‘And the Oscar Goes to… Daybreak in Udi’: Understanding Late Colonial Community Development and its Legacy through Film

Abstract

This article analyses the 1949 film Daybreak in Udi and the influential ideas of its 'star' Edward Rowland Chadwick, a District Officer, with a view to understanding the legacy of the colonial policy of Community Development in Eastern Nigeria and Cameroon. The film, which is freely available online, follows an African community using 'self-help' methods to construct a rural maternity home. It helps visualize the colonial practices of 'mass education' and 'community betterment' but is not just a drama-documentary: it is also an argument in favour of community development. The article argues that Chadwick's ideas had a profound influence within the region where he worked, and that colonial community development more generally provides a key source for 'participatory development'. The film also discloses a late colonial 'socio-geographical imaginary', articulated through a hierarchy of specific social categories (administrative officers, teachers, peasants, elders, women and troublemakers), spatial locations (urban, rural) and the distinctions between them (modern/reactionary, leader/worker, audible/silent). The article shows that colonial community development not only played an important role in fixing these categories within subsequent development thinking, but that it also ran up against one of the ongoing paradoxes of 'self-help development', namely that it usually requires an outsider.

The work of class: Cash transfers and community development in Tanzania

“…Educated people were allocated responsibilities as role models in their capacities as public servants or as volunteers, assuming designated roles in development projects as instructors and community representatives (Brown and Green 2015). The changed priorities set in place by the Colonial Development and Welfare Acts in the period after the Second World War anticipating the end of colonial administration accelerated the formalization of community development as a distinct domain of development expertise through international trainings, information sharing, and journals (Holford 1988; Page 2014).…”

“…Tensions between local empowerment and central directives continue to shape community development as a social technology of project implementation (Green 2014). Community development both as a professional competence and as a department of local and central government, in Tanzania and elsewhere, remains premised on the principle of voluntaristic change facilitated through oversight from interstitial intermediaries acting on behalf of central government authorities (Page 2014, 863). Instruction and formal oratory are an essential aspect of community development practice in Tanzania, through speeches, seminars, and trainings (Jellicoe 1978, 181).…”

Enrolling the Private Sector in Community Development: Magic Bullet or Sleight of Hand?

“…On the one hand, community development dates back to colonial programmes in Africa that began around the 1920s (Page, 2014;Smyth, 2004). On the one hand, community development dates back to colonial programmes in Africa that began around the 1920s (Page, 2014;Smyth, 2004).…”

“…The notion of working with, for and through local communities in the global South is as old, varied and contested as intentional development itself, and the concept of 'community development' has been claimed by both reactionary and radical causes and visions. On the one hand, community development dates back to colonial programmes in Africa that began around the 1920s (Page, 2014;Smyth, 2004). These were often explicit attempts to offset the social discontent caused by the dislocations of colonial economic development (Cowen and Shenton, 1996).…”