir, and access to the Mhlatuzane river where the inhabitants'
cattle drink in winter will be impeded; the Shongwe chiefdom will
suffer homestead displacement and the loss of grazing and fields; in the Gamedze
chiefdom an estimated 29 homesteads will be displaced by the construction
of the bulk infrastructure ± most of the irrigation areas commanded by
the MCN, however, fall within this chiefdom; and in the Ngcamphalala chiefdom
an estimated 43 homesteads from the Mhlabatsini neighbourhood will be displaced,
but the larger part of the command area falls within this chiefdom.
Following a pre-feasibility study (Booker Tate, 1996) and a feasibility study
(GFA-Agrar, 1998), the primary objective of the project, formulated by the
Pre-Formulation Mission led by the International Fund for Agricultural Development
(IFAD), would be to ``alleviate poverty and enhance food security
and nutrition for the inhabitants of the Lower Usuthu by creating the conditions
for the transformation of subsistence level smallholder farmers into
small-scale commercial farmers'' (IFAD, June 2000). This objective is consistent
with the National Indicative Programme (NIP) for Swaziland, as agreed
28

29
Map 2

etween the Government of the Kingdom of Swaziland (GOS) and the European
Commission (EC). The NIP set, as priority, to alleviate poverty, to enhance
food security through increased productivity and diversified smallholder
agriculture, and to promote grass-root participatory development with particular
emphasis on women's socio-economic integration.
To assist project appraisal, the IFAD-led Pre-Formulation Mission recommended
that the following need to be in place for project appraisal for
Phase 1:
. Commencement of a participatory consultation process with the affected
local authorities, communities and homesteads to determine their views on
key project issues and establish a representative institutional structure for
the project;
. Commencement of resettlement planning and the formulation of a Request
For Proposal for a comprehensive Resettlement Plan; and
. Organisation of a project Geographic Information System (GIS).
The Government of Swaziland then requested the Swaziland Komati Project
Enterprise (SKPE) to commence the planning work necessary for the project
appraisal process, and SKPE appointed a group of consultants to plan and
execute the pre-appraisal work identified by the Pre-Formulation Mission for
Phase 1.
The consultants who planned the pre-appraisal programme were anthropologists
Eddie Barendse and At Fischer, who are both involved in the planning
and implementation of rural development and resettlement projects; rural sociologist
and Participatory Rural Appraisal specialist Penny Geerdts and agricultural
economist Chris Anthrobus who managed the study. Jonathan
Jenness, the resettlement and development advisor to SKPE who assisted the
team of consultants in conceptualising their task also comes from an anthropological
background.
The team of consultants had to conceptualise the requested pre-appraisal work
as a set of specific tasks to be completed within a very short timeframe. The
task, designed as a social programme, included the following studies and actions:
. A census: to create a geo-referenced database of homesteads in the study
area containing basic demographic social information, for use as a baseline
in resettlement planning and further project development;
30

. An attitudinal survey: to obtain the views of affected homesteads on specific
project related issues;
. An assets survey and land inventory: to establish assets and arable land
inventories associated with all homesteads affected by the proposed Bovane
Reservoir and the canal works;
. Participatory community consultation: to create community awareness of
the project, to contribute to a better understanding of people's commitment
to and their views on project-related issues, to initiate a participatory resettlement
planning process, and to establish an enduring representative
participatory project structure; and
. An outline resettlement plan.
This had to be accomplished within an exceptionally short time. The social
programme was planned during August, it commenced in September, and had
to be completed at the end of October to have pre-appraisal reports ready for
the Appraisal Mission that was scheduled for mid-November 2000.
Only one of the components of the social programme, the programme of participatory
community consultation is, however, used in this article to consider
the relationship between development and anthropology. The consultation
programme is therefore outlined, and the understanding of the affected community's
commitment to and views on key project issues as well as the creation
of representative community structures as the main contributions of the programme
of consultation are briefly discussed. This is followed by an interpretation
of the contribution of anthropology to the pre-appraisal programme for
LUSIP and the significance of anthropology for development.
2 COMMUNITY CONSULTATION
2.1 Objectives
The programme of community consultation was designed to create project
awareness on all community levels and improve decisionmaking particularly on
community levels, provide understanding of people's views on key project issues,
commence community consultation and participation and establish a
representative participatory project structure.
To meet these objectives project information was systematically discussed with
the communities that would be affected by the project and possible project
31

eneficiaries to create an informed and widespread awareness of the project,
and to empower and equip the community to participate in the decision-making
process with project authorities and other stakeholders.
The local community's commitment to the implementation of the project was
examined by creating opportunities to share viewpoints, deliberate issues, and
generate diverse opinions. In this way in-depth understanding of project-related
socio-economic dynamics and people's views on and attitudes towards important
project-related issues could be obtained.
To facilitate effective community participation in project decisions, a representative
institutional framework is essential. To initiate the creation of representative
project structures, the participatory programme departed from the
community's own images of organisation and representation and obtained an
understanding of decisionmaking.
2.2 The participation programme
Community consultation commenced with protocol meetings with chiefs, traditional
authorities, tindvuna (headmen) and other community leaders to introduce
the assignment, the participatory process, and its purpose to local
leaders. Consultations and discussions with Government of Swaziland Ministries
on district level as well as Ubombo Sugar and Vunisa Cotton Ginnery
provided valuable background information. The main focus of the participation
programme, however, was the community; in this case the chiefdoms that will
be affected by the project.
The consultation programme was largely assigned to participation specialist
Steve Woodburne. Though not an anthropologist or social scientist, he has
many years of experience in smallholder agricultural development and facilitation
in the Lower Usuthu area (where he grew up), on the Makhatini flats and
in the Nkomanzi area in Mpumalanga, he also has a comprehensive understanding
of social life in rural areas and a unique ability to integrate social and
agricultural realities in facilitating agricultural development.
As LUSIP will impact on communities' use of resources, he targeted resource
users for participation and consultation, and directed the consultation programme
towards resource user groups in the Gamedze, Ngcamphalala,
Shongwe Dlamini and Mamba chieftaincies. But as it became evident that inclusive
participation and consultation required consultation on more immediate
32

levels of association, the consultation programme was extended to neighbourhood
level.
2.2.1 Resource user consultations
Livestock owners, cotton growers who also produce subsistence maize, small
sugar cane farmers and members of women's clubs who grow vegetables in
communal gardens were the main resource users in the defined project area,
who were systematically consulted.
Meetings with livestock owners were arranged for dipping days, and from the
beginning of September until the end of October a total of 1 415 people were
present at the meetings organised at the eight dipping tanks distributed over the
``study area'' (See Map 3 for the distribution of these dipping tanks). Cotton
grower associations were identified with the assistance of Vunisa Ginnery
management and extension staff, and six meetings with cotton grower associations
were attended by 375 cotton growers. Meetings with the Ubombo
Sugar Small Grower Section and chairmen of sugar cane farmer associations
preceded the meetings with sugar cane farmers. Sugar cane farmer associations
were met per chiefdom and 206 sugar cane farmers attended the four
meetings arranged with them. A meeting arranged for women's clubs was attended
by 31 women.
The meetings were designed to inform resource users and form committees to
represent resource users' interests in the organisational structure that will come
in place to manage the planning and implementation of the project.
At the meetings project information was shared, the implications of LUSIP for
the different resource users (turning 6 000 ha of fields and grazing into irrigation)
were explained and resource user concerns were discussed to understand
their views, concerns and perceptions.
To represent the interest of livestock owners, eight stockowner committees,
established per dipping tank, were formed. Sugar association committees representing
sugar associations per chiefdom were established to represent the
interests of sugar cane growers in LUSIP, and six cotton grower committees will
represent the interests of the many small farmers in the area growing dry land
cotton as cash/commercial crop in a future project structure.
Neighbourhood consultations provided a valuable tool for the appreciation of
resource users' concerns and attitudes. However, resource users represented
33

34
Map 3

specific interests, and the meetings with resource users were therefore to a
certain extent exclusive, even though the larger majority of people were resource
users. Community consultation had to proceed on a more immediate
and inclusive level of association.
2.2.2 Neighbourhood consultations
The concept isigodzi (ward or neighbourhood) refers to a political unit; the ward
represented by an umgijimi (or chief's runner); a geographical area, although
boundaries are not always clearly defined; and, a social unit of people living in
close proximity to each other and who therefore share social and economic
relations. As isigodzi socially refers to people who share a sense of place (a
geographical area), a sense of community (a neighbourhood), and a sense of
identity (a ward), and therefore represents the most immediate level of social
association beyond the family, participatory community consultation was taken
to neighbourhoods.
The main aim of neighbourhood consultations was to obtain peoples' attitudes
and views towards critical project and resettlement issues on the level where
LUSIP will be implemented and social lives, livelihoods and networks of support
and co-operation will be the most seriously affected.
Meetings with the umphakatsi or inner council of each one of the affected
chieftaincies to propose neighbourhood level consultation and arrange neighbourhood
meetings locally legitimised the process of neighbourhood consultation.
It was also agreed that structures on neighbourhood level had to be
established to have representation in project structures from levels where livelihoods
are maintained and supported. Neighbourhood consultations furthermore
localised LUSIP as specific impacts on neighbourhoods could be
discussed on neighbourhood level. Neighbourhood meetings were held in 26
izigodzi in the five chiefdoms (see Map 3 for distribution of neighbourhoods),
and 687 men and women attended the meetings.
In the meetings the impacts and the implications of LUSIP on neighbourhood
level were discussed. However, as the main purpose of the meetings was to
obtain communities' views on resettlement and compensation issues, discussions
largely revolved around beneficiary access, compensation and resettlement.
These discussions were followed by discussions on the need for
neighbourhood representation in a LUSIP institutional framework, and the
creation of neighbourhood committees as first level representative structures.
As opportunities to share viewpoints and deliberate issues, resource user and
35

neighbourhood meetings provided in-depth understanding of people's views on
and attitudes towards important project-related issues.
3 SUPPORT AND COMMITMENT
Support for LUSIP was widespread and general, but also conditional.
LUSIP was associated with irrigation benefits, and on all community levels it
was seen as a much needed/desired development opportunity. From neighbourhood
meeting to neighbourhood meeting, as well as in meetings with resource
user groups, people confirmed their support in more or less the following
words: ``Emanti vele siyafuna siyabona kutsi angasiphilisa ± we indeed want the
water since we see it gives us life''. Individuals hoped LUSIP would improve
their personal circumstances and their families' livelihoods; neighbourhoods
considered LUSIP as a development opportunity for the homesteads of the
neighbourhood; and affected chiefdoms who wanted to benefit from the irrigation
development associated with the Bovane Reservoir, saw LUSIP as development
destined for them.
The widespread support for LUSIP was based on people's assessment of their
natural resource base, their perceived risks of dry land farming and the benefits
they associated with irrigation.
People generally believed that to support the growing population and sustain
their resource base more land was needed. Cattle owners explained this need
at a dipping tank in Ngcamphalala: ``This land cannot extend any further, and
we are still increasing in population, why can't the government give us some of
the private land''. LUSIP was supported as its implementation could lessen the
need for land, which was in short supply.
The development of Tibiyo 2 and Title Deed Land (TDL) on the Usuthu North
bank and the underdevelopment of Swazi Nation Land (SNL) on the South bank
was a sensitive issue for the communities living along the Usuthu. People knew
that to address the development disparities between Tibiyo and TDL on the one
hand and SNL on the other, ``water permits'' were needed, and the community
was very much aware of the fact that they had lost their water and riparian rights
to Tibiyo and ``the Companies'' to whom the water rights of the Lower Usuthu
had largely been subscribed. People hoped that LUSIP could restore ``Swazis'
water rights'', and that they could obtain ``water permits'' to develop their land,
36

ecause, as a sugar cane farmer indicated ``there are many people out there
who want to irrigate, but there is no water''.
Growing debt and the ever-narrowing gap between input costs and incomes
from dry land cotton production had indebted many cotton growers and convinced
them as well as subsistence maize farmers that dry land farming was
neither profitable nor sustainable. They supported LUSIP in the hope that they
could change from dry land crop production to irrigated agriculture. Dry land
cultivation limits production to maize and cotton. Irrigation, though, will give dry
land cotton growers and subsistence maize farmers the opportunity to diversify
their crops, as a cotton grower explained: ``There is not enough profit from dry
land cotton farming, but we know that under irrigation cotton farming would be
profitable, and irrigation would allow us to plant vegetables, maize, sugar cane
and cotton''. Irrigation was associated with choices, and the broadening of
choices could create opportunities to escape poverty. LUSIP was supported in
the hope that it could offer an escape from the poverty cycle.
Support for LUSIP, though, was also conditional. Information and awareness
levels, the perceived impacts of the project and the history of irrigation in
Swaziland influenced people's attitudes toward the project.
Knowledge and information proofed to be important conditions for support and
commitment. The intense interaction with the community over a two-month
period through participation and consultation, a population census and tagging
of homesteads as well as an attitudinal survey, largely turned ignorance into
understanding. But it also created different levels of awareness and misconceptions.
At lower levels of awareness people were generally opposed to
LUSIP, whilst people who were informed and who understood the details of the
project (even though they might not directly benefit from the irrigation development),
tended to support LUSIP.
Communities will be differently impacted by the project, and support for the
project largely hinged on perceived impacts and the mitigation of these impacts.
Involuntarily displaced homesteads that will be affected by the reservoir and
main infrastructure will loose land and grazing, but will not benefit from the
irrigation development. Their support for LUSIP would depend on the proposed
mitigation of these impacts, as cotton growers from Mhlabatsini who will loose
their fields confirmed: ``it is difficult to say we want the project, because we are
not aware where we will be resettled''. Affected homesteads and communities
37

would only support LUSIP if they would also benefit, and insisted that they
should also share in the development, and `'not be affected and gain nothing'',
because, as it was explained: ``we also want to irrigate sugar cane and cotton''.
Established sugar cane farmers in the Lower Usuthu area were suspicious, and
concerned about their farming enterprises and investments in land, infrastructure
and equipment, and would support the project on condition that it will
not disrupt existing sugar cane growers in the area. Communities in areas that
will be commanded for irrigation welcomed LUSIP on condition that they would
be the real beneficiaries, and that the benefits of the irrigation development as
they put it ``comes to us''.
Although sugar cane is hailed as Swaziland's ``green gold'', the history of sugar
cane production has not been particularly happy from a small farmer perspective.
People were therefore sceptical, and many feared that LUSIP was yet
another dispossession strategy of Tibiyo and the ``big companies'' (or the
withes), as had happened at Simunye, Ubombo and other sugar cane estates
where communities had been removed to make way for large sugar cane developments.
They were suspicious that government had a ``hidden agenda'' and
intended to ``claim the development as Tibiyo''. The condition for support which
these suspicions imply was explained in a remark from a meeting in the Mnisi
neighbourhood in Ngcamphalala: ``Siyayifuna le project kodwa asifuni kutsi silingiswe
njenge bantfu baseSimunye labasuswa bangana lutfho'' ± ``we want
the project but we do not want to be like the people of Simunye who were
removed and left with nothing''. The condition was clear: communities needed
to be convinced that they, and not government or the ``companies'' would be the
real beneficiaries of LUSIP.
3.1 Concerns and expectations
Although the people wanted LUSIP they also had many concerns, and their
concerns and expectations were influenced and related to land use systems
and the perceived impacts of the project.
Livestock owners, subsistence dry land farmers, commercial dry land cotton
growers, women's clubs growing vegetables on communal gardens, and
commercial sugar cane farmers who already irrigated more than a 1 000 ha
sugar cane were the main resource users in the area. These resource users
that represented substantial investments in livestock and agricultural infrastructure,
sustained livelihoods and at the same time kept homesteads trapped
38

in the grips of poverty. These homesteads were understandably concerned
about the impacts of LUSIP on their livelihoods, but they also had expectations
that LUSIP would improve their circumstances. The concerns of communities
affected by the reservoir and main infrastructure who were faced with large
land losses and involuntary relocation, however, differed from the concerns and
expectations of potential beneficiary communities that would share in the development
benefits.
The major concern of communities facing involuntarily displacement by the
reservoir and infrastructure was replacement land and a resettlement area.
Their expectations and preferences were also clear: relocation within their own
chiefdoms and participation in downstream developments. They demanded
local relocation because they believed that otherwise they would be treated as
bachamuki, i e outsiders, and they feared discrimination in the allocation of
LUSIP benefits and other resources if they were resettled in another chiefdom.
Their expectations, however, went beyond replacement land, they also wished
to benefit from LUSIP. As they were the most affected, they ought to ``gain
something'', which invariably was access to irrigation development, ``otherwise''
(as cotton farmers from Mhlabatsini who were to loose all their cotton fields
explained) ``we will never have a good life again''.
In contrast to involuntary resettlers, communities in the command area are not
so much concerned about a resettlement area or replacement land. Their main
concern was the replacement procedure. Neighbourhoods and resource users
demanded control of the process and wanted to identify the resettlement sites
themselves if relocation from potential irrigable soils would be required. They
didn't ``want to be shown'' where to resettle, and would ``find their own place'',
and although they wanted to be close to their fields, roads, and other services,
they rejected resettlement into a nucleated village (asifuni iskonpulasi ± we
don't want a township).
Whereas the communities who will loose land to the reservoir and feeder canal's
main concern was the replacement of this land with land that could be
commanded, communities in the command area were concerned about the
proposed size of irrigated landholdings of between two ha and four ha, and the
reallocation and redistribution of land to meet the requirements of poverty alleviation.
Expectations of the size of individual irrigable holdings were formed by current
land use practices and were therefore not uniform. Expectations varied be-
39

