This discussion has gone on for quite sometime and like so much of such discussions about Africa it threatens to reduce to the listing of Africa as incapacitated and bounded by nothing but constraints. But this discussion also provokes several questions.
In what sense is Africa in a mess? Which Africa? All 54 countries? Some Countries? Are African countries actually where they where 40-50 years ago?
What is actually on the ground that was not there 50 years? What is actually missing in terms of Africa's capacity for self-propulsion?
2. It is true that in one way or another there has always being a world system much as there is national, regional, state, provincial, town, village, neighborhood and family systems. People and societies operate within and without the bounds of these systems.
3.Historically development has always been about consciousness, vision, goals, organization, opportunities, constraints and choice.
4. There is no question that any power that emerges, past and present will try to organize the world to its advantage just as China and India are trying to do today. The same will apply to any serious African country that emerges as a global power. In short, it has always been the practice and business of old and emergent powers to organize the world to their benefit. There is nothing new about this. What is perhaps new is that the present world system due to the advances in transport and telecommunication technologies is much tighter.
5. But this does not make the world or global system a prison-house.
6. Leaders and peoples even in Africa are quite capable of achieving breakthroughs as effective economic and social actors and makers of the system to the extent that they are driven by a a fairly clear understanding of the global system, a consciouness of its potential and actual constraints on them, and are willing to mobilize and deploy national psychological resources to the project of self-transformation.
7. It is true that Africa has experienced the loss of its autochtonous spiritual, religious, linguistic anchors as the animating motive force of its self-direction; but his loss is not total and at that this stage the lamentation of this loss is neither here nor there.
8. The point is, what will Africa as a unit and its countries do to participate in this world system as effective self-directed societies that relentelessly pursue national and continental objectives with little regard to the the constraints of the present global system. Or how can the continent or more correctly its key and potential vanguard countries organize to become makers of the global system.
9. Finally, however much we debate "Africa" from the distant or even from within, if the terms of our perception and description are derived from the defective conceptual simplifications of the world system; and not from the ideological and political and practical complexity of "actually existing Africa" much of what we say and debate will be side-tracked by the outcome of "actual African history in the making" that is not reducible to the familiar lazy constructions of Africa in terms of "corruption", "poverty" and "incapacity".
Ehiedu Iweriebor
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the "USA-Africa Dialogue Series" moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin.
For current archives, visit http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
For previous archives, visit http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com
To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue-
unsubscribe@googlegroups.com
No comments:
Post a Comment