Traditional African values and their use in implementing Agenda 21

This article argues that efforts to achieve the promotion of sustainable development within the framework of Agenda 21 should be based on reexamining and applying indigenous knowledge and techniques, as opposed to the wholesale importation of Westernized methods and ideas. The aim should be to attain the optimum combination of the best practices from traditional and modern knowledge. At the same time, the article gives many examples of African approaches to environmental concerns.

The adoption of Agenda 21 during the Rio Summit marks an important turning point for governments, donors and NGOs in their joint promotion of sustainable development worldwide. Until recently, environmental concerns were not taken seriously by either developing or donor countries, which caused serious side effects. Often efforts aimed at promoting development actually hampered the process because policies, strategies, and projects did not take sufficient account of the local environment as an integral part of development planning and implementation. Agenda 21**1 seeks to address these weaknesses by proposing a different approach. Its emphasis is on sustainable development, which should be people-centred, environmentally sound and participatory in nature.

Past and current development planning, as practised by many countries in Africa, has proved unsatisfactory for a variety of reasons.

• It fails to harness available resources within communities at the grassroots level, and has thus become expensive for governments to maintain.
  
• It excludes local people from the planning and decision-making process that governs their lives.
  
• It is not spatially specific and sensitive, and is thus inimical to the natural environment.
  
• It has led to marginalization of the poor, especially rural people, because most activities aimed at development are concentrated in urban areas. Moreover, at the grassroots level many development planning solutions are seen as unrealistic and unattainable because they ignore problems related to funding, setting and traditional values.

Traditional approaches used in various parts of Africa for the implementation of Agenda 21 are presented below. These are grouped under four headings: traditional planning approaches, traditional environmental techniques, traditional management practices, and traditional sustainable environmental awareness practices.

Traditional environmental planning approaches
To achieve sustainable development in Africa, both local and external planners should take care to involve local communities. Government officials with planning skills should serve mainly as planning extension agents at the grassroots level. This means that they accept that local knowledge is of inestimable value and that their role is not to initiate action but rather to ensure that the plans produced by the local community are as complete and comprehensive as possible.

Other aspects of traditional environmental planning approaches which are important in promoting sustainable development are:

• obtaining information--in particular from women--about herbs and other edible plants. Information on food can also be obtained from herd boys, who experiment with various wild edible fruits and plants.
  
• using colour and texture to distinguish between soils which are fertile or those which need to be enriched; (Chambers, 1993);
  
• using local knowledge to help determine when to prepare gardens for the rains, and when to mulch in order to conserve moisture;
  
• keeping in mind that local people often know not only the 'what' but also the 'where' and the 'when' of plants, animals, water, forests and other elements of their environments (Chambers, 1993). The failure of the Groundnut Scheme in 1947 in Tanzania is quite instructive in this regard. Had local inhabitants been consulted about why they never cultivated the areas proposed for the project, it would not have failed. (Jarrett, 1979).

• The use of manure and legume plants can improve fertility and reduce much of the damage done by chemical fertilizers. Moreover, manure and leguminous mulches are cheap and locally available.
  
• There are numerous indigenous methods of selecting seeds for sowing. We must return to indigenous methods of sowing with respect to seed spacing and intercropping.
  
• Vetiver grass from the Tamil Nadu hills of India is used not only for cattle feed, but also for soil and moisture conservation. It has been introduced into several African countries, but has not yet been widely adopted. According to the World Bank (1992), Vetiver costs only one-fifteenth of those soil conservation systems that rely more heavily on modern technology.
  
• In Africa chemical spraying to combat pests has caused a great deal of soil, plant and air pollution. Such traditional methods as compost manure can achieve the same goal. Studies being carried out by the International Centre for Insect Physiology and Ecology (ICIPE) in Nairobi (Kenya) confirm that Integrated Pest Management (IPM) is effective and sustainable.
  
• In many African countries the need for irrigation has resulted in the construction of dams and the use of equipment that is detrimental to the environment. The expansion of such schemes, or even the maintenance of existing ones, is beyond the reach of the poor. There is need to reexamine indigenous irrigation methods traditionally used in Africa.
  
• In Ethiopia and Nigeria, traditional techniques associated with agroforestry continue to enrich the fertility of soils, without the use of fertilizers (Harrison, 1989). Moreover, as El-Ashry (1992) notes, agroforestry may be seen as an extension of inter-cropping, as well as a means of establishing windbreaks in the Sahel region.
  
