An obscured revolution? USAID, the North Shaba Project, and the Zaïrian administration, 1976–1986
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines a major instance of United States' (US) involvement in Zaïre during the 1970s and 1980s. The paper looks at an under-studied rural development scheme, known as the North Shaba Project/Projet du Nord Shaba (PNS), which was funded by USAID from 1976 to 1986.The PNS increased maize exports from northern Shaba (Katanga) to central and southern cities in the province and aimed to curtail workers’ discontent by providing cheap food for them. Its quantitative successes and “bottom-up” rhetoric led USAID officials to call the PNS an “obscured revolution”. Unlike its colonial precedents and its post-colonial contemporaries, the project attempted to integrate village farmers’ expertise in order to drive production and provide an opportunity to change existing patterns of “top-down” development. Yet, although anthropologists facilitated some significant intercultural exchanges, the project did not wholly rely on local farming techniques. Instead, the PNS's major outcome was to briefly address the Zaïrian regime's neglect of agricultural production, thus helping it survive despite the financial pressures it was under during the 1970s and the 1980s.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".