USA Africa Dialogue Series - Towards a Rational Kingdom in Africa

When you encounter the social scientist  or the scholar of humanities make analysis and deductions based on the state/state paradigm in modern Africa-Tanzania,Congo,Burkina Faso,Cameroon,etc there is often hardly the will to question the internal forces and contradictions of these states which inevitably would lead to / would have led to the results available. Indeed it is proper to suggest that there are many wrong assumptions on which modern knowledge industry has been instituted in Africa which are not known because of the force(influence) of the state in instituting these paradigms.

"At the beginning of the African quest for independence, Kwame Nkrumah, the Ghanaian president widely known as the father of modern African political freedom project, is credited with having made a popular assertion: "seek ye first the political kingdom and all other things will be added unto you."1 This position is a strong expression of faith in the future of the African state. However, more than half a century after Nkrumah made this significant statement there is doubt on the merit of what has been added to Africa in terms of development, which to a large extent questions the validity of the assumption. This position is strongly justified especially given that another Ghanaian scholar and intellectual Kwesi Prah recently said, "little has been achieved in the 50 years of Africa's independence which can be seriously described as developmental" (Prah 2011, p. 156). This paper applies this position to interrogating the knowledge paradigm in Africa and to suggest a shift to what it calls the rational kingdom, defined as knowledge devoted to conceptual critical self-awareness driven by the vision to make innovation and constructivism a norm and a force in African social and intellectual life. I allude to Nkrumah's wisdom but in a reverse manner by saying that political kingdom is not even possible without the rational kingdom because the concept of polity or the state finds its root in the rational kingdom. So, I seek to institute another paradigm for an African future: "seek ye first the rational kingdom and all other things will be added unto you."

 For full article see: "Towards a Rational Kingdom in Africa: Knowledge, Critical Rationality and Development in a Twenty-First Century African Cultural Context":www.mdpi.com/2077-1444/9/4/96/pdf