• Fulani pastoralists in West Africa try their own medicines first, before taking their animals to be treated by qualified veterinarians. The interest in traditional medicines has lately been reinforced by shortages and the high cost of modern medicines (Salih, 1992).
  
• Traditional forms of pastoralism in various parts of Africa have maintained a dynamic equilibrium in a highly variable environment, often operating in a symbiotic relationship with shifting cultivation. For example, in semi-arid zones unsuitable for farming, nomadic herders conventionally ranged over large areas in order to take advantage of rainfall and vegetation resources that were highly variable in space and time. Cultural mechanisms kept down herd sizes, ensuring that overgrazing was not a serious problem (El- Ashry, 1992).

In a number of African countries indigenous institutions are already available, such as chieftainship and village councils charged with responsibility for conservation activities. An interesting innovation is being tried out in Zimbabwe which makes use of 'village brigades'. An example cited by Broekhuyse (1994) is the saaka system in Burkina Faso, which is based on kinship. The unique elements of the saaka system are solidarity, responsibility, accountability, collaboration, and initiative. He concludes that: 'The saaka forms the core of the social organization of the Mossi, and can be used as a basis for the institutionalization of land use planning and management for the village territory'.

To be successful, projects on community or village level should involve indigenous management structures (e.g., representatives of each clan, elders, etc.) from the start, and the project planning should be in accordance with local decision making and local labour planning practices. These institutions--where they exist--need to be strengthened. Where they have become defunct, they should be reestablished, and where they have never existed, some other form of local opinion should be encouraged.

Drastic changes in resource management practices introduced in Africa have often led to overgrazing problems. Botswana, for example, has experienced this problem due to the implementation of the Tribal Grazing Land Policy. Modern approaches to range use tend to focus on the monetization and privatization of resources, which leads to a concentration of the range in the hands of a few wealthy individuals. Moreover, it forces the poor to run their livestock on the small remaining, and essentially undesirable, parts of the range, thereby creating chronic problems of overgrazing. To counter this problem, traditional alternatives to range use, such as the rotational grazing of the Masai, must be encouraged.

Biodiversity is endangered by many 'modern practices', and the general reaction from governments is to pass laws and punish transgressors. However, this involves more control, policing, litigation, in short, the whole paraphernelia of law enforcement. In the past, much of the control was regulated by traditional taboos. People were taught from childhood what was permitted and what was not, which plants and trees they were allowed to use and which they were not, etc.--this was a way of life for them. These methods need to be revived and used to conserve biodiversity.

Traditional environmental awareness practices
Creating environmental awareness is an essential part of promoting sustainable development in Africa. This involves targeted campaigning, including public information activities, research and funding (Campen, 1994). Information dissemination methods appropriate to African conditions--where the majority of the people can neither read nor write--must be revived and employed, in order to reach a wide audience.

Public gatherings can make information easily accessible to the majority of people, especially in rural areas. Moreover, in order to achieve cognitive participatory environmental conservation, ways must be sought to ingrain the meaning and practice of sustainable environment and development of rural areas. Indigenous methods of imparting knowledge to young people at the household level should be revived, and environmental issues should be part of that knowledge. Moreover, because today most children go to school at an earlier age than in the past, school curricula should include the environment in the syllabi at all levels. This will require the whole-hearted support and commitment of African governments.

Other environmental awareness strategies in line with Agenda 21 principles include:

• learning directly from rural people: trying to understand their knowledge systems and eliciting their technical knowledge. This will enable the planners to experience the world as seen by the poor (Chambers, 1993).
  
• sitting down, asking questions and listening. The message here is that learning is a two-way process. In the area of the environment, for example, the rural poor decidedly have more to contribute than the experts (Chambers, 1993).
  
• acquiring indigenous technical knowledge. A number of suggestions have been put forward by Chambers (1993).
  
• glossaries of local terms which can be included in the training of extension officers in rural areas. These should include colours, climate, soils, plants, topography--all important means of promoting sustainable development.
  
• counting and quantification. Indigenous methods of counting and quantification can be used to design and carry out soil surveys and gather agricultural data. For example, farmers use different units in expressing their land acreage, yields, herds size, etc.
  
