Development In Modern Africa

Past and Present Perspectives

Martin S. Shanguhyia,Toyin Falola

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000721751
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Afrikanische Geschichte

Development in Modern Africa: Past and Present Perspectives contributes to our understanding of Africa's experiences with the development process. It does so by adopting a historical and contemporary analysis of this experience. The book is set within the context of critiques on development in Africa that have yielded two general categories of analysis: skepticism and pessimism.

While not overlooking the shortcomings of development, the themes in the book express an optimistic view of Africa's development experiences, highlighting elements that can be tapped into to enhance the condition of African populations and their states. By using case studies from precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial Africa, contributors to the volume demonstrate that human instincts to improve material, social and spiritual words are universal. They are not limited to the Western world, which the term and process of development are typically associated with.

Before and after contact with the West, Africans have actively created institutions and values that they have actively employed to improve individual and community lives. This innovative spirit has motivated Africans to integrate or experiment with new values and structures, challenges, and solutions to human welfare that resulted from contact with colonialism and the postcolonial global community. The book will be of interest to academics in the fields of history, African studies, and regional studies.

1
Introduction

Martin S. Shanguhyia and Toyin Falola

This book offers new perspectives on Africa’s development experience from multiple but related angles. Contributions reflect on historical and current political, economic, cultural, ecological, religious, and security dimensions of development in Africa in unique but complementing ways. More specifically, the chapters analyze the relevance of precolonial traditional African institutions, values, and practices on the development process in Africa over time. Other contributions relate to land and agricultural policies, as well as infrastructure, women, climate change, and administrations in shaping the quest for development and the improvement of the human condition in modern Africa. In this way, the studies presented in the book perceive development as a multidimensional process, one that is not only historical but also philosophical, political, economic, social, and cultural. The process of development is as dynamic as the agents that intersect to produce it.

Critiques on development in Africa

Not surprisingly, therefore, some scholars of African development have viewed challenges to development as raising important questions regarding modern African countries, from the economic, social, and cultural, to the political aspects.¹ Furthermore, the book reveals the extent to which multiple agencies have worked together or separately to shape development, ranging from groups, individuals, institutions, practices and values, to state and non-state actors operating at local, regional, and continental scales. Thus, while in its conventional sense development denotes an endeavor to improve the human social and economic condition, case studies presented in this volume demonstrate that the means toward that endeavor are numerous and have a long history embedded in indigenous, if not cultural, African practices that predate colonialism. In doing so, the book lends fresh ways in which we can understand development in Africa as a process and practice.

Africa’s development experience has attracted much scholarly attention. This attention is likely to continue into the unforeseeable future, as scholars get intrigued with the many facets of development regarding Africa and its peoples. This interest has arisen partly by the feeling among some scholars and commentators of development that this whole experience is foreign to the continent given its Western origins.² This is true, especially where development has emphasized the economic and social standards of human life, an emphasis that is borne in the Western development tradition. As a result, most of the existing analyses have focused on attempts to understand how modern African states and their constituents have coped with the demands of modern development or the impact of development on those entities.

Of interest to scholars has been a focus on the progress or failure of development in postcolonial Africa and how this experience has generated optimism, and more markedly, skepticism. The failure of development as propelled by the African state operating within the parameters of the post-1945 global economic order has fueled skepticism due to its inability to deliver or even ensure long-term benefits of development to the swelling populations. Inadequacies of modern development in meeting the economic and social needs of African states and their citizens has been evident, particularly in times of global economic crises that impinge on programs aimed at improving the human condition. In this light, theorists of underdevelopment in Africa continue to find relevance in any discussions that perceive inadequacies in ongoing efforts to implement development in Africa along Western lines and the results of those practices.

Those theorists – mostly literary critics, economic historians, and political scientists, among others – contend that the continent and its peoples have barely been able to reap the benefits of development as packaged to the continent by Western powers. Thus, for them, the interaction been Africa and the West has wrought worse than good in terms of improving the African condition. For some of them, the problem is historical, having started with Western imperial incursion in the tropics that established unequal political, cultural, and economic relations with the African communities.³ The legacies of that interaction span many centuries, going as far back as the 1400s. Others who search for the origins of Africa’s current ills with the modern development experience point to an even deeper past, in the ancient times. They demonstrate Africa’s vibrancy in institutional and cultural wealth and the indigenous knowledge that was the foundation of this wealth. They proffer that this indigenous knowledge might have been gradually siphoned off by the progenitors of modern Western development thought and practice.⁴ This thought and practice have been the foundation of Western civilization and its global influence, but not in ways that have been beneficial to Africa and its peoples.

Episodic global recession is seen to reverse any development gains in Africa.⁵ Unpredictable episodes of recession, sometimes coupled with political uncertainties, tend to expose shortcomings associated with statist and corporate approaches that have dominated the arena of development in many African countries since independence. Such circumstances have served to dent any optimism that promotes the idea of “Africa Rising”.⁶ More important, these shortcomings have drawn criticism from some scholars against modern development practice in Africa and the developing world in general. These failures have reinforced the argument that development in Africa is a Western construct, part of a deliberate power matrix that renders the continent and the rest of the developing world to political, economic, and cultural domination and subjection by the West. Critics of this modern development practice in Africa are many.⁷

Dubbed “neoliberalism”, this development experience is seen to perpetuate unequal global relations in the economic arena and in the political power that enable those relations. For the Africa of the late 1980s and of the 1990s, the blueprint of this development influence came in the form of structural adjustment programs and their stringent social and economic measures that aimed at promoting efficiency in economic spending in sectors – agriculture, transport, and industry – considered critical by Western financial institutions, notably the World Bank and the IMF. Yet evidence of increasing levels of poverty and increasing economic gaps among populations within African countries, and between Africa and the developed countries of the world, has reinforced criticism against neoliberal forms of development in Africa.⁸ Gains from such programs have been minimal, if not negligent, with very few exceptions – Ghana and Uganda.