tween subsistence farmers with limited small scale irrigation experience who
expected vegetable gardens and replacement land irrigated from ``small dams
and irrigation pipes'' and commercial sugar farmers who expected farms of
ten ha and more.
Landholders in the command area who understood that LUSIP will inevitably
result in the redistribution of irrigable land, wanted to be in control of any redistribution
of land and would therefore prefer to redistribute land within their
families, as the following quote from a meeting in the Mnisi neighbourhood
confirms: ``Kuncono ngisikelebakitsi labente insimu ± it will be better if I subdivide
my land amongst relatives''.
Livestock owners were concerned about the loss and reduction of grazing in the
area and the overriding view among livestock owners was that government
should compensate the loss of grazing by buying Tibiyo land or farms. Communities,
however, also appreciated that the reduction in grazing was an inevitable
consequence of the irrigation development, and there was a growing
realisation of own responsibility to mitigate the impacts of LUSIP on grazing by
measures such as stock reduction by selling old stock, turning towards commercial
beef production and rotational grazing.
LUSIP will transform farming and as a new farming system will replace subsistence
and dry land cotton production, people were particularly concerned
about the organisational framework of the future irrigation farming. The organisational
framework and the financial implications of the project for farmers
were ever-recurring issues at neighbourhood and resource user group meetings.
People wanted to know whether individuals could participate as individuals
in the irrigation projects or would they only be allowed as associations. Although
the majority of farming households in the area was farming on individual or
homestead landholdings, access to irrigation was largely associated with
farmer associations and collective landholding. This explains the need for clarity
on the participation framework, as well as the overwhelming preference to enter
irrigated farming as individuals. Potential project beneficiaries accepted the
need for collective responsibility, but wanted to maintain individual rights and
would therefore prefer that individuals hold land rights and that farmers' associations
should only be organisational and not landholding units.
A future institutional framework would have to accommodate these preferences,
as well as other farmer support measures. The need for training to
adapt to a new farming environment was deemed particularly important, as the
40

following request indicates: ``Sicela kuhhulumende asinike bantfu labanelwati
basisite kulolulimo lwetfu ± we ask the government to give us people with
expertise to help us in our new farming venture''.
Individuals will in the final instance decide on participation in the project. Although
people wanted the project, they realised that they would need credit to
enter the project. They were concerned about the costs of participation, the
debt they would have to carry, the nature of the repayments, the recovery of
infrastructure costs through water payments, the viability of the project and
farmers' profits. As decisions to participate will largely be determined by individuals'
assessments of the viability of the project on farmer level, they requested
clarity on the financial implications of the project.
3.2 Compensation
Involuntary resettlement displaces communities and is therefore inevitably associated
with compensation and the restoration of affected people's livelihoods.
According to international best practice this should be achieved through restoration
with development strategies. Although restoration with development
will be the appropriate restoration strategy for communities and homesteads
that will be displaced for the benefit of others by the Bovane Reservoir and bulk
infrastructure, LUSIP is essentially a ``development'' project, and the majority of
those who would have to resettle could become project beneficiaries. In this
context compensation needs to be reconsidered and a compensation policy for
LUSIP needs to be developed. As a first step towards a LUSIP resettlement and
compensation policy, communities in the command area's views on compensation
and resettlement were assessed.
Views were related to awareness. The overriding view was that government
should compensate for any relocation within the command area. As awareness
increased and people could see themselves as beneficiaries, an understanding
emerged that beneficiaries should also take responsibility for the inevitable
consequences of development and the impacts of the project and, that those
who would benefit could be expected to contribute to their own relocation. This
recognition of own responsibility, however, was subject to government assistance.
The project will not yet be operational at the time of relocation, and as
beneficiaries would not have the means to build new homes, the government
should make loans available. People, furthermore, felt that they could only
contribute to their own resettlement if the project would render profitable re-
41

turns. There was also some willingness to accept collective responsibility for
resettlement: if only a minority of the beneficiaries in a neighbourhood needs to
relocate for the sake of the project and the benefit of the neighbourhood from
either irrigable land or the alignment of canals, beneficiaries whose homes will
not be affected could be expected to contribute to their resettlement.
3.3 Institutional framework
A main objective of the programme of participatory consultation was the establishment
of a representative project structure build upon the community's
own image of representation and organisation. Following consultations with
resource users, neighbourhoods and representatives of local authority, it became
clear that a LUSIP representative structure should include strong local
representation as well as traditional authority representation.
Neighbourhoods and resource users demanded control of the planning and
implementation of LUSIP in their areas. They, however, also realised that there
were limits to their decision-making powers, and that these were subject to
traditional authority structures. When confronted with land and inter-chiefdom
issues, neighbourhood and resource user representatives emphasised that
they needed ``a chance to sit down and discuss with the umphakatsi (the inner
council)'', confirming the authority of chiefs and traditional authorities and the
important role they will have within a future LUSIP decisionmaking framework.
Neighbourhoods and resource users, however, were equally aware of the need
to control and balance central decisionmaking through local (regional) autonomy
to guarantee that they would be the real beneficiaries of LUSIP.
The overwhelming support for local level representation and decision-making
powers in LUSIP structures expressed by neighbourhoods and resource user
groups was confirmed on a meeting of more than 70 representatives of traditional
authorities, neighbourhoods and resource users who requested not only
more project information but also capacity building to equip them to participate
in the decisions that will determine the implementation of the project and shape
their destinies.
4 ANTHROPOLOGY AND LUSIP
By taking LUSIP to resource users and neighbourhoods, the programme of
community consultation created opportunities for every person in the project
42

area who wished to, to express their views, raise their concerns and state their
expectations, and it contributed to an understanding of the community's commitment
to LUSIP, their conditions for support, their concerns and expectations
and their views on compensation and representation. The degree of participation
and the level of understanding the process of consultation provided,
though, cannot necessarily be attributed to anthropology even though anthropologists
were involved in the process. The relation between anthropology and
development in the experience of the anthropologists who contributed to the
pre-appraisal work for LUSIP needs to be examined to understand the relation
as it manifests in a specific development situation.
Anthropology certainly contributed to LUSIP through the experience of the
anthropologists who planned and participated in the programme of community
consultation. The LUSIP experience, however, was also an anthropological
experience: it exposed anthropologists to a new social situation that contributed
to their general understanding of rural situations and the social dynamics of
development. The relation between anthropology and development in the experience
of anthropologists involved in development work is therefore dialectical.
And, to assess this relation around the pre-appraisal work for LUSIP, the
contribution of the anthropologists and anthropology to the social programme
and the results of the programme needs to be examined, as well as the contribution
of their participation to their anthropological work and identity.
To consider the contribution of anthropology to the IFAD-led Pre-Formulation
Mission's request for pre-appraisal work for LUSIP, the following needs to be
considered: what was asked by the Mission; what was agreed as work programme
by the proponent; and what was done by the consultants. Anthropology's
contribution therefore needs to be examined on the different interest
levels as they converge in the pre-appraisal work commissioned for LUSIP.
The Pre-Formulation Mission included representatives of international funding
organisations such as IFAD, the African Development Bank, the European
Union and the Arab Bank for Economic and Agricultural Development. Their
request for participatory consultation with the affected communities, community
views on critical project issues and a representative forum therefore expressed
international sentiments associated with the funding of resettlement and development.
It also reflects (it can be argued) anthropology's historical influence
and contribution to international development and resettlement thinking and
practice. Participation, an understanding of people's views and representation
are all intimately associated with anthropology. Although anthropology never
43

had a monopoly on participation and social understanding, the fact that community
participation (notwithstanding the fact that participation means different
things for different people) and representation have become the tools of the
development and resettlement trade, confirm the tireless efforts of anthropologists
such as Scudder and Cernea in framing development and resettlement
policies on international levels.
SKPE as proponent, who commissioned the work, encouraged a participative
approach and supported the participatory research techniques that were recommended
to obtain qualitative understanding. Although largely due to the
efforts of SKPE's resettlement and development advisor, an anthropologist
himself, SKPE's support for the proposed social programme confirmed that the
approaches and sentiments of anthropology in its critical ethnography of development
in the 1970s and 1980s have not only informed and shaped development
policies on the international level, but that these have also been
operationalised on implementation levels by implementing agencies.
Anthropologists designed the community consultation programme to create
community awareness of the project. They formulated the aims of the consultation
programme in terms of an understanding of people's commitment to
and their views on project-related issues, they commenced participatory resettlement
and development planning with the affected communities and supported
the social processes to establish an enduring representative
participatory project structure. With all this said and done though, neither the
anthropologists involved in the pre-appraisal work nor anthropology can claim
that the community participation programme associated with the pre-appraisal
work for LUSIP is a specific anthropological contribution to development. Rather,
it is anthropologists (and others) whose approach to research and development
was shaped by the methodologies, aims and objectives of
anthropology who planned and participated in the programme and who interpreted
and analysed the information. This brought about the emphasis on
qualitative understanding and community participation through intensive interaction,
particularly on neighbourhood level. Subject to the dictates of time and
scope, the means of interaction, however, had to be adapted. Community
meetings replaced the conventional participatory methodologies of anthropology
as means to obtain the understanding of the views, attitudes and perceptions
of the community the Pre-Formulation Mission required to appraise
LUSIP.
For the anthropologists who participated in the consultation programme, the
44

pre-appraisal work for LUSIP became essentially an ethnographic study, and
although the conventional long-term participative methodologies of anthropology
had to be adapted, the pre-appraisal work for LUSIP advanced their
understanding of the dynamics of development interventions, and added value
to their use of the participatory and qualitative methodologies of anthropology.
Anthropologists working in the domain of development usually work within restricted
time frames. This restriction and the nature of work within the development
consultancy context, though, provide challenging and useful
opportunities for anthropologists to extend their normal methodology, and
maintaining its distinctive participative and qualitative character and qualities. In
the pre-appraisal work for LUSIP intensive interaction on resource and neighbourhood
level replaced long-term intensive fieldwork, and a focus group approach
substituted the conventional more personal interaction possible in longterm
participation. Participation in LUSIP however established that intensive
participation through interaction with neighbourhoods and interest groups within
a restricted time frame could be achieved without compromising either its
qualitative nature or the personal quality of participation. The pre-appraisal work
for LUSIP therefore confirmed the relevance of anthropological approaches for
development work, and provided opportunities to adjust these methods without
compromising the participative and qualitative character of conventional anthropological
enquiry.
Although anthropological approaches could add value to development work, it
is usually merely an approach among other approaches. In the pre-appraisal
work for LUSIP a homestead census and an attitudinal survey accompanied the
consultation programme. The attitudinal survey provided a statistical basis for
the views and perceptions the consultation programme established. Whilst the
census recorded basic socio-economic information, it also geo-referenced the
distribution of homesteads as the social basis for an elaborate Geographic
Information System (GIS). The pre-appraisal work for LUSIP confirmed that the
mix of different methodologies could strengthen the conventional participative
and qualitative methods of anthropology. The integration of GIS with qualitative
anthropological work could enhance anthropological understanding through
accurate mapping of the social and physical landscape. In the LUSIP study a
GIS exercise was developed to correlate very informatively and visually the
distribution of homesteads, neighbourhoods and allegiance to chiefs with landuse
patterns, soil capability and the impacts of the proposed development.
The most obvious benefit for anthropologists involved in development is the
45

opportunity to study the social dynamics of development interventions. The
programme of community consultation for LUSIP confirmed the direct relation
between rural people's initial reaction to development initiatives and their level
of relevant knowledge and information.
When sugar cane was introduced to the Nkomazi area in Mpumalanga in the
1980s many subsistence farmers opposed cash crop production because, as
they argued, ``you cannot cook sugar cane''. The rhetoric of those who opposed
sugar cane development on their fields however changed when the first small
sugar cane growers bought bakkies, improved their homes and send their
children to university.
The LUSIP experience confirms that people's perceptions and views on critical
project related issues are not uniform. These differences are related to different
levels of project awareness and vary between rhetoric and reason. LUSIP also
showed that the rhetoric associated with development interventions manifests
also in demands. At lower levels of awareness and project knowledge people
demanded full compensation and farms from government to replace their
grazing. The rhetoric, however, changed and as project information was
transferred, awareness levels increased and the project was better understood.
The exposure to the realities of the project changed the rhetoric that the government
is responsible for everything, to reason, as they realised that ``the
project will come with the good and the bad''. A growing realisation among
potential project beneficiaries emerged, namely that as beneficiaries they will
also be responsible for the inevitable consequences of the development.
The interplay between rhetoric (demands), reality (project knowledge and
awareness) and reason (informed decisions) could very well be nothing more
than a reiteration of common sense or a reverberation of the obvious. But to the
anthropologists involved in the pre-appraisal work for LUSIP it provided an
analytical framework to understand the attitudes and views of the people that
could be affected by LUSIP, and it could serve as an anthropological model to
explain the social dynamics of development interventions.
Besides exposure to specific situations, involvement in development also exposes
anthropologists to a variety of settings with completely different socioeconomic
dynamics. The comparative view thus gained could contribute valuable
insights to anthropology. Previous work in Namibia and South Africa indicated
that development initiatives are very often caught in the tension
between democratic local-level institutions and traditional authorities. The
46

strength of the hereditary Swazi political system, however, proved that the
relation between democratic and traditional institutions cannot be generalised.
A comparative view based on these experiences could contribute important
insights to the structure of rural politics if anthropologists involved in development
would share their development experience with fellow anthropologists. It
is really only when consulting anthropologists maintain a commitment towards
anthropology that both anthropology and development could benefit from their
experiences in development.
ENDNOTES
1 Command is derived from irrigation terminology, and refers to the area irrigation infrastructure
``commands `' or places under irrigation. The ``Command Area'' is the area down stream of the
proposed Bovane Reservoir that will be commanded.
2 In Swaziland the following systems of land tenure are distinguished: Swazi Nation Land (SNL);
Title Deed Land (TDL); Tibiyo Taka Ngwane Land (Tibiyo); and land owned by the Government.
REFERENCES
Booker Tate 1996. Pre-Feasibility Study into the Development of Smallholder Irrigation in
the Lower Usuthu River Basin. Project No 7, ACP SW 032. Final Report.
GFA-Agrar 1998. Feasibility Study into Development of Smallholder Irrigation in the
Lower Usuthu River Basin. Final Report.
IFAD 2000. Lower Usuthu Smallholder Irrigation Project. Preformulation Mission, Aide
Memoir (draft). Kingdom of Swaziland.
47

Anthropological perspectives on
rural institutional development in
the Northern Province
Kees van der Waal
1 INTRODUCTION
The need for the development of institutions for rural development has become
a stronger focus in recent years, internationally and also in this country. The
days of a limiting focus on infrastructural development, or economic development,
as encompassing what goes for ``development'' have passed long ago.
The new jargon in development says it all: the notions of empowerment, participation,
institution-building, stakeholders, etc proclaim the importance of focusing
analysis and action on the people who are supposed to be the end of
development. Despite this new trend, however, the way in which institutional
development is conceptualised and implemented is often highly problematic.
One of the problems is that the rhetoric and practice in this field are sometimes
in conflict with one another, with the result that participation by the ``beneficiaries''
is in many cases no more than lip-service, especially with regard to
decisionmaking. Another area of concern is the lack of understanding of the
complexity of the interactions in the networks which come into being during
development interventions. South Africa, having just completed its extended
transformation of local government (which is to implement developmental services),
is a fertile laboratory for research on these and related issues.
This article takes a specific angle on the issue of rural institutional development.
Firstly, the literature on institutional development is investigated from an anthropological
perspective. Secondly, ethnographic fieldwork in the Northern
Province in the 1998±2000 period is discussed in relation to some of the main
issues. Underlying this discussion is the broader question about the relevance
48 Africanus 31(1)2001

of anthropological work in the arena of development policy and practice. In this
regard, the approach of Grillo and Stirrat (1997) is followed, namely that the
anthropology of development is firstly concerned with the anthropological
analysis of development as a cultural, economic and political process, rather
than the application of anthropological knowledge. This, then, raises the
question as to what is meant by institutional development in the development
literature and what the anthropological approach to this notion could be.
2 INSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENT AND SOCIAL CAPITAL
Whereas the roles of the state (relying on regulation) and the market (relying on
price) are well established in conventional development interventions, the roles
of local organizations and non-governmental organisations, also known as the
third sector (relying on agreement), are less firmly profiled, understood and
established. Quite often, romanticised ideas about ``participation'' and ``community''
operate in the sphere of institutional development, with negative effects
for the social sustainability of development interventions.
In the 1950s and 1960s technological change was seen as encompassing
development. Organisations were not yet regarded as important for development.
Local communities were viewed as backward and in need of becoming
part of their new nations in developing countries. In this respect, modernisation
and Marxist views were amazingly similar and only the often politically naõÈ ve
community developers were in favour of strengthening communities and their
capacity (Uphoff 1986:47±55). It became clear, in the second development
decade, that administrative weakness, top-down planning and the dominance
of elites over planning and implementation of development interventions often
led to project failures. The devastating impact of structural adjustment was a
further contributing factor to the realisation of the need for focusing on the
institutional aspects of good governance. Emphasis was shifted to the nongovernmental
sector. The World Bank started to change from an emphasis on
projects (short-term) to one on programmes (longer term) to promote institutional
development, which needs sufficient time (Pickard and Garrity 1994:5±7).
The emphasis on the use of local organisations for development (Esman and
Uphoff 1984) in the 80s has been strengthened by the introduction of the notion
of ``social capital'' in the 90s (see Esman and Uphoff 1984:243 for an early
mention of the concept). Social capital, as introduced by Putnam in 1993, refers
to the features of social organisation, such as trust, norms and networks that
49

can help to improve co-ordination between individuals, groups and institutions.
As such, the notion is useful for understanding why social relations are resources
for development and it fits in with the post-modern focus on networks
between actors and groups (Emmet 2000:508, 509). The concept also overcomes
the dichotomy between the state and the third sector, since, according to
Evans (1996:1122) ``Social capital inheres, not just in civil society, but in an
enduring set of relationships that spans the public-private divide.'' On the other
hand, the concept is also suffering from its use as all-encompassing, as exemplified
by its discovery as the missing link by the World Bank. Its eclectic use
is, therefore, strongly criticised by Fine (1999) who regards it as a chaotic
concept. In the South African context, the recent article by Emmet in which he
deals with social capital in the context of development, creates the impression
that there is an absence of South African social capital (given the disintegration
of family and community as indicated by Ramphele), which then needs to be
built as a part of South Africa's economic development strategy. While one can
agree that the concept is useful to move away from a narrow focus on needs
and entitlement, to one that looks at resources and strengths, it also contains
the danger of overlooking existing and vibrant organisations and relationships.
The concept certainly has a use for linking economic discourse with human
development and institutional development.
In the development administration literature, the idea of an institution is defined
as:
(a) ``a set of enduring rules or patterns of behaviour supported by societal
norms and values'' (Brinkerhoff 1994:137), as is found in markets, land
tenure systems, etc.
(b) ``systematised patterns or roles, in short, as organisations, that is formal
collectivities that co-ordinate the actions of groups of individuals to achieve
specified goals'' (Brinkerhoff 1994:137).
The second denotation of the term is usually followed, narrowing it even further
down to public sector organisations and using an infrastructure metaphor for the
improvement of these organisations, namely ``institution building''. In the literature,
therefore, institutional development often refers narrowly to administrative
(civil service) reform and capacity building in government institutions.
This was often achieved by management training and development (Blunt and
Collins 1994:112). ``... Institution building connotes programs of sustainable,
constructive change in organisations which are designed to make them better at
50

doing what they already do, and more efficient; or which are designed to change
the character of institutions by modifying their goals and strategies, cultures,
ways of functioning, management styles and so on'' (Blunt and Collins
1994:115).
Uphoff (1986), following Huntington, takes a much wider view of institutions. He
differentiates between institutions (norms or organisations) which are stable,
valued and recurring patterns of behaviour on the one hand and organisations
which can be new and not yet institutionalised, on the other hand. He also
includes informal, culturally based, extra-legal and psychologically embedded
institutions and relationships (e g common property, patron-client relationships
and ethnic identities) as being part of this notion, but chooses to focus on local
organisations which are identifiable social entities. The strategy for institutional
development, according to Uphoff, would be to transform organisations into
viable institutions (see also Mentz 1997). Such institutions could be a network of
government agencies, private enterprises and NGOs, and local institutions,
including membership organisations. Uphoff advises to build on institutions that
already exist, to use familiar patterns of responsibility and communication and
to work through or with such institutions, even if they have serious socio-economic
biases (Esman and Uphoff 1984, Uphoff 1986). The same approach is
taken by Pickard and Garrity (1994) who warn against the ease by which organisations
can be created and the resulting difficulty of fitting them into societal
patterns.
What becomes clear, therefore, is that the development literature and practice
points to role-oriented activities (formal or semi-formal organisations) as institutions
in the first place (Goldsmith and Brinkerhoff 1990:12). Institutional
development has become part of the conventional wisdom of development
agencies, (e g as a pillar of USAID policy). For instance, a process of Institutional
Analysis is required by the World Bank before development assistance is
given. These analyses, however, usually only refer very narrowly to internal
organisational issues and neglect an environmental analysis (Brinkerhoff 1994).
The narrow understanding of institutional development (e g as management
training) points to several problems in this field to which we now turn. One of the
questions to be discussed is: what is the nature of the understanding which an
anthropological approach can bring to these issues?
51

