With umuganda, everybody’s lending a hand regardless of their social status

Traditionally, communal self-help was a central feature of life in African communities generally.

It consisted of such things as farmers coming together to help each other clear land for cultivation, plant crops when the rains started, and eventually bring in the harvest at the end of a farming cycle.

With each activity, quantities of local beer would be served by whoever was the beneficiary of the collective self-application.

Household heads would keep their rungus, spears and other weapons at the ready, just in case someone in the community came crying out for help.

Responding to cries for help from any corner of the community at all times was an inviolable obligation.

Anthropologists studying the lives and social organisation of different communities across Africa have documented these things over several decades.

Older generations would have observed them at close range, mainly during their youth, and often look back on “the good old days” with deep-seated nostalgia.

Younger generations, especially “children of these days,” who believe that milk and tomatoes come from supermarkets rather than from cows and plants in gardens, are invariably ignorant about all this.

Granted, collective self-help of the kind I am describing, or elements of it, has disappeared from many communities, as modernity or at least our understanding of it, invades rural communities.

Modernity begets social differentiation and severes social bonds, as the better-off distance themselves from their poor kin and neighbours, or even flee from rural communities completely, often in fear of witchcraft from envious folk.

For a gripping and harrowing tale of what may happen when modern and traditional social values clash, see American anthropologist, James Ferguson’s book, Expectations of Modernity, a study of “adjustment” by retired miners returning to rural Zambia from the famous Copperbelt.

There are, of course, exceptions. Collective self-help remains very much part of life in several communities, particularly those with low levels of social and economic differentiation, where, for example, the pooling of labour remains critical to the ability of individual farming households to construct and maintain reasonably secure livelihoods.

Indeed, the still fashionable but increasingly questionable view in development circles that involving ordinary people in decision-making processes is likely to lead to positive outcomes, seems to derive from observations of internally-generated processes of self-help easily noticeable by a perceptive observer of social phenomena.

The weakness of arguments in favour of self-help as a development tool lies in two mistaken assumptions.

One is that the spirit of voluntarism exhibited by, for example, peasant farmers helping each other with bringing in the harvest can be replicated in the implementation of larger, more complex development or social projects intended to benefit whole communities.

The other is that where a project or activity is intended to benefit a community, all members will be equally motivated to ensure that it succeeds by sparing the necessary time and effort to participate in its realisation.

Experience with development projects and activities premised on these assumptions, such as water supply projects that have left thousands of broken community boreholes lying unrepaired across rural communities, shows how mistaken they are.

We can draw lessons, also, from umuganda, Rwanda’s non-voluntary, monthly communal work programme.

Umuganda has always been a mechanism through which members of communities, at the behest of their leaders, engaged in activities of common interest, such as the construction and repair of community infrastructure and amenities.

Today, with the exception of communities where residents could be called upon any time, umuganda is performed every last Saturday of the month, across the whole country.

Before mid-day, barring special circumstances, no one, regardless of status, should be out and about. Everyone, the great and mighty included, works alongside fellow residents in their neighbourhood.

As in most things in life, there are exceptions. Nonetheless, in many communities this is how things work, with compulsion a key factor in why self-help is more than a mere slogan in this highly organised and rapidly modernising country.

Frederick Golooba-Mutebi is a Senior Research Fellow, Institute of Social Research, Makerere University.