On the other hand, international financial aid to African countries at bilateral and multilateral levels has had its own problems, the most critical being the creation of a culture of dependency rather than independence in the economic improvement of the human condition in Africa. Such aid is blamed for cycles of corruption, disease, and poverty on the continent and other parts of the world.⁹ More important, dependent development curtails the political independence of modern African states. This is because of the likelihood that development aid comes with political preconditions. While this is problematic, proponents of preconditions to aid perceive them necessary conditions for creating accountability and transparency in the development initiatives designed to benefit the public. One chapter in this book offers a very incisive perspective on corruption in West Africa and its relationship to regional efforts at development.

Despite the contribution of external forces to Africa’s development problem, some of the contributors in this book demonstrate that Africa’s interaction with the global community, especially with Western countries, remain imperative to the development envisioned by African states and their leaders. This in itself illustrates the entrenched elitist role to development in Africa, inasmuch as this segment of the African population is perceived to contribute to the failure of state-led development, a view largely held by postulates of post-developmental thinking.¹⁰ Moreover, it also reminds us that the role of the state remains imperative in Africa’s development process, the shortcomings of statism notwithstanding.

Indeed, some authors in this volume demonstrate that the postcolonial state, just like its colonial counterpart, remains the key initiator of certain public development projects such as construction of modern infrastructure. The reason the state is ever present in the development process is that the entities are political sovereigns and therefore possess the ability to chart the future of their people. However, such sovereignty has come under focus where African states have deferred, for better or worse, to external political and economic pressures to implement development programs that have contributed to the optimism and skepticism already implied.

While contributions to this book are not lost to the critiques or shortcomings of development practice in Africa, the chapters offer alternatives to skepticism by exploring the opportunities inherent in Africa’s cultural systems, values, and practices to alleviate the excesses of modern development and help improve individual, community, and state conditions. Historical case studies presented in the book remind us that development practice in Africa is a historical process – has a past – that is instructive in helping us understand the present. In fact, recent scholarship reveals that modern development in Africa as we understand it has deep historical roots that precede imposition on Africa of the Western/colonial version of the process.¹¹ Thus, from ancient to early modern times, Africans fashioned economic institutions and modes of production at multiple organizational levels, and they redistributed and exchanged commodities at local, regional, and international levels, all with the objective of satisfying human needs. In precolonial times, politics and economic enterprise were often interlinked as political elite, especially rulers, launched programs aimed at insuring their own political security against potential internal and especially external forces.¹²

African traditions, culture, and development

Dating back to the nineteenth century, African thinkers and scholars have undermined the perception that the West inaugurated development in Africa. They point to the long history of African cultures and institutions and their roles in enhancing African welfare as evidence of indigenous forms of development.¹³ Traditions and culture here refers to customs, beliefs, knowledge, morals, and habits of African communities prior to contact with the outside world. These elements have been at the center of the quest by African communities’ quest to improve the general and individual welfare of peoples that constitute those communities. They vitalized African health, industrial crafts, technological innovation – such as ironworking – and political institutions that governed or nurtured these activities. Precolonial governance and use of critical resources such as land and its natural endowments such as forests and grasslands proceeded under established traditional norms that guaranteed individual and communal welfare. So was the case with health, sexuality, and architecture.¹⁴ In fact, these elements defined the ethnic and cultural identities of the various African communities.

Transition to colonialism undermined the capacity and the legitimacy of African values, cultures, and institutions to promote progress in local communities. African customs and cultures were seen by colonial states as impediments to the colonial mission of “civilization”. Economically, the latter process entailed the harnessing of Western capitalism for the exploitation of Africa’s human and natural resources, a process that could not coexist with precolonial African cultural systems. This was evidenced by the numerous African rebellions against mobilization of communal labor, low wages, and forced cultivation of labor- and capital-intensive cash crops. In numerous instances, colonial states de-emphasized African recourse to their cultural ways in the search for solutions to everyday problems. This was the case, despite instances where indigenous solutions to health and environmental challenges accelerated by colonialism.¹⁵

Cultural practices can be very difficult to erase or eliminate given that they constitute the core identity of a community or a people. This reality partly contributed to the persistence of certain cultural and institutional practices despite the forces of colonial assault on the continent. This prompted some scholars of Africa to seek a connection between antecedents of African culture with modern development practice.¹⁶ This realization become more imperative during the last decades of the last century and the beginning of the twenty-first century with increasing emphasis on integrating local or “African” solutions to problems of modern development, including a recourse to indigenous knowledge. The local has thus been universalized within modern development practice. On their own initiative, African communities still rely on indigenous knowledge in requisitioning their livelihoods in such areas as food production and health care systems. These two aspects are critical to Africa’s development especially in rural areas. The recourse to indigenous knowledge has been incorporated in official development policies, often in deliberate ways. UNESCO, United Nation’s educational, cultural, and scientific agency, has elaborated on the fact that culture is the m...