3 A CRITIQUE OF THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF
INSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENT
While there is a broad consensus about the necessity of institutional development
in the context of planned change, it has also been clear for a long time that
organisations can be used to the disadvantage of the poor, for instance in the
way in which an oligarchy can hijack organisational opportunities to their benefit.
On the other hand, Robert Michels, who formulated the ``iron law of oligarchy''
in 1915, also spoke of the flip side: ``organisation is the weapon of the
weak in their struggle with the strong'' (Esman and Uphoff 1984:36). Apart from
this possibility of organisations being to the disadvantage of the people they are
supposed to serve, there are many problems faced by local organisations, such
as resistance, subordination, internal division, ineffectiveness and malpractice.
Governments and elites are, for understandable reasons, often not in favour of
strong local organisations (Esman and Uphoff 1984:36,181).
When institutional development does take place in the development context,
there often is a strong discrepancy between the associated rhetoric and practice.
Brinkerhoff (1994), for example, investigated a sample of World Bank
projects and found that the majority of the institutional analyses done were
focused on internal management issues and the development of human capital,
with a disregard of contextual issues, such as beneficiary participation, the
policy environment, etc. Linked to the issue of insufficient attention to institutional
dynamics in the practice of development interventions, is the use of
planning methods for development which emphasise local consensus and
participation. Participatory planning methods, e g Participatory Rural Appraisal
(PRA), side-step conflict and competition by focusing on cognitive and communication
processes. Leeuwis (2000) indicates that there is a strong need in
such methodologies to incorporate a good understanding of conflict and suggests
that the insights of negotiation theory could be very valuable in this regard.
With such methodologies there is a need to locate communities, or
projects, in their wider socio-economic context: ``PRA's emphasis on practice
and experience (as opposed to theory in its broadest sense) also militates
against addressing external economic, institutional, political and social relationships,
and the constraints that these impose on local communities''
(Emmet 2000:507, 508). It is in these respects that an anthropological approach
can be useful.
52

4 ANTHROPOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES ON THE STUDY OF
INSTITUTIONS IN DEVELOPMENT
Anthropologists have contributed to the interpretation of institutions and institutional
development in various ways and degrees. The notion of an institution,
has been around in anthropology as a focus for functionalist ethnographic
work, especially since Malinowski made it his main unit of analysis early in the
20th century. Bohannan (1963:359), following Malinowski, still wrote about institutions
as systemic units in 1963: ``Social life can, thus, be divided (for purposes
of analysis) into institutions each of which is characterised by a social
system, a system of material culture, and an idea system; institutions fulfil the
needs of human beings and of social groups, and they are functionally interrelated
because change in one is likely to precipitate change in some or all of
the others.'' Although Bohannan also added a time dimension, the basic
problem with this view was its static, functionalist and systemic approach to
institutions. With the demise of functionalism, the anthropological focus on institutions
also faded away, to make room for a more dynamic and differentiated
set of approaches.
Whereas anthropology did not really develop a sustainable theory of institutions,
it did provide methodological and theoretical approaches which are very
relevant to the study of organisations and of institutional development. The
exposure to social situations which manifest the gap between ideal and actual
behaviour, through participant observation, has made anthropology a theory of
practice (Nelson and Wright 1995:18).
Mostly, in what is known as development anthropology, the contribution of an
anthropological perspective is related to the emphasis on the cultural and
subjective dimensions of development, as well as the mapping of indigenous
perspectives (a contribution in terms of a cultural understanding).
However, a more critical anthropology of development studies the power relations
and the construction of associated meanings inherent in development
processes (a contribution in terms of understanding both culture and practice).
In this work, the recurring contest between the people and the state and other
developmental role-players over the meanings of development are analysed as
one important focus for study. The meaning of development for the state is
firstly seen as a means of control over populations, which mostly excludes
alternative understandings of development. Assumptions about the homogeneity
of populations, the needs people have, and how these should be met,
53

are deconstructed in terms of the power relations and interests involved. This
approach is strongly influenced by a post-modern understanding of culture as
negotiated, contested and processual. In this, more critical approach, development
is therefore seen as a field of contestation, filled with multivocal discourses
that need deconstruction for fruitful analysis (Abram 1998; Gardner and
Lewis 1996; Grillo and Stirrat 1997). As Abram (1998:14) puts it: ``Thus, the
anthropological perspective re-introduces the heterogeneity of belief and opinion
within negotiations and struggles over development, and brings us to a
position of analytical strength.'' There is a note of optimism in this approach: a
critical anthropology of development can be married to an engaged development
anthropology (especially Gardner and Lewis 1996). Two recent publications
extend these approaches to the theme of institutional development with
which we are concerned here.
In a book written by anthropologists and development scholars, titled Development
as Process: concepts and methods for working with complexity, Mosse
(1998) indicates how the concerns of development practitioners and anthropologists
are increasingly merging around the monitoring of development programmes.
New approaches to information management in development
programmes are referred to as process documentation or process monitoring.
This methodology is closely linked to long-term ethnographic fieldwork and is
concerned with the dynamics of the development process, based on the documentation
of perceptions, relationships and conflicts. Its characteristics are its
orientation to the present, to action, being inductive and open-ended. It has not
only been used to monitor development programmes, but also to improve institutional
processes of negotiation and the designing of development institutions.
The process approach is complementary to the popular PRA
methodology, which is not capable of bringing out longer term dynamics and
does not reveal all the underlying tensions between various participants. The
process approach re-establishes the anthropological case study methodology
(recording and analysing micro-events), especially since the difficulties with a
participatory approach have become more apparent.
In a useful overview, Lewis (1999) has shown how the anthropological study of
organisations and institutions can contribute to the understanding of the third
sector and how this can feed into a renewed interest in civil society and social
capital in development studies. Although few anthropologists have worked in
this field, the approach from anthropology and its methodology have great
potential here. He indicates how an ethnography of institutions and organisa-
54

tions, based on long-term fieldwork is revealing, widening and deepening the
study of institutions. Such studies are revealing the less visible parts of the third
sector, e g rotating credit associations. They are widening the theoretical
concepts used in third sector research, e g the concepts of voluntarism, community
and bureaucracy. They are also deepening in that they interpret
organisations in terms of their working, dynamics, discourses and contextual
relations (Lewis 1999:75±77). In the anthropology of development a study of
institutions would mean that the focus should be on more than the local
organisations usually included in institutional development. The focus should
also shift upwards to those institutional structures where decisions are made
about policy and resources which fundamentally affect the relations of development,
practically and ideologically, on the local level. It would also include the
relationships between organisations and bureaucracies.
These recent publications show the specific contributions for a study of institutions
in development and institutional development that come from an anthropological
orientation. As Mosse (1998) and Gardner and Lewis (1996) have
indicated, the anthropological orientation is useful in the development field,
whether such work is being undertaken by anthropologists or by development
practitioners. In the next sections, South African material is introduced to indicate
the way in which an analysis, that is linked to the theoretical and
methodological approaches which have been discussed, can be applied to the
field of institutional development in the Northern Province. Three levels of third
sector organisations will be discussed, but first attention needs to be given to
the national, provincial and local context.
5 THE GOVERNANCE CONTEXT OF LOCAL-LEVEL
INSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENT
On the national level, the Reconstruction and Development Programme (ANC
1994) identified ``a people-driven process'' as the way in which development
would take place in the new South Africa: ``As the RDP makes clear, democratisation
also means that the state has to begin to relate to the rest of society
in a very different way ± by, for example, entering into partnerships with communities
and community-based organisations (CBOs), learning to work with
non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and local development forums, and
drawing on the skills and expertise of a host of organisations in ``civil society''
(Cousins 1994:8). This also implied the development of effective democratic
local government bodies for developmental governance. An optimistic and
55

vague tone permeated the first policy documents: notions of ``participation'',
``consultation'', ``empowerment'' and ``community'' were used without much
specific content and masking diverse interests.
On the (Northern) provincial level, the focus after 1994 was on the integration of
the three former homeland administrations with the former provincial administration.
Transitional local authorities were established during the five years of
local government transition (1995±2000). As many of these local authorities
were not institutionally viable, lacking organisational and financial capacity, the
business of local government service provision for the rural areas of the
Northern Province was practically mainly in the hands of a few strong district
councils, e g the Northern District Council which operated in the area which will
be discussed below (around Tzaneen). Its focus on infrastructure and efficiency
kept it far removed from local-level interaction or involvement. Its only social
development officer was mainly concerned with the creation of steering committees
for the management of infrastructural (especially water) projects, in
which training by consultants formed a major part of what was known as ``institutional
development and empowerment''.
Recently, the Northern Province drafted a document which set out its vision for
rural development (The Northern Province Integrated Rural Development
Framework of 2000). The main objective of the framework was ``To facilitate a
partnership between government, civil society and donor institutions in (the)
rural development process'' (Northern Province 2000:2). A key challenge was
identified as: ``There is an imperative to strengthen the inter-governmental and
inter-departmental collaborations as well as mobilising community members,
NGOs and CBOs to participate in rural development programs'' (Northern
Province 2000:19). The emphasis on institutional development was important
and justified in the underdeveloped condition of governmental and non-governmental
institutions in the province. However, this emphasis was subject to
an emphasis on economic development and the establishment of an intersectoral
team in the provincial government. A mainly government-driven initiative
was not going to lead to a successful partnership between the provincial
authority and third sector organisations. A forum which would include representatives
of provincial government and the third sector would be a first
move towards co-operation on a non-dominant basis.
The Transitional Local Councils (TLCs) that came into being in 1996, especially
the rural ones, were often no more than talking-shops. The people had elected
councillors for a structure that had no power to deliver services and their set-
56

tlements were served by the district councils over which they did not have direct
political control (Pycroft 1996:244). The Greater Letsitele/Gravelotte Local
Council in whose area of jurisdiction fieldwork was done, was a case in point.
The lack of control over resources and decisionmaking made the councillors
into powerless patrons with a large number of demanding clients in their extensive
wards. The ward in which the settlements of Mulati and Berlyn (the local
focus for this study) was situated, included settlements that were 70 km apart.
No wonder then that the councillor could not do more than make promises
about a service delivery process which he could not really influence. At several
occasions he promised that a new water project would start to be implemented
in the settlement very soon, at other occasions that the existing boreholes
would be electrified, but this failed to materialise constantly. The only improved
service the rural settlements of Mulati and Berlyn did see was the grading of the
roads just before the municipal election.
In 1999 and 2000, the prioritisation process for the electrification of the rural
settlements by ESKOM generated a substantial amount of unhappiness. Some
councillors were pushing the settlements they represented higher up on the
priority list in the runup to the local government election of December 2000.
Rumours had it that one councillor was even able to have the settlement where
he had a girlfriend to be electrified before the others. The frustration with the
slow process of electrification reached a very high level. Some settlements
were to wait seven to eight years before they would be attended to. These
frustrations and uncertainties have led to a cynical view among the population
about the role of the local TLC and its councillors.
The Greater Letsitele/Gravelotte Transitional Local Council occupied itself in its
period of existence mainly with the creation of Land Development Objectives
(LDOs, in the Northern Province combined with Integrated Development Plans,
IDPs, both required by legislation). The LDOs were required by the Development
Facilitation Act of 1995. The process of formulating these LDOs was coordinated
by the provincial department of Local Government and Traditional
Affairs, as well as the Northern District Council. A consultant (who had been
involved in homeland planning in the past) was appointed to facilitate the process
and to establish a Public Participation Committee (PPC), as was required
by the Act.
One of the objectives of the process, as described in the provincial LDO
regulations, was to formulate the objectives on the basis of wide participation.
The regulations state: ``The objective of public participation shall be to ensure
57

that land development objectives are based as far as possible on consensus
between the local government body, members of the public and interested
bodies in a particular area'' (GLG TLC 1999). Despite this aim, the process
seems to have been mainly consultant-driven, with limited participation by the
representatives of the communities and interested bodies. This is evident, for
example, from the attendance at the monthly meetings of the committee. Attendance
started with 63 people in early 1998 and dwindled to 12 at the end of
the process in March 1999. The representative from Mulati SANCO, the civic
organisation in the rural settlement on which this research was focused, attended
only four of the twelve meetings. The councillors of the Transitional
Local Council, who were all supposed to actively take part in the process, were
only represented by one of their members. Significantly, the public participation
process only started six months after the LDO process had already kicked off in
the local council. Involving the public at a late stage was a recipe for a top-down
exercise. This is borne out by interviews with the participants and the available
documentation.
The initiative to develop one of the steps in the process, as required by the law,
was every time taken by the consultant. This included a working plan; a status
quo report; a situational analysis; a SWOT analysis; the formulation of principles,
norms and standards; scenarios; a preliminary project list; issue identification;
sectoral planning; and a final report focusing on programming,
budgeting and implementation. The representatives were required to respond
to the proposals made at the different meetings and to consult with their constituencies.
The technical nature of the planning process, dominated by the
consultant, limited the involvement of the committee members to being at most
an audience and providing information. This relationship is aptly captured in the
minutes in the following excerpt: ``Communities are requested to prioritise on
their projects while the consultant also will be scientifically analysing according
to sectors'' (GLG TLC 1999). Another reason for the limited participation in the
process were the costs involved for representatives to attend the meetings at a
central point. The structure of the process itself limited participation, since the
initiative was totally in the hands of the consultant, with the committee members
having a much more passive role. The public participation process, therefore,
despite appearances that were carefully upheld and the rhetoric of participation,
took the form of consultation rather than real participation. Advertisements were
placed in local newspapers for representatives to be delegated, minutes were
kept and notices were again put up in which members of the public were requested
to comment on the final report. The role of the participants was,
58

however, merely to provide that information which the consultant could not
acquire himself. This was done by means of questionnaires, aimed at finding
out about the needs in the different communities. The perception, from the
viewpoint of the local communities, was that they were continually requested to
submit priority lists of their needs, without getting feedback on these lists
afterwards and, more importantly, not seeing any of these needs being met.
The end result of the work of the PPC, therefore, was a wish list of possible
projects for the future, based on an arbitrary process of consultation.
One of the most important changes to the local government system was the
merging, early in 2001, of about half of the local government structures into
stronger and larger entities, which would be more viable than the previous
fragmented ones. In the Northern Province the new municipalities were to have
many more councillors than in the interim phase. Whereas councillors in the
transitional local councils represented between 8 000 to 20 000 voters, the new
wards contained no more than about 4 000 voters. High expectations of improvement
of service delivery has set in with these changes. In the rural ward of
the new Tzaneen Municipality, where this research was focused, the people
have started to sing when they see the newly elected councillor, Cromwell
Nhemo: ``Mfana wa Nhemo, hi ri kuma rini gezi na mati?'' (Son of Nhemo, when
will we get electricity and water?).
Legislation that sets out the working of the new democratic local governments in
South Africa is contained in the Local Government: Municipal Structures Act
(RSA 1998) and the Local Government: Municipal Systems Act (RSA 2000).
These acts indicate that formal representative government needs to be complemented
by a system of participatory governance. Local communities are to
participate in the development of an integrated development plan (IDP), performance
management and the budgeting process. This will lead, according to
the legislation, to the building of capacity of the local community. For the purpose
of enhancing participatory democracy, ward committees are to be established,
of which the councillors are the chairpersons. These committees
would make recommendations and members would not receive any remuneration.
They start to function in 2001 and are important for assessing the
extent to which the supposedly participatory processes are genuine or merely
consultative in nature.
Tribal authorities have been functioning on the basis of the powers extended to
them in the colonial and homeland past. This brought them in competition with
the new local government system and the civic organisations, which are based
59

