Today in Zambia we may hear people praise the Jesuits for their contribution to education in the country.  Usually, they have in mind Canisius secondary school which started in 1949 and to a lesser degree Charles Lwanga Teachers’ College which started in 1959.  Undoubtedly, the achievements in this area are commendable but as I visit those institutions I am also struck by the apparent lack of significant rural development in the surrounding area.

Dwellings and modes of agriculture seem rather poorly developed.  This leads me to ask: Did the Jesuits pay much attention to rural development in the sense of building up prosperous local communities or did they neglect it?  What follows is not comprehensive in either range or depth but is an attempt to highlight some Jesuit attempts to address the issue of rural development.

THE EARLY MISSION AND RURAL DEVELOPMENT

When Father Joseph Moreau, arrived in Chikuni in 1905, one of his first challenges was to create a farm that would sustain him and his colleagues in the setting up and development of a mission station.  Being of a French farming background, he quickly responded to this task.  Within a short time, his mode of agriculture, especially the use of the ox-plough gained the admiration of the locals.  As Lane put it:

In his account of how Chikuni came to be started, Moreau wrote the first and most important thing he did was to buy a good Oliver plough which was to open a new era among the Batonga, who up to this time had used only hoes to till the ground.

Moreau not only worked steadily at setting up a model farm at the mission but in the process he tried to encourage and support local people at their farming.  In this he succeeded to some extent for in 1927 it was noted:

…only twenty-two years ago there was not among the Batonga a single trained ox, a plough, a wagon, or even a scotchcart.  When a native sold one basket of grain to a white trader it meant he was selling a large proportion of his harvest.  Today, in some districts every married man has his trained oxen and at least one good modern plough.  Scotchcarts and wagons are coming in fast.  Cultivators are by now no means rare, while mealie planters, mealie skillers, weighing machines and dam scrapers are occasionally to be seen.  I have been told by one who has the means of knowing that from May to October, 1926, the traders at Pemba and Monze which lie on a stretch of only twenty-two miles of railway, bought from natives no less than 13,000 bags of mealies, besides other produce such as beans and monkey nuts.

Moreau however held a longer-term vision for the Tonga which was that they should eventually become a group of prosperous peasant farmers.  With the passage of time, Moreau was challenged by superiors to leave aside his concern with farming and to place more emphasis on evangelization.  This somewhat coincided with local aspirations toward academic schooling which they perceived to be the path towards better livelihoods away from the land.

Parents were willing to send their children to the mission school but were less enthusiastic about sending them to become better farmers despite the government philosophy of promoting the kind of education that  was  meant  to  enhance  the local village.  Moreau adjusted with not a little reluctance to the promotion of a different kind of society than he had earlier envisaged.  In this way, one might argue that the early focus on rural development was sidelined but this did not exclude emphasis on the promotion of trades and skills.

During the thirties the running and expansion of the station involved much diverse work.  Brother Francis Meier trained generations of students in workshops; Brother Joseph Duda was a mechanic and builder; Brother Andrew Jedrezjezyk was a gardener and mechanic while Brothers Joseph Gaydos and Francis Uberman were builders who constructed quality buildings very economically, not only in Chikuni but throughout the Prefecture, a tradition that was to be handed on.

While Moreau did not prevent the development of the kind of schooling that would lead to a new way of life centred more on industry and urbanization, he was not as enthusiastic about it as was his confrere, Prokoph, who arrived at Chikuni in 1940.  Prokoph almost immediately set out to upgrade the quality of schooling which the mission offered in the interests of producing a new kind of leadership for the territory.  Nevertheless, even Prokoph was not inattentive to practical skills training.  Emphasis was also given to trade schools in the rural areas.

THE LATER MISSION AND RURAL DEVELOPMENT

During the 1950s, however, as the nationalist movement gained momentum, desire for academic schooling became ever more dominant so that after Independence in 1964, with the large-scale investment in academic style schooling, trade schools were even more marginalized than they had been.  By the early 1970s, this began to change when it became evident that graduation from the academic system would not guarantee employment.  Attention to trades training and rural development regained some status.

This is the setting where people like Frs. Joe Conway and Richard Cremins in the Monze area helped set up cooperatives to enable small scale farmers to become more productive.  Meanwhile, Fr. Joe McCarthy strove to develop cash crop farming in the Gwembe valley, as the indefatigable Brother Pat McElduff spent much time and effort in trying to empower local small scale farmers in the Chikuni area to become self-sufficient.  Within the school context, Fr. Donal McKenna struggled to promote local industries.

