ABSTRACT

This chapter reveals that a major aspect of the elusive solution to water for food in small-scale farming lies in innovations emerging from the non-hegemonic collaborative engagement between farmers, extension services and agricultural educators. Ethnographic and socio-cultural studies informed by cultural historical activity theory expose key absences, which have resulted from deliberate political-economy processes under colonialism and apartheid. The small-scale rain-fed farming sector is by no means small – it accounts for 60 per cent of world staple production and covers 95 per cent of the agricultural area in sub-Saharan Africa. Agricultural water has been a limiting resource for marginalized small-scale farmers in southern Africa for nearly two centuries yet it has not been properly addressed by agricultural policy, extension services or agricultural education. The root of the problem lies in the history of political and economic marginalization, dislocation and epistemic subjugation from the times of colonization and the culture of dominant conventional agricultural practices. The problem has been reproduced by inherited institutions and inadequate transformative praxis processes in the post-colonial period. The chapter thus argues that by connecting with history and culture to provide a structural explanation to contradictions, a dialectical approach to research helps to account for non-fulfilment of aspirations. The study concludes that transformative agentive action in agricultural education needs to mobilize sustainable agricultural praxis in order to contribute to the public good. The knowledges to do so are available in non-traditional sources, but need to be mediated through transgressive and boundary-crossing learning processes that are not naïvely constituted, but which take careful account of the generative mechanisms that structure and potentially constrain transformative praxis. This opens up space for expansive social learning.