on democratic principles. Because of their powers to allocate business licences,
control school funds, and, most importantly, decide on land matters, the traditional
leaders were not dependent on their subjects. A patron-client relationship
with individuals from the elite had developed. The traditional authority was
challenged in the middle 80s by the youth who were using the discourse of
witchcraft to oppose the chiefs and in turn introduced a political tyranny of their
own. By 1990 the balance of power between the youth, the chiefs and the civics
was returned when the ANC started to form links with the traditional leaders and
homeland leaders. There was a realisation that the services that were needed
could only be brought through co-operation between the various stakeholders
(Bank and Southall 1996). Despite this improvement in relationships, there
were areas where the conflict between the traditional leaders and the civics, or
the youth, continued for a long time. The relationship between the Nkuna Tribal
Authority (in whose area Mulati and Berlyn were situated), the civic, the youth
and the TLCs in its area of jurisdiction remained at times quite tense after 1990.
In a discussion with the headmen of the Nkuna Tribal Authority in 1999, a strong
sense of disappointment with the new democratically elected local government
system was expressed. The feeling was that the traditional leaders had been
sidelined and that their functions had been handed over to politicians. A strong
link between the chief and his land was claimed: ``vanhu i ya hosi, tiko i ya hosi''
(the people are of the chief, the land is of the chief). The days of 1993 were well
remembered when the comrades had shouted slogans such as: ''pansi hosi,
pansi ndhuna!'' (down with the chief, down with the headman!). The administrative
experience and local knowledge about improvements in the rural areas
were further arguments for the headmen for the need to continue providing
services. Did they not know better than the councillors exactly where every
borehole in their area was and where to drill for new boreholes?
Nevertheless, it seems that the relationship between elected and appointed
leaders had eased somewhat by the beginning of 2000. Representatives of the
tribal authority had started to attend TLC meetings and previously ignored requests
from the TLC for land for development were now granted. However, this
improvement in relationships had only come about after the chief had requested
help from the TLC with a problem around geological prospecting on his land and
a land invasion from the adjoining Sotho-speaking area.
On the level of the settlement, improved relations between the headman and
the civic organisation, which had been characterised by sharp conflict in the
preceding years, seemed to have set in by early 2000 as well. The co-operation
60

etween civic members and headmen in the Interim Ward Committee, discussed
below, is one indication of this improved relationship. The minutes of the
civic organisation of 11 March 2000 record an interesting decision about the
jurisdiction of the two forms of organisation: ``When trumpet is blown, it invites
all to be there including members of the civic. The civic structure must ask
permission from the Headman to announce all what is important for the community.
Meetings should be planned together for the benefit of all parties involved.
If any person who is a member of the community get or receive anything
for the consumption of the community must take it to the headman before
announced to the community. Issues pertaining to the civic must be handled by
the civic and that pertaining to the Headmen must be dealt with that authority.''
Significantly, the blowing of the antelope horn (``trumpet'') remained the prerogative
of the headman and signalled that the institution of headmanship had
never really been in doubt. The Mulati civic also started to submit their letters to
the headman for his official stamp before sending it to various departments.
Whereas the civic and the institution of traditional leadership seemed to have
grown closer to each other by 2000, the uneasiness in the relation with the
youth flared up from time to time. Although the serious witch-hunts of the early
90s were over, in 1995 two headmen of the area were nearly burnt by a mob,
angry about the muti murder of a child. And in November 2000, just before the
election, the headman of Mulati (who lived in another settlement) was seriously
challenged by young people about his lack of leadership in solving the cause of
death of two boys in the settlement. At the funeral of one of the boys the
representative of the headman was silenced when he wanted to have his word
of sympathy to the family with the other speakers who normally speak at the
graveside. A meeting at the sportsground (typically the place where the comrades
used to have their meetings in the past) was held after the funeral,
organised by the youth, during which they demanded the headman's presence
in the settlement. The next day, at a meeting with the youth, the headman was
accused of neglecting his duty in leading the people against the witches. He
was threatened with being burnt if he did not co-operate and was told to move to
the settlement or vacate his position. He was also sent to the chief with their
grievances. The end of the matter was the response of the chief who called a
delegation of the youth to his office for discussions. Knowing what the outcome
would be, the complainants gave up. Significantly, the institution of traditional
leadership was again not challenged in this episode, but the bone of contention
was the lack of leadership by the headman in witchcraft accusations and his
absence from the settlement. These events do indicate a continued tension
61

etween traditional leaders and segments of the population in their areas of
jurisdiction.
Banks and Southall (1996:426) comment on the need for fundamental transformation
of the institution of traditional leadership in its relationship to democratic
institutions: ``The implication of all this is that any shift from authoritarian
to more democratic forms of rural local government in the former bantustans will
require controlling mechanisms and practices so that whoever allocates resources
(and the evidence is that civics no less than chiefs can easily become
corrupted) is rendered accountable to the community.'' It has to be seen how
this will be done in future. The recent increase of the allocation of the number of
seats in local councils to traditional leaders from 10% to 20% may be one way in
which traditional leaders will be appeased. The most difficult issues remaining
to be solved have to do with the overlap of functions of elected and appointed
leaders, with land allocation as the most burning question.
6 THREE LEVELS OF THIRD SECTOR ORGANISATIONS
In the discussion up to this point, organisations and institutions were discussed
that were either not initiated by the local level (the TLC, created on the basis of
national legislation), or that have been fundamentally transformed by the national
governments of the past (the tribal authority). We now turn to organisations
which have a stronger link to the local level in their origin and functioning.
The first organisation to be discussed is the Mulati Civic Organisation, formed in
1993. At that time SANCO (South African National Civic Organisation) took the
initiative in forming civic organisations in the rural areas as part of the preparation
for the political transformation towards democracy. The civic that was
formed for Mulati included both the Berlyn and Mulati settlements, because of
their shared characteristics (both on the same stretch of land between the
Murchison mountain range and a gravel road). The creation of one civic
structure for an area that was divided into two tribal wards under separate
headmen, was to be a continuous bone of contention between the civic and the
traditional authority. It was interpreted as an act to undermine the authority of
the headmen, which may indeed have been the intention to some extent at that
stage. By the year 2000 the relationship with the headmen had become much
more relaxed and even changed into co-operation in specific cases, as has
been alluded to above. It was said at civic meetings that the headmen should be
invited to their meetings and that they should be regarded as the local leaders.
62

This improvement of relationships applied to one headman specifically, whilst
the other one, who was not living in the settlement under his jurisdiction, was
opposed by the civic and the youth for his authoritarian style and his absence
from the settlement, as was evident in the confrontation at the graveyard,
discussed above.
The civic's structure, however, was not very strong, after the initial period of
establishment and public enthusiasm had passed. People's expectations about
the capacity of the civic to reach the objectives of local development had become
more realistic. In addition, the establishment of the TLC had been an
indication to the inhabitants of the settlements that a new body had been created
on democratic principles, which would be responsible for local-level development.
Community meetings were not very well attended any longer and
even the committee members were often absent from the executive committee
meetings. Several sub-committees had been established, for instance a water
committee, an electricity committee and a development forum. The development
forum was the successor of the RDP committee which had dwindled from
about ten members to three active members by 1998.
The civic organisation had a watchdog function on public affairs and would
typically discuss issues of public interest that needed attention. One such issue
was the disciplining of the water pump operators in May 2000 about their laxity
in their tasks of keeping the pump areas clean and signing their attendance
books. Another was the contact that had to be maintained with the TLC through
the ward councillor. He was approached by the civic on the amount of money
that was to be allocated to the ward, in order to have some influence on its
spending. When the LDO process took place, the civic had to complete a
questionnaire about the local needs and send a representative to serve on the
Public Participation Committee. For the local government election of December
2000 the civic was involved with regard to the registration of voters and the
nomination of candidates. The registration of voters was seen as an important
issue by the civic because the ward boundaries were to be based on the
number of registered voters in a ward. If the number of voters would have been
too small, then there was the possibility that another settlement might be added
to the ward, which would make it more difficult to get access to the already
severely limited resources for rural development.
The combination of the two settlements into one, for the purpose of the civic, led
to unexpected misunderstandings with outsiders. The TLC had arranged that
Mulati and Berlyn had to be provided with electricity for the water pumps. As
63

was usually done when referring to both settlements, the only name mentioned
was ``Mulati''. When the surveyors came to do their calculations, Berlyn was left
out, because local people had been asked to point out the boundary of the
settlement Mulati. It was only when the councillor was notified about this
oversight that Berlyn was also surveyed. The issue of the two names of two
tribal wards for one civic remained a point of dispute between the civic and the
headmen. However, as has been indicated above, the relationship with the
headmen had improved considerably over time. The letters from the civic to the
regional office of the provincial Department of Work to request improvements to
the access gravel road which had been damaged by the floods of early 2000,
for instance, were stamped and signed by the headman as well as the civic. The
same consideration was expressed when Sotho-speaking people from the
former Lebowa claimed their land back from which they had been removed in
the early 1980s when the ethnic homelands of Gazankulu (Tsonga-speaking)
and Lebowa (Sotho-speaking) had been created and consolidated. Erstwhile
inhabitants of Mulati were giving notice of their intention to return to their former
land and to have their own headman. This was communicated to the civic
through relatives who had remained in the settlement in order to prevent the
events of 1999 when some of the Sotho-speakers had erected structures on
their former building sites. The tribal police of chief Muhlava had them destroyed
then. On the receipt of this intended remigration in 2000, the civic
advised the claimants to write to the headman, clearly convinced that land
issues were outside their jurisdiction.
The civic was able to attend to local issues to some extent, e g establishing
relations with a group of six French students who brought a contribution of
R57 000 from a French student association for the building of classrooms.
When it came to issues which involved co-operation and competition with other
settlements and negotiations with large service providers, the limitations of the
local base became more evident. The civic asked the people to donate R50 per
household to build up a fund which could be used in approaching ESKOM, the
national electricity provider, for speeding up the provision of electricity to the
settlement. When ESKOM was contacted, the civic representative was told that
such contact had to be established through the TLC. Such experiences,
especially the high frustrations around the lack of a dependable water reticulation
network and the disappointingly long period most of the settlements in
the ward would have to wait for electrification, pointed to the need to have a
representative structure which was based on the common needs of a number of
settlements.
64

In anticipation of the ward committees which would be part of the final local
government structure, an Interim Ward Committee was formed in the settlements
(including Mulati and Berlyn) which were to be part of a new ward from
2001 onwards. This committee consisted of civic representatives as well as
headmen from the participating settlements. The participation by headmen was
a major step forward in the direction of co-operative governance. The headmen
were reported to support the stronger need to work in unity for local service
delivery, by saying: ``We want to kill the issue of villages and become united in a
ward.'' The committee facilitated the registration of voters and the nomination of
candidates for the December local government election. The newly found cooperation
between the elected and appointed leaders was based on mutual
dependence: while the headmen were losing their control over development
functions to the new local government structures and the civic organisations,
the civic and TLC were dependent on the traditional authority for its continued
control over tribal land. The limitation in the power of the Interim Ward Committee
was demonstrated when candidates for the local government election
were eventually nominated, after the finalisation of ward boundaries made the
composition of the committee redundant. The nomination of candidates was
done on the basis of political parties, overriding any common interests between
the settlements.
The second organisation which we look at is the Murchison Development
Forum (MDF). The MDF was an organisation that tried to amalgamate nine
different settlements that are all situated near the Murchison mountain range.
These settlements were sharing problems with regard to infrastructure needs
and the delivery of services. The organisation seems to have been suggested
by the local ANC parliamentary office which promoted the creation of ``zones''.
The people who were involved in creating the organisation motivated its formation
with reference to the fact that many decisions were taken and information
given at meetings where the different settlements were not well
represented and consequently were left out of the processes. This referred
mainly to the unsatisfactory communication links with the TLC and the provincial
departments. In many cases notice of only one day for a meeting was
given. The specific reason for creating the MDF in early 2000 may also have
been influenced by the LDO process of 1997±1999 when much more information
on local development became available, as well as the frustrated
expectations with local government's service delivery which became acute by
1999, especially around the issue of electrification. With the knowledge that
ward boundaries were going to change anyway, the inclusion of the nine set-
65

tlements in the MDF was mainly based on the expectation that sharing the
same geographical area and being in one school inspection circuit could be a
basis for inclusion into one co-operative unit.
An interim committee was formed, with representatives (mainly teachers) from
each settlement. At that point a senior headman interfered, arguing that such an
organisation should be more representative and supported by the participating
settlements. A mass meeting was then called, where the MDF was formed. The
MDF was to be fully representative by including all possible stakeholders: the
headmen, taxi owners, health workers, civic organisations, sport organisations,
agricultural interests, pensioners, land committees, electricity committees,
youth committees, church representatives, traditional healers and development
fora. In total, about 30 members would form the forum and would convene
during monthly meetings, based on a constitution that was worked out. An
executive of five members was elected which would meet every two weeks. A
total of 16 committees or ``desks'' were created which represented the different
interests that have been mentioned. The main priorities of the MDF would be
roads, water and electricity.
All member settlements were urged to bring their planning objectives for discussion
and further attention in terms of establishing the common priorities of
basic needs. This process did not get off the ground, especially since it was a
mere repetition of what the TLC had already done through the LDO process.
The issues that were most central in the initial discussions of the MDF were the
need to have a bank account, a letterhead, an office, etc. The TLC was found
willing to type letters for the MDF, while one of the local councillors promised to
donate R1 000 for the bank account (which was never paid). The MDF saw its
work mainly as being a link between the settlements and the authorities. It
strongly depended on a vague notion of development, as was expressed, for
example, in the minutes with reference to the new ward boundaries which would
not stop the MDF, because ``we are doing development.'' This notion of development
seemed to refer to infrastructural development mainly.
By July 2000 the MDF was not very active any longer. Many members were no
longer attending the meetings. The coming local election and the change of
ward boundaries were important reasons for the decreased momentum of the
MDF. The creation of the Interim Ward Committee also took some of the wind
out of the sails of the MDF and indicated that the institutional arena was continually
changing, while being determined by changes in local government
structure. One of the few actions taken by the MDF was their contact with
66

ESKOM on the inclusion of the settlements in the priority list for electrification.
The executive committee of the MDF was still meeting by the end of 2000, but
clearly the initial momentum of the organisation had been lost.
The third organisation that is relevant to our discussion, is a coalition of nongovernmental
organisations (NGOs), under the acronym NONGOCO (Northern
NGO Coalition). It was established in 1996 as a part of the national coalition
SANGOCO, similar to other networks of NGOs in other parts of the country,
especially KwaZulu-Natal. It consists of about 150 member organisations, has
offices in Pietersburg and uses the services of a co-ordinator and an administrator.
The aim of the organisation is to strengthen civil society in the Northern
Province and to co-ordinate the work of the NGOs in the province, especially by
networking. The organisation was funded by national and international foundations,
but was struggling financially. The organisation took a strong position
against what was perceived as the lack of government service delivery and the
inability of government to honour its election promises about the improvement
of life for the poor.
In 2000 eight ``Meeting Basic Needs'' workshops across the province were run
by NONGOCO in which the enormous needs of the rural population were
contrasted with the lack of service delivery by government. In November 2000,
just before the local government election, this action culminated in the launch of
a Northern Province Movement for Delivery (MFD), ``... a new initiative that
promotes socio-economic literacy and action through study groups and peopleoriented
campaigns ...'' A populist approach, with emphasis on the role of the
developmental state, was evident in the approach of the MFD: ``The launch is
open to all NGOs, trade unions, churches, students, media groups, women's
groups, civics, the youth and every member of the public concerned about
delivery and believe it is the role of the state to fulfil the constitutional obligations
such as providing clean water, decent education, reliable energy, efficient
transport and proper health care services'' (Community Gazette Nov. 2000:1).
From early 2000 a free newspaper, the Community Gazette, was brought out
every two months. Another publication: Delivery Faultlines (wa ka Bila 2000)
also set out the views of NONGOCO with regard to the role of the state in
service delivery. GEAR was strongly criticised for its emphasis on fiscal discipline
and the negative impact it had on the implementation of the RDP development
initiative of government. As an alternative, strategies were proposed
that would strengthen people's participation in development planning. Therefore,
a people's budget was proposed, the Rural People's Charter of the Rural
67

