Values and Development in Southern Africa

1. Introduction

1 Introduction Hans Müller, Pinkie Mekgwe and Marvellous Mhloyi Our Cause Africa’s most important challenge is the uneven development within and between countries and the pressing issues relating to poverty in Southern Africa and the continent as a whole. We acknowledge that development has been on Africa’s agenda for a long time and progress has been variable. We contend that development has been limited partly due to the level at which discussion of the challenges and interventions made to tackle them have been conducted. Our contribution focuses on the social and cultural dimensions of development dynamics and, in particular, the role of values in shaping development. Values are at the core of the hopes and aspirations of individuals, communities and societies; while they also inform worldviews and therefore co-determine the path that individuals, communities and societies follow to realise their aspirations. We do not aim to analyse and then prescribe. Our aim is to understand as best as we can the values that motivate and inform African communities and societies; and then facilitate a dialogue about sustainable development in that context among academics and intellectuals, policy-makers and decision-makers and the communities. We take a minimalist view of what development is, in an attempt to reconstitute the development debate at a different level. The aim is neither a technical imposition from outside, nor a normative position that excludes dissenters of that position. The aim is to facilitate a dialogue. Our methodology is informed by the realisation that the conceptual definition of social and cultural values is difficult; that empirical and comparative perspectives from both qualitative and quantitative data would be necessary; and, last but not least, that the available data is insufficient and sometimes misleading. On the quantitative level, some comparative data that is available was developed in terms Values and Development in Southern Africa 4 that are more appropriate in industrialized and Western contexts, while other data-sets do not deal directly with the issues that we consider central to our quest. Furthermore, we are well aware of the limitations of working with aggregate data on large populations when attempting to deal with a complex social issue or series of issues. On the qualitative level, the obvious problem was finding data that would enable consistent interpretation across the region as most qualitative insights are particular and not conceived from a comparative point of view. Therefore, attempts at developing capacity to collect data in terms of the conceptualisation of issues that we address are ongoing and this publication can only be seen as a start on a more comprehensive process and task. The Southern African Values Comparative Research Network was set up in 2005 with support from CODESRIA, the South African National Research Foundation and Stellenbosch University. The network brought together researchers from different disciplines from six Southern African countries to investigate social and cultural values, and the social dynamics associated with values in the region. We decided to focus on the link between values and development as a first attempt at developing perspectives on the very popular, but diffuse and ideologically fraught concern with the role of values in society. Funding constraints limited the research activities to conceptual argumentation and secondary analysis of existing data. The Imperative of Development Development is the African agenda – if one can navigate the ideological constructions of the term by outside institutions and capitalism generally and just focus on creating a better life for Africans. African people are mostly poor and often have very little real choices in a wide variety of aspects of human existence. Extreme poverty exists in large parts of Africa. There is massive inequality within some comparatively wealthy countries, and significant inequality in most African countries. All poor people are plagued by loss of freedom and dignity and are often not able to effectively participate in their countries’ political, economic, legal and social processes. Poverty, therefore, causes the victims to suffer social exclusion or political repression or any combination of these factors. Societies that experience poverty are under continuous threat of ecological disaster and disease. In a global perspective, the relatively poor position of Africa is glaring. In purely income terms, the picture is fairly clear: African countries dominate the lower reaches of global income scales. In 1998, over 80% of the people in the world’s lowest quintile outside China and India lived in Africa. The entire populations of Benin, Chad, Congo, Malawi and Togo … and Tanzania are in the lowest quintile. 80% of...