"LAND, CULTURE, CULTURE LOSS AND COMMUNITY": A Review

 

Understanding Community Development

Review on: LAND, CULTURE, CULTURE  LOSS AND COMMUNITY: Rural Insights from Sub-Saharan Africa By Uchendu Chigbu, Chimaraoke O. Izugbara and Walter T. de Vries

Community development has long been a key term in poverty alleviation discourses about Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). The important element that tends to be left out of the various principles of community development is the intrinsic relation that communities have with their land and culture.

Land is the most valuable asset for people in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) because a majority of them depend on it for income generation, food security and poverty alleviation. The culture of the people, which is interwoven with land tenure practices, forms a critical part of their everyday life. Their culture encapsulates their common experiences, values, heritage, gender structure, class systems and worldview (Chigbu 2015a). Together, land and culture are two of the most important threads that bind SSA societies together. That is why land and cultural issues are important aspects of community development in SSA.

With the introducing background of community and development, this article focuses on community as a socially and geographically defined place “where people interact with each other and have psychological ties with each other and the place in which they live” (Garkovich 2011: 13). And it views development as any action directed towards specific social, cultural, political, economic and environmental changes in societies. The article defined community development as activating collective action that would lead to progress in societies and highlighted the three essential aspects of community development, those are - “collective action”, “informal learning” and “organization development” (Gilchrist and Taylor 2011: 10).

The article is divided into 9 major sections before closing comments  under the headings-

1.      Understanding community development in SSA

2.      Pre-colonial legacies of community development

3.      Colonial and post-colonial administrative influences

4.      Prevailing ideas of community in SSA

5.      Elements of land and culture in community development in SSA

6.      Approaches to community development in SSA

7.      Policy neglect of Land and culture in community development in SSA

8.      The challenge of culture loss in community development in SSA

9.      The land and culture-based community development (LCCD) approach to tackling loss of culture in SSA

The early stages of this chapter presented a host of information on the notion and history of community development in Africa, with focus on Sub-Saharan Africa. The issue of land and culture is important because the future of community development in SSA will depend largely on the ability of policymakers and community development professionals to understand how to manage them, as well as integrate them into community development planning and practices. This is crucial because the achievement of the global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in SSA will depend on how community development is implemented in the region.

The article stated Different ideas of community development  that were encountered in SSA . the treatment of constructivist thinkers and positivist thinkers have been mentioned to evident how contemporary context have been changed in SSA. The contemporary challenge is that all of these viewpoints are encountered simultaneously in the SSA context of community development initiatives. In some cases or situations, the idea of community in SSA has been imagined (Anderson 1983) as situations that can be produced (Appadurai 1995). It has also been viewed either as conditions that can be constructed (Lentz 1998) or as symbolic (Cohen 1993), or can be built, renewed or lost (Chigbu 2013a). In the SSA context, cyberspace has had its influence on community (especially in annihilating distance in the conception of communities), but it has not destroyed the importance of place as a focal point of community.

A list of the type of activities that are undertaken under the umbrella of community development in most SSA countries have been mentioned in the article which summarizes the typical activities that are carried out in community development initiatives across various SSA countries. Depending on particular cases, these activities may be initiated or implemented by governments, private foundations or socio - cultural organizations.

Methodology :

Community development—being a way of injecting change in societies—requires a critical understanding of the dynamics of land and culture in SSA. The purpose of this article is to present the importance of land and culture in community development in SSA. It also discusses historical and contemporary issues concerning community development in SSA. Much has been written about loss of community and its implications in societies (Putnam 2000). However, little has been written about loss of culture and how it affects community development.

This article also identifies culture loss as a key challenge to community development in SSA and suggests the Land and Culture-based Community Development (LCCD) approach as a means of improvement. LCCD is a community development approach that focuses on the enhancement of cultural heritage and development-oriented land tenure practices as a way of improving the living conditions of communities.

The land and culture issue relates not only to the understanding of the idea and challenge of community development in SSA. It raises questions concerning community development approaches in the region. As a result, this chapter presented the major community development approaches practiced in SSA from the pre-colonial period to the present. The LCCD approach was therefore introduced to fill the gap left by the neglect of land and culture in community development. The LCCD approach presented in this chapter is based on fieldwork conducted in Nigeria concerning loss of culture. It integrates culture and land factors in ways that, if well implemented or adapted, can help reduce the emerging culture loss in SSA. Although the approach is based on the SSA context, it can apply to other parts of the global South where loss of culture exists due to community development. However, this is only feasible if the approach is grounded in a specific context.

So when writing about community development in the context of sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), there is always a dilemma regarding which aspect should be highlighted. This article approached this dilemma by presenting a generalized view of community development in SSA by focusing on land and culture using LCCD approach and also presents a host of information on the notion and history of community development in Africa, with focus on SSA.

 

Reference:  Kenny, S., MacGrath, B., & Phillips, R. G. (2018). The Routledge handbook of community development: Perspectives from around the globe.