Development Initiative was strongly supported and the Jubilee 2000 South
Africa movement was also positively regarded. These were various initiatives
from the NGO and CBO (community based organisation) sectors in South
Africa that had developed in reaction to the government's shift from a peopleorientated
development programme (the RDP of 1994) to a more conservative
macro-economic strategy (the GEAR strategy of 1996). NONGOCO was a
mirror image of SANGOCO in its views (see Community Gazette Nov 2000:2)
and could be regarded as a branch of the national organisation.
During the annual general summit of NONGOCO in July 2000, several challenges
facing the NGO sector in the province were identified: a lack of coordination,
a lack of sharing information, the lack of a database, poor relations
among NGOs and other role-players, a lack of clarity on their roles and a lack of
resources (Makakase 2000:6,7). These identified challenges indicated the
weakness of the NGO movement in the province, starkly in contrast to the
populist language of unitary opposition to government policy that dominated the
publications of the organisation. In this regard the NGO movement in the
Northern Province had the same problems that were identified among most
rural organisations in South Africa: a lack of accountability of some CBOs, male
domination of most organisational forms and the invisibility of rural organisations
to the bureaucrats (Cousins 1994:15).
While the NGO network at least had some organised structures in place that led
to public events and publications, the CBO network of the Northern Province
was little more than an idea by the end of 2000. Work was being done by the
Development Resources Centre (an NGO based in Johannesburg and Pietersburg)
to create a network of CBO participants in the province and to develop
a constitution. This work was aimed at the participants in development projects
and was meant to lead to the improvement of the co-operation between NGOs
and CBOs.
The three types of organisation discussed here, though differing in their scale of
operation and the specific issues they were involved in, were similar in one
respect: the initiative for their existence had come from outside role-players.
This may in part explain the limitations of these organisations: they were to a
large extent dependent on outside initiatives and resources for setting the
agendas for their activities. All three of them seemed to lack a strong momentum
of activity and organisation. They were not effective in being third
sector organisations that could mobilise the population for specific developmental
ends. This is not to say that these organisations would not be able to
68

ecome effective in future. Rather, they show the complexities inherent in the
development field and the strong field of social and political forces in which they
had to operate.
7 CONCLUSION
Because of their complexity, institutional problems are not easy to analyse or
resolve (Brinkerhoff 1994:149). In this article, the focus was on the study of rural
local institutions for development, with case material from the Northern Province
of South Africa. The literature revealed an increasing focus on these
institutions, indicating that they have become an integrated part of development
theory and practice. At the same time, institutional development seems to be
mainly focused on government institutions. Also, the focus in institutional development
is mostly on internal issues, without sufficient attention to the dynamic
and complex context in which institutions function. Institutional
development seems to be limited by a heavy emphasis on training, capacity
building and the use of a consensus model. This results in the limitations of the
methodologies which are used, even of those that promote local understanding
and participatory action, such as PRA.
In order to address this situation, several useful strategies are advanced in the
literature. Uphoff (1986:188±199), for example, argues for less emphasis on the
concentrated training of individuals and the need for more informal involvement
of the whole community in planning and decisionmaking. The metaphor of
`'nurturing'' institutions, rather than ``building'' them is used by Esman and
Uphoff (1984:264) to indicate the need for a more open-ended approach. They
also point to the need of networks of institutions, linking local to higher levels,
through which a process of assisted self-reliance can take place. The need for
synergy between the state and civil society is emphasised by Evans (1996) and
Emmet (2000) who differentiate between positive relationships of complementarity
and embeddedness. There is also an emphasis by several writers
on the need to study institutions and accompanying relationships as a process.
This would mean an inductive approach, as expressed in the ``learning process''
approach associated with the work of Korten. Process documentation (Esman
and Uphoff 1984; Mosse 1998) of the institutional aspects of rural development
is the most promising methodological strategy to follow for both research and
intervention objectives.
This is where an anthropological approach can be very useful. The anthro-
69

pologist is well-situated, through the established methodology of participant
observation and the accompanying analysis of the tensions between theory
(ideology) and practice, to lift out the complexity of institutional processes in the
development context. The work of the anthropologist, the ethnography of institutional
dynamics, can widen and deepen the understanding of organisational
contexts. There is a tradition in anthropology, the anthropology of development
(Grillo and Stirrat 1997), which occupies itself with the study of the complexity of
development situations. In this tradition, the notions and practices which are
labelled ``development'' are deconstructed as discourse and action, based on
underlying power relations. The research methodology of such an anthropology
of development is increasingly associated with a study of different levels of
development discourse and action. Therefore, the anthropologist, or person
using an anthropological approach, needs to continually move between the
different levels and give voice to the louder and softer discourses that are
relevant. Such an approach can lead to a multi-sited and multi-vocal ethnography
in the post-modern sense.
In the ethnography reported in this study of the third sector in the Northern
Province of South Africa, an attempt was made to bring out the complexity of
the processes on the various levels, relevant to rural development in one area.
A multi-site and multi-vocal ethnographic approach was attempted. The organisational
and policy context on the three tiers of governance was sketched,
including the continuing uneasy co-existence of democratic and traditional
authority. It was indicated that the rhetoric of participation and institutionbuilding
was, despite participatory and democratic appearances, based on a
top-down practice of development planning and implementation. Against this
background, three examples of third sector organisation were discussed.
The Mulati Civic Organisation, at the settlement level, was a local organisation
that had been initiated by the national SANCO structures and was regarded as
the most representative organisation at the local level. The local government,
therefore, used it to gather information needed for prescribed processes of
development planning. The civic, however, had to function in the context of the
unresolved contradictions between a tribal authority and a local government
authority which severely limited its jurisdiction and independence, especially
with regard to land issues and infrastructural services. Although the headmen
and civic seemed to have started to work according to a co-operative approach
by 2000, there was very little that this organisation could claim to have achieved
for the local population. The momentum of the local civic movement had con-
70

tinuously decreased from its apex during 1993 and it had not succeeded to
overcome its dependence on a male leadership that was mostly dominated by
salaried and professional people.
The Murchison Development Forum was established by teachers and local
leaders who saw the need for an organisation which could bind together several
settlements and provide a forum for co-operative interaction by the various
stakeholders, including the traditional leaders. The specific context for the
emergence of this organisation was the stimulus given by the parliamentary
office, the looming local elections and the high levels of frustration with the slow
provision of basic services to the rural settlements. As in the case of the civic,
the initial momentum of this organisation was lost after some time. Important
reasons were its lack of focus, the emphasis on inclusiveness to the detriment
of efficiency and the redemarcation of ward boundaries which undercut the
basis on which the forum had been formed. The forum was also not able to
achieve much during its existence, since it had to submit to the same forces
faced by the local civic organisation, despite the larger area it represented.
The third organisation that was looked at, was NONGOCO, a coalition of
Northern Province NGOs. Again, outside initiative and support (from the national
NGO coalition, SANGOCO) was crucial for the formation of this organisation.
This organisation was able to raise awareness and became an important
critical voice, commenting on the lack of rural development delivery and real
participatory democracy. The organisation had a few full-time officers and was
financially supported to hold workshops and bring out publications which popularised
a critical view of government delivery, based on a populist perspective.
At the same time, it appeared that the NGO sector in the province was very
much fragmented and not very influential. Cooperative relations with government
institutions still had to develop. An organisation for CBOs was still in its
infancy at the time of writing.
When looking at the three third sector organisations studied, it is clear that they
are all relatively recent initiatives (from 1993, 1996 and 2000 respectively) from
interests outside the local context. This dependence on outside organisations or
initiative was one of the reasons for a lack of sustained local momentum. A
further inhibiting factor for the growth of third sector initiative was the inhibiting
political and administrative context in which they existed. The following dimensions
of that context are relevant in this regard: the lack of clarity on the
roles of democratic and traditional authority, the transformation of local government
structures in recent years, and the lack of capacity and resources in all
71

organisations in the Northern Province, one of the poorest provinces in the
country.
While the organised third sector has not made strong inroads in the rural areas
of the Northern Province, it is significant that it has developed since 1993 at all.
Further growth and effective organisation can be based on existing organisations.
At the same time, there are many local organisations in the rural settlements
which have not been focused on here and which do have vibrancy and
strong local support. These are the burial societies, football clubs, churches and
other specific interest and voluntary groups that have been part of rural life all
along, even under the previous political dispensation. In these, both elite and
ordinary people are participating, making them more democratic and representative
than the organisations that have been discussed. It remains a
challenge for development studies and anthropology to study existing and
emergent authentic rural organisations. Such research could feed into the
support of such institutions, where appropriate and needed, in order to
strengthen civil society in those parts of the country where it is still very weak.
Awareness and understanding of the local dynamics can also help to promote
co-operative governance, including partnerships between government institutions
and the third sector. Anthropological studies of rural institutions are potentially
very useful, if based on a contextual and process documentation
approach, for understanding the dynamics of local-level and higher level rural
institutional development.
REFERENCES
Abram, S 1998. Introduction: Anthropological perspectives on local government. In:
Abram, S and Waldren, J (eds). Anthropological Perspectives on Local Development:
Knowledge and Sentiments in Conflict. London: Routledge: 1±17.
ANC 1994. The Reconstruction and Development Programme. Johannesburg: Umanyano.
Bank, L and Southall, R 1996. Traditional Leaders in South Africa's New Democracy.
Journal of Legal Pluralism and Unofficial Law. 37±38:407±430.
Blunt, P and Collins, P 1994. Introduction. Public Administration and Development
14:111±120.
Bohannan, P 1963. Social Anthropology. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
Brinkerhoff, D W 1994. Institutional Development in World Bank Projects: Analytical
Approaches and Intervention Designs. Public Administration and Development
14:135±151.
Community Gazette Nov 2000.
Cousins, B 1994. Issues and Options for Institutional Change for Rural Development,
72

Agriculture and Land Reform, vol 1: Summary and Overview. Johannesburg: Land
and Agriculture Policy Centre.
Emmet, T 2000. Beyond community participation? Alternative routes to civil engagement
and development in South Africa. Development Southern Africa 17(4):501±518.
Esman, M J and Uphoff, N T 1984. Local Organizations: Intermediaries in Rural Development.
Ithaca: Cornell.
Evans, P 1996. Government Action, Social Capital and Development: Reviewing the
Evidence on Synergy. World Development 24(6):1119±1132.
Fine, B 1999. The Developmental State is Dead ± Long Live Social Capital? Development
and Change 30:1±19.
Gardner, K and Lewis, D (eds) 1996. Anthropology, Development and the Post-modern
Challenge. London: Pluto.
GLG T L C 1999. Compilation of Land Development Objectives in Terms of the Development
Facilitation Act, 1995 for the Greater Letsitele/Gravelotte Transitional
Local Council 1997±1999. Volume 2: Public Participation and Working Plan. Unpublished
report.
Goldsmith, A A and Brinkerhoff, D W 1990. Sustainability and Rural and Agricultural
Development. In: Brinkerhoff, D W and Goldsmith, A A (eds) Institutional Sustainability
in Agriculture and Rural Development. Praeger: New York: 7±17.
Grillo, R D and Stirrat, R L (eds) 1997. Discourses of Development: Anthropological
Perspectives. Oxford: Berg.
Leeuwis, C 2000. Reconceptualizing Participation for Sustainable Rural Development:
Towards a Negotiation Approach. Development and Change 31:931±959.
Lewis, D 1999. Revealing, Widening, Deepening? A Review of the Existing and Potential
Contributions of Anthropological Approaches to ``Third±Sector'' Research. Human
Organization 58(1):73±81.
Makakase, P 2000. Towards the Development of Strong, Focused, Visible and Effective
Sectors within the NGO Community in the Northern Province. Synthesis Report:
Annual General Summit of the Northern Province NGO Coalition (NONGOCO),
Pietersburg.
Mentz, J C N 1997. Personal and Institutional Factors in Capacity Building and Institutional
Development. ECDPM Working Paper No 14.
Mosse, D 1998. Process-oriented approaches to development practice and social research.
In: Mosse, D; Farrington, J and Rew, A (eds) Development as Process:
Concepts and methods for working with complexity. London: Routledge: 3±30.
Nelson, N and Wright, S 1995. Participation and power. In: Nelson, N and Wright, S (eds)
Power and Participatory Development: Theory and Practice. London: Intermediate
Technology Publications:1±18.
Northern Province 2000. The Northern Province Integrated Rural Development Framework
(Draft). Unpublished document.
Pickard, L and Garrity, M (eds) 1994. Policy Reform for Sustainable Development in
Africa: the Institutional Imperative. Boulder: Lynne Riener.
Pycroft, C 1996. Local government in the new South Africa. Public Administration and
Development 16:233±245.
73

RSA 1998. Local Government: Municipal Structures Act, No 117 of 1998. Government
Gazette No 19614.
RSA 2000. Local Government: Municipal Systems Act, No 32 of 2000. Government
Gazette No 21776.
Uphoff, N 1986. Local Institutional Development: An Analytical Sourcebook With Cases.
West Hartford: Kumarian.
wa ka Bila, V 2000. Delivery ``Faultlines''. Pietersburg: NONGOCO.
74

Anthropology and epidemiology:
a case study of health and
environment in Alexandra,
Johannesburg 1
Thea de Wet a Angela Mathee b
and Brendon Barnes b
1 INTRODUCTION
The critical link between health and development is often neglected or
ignored by researchers and practitioners working in the field of development.
This is a lost opportunity, because good health is not only a
resource for social, economic and personal development, but also the
basis for living a quality life. Agenda 21 recognises this interconnection:
``Health and development are intimately interconnected. Both insufficient
development leading to poverty and inappropriate development resulting in
over-consumption, coupled with an expanding world population, can result in
severe environmental health problems in both developing and developed
nations. Action items under Agenda 21 must address the primary health
needs of the world's population, since they are integral to the achievement of
the goals of sustainable development and primary environmental care. The
1 This paper is based on a report by Mathee, A, Barnes B and De Wet, T (1999). The State of the
Environment and Health in Alexandra. LEAD Programme in Technologies for Enhanced
Environmental Management, Durban, December, 1999.
a Department Development Studies, Rand Afrikaans University
b Health and Development Group, Medical Reseach Council.
Africanus 31(1)2001 75

linkage of health, environmental and socio-economic improvements requires
intersectoral efforts'' (United Nations 1992).
These `intersectoral efforts' cannot happen without interdisciplinary collaboration.
Anthropologists and health and development specialists (epidemiologists)
combine their efforts more and more on issues relating to the environment and
health. Their focus is usually on the interaction between biological, environmental,
social and cultural factors that influence human well-being. Collaboration
between epidemiologists and anthropologists are ``leading to more nuanced
and accurate descriptions of human behavior and more appropriate and effective
interventions'' (Trostle and Sommerfeld 1996:253).
The history of the collaboration between anthropologists and epidemiologists is
reviewed in a article by Trostle and Sommerfeld (1996), while Helman (1996)
discusses the link between epidemiology and cultural factors. The main obstacle
for collaboration between anthropology and epidemiology is methodological.
A combination of quantitative and qualitative methods in collaborative
research is often an effective way of bridging the gap between the two fields.
The research and policy project on `the state of health and the environment in
Alexandra, Johannesburg' offered the opportunity for collaboration between
researchers from the health and development field (epidemiologists), and anthropology.
From the outset of the project the two groups agreed on a combination
of quantitative and qualitative methods.
The project attempted to take a holistic perspective on environmental health
and development issues in Alexandra through the collation of information from a
series of in-depth-interviews, a community consultation workshop, a literature
review, a comprehensive database search and site visits to Alexandra, aimed to
identify and describe a selection of environmental health concerns occurring in
Alexandra. The findings were translated into a set of environment and health
indicators that could be used by local governments to assess the state of the
environment in poor communities.
2 THE RESEARCH PROCESS
Decades of bad planning and development decisions in the context of apartheid
have left a legacy of environmental degradation and hazards to health and
safety in Alexandra, which local authorities and other stakeholders are now
battling to address. The Alexandra community profile is characterised by high
76

population density and growth rates, elevated levels of unemployment, an age
profile skewed towards younger age categories, relatively low levels of education,
and low monthly household incomes. Over and above, or in association
with, this disadvantageous socio-economic profile, residents are exposed to
wide-ranging and sometimes severe threats to health emanating from local
environmental exposures. Settlement upgrading initiatives are costly. To ensure
that investments are directed towards interventions of high yield in terms of
environmental quality and health, it is important that decisions are based on
sound research and information.
In settings such as Alexandra, with a lack of published information on health in
relation to the environment, expensive and time-consuming primary research
studies are often not feasible. Alternative approaches need to be adopted in
order to gain an understanding of the main environment and health concerns.
The steps for collecting essential and available information, and ensuring the
success of the project include:
. Presentations to key groups involved in the community, for example, the
management committee and plenary groups of the Greater Alexandra Development
Forum;
. Conducting a community consultation workshop in Alexandra at which a
wide spectrum of community organizations discussed their perceptions of
priority environment and health concerns in the area;
. A literature search to identify and obtain published information on the environment
and health in Alexandra;
. A literature review in relation to settings similar to Alexandra to obtain relevant
environment and health information;
. Personal interviews with key stakeholders;
. Consultation of databases, for example, clinic statistics and the 1996 census
database for information relevant to the Alexandra setting; and
. Site visits to observe key areas of environment and health concern in
Alexandra.
There was close collaboration between the research partners in setting up the
methodology for this study. The typical methodologies of anthropologists (getting
the insider's perspective by consulting with the community in groups, indepth-interviews
with key informants, as well as observation of the problems in
the area) were combined with the more quantitative methods of epidemiologists
(finding demographic, health and safety statistics).
77

3 ENVIRONMENT, HEALTH AND DEVELOPMENT
Increasing awareness during recent decades of the deteriorating state of the
environment has led to unprecedented attention being given to the broad impacts
of human activity on the environment, world-wide. There is increasing
recognition of the complex and inextricable linkages between the nature and
level of development, the state of the environment, and health. There is also
acknowledgment of the impact of broad and complex processes on the state of
the environment in any one setting. These processes, which may occur at local,
national or regional levels, include, for example, population dynamics, urbanisation
rates, poverty, inequality, and levels of scientific and economic development
(WRI 1998).
New approaches to public health worldwide have been developed following
from changes in our understanding of the environment-health-development
relationship. The Alma Ata declaration, the European Charter on Environment
and Health, the Sundsvall Declaration on Supportive Environments for Health,
the Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion, the World Health Organisation's
(WHO) Healthy Cities Project, and Local Agenda 21, represent milestones in
the path to the `'new'' public health. These milestones have increasingly emphasised
the role of the environment and development in health. Emerging
conceptual frameworks for public health emphasize the promotion of good
health and the prevention of disease through cross-sectoral planning, community
participation in planning and development, the notion of sustainable
development, as well as integrated, holistic planning and action in key settings,
such as schools, workplaces and homes, and the use of emerging environmental
management tools and technologies. These and other concepts now
form fundamental pillars of the revised WHO `Health-For-All' strategy. Tools
such as environmental health impact assessment, the use of environment and
health indicators, the preparation of state of environment and health reports, are
increasingly used with a view to health protection or promotion (WHO 1997).
4 ENVIRONMENT AND HEALTH IN SOUTH AFRICA
Broadly defined, the human environment refers to the collective of surrounding
physical, chemical, biological, social, cultural and economic conditions. The
particular human exposures emanating from these conditions may vary, for
example, according to time (e g the period of the year or day), place (e g
geographical location, work or home), infrastructure and personal activity. In
78

