When colonial administrators came to the African continent, they didn’t recognize local gardens because they weren’t tidy plowed fields, with orderly rows of plants, and no trees. They didn’t ask why local people grew their gardens as they did. Instead, they got local people to plow their fields and remove tree stumps, and governments also adopted this ‘scientific’ cultivation, often with disastrous results. 

In ‘Seeing like a State”, James C. Scott calls it the triumph of ‘techne’ – apparent technical expertise – over ‘metis’ – local ingenuity, skill and knowledge. And now we know what ‘metis’ looks like in action, a story that stunned the development and research world once they finally learned about it, two decades after it began. 

It is the story of how, “over three decades, hundreds of thousands of farmers in Burkina Faso and Niger have transformed huge swaths of the region’s arid landscape into productive agricultural land, improving food security for about 3 million people.”