While the Jesuits formed part of the drive to Zambianize the state after Independence through, among other things, the promotion of academic schooling, this is not the entire story.  Individuals at mission stations and elsewhere also attempted to promote rural development.  Moreover, people like Fr. Fred Moriarty, in collaboration with various Holy Rosary Sisters, among others, who were pioneers in this area, did much to take the kind of initiative that had been Fr. McKenna’s in the context of Canisius secondary school further by setting up many skills training projects and small scale industries in Monze.

EXAMPLES

Today, partly as a result, Monze diocese has a Diocesan Development Department under the direction of Mr. Solomon Phiri with a large and committed staff.  This Department maintains projects in Development Education, Rural Development, Rural Appropriate Technology, Women’s Skills, and Youth Skills Training, offering training in carpentry, catering, metal work, tailoring, computers and bricklaying.

Annually, these combined training programmes provide approximately three hundred youths at eight distinct centres from Mazabuka to Zimba with varied skills which enable them to successfully enter the world of formal or informal employment.  In fact, as Mr. Solomon Phiri noted, some areas of training are so successful that graduates have become major competitors to existing catering, carpentry, and tailoring industries.  Nevertheless, Fr. McKenna’s dream of linking skills training and academic education has remained largely unrealizable.

During the same period, a further Jesuit rural development endeavour was undertaken at Kasisi where Brother Paul Desmarais in the tradition of the Jesuit Brothers laboured much to enable farmers to be more and more self-sufficient.  Today, the Kasisi project which is called Kasisi Agricultural Training Centre (KATC) which started in 1974 offers a two-year training programme for farmers and their families in the Kasisi area.  Initially, it is said to have been somewhat conventional in its methods but very soon included an appropriate technology workshop so as to produce such things as oxcart wheels, weight scales, and treadle water pumps.

By 1990, KATC had begun to experiment with organic farming leading to what is identified as sustainable agriculture.  KATC moreover shares much of its experience and expertise through five-day radio courses, demonstration plots, and field days.  It provides quality animals for breeding as it is primarily concerned with the support and development of small scale farming.  On a more general and national level, Brother Desmarais and Fr. Roland Lesseps have become involved in national policy issues such as Genetic Engineering.

Much recently, Fr. Stanko Rozman did much to uplift the Nangoma area by setting up various forms of industry, changing Nangoma from being a small mission outpost in 1986 to what today is a small town with a sizeable hospital, secondary school, carpentry and metal work training centre, homecraft training school, as well as such highly prized amenities as a saw mill, cattle and piggery farm, post office, petrol station, and supermarket, providing much local employment creating the realization that one does not have to leave the rural areas to find a decent livelihood and home.

At Chikuni itself, the birthplace of the Zambian Jesuit family, rural development projects like that of a Juice and Jam Factory linked to the initiatives of Frs. Moriarty and McKenna developed for a while but, for reasons that may be helpful to identify for future development, did not survive.

It would nonetheless be a major oversight to conclude that Chikuni mission is no longer involved in rural development.  Although Brother McElduff is in his grave and the Chikuni farm hardly poses as a model, rural development in another sense features.   With the appearance of a radio station, Interactive Radio Instruction was developed in conjunction with the Ministry of Education so that the Chikuni parish now provides basic education (up to Grade 5) to about fifteen hundred children at twenty three different centres with the help of about 63 volunteer mentors.

Double classrooms and offices are also being constructed at these centres, most of which are in extremely remote settings.  The radio station has a range of eighty kilometers.  Besides the contribution to formal education, there are skills training projects as well as a major programme in home based care and HIV/AIDS education which, it is confidently asserted, has lowered infection rates.  Chikuni radio moreover works in close collaboration with Mukanzubo-Kalinda Institute, located nearby, a major aim of which is to sustain a long tradition of encouraging people to treasure their culture.  Among the numerous outcomes of this link with Mukanzubo is an annual music festival which in 2004 drew ten thousand people.  Indeed, this event in 2005 may be a highlight of the centenary celebrations.

CONCLUSION

While the overall Jesuit endeavour to foster rural development may not have been as systematic or extensive as one might have hoped, it has nevertheless not been entirely forgotten.  It forms part of the Jesuit missionary enterprise in Zambia.  In reviewing the Jesuit contribution to rural development, perhaps we need to situate it within the context where Fr. Moreau’s vision of creating a prosperous peasantry was overtaken by that of Fr. Prokoph, which was framed in terms of the development    of    an    industrial society.  Prokoph’s perspectives accorded better with the aspirations of the nationalists and the people for whom they fought.  It may well be that such dreams still inspire most Zambians today despite some legitimate criticisms of the International Monetary Fund and the business interests which surround it.

I conclude however by asking: Did the Jesuits err in moving with the tide of so-called modernization and its attendant development of underdevelopment which has left Zambia with so much poverty or should they have paid more attention to Fwala Moreau’s vision of more integrated rural development?

Brendan Carmody, S.J.
Jesuit Novitiate
Lusaka