general, environmental threats may be separated into `traditional' and `modern'
hazards, associated largely with under-development, and unsustainable development,
respectively. `Traditional' environmental health concerns may include,
for example, a lack of access to safe water supplies, sanitation facilities
and adequate waste disposal services. `Modern' environmental health concerns,
on the other hand, may refer to exposure to lead in the environment,
ambient air pollution from vehicles, and chemical pollution of the environment
from industrial activity. Developing countries tend to experience predominantly
the former, and developed countries the latter. Countries such as South Africa,
may be described as being on a path between traditional and modern environmental
health concerns.
Having, simultaneously, elements of both a developed and a developing
country, the people of South Africa may be at risk of exposure to the environment
and health concerns associated with both traditional and modern hazards.
In addition, a number of factors prevailing in the country predispose the population
to particular environmental health risks. These factors include, for
example, high degrees of poverty and inequality, high rates of urbanisation,
relatively low levels of scientific and economic development, low levels of massbased
``environment and health literacy'' and activism, and a poor tradition of
sound environmental management practice. All of these phenomena are to be
found in, or impact on, the quality of the environment and on health status in
Alexandra, a spatially confined township to the north of central Johannesburg,
accommodating around 150 000 people.
4.1 Poverty and inequality
There is little doubt that poverty is a powerful determinant of environmental
quality, and of human health and well-being. A WHO report suggests that
children from poor households in developing countries are 40 to 50 times more
likely to die before the age of five years than their developed nation counterparts.
Compared to Europe and North America, infants and young children in
developing countries are several hundred times more likely to die from preventable,
environment-associated diseases such as diarrhoea and pneumonia.
In the poorest countries of the world between a quarter and a third of all children
die before the age of five years. Amongst the poorest people within these
countries, as many as one in two children die before that age (WHO 1992).
Much of the poverty-related burden of ill health is preventable. The relationship
between levels of poverty and a number of environmental, health and service
79

factors was illustrated by a city-wide study undertaken in Port Elizabeth, a
selection of findings from which is given in Table 1. As can be seen, the poorest
communities tended to have the poorest environmental health conditions and
service coverage (Thomas EP et al 1999).
Table 1 Distribution of a selection of socio-environmental factors by
wealth category in Port Elizabeth
LEVEL OF WEALTH
low
lowermiddle
middle
upper
middle high
Tertiary education 1% 2% 5% 11% 18%
Access to piped water
indoors 11% 27% 57% 82% 98%
Indoor toilet 13% 19% 38% 72% 97%
Rats/mice seen during
past 24 hours 55% 46% 22% 10% 1%
Electricity used for
cooking 19% 36% 84% 94% 100%
Zero household members
who smoke
inside the home 33% 41% 46% 56% 62%
Dampness in the
home 75% 71% 44% 29% 16%
Problem with outdoor
air pollution 85% 70% 54% 33% 18%
Land ownership 33% 40% 65% 69% 89%
Adapted from: Thomas E P et al, Port Elizabeth 1 000 household environment and health study 1999.
Links between the environment, development, poverty and health are complex
and inextricable. Recent analyses indicate a trend of increasing poverty and
inequality across the globe. In developing countries, `the poor' tend to become
concentrated in areas of `under-development' such as Alexandra, which are
80

also of the poorest environmental quality. Poverty and environmental degradation
are thus becoming increasingly linked (WRI 1998). While large-scale
poverty exists, the quality of the living environment, and hence the health of
large numbers of people, is unlikely to improve. Due to their inherent vulnerability,
and their disproportionate numbers amongst `the poor', social categories
such as women, the elderly, adolescents and young children are at particular
risk of ill health (WHO 1997; IFUP 1997).
In South Africa, an estimated 24% of the population lies below the international
poverty line (WRI 1998). Inequality is well known to be associated with environmental
degradation and ill health. During 1993, the South African Gini coefficient
for income distribution (a measure of inequality) was 0.62, amongst the
highest in the world. At this time, 65% of the national income was being received
by the wealthiest quintile of the population (WRI 1998). A study reported
in 1984 showed that the average monthly income in Alexandra equalled
R111.00 per capita (Ferrinho et al 1991). The poor in South Africa, including in
Alexandra, often face a double burden of environmental exposure and disease,
in that they are most likely to be exposed to traditional environmental health
hazards (such as a lack of sanitation) as well as modern hazards (such as
chemical exposures) as a consequence of living in close proximity to industrial
sites (Tabibzadeh et al 1989).
In terms of health and well-being, the true plight of the poor is often hidden,
because of the aggregation of data across cities or areas (WHO 1992). In
studies conducted in Bombay and New Delhi, India, infant mortality rates were
221 per 1 000 in low income settlements, but were twice as high amongst the
poorest castes within these settlements. A study of environment and health
status in the Johannesburg inner city suburb of Hillbrow, has indicated that
significant health disparities may occur even within an area as small as one
square kilometre or from one high-rise building to another (Mathee et al 1999).
Some of the very poorest people may also be entirely excluded from urban and
health statistics, due to their status as illegal immigrants or refugees (WHO
1992; WHO 1993).
4.2 Multiple burdens of risk
With the characteristics of both developed and developing nations being found
in South Africa, it may be expected that the population, especially `the poor',
would be exposed to a double burden of health concerns. An emerging concern
81

in South Africa, is the health risks linked to the burgeoning informal sector
income generating activities. As indicated by a recent study conducted in Soweto,
in around 7% of homes, activities including clothing manufacture, food
preparation, electrical repairs, motor vehicle repairs, panel-beating and spraypainting,
shoe repairs, brick-making, and metalwork, were being undertaken,
largely in the absence of health and safety programmes. For residents of such
dwellings, in addition to risks from local under-development, threats to health
may also emanate from exposure to chemicals used in home-based incomegenerating
activity (Pick 1999). A related health risk in Alexandra relates to the
keeping of animals such as sheep, goats, chickens and cattle, which is fairly
commonplace, leading to environmental contamination and degradation, consequent
threats to health and community discontent.
4.3 Environmental racism
Of particular note in South Africa, is the way in which the apartheid system,
including aspects such as the influx control legislation, the Group Areas Act,
and education and labour preference policies, have engineered the differentiation
by race, of exposure to environmental hazards. For example, the
location of mainly black people in township and informal housing settings predisposed
this category of people to a wide range of environmental health
threats. Table 2 gives the proportion, by former population group, living in informal
settlements and with access to an indoor water supply.
Table 2 Proportion of people (by former population group) living
in informal or squatter settlements and with access to an indoor
water supply, 1996
Proportion living in
informal settlement
Proportion with a tap
inside their dwelling
African/
Black
Coloured
Indian/
Asian
White
15.5% 4.2% 0.4% 0.06%
27% 72% 97% 96%
Source: SSA 1998.
82

5 A DESCRIPTION OF ALEXANDRA
Alexandra has been described as amongst the most polluted and degraded
living environments in South Africa. The township comprises a roughly rectangular
piece of land located about 16 kilometres to the north of central Johannesburg.
The area is unique in that it is the only black Johannesburg
township located in close proximity to industry and a range of characteristically
urban amenities. This is in contrast to other South African urban townships,
which are usually located some distance away from urban centres. The residential
suburbs of Marlboro, Kelvin, Lombardy East and Lombardy West are
in close proximity to Alexandra. Kew, Wynberg, Wendywood, Bramley View and
Marlboro are industrial sites, which in the late 1980s accommodated around
400 workplaces (Rex 1991). London Road borders Alexandra to the south,
while to the east, the Jukskei river separates ``old'' Alexandra from the East
Bank and Far East Bank (Raymer 1989).
Alexandra population estimates have varied widely in the past, and have been a
widely debated issue. According to CASE (1998), reported population figures
have varied from 124 408, to as many as 800 000 in some reports. The estimate
in 1998 was in the region of 157 329 people. This estimate is in keeping
with the 1996 census data, which reports the population of Alexandra at approximately
136 727. Whatever the exact figure, the concentration of people in
a small area contributes to a picture of extreme overcrowding and environmental
degradation. In 1998, the Alexandra population density was estimated at
1 person per 29 square metres or 34 000 people per square kilometre. By
comparison, a recent study estimated the population of central Johannesburg to
equal 120 600. The central Johannesburg geographical area is however around
8 times larger than Alexandra (CASE 1998). For the purposes of this article, the
population of Alexandra will be regarded as in the region of 137 000 to 150 000
people.
Males comprise 54% of the population of Alexandra (SSA 1998). The age
distribution of the Alexandra population is given in Figure 1.
83

Figure 1 Age distribution of the Alexandra population
Age category, (years)
unspecified
>70 yrs
61±70 yrs
51±60 yrs
41±50 yrs
31±40 yrs
21±30 yrs
11±20 yrs
0±10 yrs
0 10 000 20 000 30 000 40 000 50 000
Population Size
Source: SSA 1998 (1996 population census).
As can be seen from Figure 1, 21±30 year old age category (usually the most
economically productive age category) accounts for the major portion of the
Alexandra population, and may be associated with people migrating to Johannesburg
to seek employment. Importantly, approximately 18% of the population
is younger than ten years of age, which may indicate a high birth rate in
recent times. In addition to the economic strain on the economically active
proportion of the population in relation to the social welfare of this category,
there are also planning and development implications in terms of responding to
future population growth in Alexandra. Thus the birth rate and ongoing migration
into the area may pose increasing challenges to city planners and managers
in Alexandra.
Recent population growth in Alexandra may also be attributed, at least in part,
to an influx of `illegal immigrants' who have made certain parts of Alexandra
their home. For example, an area along the banks of the Jukskei river, commonly
referred to as Maputo, accommodates mainly citizens from Mozambique.
Because of the depleted economies in many of South Africa's neighbouring
countries, South Africa, and Johannesburg in particular, has been a popular
84

destination for people seeking economic security. A community based socioeconomic
profile of Alexandra conducted in 1998 indicated that 2% of residents
claimed to have been born outside of South Africa. However, the report also
states that this number may be an under-estimate, due to unwillingness
amongst respondents to reveal their true country of origin, for fear of prosecution.
Whilst it is estimated that the proportion of illegal immigrants in Alexandra
is significantly higher than 2% (CASE 1998), there are currently no
reliable or accurate data available in this regard.
Approximately 33% of the population either do not have formal education or
have less than seven years of formal schooling. Fifty percent of the population
have attended one or more years of secondary school, whilst 17% reported
having a tertiary education.
According to the 1996 population census, 39% of the Alexandra population
were unemployed, whilst 44% were employed, 10% were students or scholars
and 4% were pensioners or retired.
While 44% of the Alexandra population were employed, this was mainly in lowand
semi-skilled jobs, usually associated with relatively low incomes. For example,
more than one in four men were employed in trades such as plumbing,
carpentry, electrical work and painting. Similarly, one in five women were domestic
workers. There were few professionals such as doctors, lawyers and
engineers residing in Alexandra (CASE 1998). Consequently, the average
monthly household income was low. The average monthly income of households
in Alexandra has been estimated to equal approximately R1 029,00.
Overall, men tend to earn more than women in Alexandra, with the major
portion of men earning between R900,00 and R1 499,00 monthly, while the
greatest proportion of women earn between R500,00 and R899,00 per month
(CASE 1998). These figures represent an aggregate across Alexandra, and
may be misleading. In reality there is considerable heterogeneity across the
township, with average incomes in more affluent areas being considerably
higher than in informal settlement areas, for example.
In summary, Alexandra is a township characterised by a high population density,
a high population growth rate, high levels of unemployment, a relatively
young population, low education levels, and low monthly household incomes.
Against the historical and socio-economic context outlined here, residents are
also exposed to a number of environmental concerns, which ultimately serve to
threaten or compromise their health status.
85

6 ENVIRONMENTAL EXPOSURES
6.1 Housing and health
One of the most effective ways of improving the health of people is to improve
the quality of their housing and living environment. Housing of high quality not
only serves as an important defence against ill health, death and injury, but also
supports a state of `positive health' implied by the World Health Organisation
definition, which describes health as a state of physical, mental and social wellbeing,
and not merely the absence of disease. Poor housing conditions, on the
other hand, provide weak defences against death, disease, and injury and may
even increase vulnerability to them (WHO 1987). The majority of the world's
population lives in shelter that does not meet the basic requirements for healthy
housing.
The WHO adopts a broad definition of ``healthy housing'', which goes beyond
the mere physical structure, and includes the provision of basic environmental
health services, as well as aspects associated with the broader living environment.
Amongst the fundamental elements of healthy housing are included
the shelter, water supply, sanitation, solid waste removal, wastewater disposal,
the site, access to housing (overcrowding), indoor air pollution, food safety,
vectors of disease, the use of the home as a workplace, as well as aspects
related to transport, education and shopping facilities (WHO 1997). The design
and structure, as well as the maintenance of buildings are important determinants
of the health and safety of occupants.
Of particular concern are the health hazards occurring in informal settlements.
In general, informal settlements are characterized by high-risk locations, ramshackle
shelter, inadequate access to basic environmental health services, and
a lack of facilities such as transport, education and shopping. Living conditions
in informal settlements predispose residents to a wide range of ill health conditions.
A World Health Organisation Commission on Health and Environment reported
that many of the world's most common causes of death from diseases could be
prevented through improved housing and living conditions, better nutrition and
comprehensive coverage of primary health care (WHO 1992). Building materials
themselves, may fail to protect, or may even threaten health. Dwellings in
informal settlements, for example, are constructed from a variety of materials,
including, plastic, cardboard, and corrugated iron sheeting, which may afford
minimal protection from extremes of temperature, noise and dust intrusion.
86

Asbestos roofing, associated with serious conditions such as mesothelioma,
asbestosis and lung cancer (Landrigan 1998; Berman 1986), has been extensively
used in low-cost housing construction in South Africa, including in
Alexandra, during recent decades.
6.2 Housing in Alexandra
Housing in Alexandra ranges from free-standing brick homes to crowded informal
housing constructed from various materials, and frequently located in or
along high risk areas such as busy roads, along the banks and tributaries of the
Jukskei river and on land formerly used as a waste disposal site. The 1996
Population Census indicated 41 605 dwelling units in Alexandra, classified into
a number of dwelling types. Much of the formal housing infrastructure in
Alexandra has been poorly constructed to start with, and also poorly maintained,
and is consequently in a state of disrepair. The backyards of formal
dwellings may accommodate large numbers of informal housing structures, and
constitute an important component of the local economy.
Informal dwellings and shacks account for approximately 44% of all dwellings in
Alexandra. There has been particular concern about the location of informal
housing in Alexandra, for example within the floodlines of the Jukskei river and
its tributaries, encroaching on busy roads, and on former waste disposal sites.
Informal dwellings in Alexandra have been built from a variety of materials,
which may afford little protection against the elements or noise. The construction
materials themselves may be hazardous, for example asbestos, and
insulation materials such as polystyrene, which are highly flammable.
A study of the health of children in various parts of Alexandra showed that
children living in informal dwellings were more likely to be malnourished, less
likely to be immunized, more likely to have been delivered at home, less likely to
have attended post-natal services, and more likely to have been breastfed for a
long time or not at all (Ferrinho et al 1991).
In general, dwellings in Alexandra are small and located in close proximity to
each other. For example, 63% of both formal and informal dwellings in Alexandra
were reported to be one-roomed dwellings (CASE 1998). This implies the
use of rooms for multiple functions. For example, rooms used for cooking, may
also be used for sleeping, with the potential for exposure to elevated levels of
indoor air pollution. Within dwellings, conditions are often cramped and crowded,
a factor in the transmission of communicable diseases.
87

6.3 Water supply and health
Sewage, nutrients, toxic metals, and industrial and agricultural chemicals may
all contaminate water. Of these, the Global Environment Monitoring System
(GEMS), found organic matter present in household sewage to be the most
widespread pollutant. Water contaminated by sewage may expose users to a
wide range of diseases caused by pathogens such as bacteria, viruses and
other organisms. Diseases related to an unsafe and inadequate water supply
include, amongst others, typhoid fever, cholera, non-specific diarrhoeal diseases,
dysentery, skin infections and helminthic conditions. In addition to the
direct effect on health, frequent bouts of gastro-intestinal infections may reduce
absorption of nutrients significantly, and reduce the body's general defence
capacity against diseases such as measles and pneumonia (von Schirnding et
al 1993).
In terms of health, both the quality, and access to sufficient quantities of safe
water are important. Data from the 1996 South African census indicate that less
than half of all South African households have access to a tap inside their
dwellings, whilst around 40% have no access to water on their dwelling site.
Having to walk extended distances, or wait in long queues for water cuts the
amount of water used by households to levels which may be insufficient to
protect health (WHO 1992). A further concern is the storage and handling of
water for drinking, and personal and domestic hygiene purposes. Genthe and
colleagues (1997), reported on significant deterioration of water quality in a periurban
settlement, following handling and storage, to the extent where indicator
organisms exceeded national guidelines by 1 to 6 orders of magnitude. The
authors identified improved hygiene and health knowledge as an important
element of health improvement initiatives in such settings.
According to the 1996 census, the three main sources of water in Alexandra are
indoor supplies (26%), on-site supplies (46%) and public taps (27%). The type
of water supply option is linked to location in Alexandra. Around 90% of
households in the East bank area and flats have access to water inside their
dwellings. In contrast, only 5% of households in informal areas have access to
an indoor water supply, which is well below the national and provincial (Gauteng)
average of 64%. Sixty five percent of households in the `Seswetla' area
rely on public taps for their water (CASE 1998).
Inadequate mechanisms and practices in relation to the disposal of used or
wastewater may also pose risks to health. Visual inspections in Alexandra re-
88

veal pools of standing water, often alongside piles of refuse, providing fertile
conditions for the growth of vectors of disease such as insects and rodents, and
also serve to attract animals such as dogs, poultry, sheep, goats and cattle.
6.4 Sanitation and health in Alexandra
Human faecal matter is a highly toxic substance, containing a wide range of
disease-causing pathogens. In order to protect public health, it is essential that
faeces be removed from the living environment as quickly and effectively as
possible (von Schirnding et al 1993).
The spread of sanitation-related diseases may occur through a number of
pathways. For example, ill health may be caused through direct contact with
faeces, when children, for example, put contaminated fingers into their mouths,
or indirectly, when bacteria or other organisms are transferred to food or water
by agents such as insects, rodents or fomites. In terms of disease-causing
organisms, faecal matter may contain viruses, bacteria, protozoa or helminths
(worms). Diseases associated with these organisms include, for example, polio,
non-specific diarrhoeal disease, dysentery, hepatitis, cholera, typhoid, shigellosis,
schistosomiasis, hookworm, ascariasis, and taeniasis. The health effects
of inadequate sanitation facilities are of particular concern in crowded
settlements such as Alexandra.
According to the 1996 census data, 81% of the households in Alexandra have
access to a flush or chemical toilet, 1% of households use pit latrines and
approximately 15% use the `bucket latrine' system. However, in Alexandra
chemical toilets are usually provided for communal use in informal or squatter
settlements. In terms of reflecting potential health risks, it would be preferable to
separate these categories. Data from alternative sources indicate that only 25%
of Alexandra residents have access to flush toilets inside their dwellings.
Twelve percent of formal households have access to flush toilets while 1 in 25
(4%) informal dwellings have access to flush toilets (CASE 1998). In the
`Seswetla' area approximately 65% of residents reportedly use communal
chemical toilets (portable) and 20% rely on the bucket system (CASE 1998).
Of particular concern in terms of health is the use of the `bucket toilet' system,
which may lead to soil contamination, predisposing those in the area to direct
and indirect contact with faecal matter.
An associated sanitation concern in Alexandra, particularly in the informal
89