• environmental awareness campaigns, conducted jointly with farmers and local people. Farmers are in a position to explain how they protect their land from environmental damage. (Chambers, 1993).

• to help to ensure access--in particular on the part of developing countries--to scientific and technological information, including information on state-of-the-art technologies;
  
• to facilitate the maintenance and promotion of environmentally sound indigenous technologies that may have been neglected or displaced, in particular in developing countries, paying particular attention to their priority needs, and taking into account the complementary roles of men and women.

• The implementation of Agenda 21 requires the commitment of everyone--rural people, urban dwellers, governments and donors--as well as an appropriate combination of traditional and modern approaches. In this context, comparative research is needed to provide a better understanding of the practical and economic utility of employing indigenous innovations on their own, or combining them with modern technologies.
  
• It is important to build on local knowledge and institutions, if Agenda 21 is to succeed. As Salih (1992) argues, 'problems of resource management relate not only to physical planning and efficient deployment of modern input delivery systems, but also include the local communities and their readiness to accommodate change'.
  
• In the promotion of sustainable development, traditional/customary resource management practices need to be reassessed and encouraged. In the past, for example, the village chiefs or elders regulated the use of natural resources in their locality. This approach maintained an ecological balance, which has since been overtaken by modern practices.
  
• Rural communities and African countries should contribute in cash or in kind to the implementation of Agenda 21. As Harrison (1989) has pointed out, when people have to pay for tree seedlings--even only a nominal amount--they will make a greater effort to see that they survive and thrive. Harrison goes further, saying that 'payment boosts the dignity of villagers, the feeling of self-reliance'.
  
• The essential messages of Agenda 21 should be translated into local languages, in order to enhance its implementation and facilitate the participation of extension staff and village elders. What is also needed is a better understanding of the mechanism of decision-making and the cultural transmission of indigenous cultural knowledge by older users and keepers to younger generations.
  
• Traditionally, Africans have developed excellent approaches to the management of natural resources. The elders were empowered to make appropriate decisions on the regulation of resources. As El-Ashry (1992) noted, the elders were able to effectively control soil erosion and reforestation. Incidentally, while in some African countries environmental legislation is in place, this is unfortunately difficult to enforce. Traditional management of natural resources should be revised, as part of empowering local communities to promote sustainable development. (See chapter 26 of Agenda 21)
  
• A network is needed that will share information on traditional approaches which can be used to implement Agenda 21. This would involve the establishment of links between the various institutions engaged in such work in Africa and elsewhere. Cooperation will enhance the development of information systems that can capture and systematize indigenous knowledge before it is irretrievably lost.

Dr J.O. Kakonge
UNDP Resident Representative
P.O. Box 301
Maseru 100
Lesotho
Southern Africa

Remarks
The many examples and insights in this article were gathered by the author over the past 20 years. Dr Kakonge has published a number of articles in the Environmental Impact Assessment Review by Elsevier Publishing Company Inc. He is a member of the New York Academy of Sciences as well as the International Association of Environmental Impact Assessment.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and not necesarily those of the UNDP.

References
Broekhuyse, J. (1994) 'Traditional and modern institutions', in H. Savanije and A. Huijgman (eds) Making haste slowly. Amsterdam: Royal Tropical Institute.

Campen, W. Van (1994) 'The long road to good land management in southern Mali', in H. Savanije and A. Huijgman (eds) Making haste slowly. Amsterdam: Royal Tropical Institute

Chambers, R. (1993) Rural development. Essex: Longman Scientific and Technical.

El-Ashry, M.T. (1992) Natural resources management and agricultural productivity in sub-saharan Africa. Staff Working Paper 2. Rome: IFAD.

Harrison, P. (1989) The Greening of Africa London: Paladin Grafton Books.

Jarrett, H.R. (1979) Africa. Plymouth: McDonald and Evans.

Salih, M.M.A. (1992) Pastoralists and planners: Local knowledge and resource management in Gidan Magajia grazing and reserve, northern Nigeria. International Institute for Environment and Development, Paper No. 32. London: IIED.

United Nations (1992) The global partnership for environment and development: A guide to Agenda 21. New York: United Nations.

World Bank (1992) World Development Report 1992. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Endnotes

**1 Agenda 21 - is a product of the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in June 1992. It has over 100 programmes for sustainable development agreed by the International Community for 1992 and on into the 21st century.