Economic Growth and Community Development

A RJE article on economic development in the rural areas of Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe.)Economic growth in Tribal Trust Areas is the problem facing us and the question is how are we to understand it, grasp its nature? Any one of us may take a walk through a tribal area and see a tumult of rocks and boulders, a mass of shrubs and grasses, or a collection of individuals engaged each on his or her little affairs. We could also give a report on what we saw, maybe even theorize on the evidence of our eyes and suggest improvements. How valid are such observations, yet they form the basis for most of the views and arguments! A geologist, armed with his science, would find “laws and common properties” amidst the chaos of rocks and soils; the botanist would do the same admist the chaos of vegetation. What then are we to do about the human phenomena we see in the tribal areas? How put some meaning, some system, some interpretation into the chaos of human actions? Just as some people haphazardly collect wild flowers, so some have collected “customs”, and could go on collecting customs all their lives, so rich and varied are they. Obviously such collections are extremely interesting, and lend themselves to systematic cataloguing analysis and description, but how useful are they! Had Newton confined himself to noting that apples fell, or the number that fell per hour under varying conditions of temperature or sunlight, we would never have had a theory of gravity