Africa in the Age of Globalisation

Perceptions, Misperceptions and Realities

Edward Shizha, Lamine Diallo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781472436696
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317184478
• Topic: Economia
• Subtopic: Economia dello sviluppo

This is a collection of bold and visionary scholarship that reveals an insightful exposition of re-visioning African development from African perspectives. It provides educators, policy makers, social workers, non-governmental agencies, and development agencies with an interdisciplinary conceptual base that can effectively guide them in planning and implementing programs for socio-economic development in Africa. The book provides up-to-date scholarly research on continental trends on various subjects and concerns of paramount importance to globalisation and development in Africa (politics, democracy, education, gender, technology, global relationships and the role of non-governmental organisations). The authors challenge the familiar paradigms in order to show how imperfectly, if at all, assumptions about globalisation and development theories have failed in their depictions and applications to Africa. The scholars in this volume both inform and advocate for a re-visioning of perceptions on Africa and how it navigates global processes.

PART I
Social and Institutional Development

Chapter 1
Globalisation and Africa: Critical Historical and Deconstructive/Reconstructive Epistemic Reflections

Ali A. Abdi

Introduction

The formalised studies of globalisation tend to present it as something that is contemporaneously attached to, or coming from current economic and political contexts. Certainly there is something unique about the quality of current globalisation trends we are experiencing, as I shall discuss, but globalisation qua globalisation, especially in its interactive human connections and exchanges, should be as old as the earliest formations of geographically detached groups of people in different parts of the world (Abdi, 2010). Indeed, it seems that with the establishment of blocks of people that could have inhabited even in adjacent lands, the perception or more practically the desire to inform about and spread their ways of living and doing things should be as old as the earliest reign of homo-sapiens. With the enlargement of the size of those groups and the forward movement of the sophisticated livelihood methodologies they have adopted, which should have slowly ameliorated their residential and material exchange conditions, with their capacity and willingness to move through the valleys or around the mountain ranges, the human desire to expand their ways of being and doing increased, which should have led to more organised ways of extra-localising and slowly globalising their ‘world’, and that apparently began to become a normative practice that multi-directionally affected different people’s intentions and existentialities.

It is with the beginnings of these limited globalisations that should have slowly expanded as our planet was more heavily populated with former geographical neighbours gradually formalising their lives into different national, continental and intercontinental connections and disconnections that expanded into what we are now describing formally as globalisation. It is with this in mind that ancient commercial routes were charted, which did not only lead to people being exposed to novel ways of doing and living, but also to their own possibilities to export their life style, their religion and their overall worldly achievements. The expansion of those early exchange routes of course, went beyond the simple swapping of goods and services related to those goods. Certainly they extended to cultural exchanges, linguistic sharing and the incremental mixing of peoples from different parts of the already expanding world. In addition, one of the main factors in these slowly complex transfers of life aspects was religious expansion where, for example, while all major religions practised in the world today have originated in what we term today the ‘East’, i.e., regions that lay east of a geographical line that may be hypothetically vertically placed in the middle of the Mediterranean sea on a north-to-south axis, their spread to all corners of the earth, should actually represent one of the most important globalisations of human relationships and activities. Therefore, globalisation, in its historical, sociocultural, politico-economic and related formations, was (is) first and foremost an idea whose creators and practitioners see it as worth spreading and from here to there, and constituted into an actionable project that should reach beyond their own boundaries.

From Religious Expansion into/with Dynastic/Imperial Formations

Beyond the general desire to share ideas, emerging life styles, the limited and possibly equitable ways of exchanging select and limited goods and services of worship in early globalisations, the expansion as well as the slow formalisation led to more organised systems of globalisations that represented the numerous empire and dynastic formations that have brought diverse populations together, in most cases, through invasion and warfare that led to the establishment of the long-term dominant-subordinate relationships whose effects are still shaping our contexts today. In perhaps analysing the difference between religious expansions and dynastic formations as two important historical pillars of globalisation, one can critically differentiate their fundamental objectives with one philosophically aiming to help people in their potential salvation in the meta-worldly permanent lives, while the other is bent on the actual conquest as well as exploitation of peoples’ lives and resources. While that may be the case in many instances, the picture might not be as clear cut as I seem to be indicating here. In the global processes of empire and the spreading of belief systems, the two were not always as exclusive as one would have expected. Indeed, at two different levels, we can talk about religious expansion as being achieved both through preaching and through warfare. It shouldn’t represent any stretch of the imagination to say that in many instances when people were not willing to accept the newly expanding religion, they were forcefully engaged to do so, and in most cases, successfully.