areas, is the under-supply of chemical or portable toilets. A 1997 survey
showed that in some parts of Alexandra, up to 120 people were using a single
toilet (Ibini-bini 1997). Personal interviews conducted recently indicated that
additional toilets have since been provided (Ncumisa Mehana, personal correspondence,
2000). However, concerns remain in relation to maintenance and
generally poor sanitary conditions around these toilets. In addition, there was no
evidence of essential hand-washing facilities being available.
In terms of bulk infrastructure, the sewer system in Alexandra, having been
designed originally for a population of around 30 000 people, and currently
serving a population of around 150 000, is inadequate. The inadequacy and
degradation of the sewer system constitutes a major environmental and public
health problem. Challenges faced in addressing the problem include the erection
of dwellings over sewer maintenance points, and the development of settlements
within the flood lines of the Jukskei river and in public open space areas.
6.5 Waste disposal and health
Household solid wastes may include leftover food, packaging and other redundant
items, as well as hazardous substances such as paints, medicines,
solvents, cleaning materials and batteries. In informal settlements, uncollected
solid waste may pose numerous risks to the local population. Young children
may be at risk of injury, poisoning or infection from waste in streets or local open
space. Organic waste may attract insects and other household pests, as well as
animals. Fermentation processes in organic waste may cause foul smells and
also create conditions favourable for the growth of microbial pathogens. Uncollected
solid waste may also obstruct storm water run-off, leading to the
formation of stagnant pools of water, which may in turn facilitate the breeding of
mosquitoes and other insects (WHO 1997). The local combustion of waste is a
common occurrence in informal settlements, with the potential for elevated
levels of ambient air pollution, as well as risks of burn injuries to residents,
particularly young children, in the area.
The 1996 census indicates that waste from 76% of households is removed at least
once weekly, 15% is removed less frequently by the local authority, whilst 3%
percent make use of a communal refuse dump. Although waste is removed on a
regular basis in Alexandra, the volume of waste generated, as well as waste disposal
practices, pose a challenge to waste collection departments. For example,
although households are supplied with plastic bags for waste disposal, many of
90

these are left on the road and ripped open by animals. Some do not make use of
bags and waste is illegally disposed of along streets and in other spaces.
6.6 Surface water quality
The Jukskei river and its tributaries form a focus for parks and recreational
areas in and around Alexandra. While the river itself should offer opportunities
for recreational activities for members of Alexandra and other communities,
water quality investigations have indicated the river to be extremely littered and
polluted, posing an eyesore and serious health risks to all who use it. As and
after it passes Alexandra, the river is devoid of aquatic life, and has been
described as having amongst the worst water quality in the entire country.
Monitoring programmes conducted indicate that levels of Escherichia coli (an
organism which indicates faecal contamination of the water) in the Alexandra
area are consistently higher than at other monitoring points along the length of
the Jukskei river. As the river passes Alexandra, mean pollution loads increase
by 56% to 89%, grossly exceeding all national guidelines. For example, in the
region of Alexandra, Escherichia coli levels as high as 30 million/100ml have
been determined, which might be expected from raw sewage. Unacceptably
high levels of Escherichia coli, are routinely measured in the Jukskei river at
Alexandra. During summer months, children frequently use the Juksei river for
full (swimming) or intermediate (paddling, canoeing) contact recreational purposes.
Table 3 gives the measurements for three key parameters upstream and
downstream, as well as at Alexandra.
Table 3 Water quality in the Jukskei river
Area PH levels E Coli Turbidity
Upstream 8.2 1500 .970
Alexandra 7.9 370 000 2.91
Downstream 7.8 130 000 .783
Source: Johannesburg Eastern Metropolitan Local Council)
The major source of bacterial pollution of the Jukskei river is inadequacy and
extensive degradation of the sewerage system in Alexandra. A further source of
pollution is indiscriminate dumping of waste on the banks of the river. Water
quality in the Jukskei river is particularly poor during rainy periods. Authorities
91

attempting to improve water quality in the Jukskei river are faced with major
challenges that include the existence of squatter settlements along the riverbanks
and tributaries, dwellings built over sewer lines, and the overall situation
of extreme overcrowding. However, unless these challenges are met,
water quality in the Jukskei river around Alexandra is unlikely to improve, and
associated threats to environmental quality and health will continue.
6.7 Air quality and health
Millions of children die each year in developing countries, and many millions
more suffer from acute and chronic ill health as a result of air pollution. In parts
of Africa acute respiratory disease accounts for a quarter to a third of deaths in
young children, and is the main reason for using the health services. There are
indications that in some South African urban areas deaths from acute respiratory
infection are becoming more important than from diarrhoea (von
Schirnding et al 1991).
Although many activities such as cooking, space heating, cleaning and smoking
of tobacco, as well as materials such as carpeting, curtaining and furnishing
may all contribute to air pollution indoors, there is particular concern about the
domestic use of fuels such as wood and coal for cooking and space heating
purposes, which may cause extremely high levels of indoor air pollution.
Measurements of indoor air quality in developing countries have shown levels
well in excess of international air quality guidelines. Women, girls and young
children, who spend a large proportion of their time indoors, or who participate
in cooking activities, are at particular risk of exposure (UNEP/GEMS 1991).
In South Africa, large numbers of people living in informal settlements are
without access to electricity, leaving residents reliant on fuels such as paraffin,
wood and coal for cooking and heating purposes. Even where electricity has
been supplied, economic constraints often lead to the use of electricity for a
limited number of functions, such as lighting and entertainment, and the continued
use of alternative fuels for cooking and heating. Under these conditions,
residents continue to be exposed to elevated levels of indoor air pollution.
Very few in-depth studies of indoor air quality and health status have been
conducted in South African informal settlements. Where measurements of indoor
air pollution have been undertaken, the data indicate levels well in excess
of international guidelines (Health Consulting Office 1998). The revised WHO
air quality guidelines for Europe, reflecting growing evidence that there appears
92

to be no safe lower limit for particulate exposure, no longer gives a guideline
value for PM 10 . Instead, exposure-response data for mortality, respiratory
symptoms, and service use are presented, with the recommendation that this
information be used to decide local standards and policy (WHO in preparation).
Against this background of ever more cautious attitudes to particulate air pollution
in the developed world, it is of concern to note that PM 10 concentrations
several times higher than international recommendations have been measured
in informal settlements in developing countries, including South Africa. Respiratory
ill health is currently the main reason for use of the health services in
large parts of South Africa (von Schirnding et al 1991). In Alexandra, the use of
paraffin and solid fuels for cooking is widespread in informal settlements. During
winter particularly, when residents use wood and coal for space heating, a
blanket of pollution may be seen to cover the township.
Although the 1996 population census reveals that 91% of the Alexandra population
have access to electricity, as outlined earlier, access does not imply
use. For example, the majority of households in Alexandra use paraffin for
cooking purposes.
When we look at the distribution of fuel used for space heating purposes in Alexandra,
electricity accounts for 43% of fuel used, whilst paraffin and coal are used in
40% and 7% of households respectively. It should be noted that the census interviews
were mainly conducted in summer months. Had the data been collected
during colder periods, it may be expected that the proportion of households using
polluting fuels such as coal and wood, would have been significantly higher. The
Alexandra Community Clinic reports that the incidence of respiratory disorders is
much higher in winter (Ncumisa Mehana, personal communication, 2000). There
have also been reports of people suffocating from insufficient ventilation particularly
when paraffin and gas units are left burning at night.
Environmental tobacco smoke constitutes a further important source of indoor
air pollution. In a study of smoking patterns in Alexandra, it was shown that
more men than women smoked. Eleven percent of men between the ages of
nine and 19 years smoked, whilst only 4% of women in this age category did.
Twenty percent of those who had lived in Alexandra for more than five years
smoked whilst only 14% of those who had arrived within the past five years
smoked. These findings are in line with previous observations associating urbanization
with higher rates of smoking. The study also showed higher levels of
smoking amongst residents of informal settlements, relative to people living in
formal housing developments. The author concluded that smoking was a major
93

problem in Alexandra, and recommended that community-wide education
campaigns be undertaken as part of a comprehensive primary health care
strategy in Alexandra (Ferrinho 1994).
6.8 Safety and health
Not only does the environment play a role in physical health, it also plays a
significant role in the psycho-social health of the community. In particular,
proper housing plays a vital role in reducing psycho-social problems. Increasingly,
housing in urban settlements such as Alexandra fail to serve the role of
promoting psycho-social health (WHO 1998). Overcrowding and the stresses of
urban life may contribute to increased substance abuse, mental illness and
violent behaviour. The urban poor have the additional burden of high levels of
unemployment, living with insecurity of tenure and in unpleasant surroundings.
Consequently, the safety and psycho-social well-being of community members
are threatened.
There is an ongoing association of Alexandra with crime and violence. Data
from the South African Police Services confirm that levels of serious crime in
Alexandra are amongst the highest in the Johannesburg region. According to
the official website of the South African Police Services the number of murder
cases reported at the Alexandra Police Station in 1998 was usually comparable
to those reported at the busiest police stations in Johannesburg, often second
only to the Johannesburg Central or Hillbrow Police Stations. Given the small
surface area of Alexandra township, and assuming that the majority of cases
reported are actually occurring in Alexandra, these levels would seem particularly
high. Looking at it in another way, during 1998 19% of murder cases
were reported at the Alexandra Police Station, whilst this station is one of 20 in
the Johannesburg area.
In Figure 2, the levels of selected crimes committed in Alexandra between
January and June 1999 are compared with the national average. As can be
seen, the levels of murder, rape, and robbery and housebreaking exceeded the
average for the nation as a whole, whilst in other categories Alexandra figures
were well below the national average. A number of factors ought to be borne in
mind when considering the data presented here. For example, crimes reported
to the Alexandra Police Station are not necessarily representative of all crimes
committed in Alexandra. Nor is it certain that crimes reported at the Alexandra
police station were committed in the suburb.
94

Figure 2 Specific crimes in Alexandra for the period January to June 1999
Population number per 100 000
(Source: Alexandra Police Station & SA Police Service)
The physical environment in certain parts of Alexandra may facilitate criminal
behaviour. Because of housing density, numerous alleys and hiding spaces
exist. For example, car hijackers have been known to `disappear' into these
alleys (personal communication 2000).
Apart from crime, there are numerous other safety hazards in Alexandra. For
example, dwellings encroach on several roads, and pedestrians are forced to
walk in the roads rather than on sidewalks. The lack of safe play areas for
children also leads to children playing in busy streets. In several roads, residents
have themselves constructed humps to decrease motor vehicle speed.
The risk of electrical shock is exacerbated through illegal electrical connections,
which are visible along and across roads in Alexandra. In some cases wires are
exposed, and could potentially cause electrocution.
95

6.9 Food preparation and health
Harmful toxins occur naturally in all foods. Over time, human beings have come
to recognize and avoid or adapt foods with naturally occurring toxins. In recent
years there has been increasing concern over preventable bouts of food poisoning
as a consequence of inadequate food handling, preparation and storage.
One of the best defences against food-borne illness is a safe water
supply, as well as adequate cooking and refrigeration temperatures (WHO
1998). Amongst the requirements for safe food preparation are the cleanliness
of the preparation area, availability of proper sanitation facilities, high levels of
personal hygiene amongst those involved in food preparation, access to clean
water, and the control of pests. Adequate temperature control is important in the
prevention of bacterial replication, and a refrigerator is essential in this regard.
Steps should also be taken to avoid chemical contamination, for example from
storage of food in lead-glazed containers.
Of particular concern in developing countries is food prepared on the street.
Although the preparation and sale of food by informal vendors employs anywhere
between 6% and 25% of the workforce in certain developing countries,
this industry has been difficult to regulate, particularly in relation to health. In
principle, foods that are prepared and consumed immediately should be safe.
However, street foods may also be stored in unhygienic conditions and left to
stand for extended periods before being purchased and consumed. In addition,
hazardous chemicals and additives, notably unauthorised colorants and preservatives
have been found in street-vended foods (WHO 1998). The consumption
of food from the informal sector, as is the case for the formal food
sector, may potentially pose a serious public health risk to consumers, particularly
in light of the large numbers of individuals who may be exposed to
unsafe foods.
The number of informal vendors selling food to the public in Alexandra has
increased during recent years. In a survey conducted in 1998, it was found that
vendors sometimes had to operate under unhygienic conditions which had
implications for the safety of foods prepared (EMLC 1998). For example, it was
found that although most informal vendors had access to water, approximately
29% were about 50 metres from the nearest water point. This led to extended
periods between water changes, to save on time and energy. In the same
survey, it was found that approximately 86% of traders were using inappropriate
water and food storage containers and approximately 90% were undertaking
inappropriate water handling practices (EMLC 1998). For example, the same
96

water was being used for all of hand washing, washing foods, and washing
dishes. In addition, it was found that 81% of the food traders could not adequately
control the temperature of food through the availability of adequate
refrigeration and reheating facilities. Of particular concern was the finding that
approximately 88% of traders operated on a full day basis. Consequently, food
was often left to stand for longer than four hours (WHO standards for the length
of time which food should stand at room temperature) (WHO 1998).
In terms of wastewater, disposal often occurred in the immediate surroundings.
The EMLC (1998) survey showed that because of inadequate waste water
disposable facilities and practices, approximately 94% of vendors were contributing
to the formation of pools of standing water, and the creation of associated
health risks. Moreover, the report emphasized that 74% of vendors had
problems with the hygienic preparation of food and that personal hygiene
concerns could be detected in 66% of cases.
An assessment of the `formal' food sector in Alexandra also identified a number
of concerns. One of the major problems in the formal Alexandra food sector was
the use of prepared food establishments for other purposes. For example, 14%
of the establishments that sold prepared food also served as butcheries, 4%
were dry cleaners and 64% were general dealers (EMLC 1998). Particular
problems identified in these settings, included the presence of flies, and a
failure to separate wet (eg potato skins and other food waste) and dry refuse
(papers and plastic wrappers). In the change rooms 99% of establishments
visited had no soap available. In the preparation area, 88% had no hot water
available, 98% had no towels, none had nailbrushes and 86% had no hand
soap available. Ninety percent of premises were not well maintained or clean,
whilst 92% of the people preparing the food wore no protective clothing. Nails
were long and unhygienic in 94% of cases, and 98% were not wearing required
headgear (EMLC 1998). In respect of temperature control, 63% of establishments
were problematic, 65% had a problem with improper shelving, 78% had a
problem keeping raw and cooked food separated, and in 70% the storage
space was not protected.
Given the above findings, food handling and preparation can be described as a
major concern in Alexandra. The EMLC has implemented various response
interventions, with varying degrees of success, which have been reported separately.
97

6.10 Environmental disasters and health
Thepatternofdisastersisstronglyassociatedwithseason.Forexample,floods
are more likely to occur during the rainy season whilst fires are more likely to occur
during the dry season. In general, human settlements develop in areas that are
less susceptible to natural disasters. However, settlements accommodating the
poorest portion of the population tend to develop in areas most susceptible to
disasters. The human impacts of disasters such as fires and floods include loss of
lives, injury and loss of property. However, there are a number of factors that may
either alleviate or aggravate the human impact of natural disasters. These include
the location and density of the settlements, the dwelling construction materials and
the emergency support available to that settlement.
Alexandra is located in, and characteristic of, an area that is highly susceptible
to the impacts of natural disasters. The area is densely populated, many of the
dwellings (particularly in the informal settlements) are constructed from flimsy,
often flammable materials, or located within floodlines. A large proportion of
households use open flames for cooking and space heating. Consequently,
Alexandra has become synonymous with floods in the summer, and fires in the
winter.
Fires are mainly associated with the use of paraffin and candles, and gas cylinder
explosions (Eugene Cilliers, personal communication, 2000). Arson has also been
associated with fires in Alexandra. The rapid spread of fires in Alexandra has been
associated with housing density and the use of flammable materials. On average
two fires occur in Alexandra each year, with an average of 120 dwellings and an
estimated 720 people being affected each time. Because the threat of fires in
Alexandra is considerable, the EMLC have put together a response team, who
report that five people have lost their lives due to fires in Alexandra during the past
five years (Eugene Cilliers, personal communication, 2000).
Flooding affects Alexandra annually. A large number of informal dwellings have
been erected within the floodlines of the Jukskei river. The water level rises
rapidly during periods of heavy rainfall, washing away dwellings along its banks.
This occurs mostly during the summer months of January, February and March.
During February 2000 for example, approximately 500 shacks were washed
away (Eugene Cilliers, personal communication, 2000). In addition, floodwaters
carry material which may cause damage to infrastructure and serve as a hazard
to river users (Eugene Cilliers, personal communication, 2000).
98

7 HEALTH STATUS
Given the environmental exposures outlined in earlier sections, it is of little surprise
that health in Alexandra is of continuing concern. A selection of health concerns, for
which data could be procured, will be outlined in this section. Due to their known
vulnerability and the proportion of time they spend at home, women, young children,
the elderly and those already ill, are at particular risk of suffering the health
consequences of exposure to hazards in poor quality living environments.
In contrast to the early years of its existence when there were no health facilities
at all in Alexandra (Ferrinho et al 1991), the area is currently serviced by four
health care facilities and one satellite clinic. These are the Eighth Avenue Clinic,
the East Bank Clinic, the Fourth Avenue clinic, the Thoko Mngoma Clinic, and
the Watt Street facility serving as a satellite unit associated with the Fourth
Avenue Clinic. In addition, the Alexandra Health Care Centre, run by a nongovernmental
organisation, provides primary health care services, including
curative and trauma services.
In a 1991 report on an analysis of death certificate records at the Alexandra
Health Centre, it was shown that 60% of deaths occurred amongst children
under the age of one year. Gastro-enteritis was the most frequent killer of young
children, while amongst adult males violence and trauma caused most deaths.
The majority of trauma-related deaths in males was due to stab wounds. Respiratory
tract infections, cardiovascular diseases, abortion and trauma accounted
for most deaths amongst adult women. Trauma deaths amongst
women were mainly due to gunshot wounds (Ferrinho et al 1991).
A community-based study amongst 450 children aged 12 to 23 months was
conducted in Alexandra during April 1990. The results showed that 18% of boys
and 9% of girls were below the third percentile of weight for age (wasting). In
terms of height for age (stunting) 44% of both boys and girls were below the 3rd
percentile. Less than 4% of girls and boys were below the third percentile for
weight for height. These findings indicated a high percentage of children suffering
from stunting, but not from malnutrition.
More children from informal dwellings (79%) had weights below the 50th percentile
for age than those from formal dwellings (68%). Similarly, 53% and 40%
of children from informal and formal dwellings respectively, had heights below
the third percentile for age.
Overall the study found that severe protein energy malnutrition was rare in
99

