Hi everyone!
I haven’t blogged in forever, due to a creative
bloc, plus a whole lot of school work, sitting down to write something for
myself and just myself and not for a lecturer’s yay or nay!
Amazingly, I was selected this year as a
Mandela Washington Fellow in President Obama’s Young African Leaders Initiative
and I’m currently serving my tenure on the civic leadership track at the
University of Illinois. Thus, the other fellows and I are deeply immersed in
topics such as civic engagement, democracy and what it looks like, and of
course, development and its measurement. In these discussions, one finds that
inevitably, there are constant comparisons made of Africa, and its various
countries, to America. A persistent question that has surfaced throughout our 1st
week has been the question posed above: Which should come first: Democracy or
development? Bracketed in this question has been a lot of despair raised against
developmental and ‘democratic’ spaces in Africa; my colleagues bemoaning the
state of fiasco in Zimbabwe, the violent instability of South Sudan, the
corruption across all democracies in Africa.
To begin to even answer this question, we
need to start with a context, with the context of Africa’s history and all the
elements that have shaped Africa into what it has become now. Starting from the
surface premise of comparing Africa and America would lead to a long diatribe
of complaints against Africa and ‘why can’t Africa be as ‘developed’ as America
is?’ and frankly, that is a very problematic premise to start with.
So let’s start with the context: who
defines development?
It’s like a game of catch between a
mistress and her dog. The dog will solely be focused on the competition that
has been laid out for it: to get the bone that its mistress is about to throw.
The dog’s mistress, on the other hand, who is the ‘bone-thrower’ however is not
concerned about the competition, because she operates in a totally different
sphere, a sphere of power where the dog’s competition is not relevant to her
reality. Because she throws the bone,
she is not a part of the competition.
She has a higher realm of operation and preoccupation. I use ‘higher’ because
whereas the dog whose only focus is to meet the standard its mistress has set
for it by catching the bone, the mistress, on the other hand, is the one setting the standards.
It is in this context that I place the discussion of development and democracy. The concert of ‘development’ is a
neo-colonial tool. The concept of development as it has been universalized now
is one deeply rooted in a Eurocentric worldview. Rooted in 19th
century evolutionism and 19th century social technology (processes
of western change not African change), development theory and its standards as
defined today for Africa is one that does not originate from Africa.
Evolutionism is a western concept that implicitly implies a certain process and
succession of events that a society must go through to reach a certain stage of
wellbeing; this stage of wellbeing is inherently decided by the lens of who
defines it. Thus, in Eurocentric development lingo, we have ‘developed’ and
‘developing’ (essentially ‘Third World’, but someone thought to change it not
to flare up African sensibilities). Implicit in the designation of ‘developed’
and ‘developing’ is the notion that to reach the higher stage of ‘developed’,
an African country must look, feel and act like a western state. It assumes a
singular Eurocentric discourse in the language of development, totally
disregarding the reality that European processes of social change will not be
the same as the processes of social change which have defined what Africa looks
like and feels like today.
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| Mali Empire |
In short, if the concept of development is
defined from this Eurocentric view of the world, lensed in a European history
and European evolution, Africa would never match up. This is because there is a
crucial missing perspective: Africa’s. Africa’s processes of social change have
not been factored, recognized or respected in this universalized Eurocentric
concept of development. It is why in these criteria, we would be and would
remain for a long time ‘developing’ countries. Proof of this is evident in the
young and fledgling democracies in Africa: Zimbabwe and its current cash crisis
(amongst others), Nigeria and Ghana and the almost systemic state of
corruption, South Sudan and its prism of violence. The list goes on. Why are
these countries defined as ‘young’ though? Because we start counting from a
Western development calendar where Ghana was only born 59 years ago, South
Sudan a mere 6 years old. What if we looked further than that? In fact, why do
we consistently ignore a past further than that in a continent which housed the
oldest civilizations if the world?
Worse in this conceptualization of
development is the tendency to set western development and democracy as the
‘ideal’. This ‘ideal’ stage of development for instance in American democracy
is one that carries with the heavy baggage of racism, where police brutality,
racial stratification, and its accompanying counterparts socially,
economically, politically, and in Britain with the current surge of ill-feeling
against immigrants, are part and parcel of the Eurocentric ideal of ‘developed’.
I cannot fathom where Africa would have a place in this ‘ideal’ of democracy
and development.
What are the African processes of social
change that have been imperially ignored in this Eurocentric definition of
development?
1. The destruction of many African
civilizations by Arab and European invasions - empires such as the ancient
Egyptian civilization of the pyramids(Kemet), the Mali empire, the Songai
empire and the many highbrow cultures in Africa that operated on complex
philosophies and social systems (Yoruba, Ibo, Ashanti, Masai) that were
evidence of what will be by today’s
standards highly ‘developed.’ Many of these systems were at a point in time
slapped with the tag ‘primitive’ in this Eurocentric concept of development.
2. The systemic institutions of
Arab and European occupation, colonialism and slavery and the disruption of
African processes of social change thereafter
3. The schizophrenic state of
Africa as a consequence and what I will call a ‘reeling’ from a past
characterized in the last 1000 years (if I may hastily measure) by systemic
interference and disruption of African processes of social change
If these factors
were considered in a definition and criteria of development, Development as
defined today would look and sound very different.
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| Ashanti Empire |
I would not
argue for an inclusion of Africa’s historical processes of change in the
current criteria for development. To do so would be a futile attempt at fitting
square pegs in round holes.We must
re-construct the language of development. We need to re-define development solely
from an African perspective, with an examination of the various African
processes of social change, a study of African social systems, carefully taking
into consideration the stages of disruption, studying its repetitive
consequences across the continent, and not through, as Ziai put it, the lens of
the ‘colonizer’s model of the world’. Only from this
lens of development would Africa set its own standards and from there, begin to
forge the much needed social change we all crave to see in our societies.
