... cast in stone.' `(Watts, 1993) In Africa therefore, the notion of 'development' has only a relatively short history, with development programmes only being set up late this century. The true implications of the concept are still being realised however. It is only since the 1980s that Western thought has really cast a critical eye over exactly what development has achieved and begun to look at the alternatives. This reappraisal has been encouraged by the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe in the late 1980s, which undermined faith in the power of the Capitalist model, since instead of producing a single model of capitalist democracy, it created 'a new world disorder' (Anderson, 1992). This acted as an illustration that the world's economic system is not evolving as many people once thought it would - that is, slowly incorporating all underdeveloped countries into the capitalist mode of production which, it was suggested, would of ...

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