So while the global dynastic formations with their subsequent empire productions were clearly more systematic, the twinning of religious expansion and the conquest of foreign lands was a stable in the colonial programmes of Europe from as early as the 14th century. As Mazrui (1990) pointed out, the culture of colonialism, undoubtedly one of the most powerful, formalised forms of globalisation, contained in its basic blocks, few thick interconnected ideologies and objectives that combined the economic and the political with the religious and the cultural, thus engendering an expansive platform of uni-directionally constructed but false justifications where those to be conquered populations in Africa and in other colonised zones of our world, needed European prescribed mixed doses of divine salvation, cultural redemption and economic development. This selfishly concocted programme known in select historical parlance as the mission civilisatrice (Said, 1993; Abdi, 2010) practically induced the opposite of its announced economic, political, cultural and educational intentions. To the contrary and with respect to the African context, such mission and its enduring psycho-social outcomes have assured deep onto-existential colonisations that created the current situation where the desired embodied and cognitive recoveries are taking so long that one only has to hope the long awaited xoraynta buuxda (total liberation) will be achieved.

Conceptualising and Theorising Globalisation: Historical and Epistemic Issues

With the historical notations provided above, it shouldn’t be that simple to either conceptually or theoretically categorise globalisation. For certain, it is a complex process with thick antecedent attachments, but also something relatively new in its actual constructions, intentions and outcomes. To pay some conceptual debt to the historical analysis, one might describe globalisation as early and continuing human interactions and exchanges that expanded across peoples’ material, educational and spiritual locations with the underlying aims of sharing diverse world contexts and persuading others to do life the way it is done here and there. By doing that, we may then be ethically forced (re: the requirements of the expected research analysis continuum) to aim for what I might tentatively term as an intermediate explanation of the process and its attendant as well as its metamorphosing characteristics in the African situation. That is, how it was constructed and practised through colonial rule in Africa. Succinctly, colonial globalisation in Africa started with the deliberate but non-substantiable demeaning of everything African via the writings of Europe’s most important thinkers, especially continental European philosophers including Hegel, Kant, Hobbes, Montesquieu and Renan whose de-experiential ‘epistemic’ exhortations about the old continent were partially used for the subsequent wide-spread conquest and destruction of Africa and its peoples.

Clearly, therefore globalisation in its early and middle stage historical formations, and especially with respect to its interactions with African life, contains in its kernel and in its other constituent particles, not only the general ideological and social qualities, but as well, clusters of philosophical and epistemic intentions and outcomes that were aimed for so much beyond the inter-human subjective connections and poly-actions, and were deliberately deployed to effect extensive physical and cognitive deformations that bring about new beings who think and act differently. The experience was extensive and so traumatic in the lives of Africans that Van Sertima (1991, p. 8) presented it this way:

No other disaster with the exception of the Flood (if that biblical story is true) can equal in its dimension of destructiveness the cataclysm that shook Africa. We are all familiar with the slave trade and the traumatic effects of this on the transplanted African, but few of us realise what horrors were brought on Africa itself. Fast populations were uprooted and displaced, whole generations disappeared, European diseases descended like the plaque, decimating both people and livestock, cities and towns were abandoned, family networks disintegrated, kingdoms crumbled; the threads of cultural and historical continuity were so torn asunder that henceforward, one would only have to talk of two Africas: the one before and the one after the Holocaust.

With this engulfing psychosomatic trauma, the colonially globalised African started, to an important extent, to think and act differently. While the ontological deformations that affected the lives of these men and women have been brilliantly studied and analysed by some of the most gifted and historically exacting anticolonial thinkers including, inter alia, Julius Nyerere (1968), Frantz Fanon (1967, 1968), Aimé Césaire (1972), Walter Rodney (1982), and Chinua Achebe (2000, 2008[1958]), what we should not discount is the endurance of such realities, and for me especially, how those colonial globalisations can be actually analytically connected to the new globalisations that have been in course for the past 30 or so years.

Still, in its non-analytical locations, globalisation today is simply described, if undoubtedly simplistically, as a process where all barriers for the exchange of goods and services are removed among nations. Such innocuous statement hides so much that one could wonder how the construct ‘unequal’ is missing from anything that speaks about contemporary globalisation contexts and relationships. So to what extent is what I like to tentatively term the new globalisation different from the previous globalisation systems, and how should we locate its beginning points? By starting with the second point, I may actually have few issues with the generally agreed upon timing of this; and while I myself have used the quasi-singular dates of 1979/1980/1981 as temporal conjectures for the beginning of current globalisation, I think the situation is more complicated than that, and perhaps indicating, without exact demarcations, a general time span could be more helpful. I am therefore adopting such time of 1975 to 1985 for this writing. I understand that this may sound an arbitrary observational excursion into the timely reconstructions of current globalisations, but I actually believe that something as systemically connected to almost all aspects of our social, cultural, educational, economic, political and technological lives, cannot just start within one or two years, and should have had a more expansive temporal representation.

As Held and McGrew (2004) noted in their influential work, Global transformations, this new globalisation is different from every other form we have experienced in human history, in at least two important ways. The first is that it is more extensive than previous ones, in that its effects and results reach more global spaces and more people than ever before; the second is that it is more intensive than previous globalisations in that its policies, programmes and livelihood influences move faster and reach intended locations and populations at a speed that has not been hitherto experienced. Certainly one of the driving forces of such intensity is technological innovation which has effectively transformed, although not necessarily always in the best ways, the way we receive and interact with ideas, information and other active parcels of life that facilitate or govern our contemporary contexts and relationships. But technological facilitations are not again equally distributed, and through different economic and attendant attached locational endowments, this type of globalisation doesn’t reach all at equal speeds, and doesn’t of course, enhance the lives of all equally. As such, and especially with respect to the African situation, the way globalisation is conceptualised and theorised should pose a difficult de-equalising issue that has been problematic for the lives of the common man and woman.