Alexandra. However, the percentage of underweight children was high, and the
percentage of children with stunting was extremely high. These findings were
comparable to other communities in the Cape and Oukasie. The authors concluded
that socio-economic factors and exposure to poor environmental conditions
were associated with the higher prevalence of poor nutritional status
occurring in informal dwellings (Coetzee & Ferrinho 1994).
8 ENVIRONMENT AND HEALTH INDICATORS
The relationship between the environment and health is complex, with a variety
of factors and processes playing multiple roles. During recent years, a health
and environment cause-effect framework has been developed which reflects on
the relationships operating between driving forces, environmental pressures,
environmental states, human exposures, health effects and actions aimed at
minimizing or preventing these effects.
Typical forces, which may act as drivers of the state of the environment and
health in a particular setting, include population growth, the urbanization rate,
the level of technological development, the level of economic development, rate
of industrialization, and the degrees of poverty and inequity. Driving forces
result in pressures on the environment, which may be generated by all economic
or development sectors, including for example the transport, energy,
housing and industrial sectors. Pollution, for example from the combustion of
fossil fuels, vehicle emissions, or pesticide application, is an important example
of an environmental pressure. Environmental pressures, in turn, affect the state
of the environment. Thus concentrations of lead, ozone, sulphur dioxide, nitrogen
dioxide and particulate matter in ambient air may be elevated as a
consequence of vehicle, industrial and domestic emissions.
Whist the state of the environment may be affected through pollution, it does not
necessarily follow that people will be exposed. Factors such as type of activity,
age, place, time of day, and behaviour all play a role in determining the extent to
which a particular individual might become exposed to a particular pollutant.
Exposure to mixtures of chemicals in the environment is increasingly common.
Certain of these may co-act to produce synergistic effects, thus levels of lung
cancer are particularly high amongst uranium miners who are also smokers.
Examples of environmental exposure indicators include personal measurements
of exposure to particulate matter, the proportion of children with elevated
blood lead levels and the proportion of the population living in poor quality
100

housing. Following exposure, health effects may occur immediately (acute) or
may take many years to manifest. A number of factors influence the severity of
the effect, including, for example, the exposure dose and duration of exposure,
individual nutritional status and so on. The foetus and children, due to their size,
play and development activities, and developing nature of their organs and
biochemical pathways, are usually at particular risk of exposure and health
effects. Action indicators may include measures of the provision of water, sanitation
and housing, or the implementation of environment and health education
programmes. Environmental health indicators may be selected in relation to
each of these `levels' in the environment-development-health chain.
By way of example one could consider acute respiratory infections in children.
In this respect relevant driving forces may include poverty, household energy
policy, housing policy and agricultural policy. These driving forces may in turn
give rise to environmental pressures such as cooking and space heating
emissions, crowding, the growth of slums, and land degradation.
The state of the environment may be affected through the development of
indoor air pollution, poor housing quality and a lack or poor quality of food.
Consequently, exposure to particulate matter, chilling, infectious agents and
malnutrition may occur, facilitating the development of a scenario of elevated
levels of acute respiratory infections (effect) (Briggs et al 1996).
Environmental health indicators need to be based on a known or suspected
relationship between the environment and health. Their selection thus requires
a comprehension of the key issues and complexities of the environment-health
relationship, as well as an understanding of the broad system and intended use
of the indicators. Based on the information available in relationship to Alexandra,
and the perceptions of priorities as far as the community is concerned, a
preliminary set of 23 core indictors has been identified, for further discussion
and refinement, and is given in Table 4.
101

Table 4 Proposed environment & health indicators for Alexandra
CATEGORY
AMBIENT AIR
QUALITY
ACCESS TO
SAFE WATER
DISASTER
EPISODES
HOUSING
SAFETY &
CRIME
SURFACE
WATER
QUALITY
INDOOR AIR
QUALITY
SOCIO-
ECONOMIC
FOOD QUALITY
PROPOSED INDICATOR/S
Levels of particulate matter (PM 10 ), sulphur dioxide, nitrogen
dioxide and ozone in air.
Annual noise complaints
Proportion of households with access to sufficient quantities
of safe water
Number of homes destroyed/number of people left
homeless annually by fire
Number of homes destroyed/number of people left
homeless annually by floods
Proportion of people accommodated in informal or ``unhealthy''
housing
Number of children/people injured in traffic events
Number of cases of murder reported
Number of cases of rape reported
Number of cases of child abuse
Levels of coliforms in the Jukskei river at Alexandra
Levels of particulate matter in indoor air
Proportion of unemployed people
Proportion of people without functional education
Proportion of food samples not meeting guidelines in
annual surveys
102

CATEGORY
HEALTH
PUBLIC
PERCEPTIONS
PROPOSED INDICATOR/S
Number of cases of diarrhoeal disease reported at
Alexandra clinics/health centres annually.
Number of cases of acute respiratory infections reported
at Alexandra clinics/health centres annually.
Proportion of people who smoke
Proportion of people with tuberculosis
Childhood blood lead levels
Public perceptions of the state of the environment in
Alexandra.
Public perceptions of the prevalence of threats to health
in Alexandra.
Levels of awareness amongst Alexandra residents of the
links between the environment and health.
9 CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS
Planning and development departments have enormous power to determine, in
both the short and longer term, levels of environmental quality and associated
public health status. A drive or walk through the streets of Alexandra provides
powerful support for the old adage that ``prevention is better (and cheaper) than
cure''. Decades of bad planning and development decisions in the context of
apartheid have left a legacy of environmental degradation and hazards to health
and safety, which local authorities and other stakeholders are now battling to
address. In addition, this article presents data and information from a variety of
sources that depict a wide range of environment and health risks posed to the
Alexandra community.
The quality of the living environment is well recognized to be a powerful determinant
of community health status. Settlement planning and upgrading efforts,
if environment and health benefits are to be optimised, require holistic
approaches and integrated input from a wide range of sectors and stakeholders,
as well as investment from the state. Settlement upgrading initiatives
are costly. To ensure that investments are directed towards interventions of
high yield in terms of environmental quality and health, it is important that
103

decisions are based on sound research and information, and that impacts are
evaluated. In this regard, communities can play an important role.
The article was compiled with a view to the development of environment and
health baselines, against which the future environmental health impact of current
and planned improvement initiatives in Alexandra might be measured.
Based on the information presented here, and that gathered during interviews
with key informants and community groups, we identified a set of 23 key environment
and health indicators. We propose that information related to these
indicators, or a subsequently decided final set, be collated, and analysed for
discussion and dissemination on a regular basis in the community. A neglected,
yet cost-effective and powerful component of settlement upgrade initiatives, is
the improvement of community knowledge of the relationship between the
environmental conditions and exposures, and community health and well-being.
During recent years, this aspect has been receiving increasing attention from
international organizations such as the World Bank and the World Health Organisation.
In this regard, the selection and implementation of a system of
environment and health indicators, and the analysis and appropriate presentation
of the data is likely to be a highly useful tool.
The collaboration between anthropology and epidemiology was fruitful and
stressed the importance of combining qualitative and quantitative information
on issues related to health and the environment. We avoided the, often narrow,
focus of epidemiology on a limited number of variables, by not only looking at
quantitative health measures, but by also using qualitative information from our
combined observations, in-depth-interviews and focus groups with community
members. The outcome was a comprehensive overview of the state of the
environment and health in Alexandra, where we moved from a descriptive study
to an understanding of the range of contextual factors impacting on health and
the environment.
REFERENCES
Berman D M 1986. Asbestos and health in the third world: the case of Brazil. Int. J.
Health Serv. 16, 253±263.
Briggs D, Corvalan C and Nurminen M 1996. Linkage methods for environment and
health analyses ± general guidelines. United Nations Environment Programme/
United States Environmental Protection Agency/World Health Organisation, WHO,
Geneva.
104

Coetzee D J and Ferrinho P 1994. Nutritional status of children in Alexandra township,
SAMJ, 84(7):413±415.
CASE (Community Agency for Social Enquiry) 1998. Determining our own development
a community based socio-economic profile of Alexandra.
EMLC 1998. Food preparation by formal food traders in Alexandra report, Johannesburg.
Ferrinho P, Robb D, Mhlongo A, Coetzee D, Phakathi G, Cornielje H and Ngakane P A
1991. Profile of Alexandra. SAMJ, 80:374±378.
Ferrinho P 1994. Smoking in a poor, rapidly expanding urban community of South Africa.
Central African Journal of Medicine, 40(10:275±278.
Genthe B, Strauss N, Seager J R Vundule C, Maforah F and Kfir R 1997. The effect of
type of water supply on water quality in a developing community in South Africa.
Wat Sci Tech 35 (11±12):35±40.
Health Consulting Office 1998. Electrification and Health: The South African Experience.
MRC/ESKOM.
Helman C G 1996. Culture Health and Illness. Oxford: Butterworth-Heineman.
Ibini-bini M 1997. Upgrading Sanitation Ablution Facilities in Alexandra. MSc thesis in
Development Planning and Urban Geography. University of the Witwatersrand.
IFUP (International Forum on Urban Poverty) 1997. Proceedings of the International
Conference on Urban Poverty. United Nations Centre for Human Settlements. 9±
13 November 1997, Florence, Italy.
Landrigan P 1998. Asbestos ± still a carcinogen. N Eng J Med 338, 1618±1619.
Mathee A, Swart A, Matshe M, and Martinson N 1999. The Hillbrow environment and
health study: preliminary report.
Pick W 1999. The health risks of informal sector manufacturers in Johannesburg. Urban
Health and Development Bulletin, 2(2):33±37.
Raymer P B 1989. An Investigation into urban renewal in Alexandra with specific reference
to housing. Dissertation submitted to the Department of building sciences
of the University of the Witwatersrand, in partial fulfilment for the degree of Bachelor
of Science in Building.
Rex G G 1991. Launching a problem service ± the organization of an occupational health
service in the primary health care context. SAMJ 80:404±406.
SSA (Statistics South Africa), 1998. The People of South Africa Population census 1996,
Report No 1:03±01±11.
Tabibzadeh 1, Rossi-Espagnet A, and Maxwell R 1989. Spotlight on the cities: Improving
urban health in developing countries. WHO: Geneva.
Thomas E P, Seager J R, Viljoen E, Potgieter F, Rossouw A, Tokota B, McGrahahan
and Kjellen M 1999. Household environment and health on Port Elizabeth, South
Africa. Urban Environment Series Report no 6. Stockholm Environment Institute,
South African Medical Research Council and Sida.
Trostle J A and Sommerfeld J 1996. Medical Anthropology and Epidemiology. Annual
Review of Anthropology 25(1)253±274.
UNEP/GEMS 1991. Urban Air Pollution. Nairobi. Environment Library No 4.
United Nations 1992. Urban Air Pollution. Nairobi. Environment Library No 4.
105

United Nations 1992. Sustainable Development. Agenda 21, Chapter 6.
Von Schrinding Y E R, Yach D, and Klein M 1991. Acute respiratory infections as an
important cause of childhood deaths in South Africa. S Afr Med J, 80(2):79±82.
Von Schirnding Y E R, Yach D, Mathee A 1993. Health aspects of sanitation, with
special reference to South Africa. CHASA Journal, 4(3100, Geneva.
WHO (World Health Organisation) 1987. Improving environmental health conditions in
low-income settlements Ð a community-based approach to identifying needs and
priorities. World Health Organisation and United Nations Environment Programme,
WHO Offset Publication No. 100, Geneva.
WHO (World Health Organisation) 1992. Our Planet, Our Health, Report of the WHO
Commission on Health and the Environment, Geneva.
WHO (World Health Organisation) 1993. The urban health crisis: Strategies for health for
all in the face of rapid urbanisation. Report of the technical discussions at the fortyfourth
World Health Assembly. WHO: Geneva.
WHO (World Health Organisation) 1997. Health and Environment in Sustainable Development
five years after the Earth Summit. WHO, Geneva.
WHO (World Health Organisation) 1998. Basic Environmental Health. WHO/EHG/98.
19, Geneva.
WRI (World Resources Institute/United Nations Environment Programme/United Nations
Development Programme/The World Bank). 1998. World Resources 1998±99.
Environmental change and human health. Oxford University Press, New York.
106

NOTES TO CONTRIBUTORS
Contributions to AFRICANUS are welcomed and should be submitted in English. The length of an average article
is 4 000 words, research notes 2 000 words, and book reviews 500 words, but in exceptional cases longer
contributions could be accepted.
AFRICANUS aims to be a conduit between the academic debate on, and the practice of, development. Therefore,
contributions should reflect
. practice (case studies dealing with practical aspects of development)
. theory (debate and reflection on development theory in respect of the Third World in general but southern Africa
in particular) ± in other words, the application and interpretation of theory in the Third World and particularly in
the southern African context.
Contributions are subjected to peer evaluation. The manuscript should be typed in one-and-a-half or double
spacing. One hard copy and one electronic copy of the manuscript, preferably in Word Perfect 8, should be
submitted.
This journal uses the Harvard reference technique. This technique involves inserting, in the text, the author's
surname, the year of publication of the source and the page number(s) on which the information appears. An
alphabetical list of sources consulted should be provided at the end of the article, containing all the relevant
information such as the author's surname and initials, date of publication, full title of the book or article, place of
publication, and publisher. Contributors are requested to follow the format indicated below.
Direct quotes from books, edited contributions and periodical articles used in the manuscript:
``Ignorant of the law, without legal advice, competing for employment and services with others in a similar
condition, the household is an easy victim of predation by the powerful'' (Chambers 1983:110).
Paraphrasing or indirect references:
Chambers (1983:110) points out that poor households are powerless and vulnerable.
Example of a list of sources consulted:
Chambers, R 1983. Rural development: putting the last first. London: Longman.
Griffen, K 1986. Communal land tenure systems and their role in rural development, in Theory and reality in
development: essays in honour of Paul Streeten, edited by S Lall and F Stewart, London: Macmillan.
Rogerson, C M 1992. Feeding Africa's cities: the role and potential of urban agriculture. Africa Insight 22 (4).
Contributors of articles, research notes and book reviews accepted for publication will receive two copies of the
number.
All contributions, books for review and other editorial correspondence should be addressed to the Editor,
AFRICANUS, Department of Development Administration, University of South Africa, PO Box 392, Unisa, 0003,
Republic of South Africa.
107

108

VAN SCHAIK PUBLISHERS
How to succeed in your
Master's & Doctoral Studies
A SOUTH AFRICAN GUIDE AND RESOURCE BOOK
Johann Mouton
How to succeed in your Master's and Doctoral Studies is the first comprehensive
and specifically South African text and resource book for postgraduate students
and supervisors alike. It covers a wide range of topics related to the management
of postgraduate research studies including
. the development of a successful research proposal (with examples),
. research resource management,
. how to write a proper literature review,
. conducting your fieldwork,
. the logic and structure of your thesis,
. a comprehensive map of research designs,
. referencing techniques and
. research ethics.
It also has separate chapters on the nature of supervision and the relationship
between supervisor and student. A special feature of the book is its extensive
references to other sources, including the latest Internet sites and electronic
documents. This is a must for every student who embarks on a master's or doctorate
irrespective of the field of study.
Johann Mouton is currently Director of the Centre for Interdisicplinary Studies and
Professor in Sociology at the University of Stellenbosch. He has authored numerous
books on research methodology including Basic concepts in the methodology
of the social sciences (with HC Marais) and Understanding social research.
Price R145,95 (postage and package excluded)
To order this book
Contact: On the Dot Distribution
For more information
Contact: Van Schaik Publishers
Madelyn Momsen
Marie Botha
Tel: (021) 918-8500 (012) 342-2765
Mmomsen@naspers.com
mbotha@vanschaiknet.com
109

JOIN THE STRUGGLE AGAINST MASS
POVERTY
STUDY DEVELOPMENT
ADMINISTRATION!
Register at UNISA (either in January or June) for a BAdmin, BA or BBA
degree with DEVELOPMENT ADMINISTRATION AS A MAJOR
NEW!!
NEW!!
PROGRAMME IN DEVELOPMENT STUDIES
PROGAMME IN COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT
Postgraduate level: Honours degree, a course work or research MA or
MAdmin
Doctors degrees offered by the department are research degrees which
require the writing of a thesis on an approved topic
The CENTRE FOR DEVELOPMENT ADMINISTRATION offers one year
certificate courses in:
. COMMUNITY CAPACITY BUILDING
. COMMUNITY-BASED DEVELOPMENT
. PARTICIPATORY RURAL APPRAISAL
For further information contact:
Department of Development Administration
TEL: (012) 429 6813
FAX: (012) 429 3646
E-MAIL: venteme@unisa.ac.za
Centre for Development Administration
TEL: (012) 429 6592
FAX: (012) 429 3646
E-MAIL: kotzeda@unisa.ac.za
VISIT OUR WEBSITE: http://www.unisa.ac.za/dept/ona
110

CHECKLIST FOR CONTRIBUTIONS TO AFRICANUS
(Please photocopy, complete and include with manuscript)
1. Original contribution t
2. Of interest to development debate and practice t
3. References (Harvard technique) t
4. Not exceeding 4 000 words t
5. One and a half (or double) spacing t
6. Sequence of headings correct t
7. Printout (hard copy) t
8. Floppy disc (in Word Perfect clearly marked) t
9. Kept own copy t
111