One of the most consequential recent developments in Africa is its rapid rate of urbanization. Over much of the continent, there is a movement from rural areas to urban centers and towns (Hanna and Hanna, 1971). There has been some social science research on this process (Caldwell, 1969; Mabogunje, 1968; Ross, 1975). Additional case studies reflecting original empirical research are essential to social scientists attempting to interpret the nature of the concomitant social and political change. Data generated by such empirical research are also needed by policy makers struggling to fashion policy strategies responsive to the changing urban needs.

On this most rapidly urbanizing continent, one of the countries with the highest rates of rural to urban migration is Botswana. Between 1971 and 1975, its capital, Gaborone, experienced an annual population growth rate of almost 15 percent. In December 1975, the Department of Statistics of the University College of Botswana conducted a major survey of migrants in Gaborone. In this article, we will report and discuss significant survey findings concerning the demographic and social characteristics of migrants, their motives for migrating, places of origin, the disposition of new arrivals in town, and the continuing pattern of rural urban linkages.

In 1966, at the time of independence, Botswana, about the size of France or Kenya, had only three “modern” towns with a combined population of around twenty thousand people. Gaborone, a small tribal village and colonial administrative center, was selected in 1964 as the site for the new capital which previously had been Mafeking, South Africa. Nearly all of the present population are migrants to the new town.

As Zambia's Second National Development Plan gradually comes to an end and the country prepares to embark on its Third National Development Plan (hereafter TNDP), in January 1979 both the regime members and policy planners will more than ever before be confronted with the ominous task of matching intentions with performance. A major impetus for this rethinking of development strategy has been the product of a single fact: the strikingly poor performance of the rural sector during the period of the First (1966-1971) and Second National Development Plans (1972-76) (hereafter FNDP and SNDP). Despite the impressive record of economic growth rate achieved since independence in 1964 and despite the ostensible concern of the national leadership for rural development, the rural masses continue to be socially and economically the most relatively deprived social group in Zambian society.

Aside from the issue of relative deprivation, other aspects of the poor performance of the rural sector are also discernible. For instance, not only did the anticipated integration or linkages between agricultural production and modern industry envisaged in the FNDP and SNDP (Republic of Zambia, 1966: 1971a) fail to materialize, but also the attraction of the high urban wage structure and mobility opportunities induced large-scale migration of relatively well educated and enterprising individuals to the urban centers. Thus, while 80 percent of the Zambian population lived in the rural areas in 1963, in 1969 it was 71 percent, and in 1974 it was further reduced to 65.5 percent. In direct proportion to the decline in rural population, the urban population has grown from 20 percent in 1963 to 29 percent in 1969 and 34.5 in 1974. Whereas the average annual population growth rate of Zambia's urban centers was 8.9 percent between 1963 and 1974, the average annual growth rate of the rural population was barely 0.5 percent. In 1977 the population of the urban centers stood at 38.5 percent (Central Statistical Office 1975; 1977). Aside from the issue of chronic under-utilization of migrant labor, massive unemployment has also been one of the most serious developmental problems posed to the Zambian regime.

The purpose of this paper is to indicate how one area of social science research may contribute to social and economic development in the Third World. International aid and technical assistance programs for less developed nations began in the late 40s shortly after World War II. The interest of scholars in the study of such programs also dates from this time (Opler, 1954). Ever since the early days, we, the social scientists, have been called upon to explain the failure of many assistance efforts or to discern why new ideas and practices caused chaos in the societies into which they were introduced. An example of an early program failure was documented in Peru when village women failed to use the “good” public health practice of boiling contaminated water before drinking it after the method had been advocated in an extensive education campaign by public health personnel (Wellin, 1955: 71-103). The disorganization of a society in the face of what appeared to be a relatively minor technological improvement of an existing tool, was reported in 1952 after missionaries gave steel axes to Australian aborigines (Sharp, 1952: 66-92). The determination of the adverse social consequences of innovation was an important aspect of the early studies done by social scientists, especially anthropologists (Rogers, 1962: 27). Though there were reports of cross-cultural diffusion which did not affect societies adversely, for example, the adoption of potato growing by a Pacific Northwest Indian tribe (Suttles, 1951: 272-88), many reports appear to concentrate upon the damage done by technical assistance programs (Dobyns, 1951;Bliss, 1952;Mead, 1955; Erasmus, 1961).

How should one relate culture to the modernization process in Africa? This paper will attempt to indicate how one might go about answering this important question, probably raising more questions in the process than providing substantive answers. A point of departure, in doing so, is to offer a critical exposition of the uses to which certain African political thinkers, principally Frantz Fanon and Amilcar Cabral, have put the culture concept.

The paper assumes that contemporary African political thought, especially since the 1950s, has been preoccupied chiefly with explaining the modernization process in cultural terms. A thesis, deriving from this basic assumption, is that the culture concept provides a useful focus for interpreting and assigning meaning to contemporary African political thought. This paper will illustrate this thesis with respect to aspects of the political thought of Fanon, Cabral, and some others.

Students of contemporary African political thought have tended to ignore and, therefore, have not explored the implications of the strong connection between the concepts of culture and modernization in contemporary African political thought. Hopefully this paper will correct this situation. In doing so, the paper will point to the explanatory dimension and force of contemporary African political thought. This is because the interpretation offered here looks upon African political thinkers as using the culture concept to explicate the consequences of colonial rule and the colonial inheritance for the modernization process.

When we begin to talk about planning in any society, we are immediately confronted with a whole range of ambiguities. First, are we talking about persuasion or prescription about the future allocation of resources in the society? Are we considering the operation of a technical sector where all issues will be decided by equations and empirical studies? Do we have adequate information about the present, much less the past and its trends or the future? Who will be actually planning for whom? These questions and many others are endemic to any consideration of the social and political environment of the polity under consideration but will also demand clear judgments about what values are important for that society as well as about the dynamics of history and change which will guide what is actually likely to happen.

The conceptual difficulties involved in any sort of planning and the complexity of all societies within which one might undertake planning have combined to make me quite skeptical of most planning procedures outside of a few areas of human concern where there is no dispute about the measures of value, although even there (the market place and/or military body count) one finds room for great dispute about the values measured in relation to the goals of the larger society. This general skepticism about planning has led me to cast a cold eye on the planning processes I have observed in developing countries as well as those in which I have participated in this country. Therefore, I propose in this brief paper to raise the questions of the skeptic about planning as they apply to the particular area with which I have had some experience, that is, education, and as the processes have been manifested in countries with which I have some familiarity, in this case in Africa, particularly Kenya and Tanzania. However, before raising these questions within the context of developing societies, I believe it is a useful exercise to see that the questions all emerge in post-industrial settings as well. Therefore, I shall begin by raising the questions in quite general terms and putting these questions in the context of one developed society—our own. Then, I shall move to a consideration of how the questions themselves might be affected by the institutional context of the developing country, and, in particular, two developing countries with very different conceptions of their present and future—Kenya and Tanzania.