The absence of the necessary analysis on the crucial de-equalising nature of globalisation should be a function of how it is epistemically constructed, which for reasons unknown to me, are not even discussed. Technically, if this new globalisation, in its current extensive and intensive localisations, affects almost everyone in our world, then shouldn’t we have some understanding of its origins and how it has been, knowledge reconstructed from the history of other globalisations that preceded it. I suggest we should do that, for it accords us both the observational and epistemic capacities to critically reread globalisation and re-theorise it from a wider perspective than has been provided, which is not only important but essential. To do so, one needs to understand anew, that this new globalisation is also constructed on ideological, philosophical, economic and attendant discursive assumptions and realities that locate it and sustain vis-à-vis its practitioners, profiteers and victims.

So granted that knowledge is a social construction and has a wider elemental structure that represents the contributions of many people (Harding, 1998, 2006), the general episteme of the new globalisation is certainly attached to that inter-civilisational collective knowledge that was inherited by all humanity from previous generations of human species. As the now Western claimed projects of enlightenment and modernity, though, it was reconstituted as representing the so-called mono-economic values of Western governments and their international financial institutions (IFIs) of which the most important are the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). As one should immediately detect here, the idea of a world bank (in all its conceptual, theoretical and related discursive notations and possibilities) should encounter problems of representation and inclusion; basically for me, how can one institution claim such a label when I am not included as either one of its creators, owners, or profiteers. Of course, I know I am simplifying it here, but the point is not about simplification, but how big things are theorised, and then applied to those in Africa who had no say in their constructions or programmes, but are to the contrary, marginalised by their ideologies and policies, which means the common persons have, after all, a relationship with the World Bank: they are marginalised by it. As such, the issue of ascertaining both the ideological and epistemic constructions is indeed important. It shouldn’t be difficult to understand, especially if we are willing to employ select global problematic power relations that can be analysed using the selectively thick counter-system writing of among others, the original postmodern and poststructuralist thinkers, who contrary to dominant discourses, are not the celebrated mostly European (French) men and some women including Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard, Héléne Cixous or Julia Kristeva, but actually their epistemically subalternised (partially in the way Antonio Gramsci deployed the term) teachers of the topic including Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, Chinua Achebe and others. Certainly these anticolonial thinkers and writers, along with Edward Said, Julius Nyerere and Walter Rodney and few others, were among the first scholars who launched the all too important epistemic counteroffensive that questioned the problematic uni-directionality of dominant knowledge systems and colonialist worldviews that marginalised Indigenous people’s histories, cultures, and ways of knowing. While the theories of postmodernism and poststructuralism are so many times originally associated with the above-stated European thinkers, along with few Euro-American thinkers including Frederic Jameson, I contend that the first block of counterhegemonic epistemic re-narrations of the vita Africana was actually achieved by such countercolonial writers such as Fanon and Achebe who many years before the two interrelated ‘posts’ became fashionable in the metropolitan universities of Europe and North America.

In Achebe’s magnum opus, Things fall apart (2009 [1958]), the social schizophrenia that afflicts the main protagonist in his native Nigeria, Okonkwo, is actually an untenable critical, if eventually fatal, response to a forced globalisation that deconstructed his discursive points of reference, thus rendering his reading of the world his community created over time and space, not only as meaningless, but more so, as a liability that was to be avoided and totally de-practised. Beyond any doubt, therefore, the story and its tragic outcomes were essential fragments of what I might tentatively term the epistemic de-localisation of one’s life, with a perforce globalisation that so decentres one’s existentialities that it renders life unlivable. And to perhaps hesitatingly borrow an expressive point from the more popularised linguistic reconstructions of Foucault, the only way for Okonkwo to survive the new onto-existential dislocations was to invent new discursive formations that could counterweigh the effects of his newly acquired cultural and livelihood ailments. That was not possible as Okonkwo was not a free European man who could theorise about the world as he wished, he was to practise his being the way it was praxically constructed by his enemies with negating power differentials that Foucault and company could not imagine, let alone understand. As such, a critical understanding of the power-knowledge nexus analysis that Foucault (1980) surely partially distilled from the works of original postmodern thinkers, might have helped open liberated space for Okonkwo to deploy its possible practices.

As Memmi (1991[1956]) also noted ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Contributors
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• PART I: SOCIAL AND INSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENT
• PART II: TECHNOLOGY AND GLOBAL PARTNERSHIPS
• PART III: GENDER, MIGRATION AND SETTLEMENT
• PART IV: EDUCATION AND GLOBALISATION IN AFRICA
• Index