Endogenous knowledge and the development question in Africa^*

Abstract

An apt analogy for speaking to Africa's experience with development is offered by the twinning of colonialism and modernization. While colonialism left behind some forms of hybridity and mimicry, the urge to decolonize—to be free from the colonizer's control in every possible way—was integral to all anti-colonial criticism after the Second World War. The politics of decolonization followed by the new states in the mid twentieth century, however, displayed an uncritical emphasis on modernization, in which development, pursued—with technology and tools of scientific progress—was a catching-up exercise with the West. As an epistemological export from the West, taking the form of science as hegemony and ideology within colonial discourse, this has not delivered material progress for Africa. The widespread concern about the intractability and magnitude of the problems facing the continent has made development a popular theme in the literature on African studies. The disappointment across various academic circles and the popular press over the dwindling prospects of development in Africa—illustrated in its food insecurity, low life expectancy and the familiar litany of its ills—has made revisiting the debates on African development both compelling and timely. Much has consequently been written on what development is or should be about in Africa. This article underlines the centrality of endogenous knowledge as the material precondition for autonomous development for Africa.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

^*This article draws on research funded by the AC Jordan Chair in African Studies at the Centre for African Studies, in collaboration with the Research Funding Office of the University of Cape Town. Between 1 March 2013 and 28 February 2014, the author was a research fellow under the auspices of the AC Jordan Chair in African Studies at the Centre for African Studies at the University of Cape Town. The author is grateful to Adetoun Oyelude, Adigun AB Agbaje, Christian A Williams, Harry O Garuba, Horman Chitonge, Ifeanyi Onyeonoru, Jane Bennett, Lungisile Ntsebeza, Osisioma BC Nwolise and the journal's editorial board members and external reviewers whose comments, goodwill and input contributed immensely to the overall quality of this paper.

¹ Comprising South Sudan, Somalia, Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Sudan, Chad, Afghanistan, Yemen, Haiti, Pakistan, Zimbabwe, Guinea, Iraq, Côte d'Ivoire, Syria, Guinea-Bissau, Nigeria, Kenya, Niger, Ethiopia; and covering countries at great risk—not just countries that have actually already failed. A failed state is defined as ‘one in which the government does not have effective control of its territory; is not perceived as legitimate by a significant portion of its population; does not provide domestic security or basic public services to its citizens; and lacks a monopoly on the use of force’ (Foreign Policy2014).

² Although the idea of the ‘South’ signals a geographical division of the world between the countries of the North and their counterparts in the South, its actual meaning is not entirely coeval with conventional textual understanding. As a discursive referent, the idea of the ‘North’ overlaps with the self-designation of Europe and, more broadly, the West in modern history. Its usage speaks mainly to the division of the world into the North and the South within three broad contexts, namely, (i) the division of the economically prosperous and richer countries of Australasia, Europe and North America from the backward countries or developing regions of Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean, the Middle East and the Pacific; (ii) the division of the former imperial powers from those countries which have experienced formal or indirect colonial domination; and (iii) the division of those countries which control the production of knowledge from their counterparts which remain at its liminality and margins. Far from being innocent, this division is integral to a world order in which the globalization of commodities, ideas and services takes place under the control and mediation of a new empire. Although, as figures of the imaginary, ‘Africa’ and ‘Europe’ refer to certain figurative constructions whose geographical referents remain somewhat indeterminate, they are nevertheless understandable as given, reified categories, especially as opposites paired in a global structure of dominance and subalternity. For an elaboration on this position, see Ashis Nandy (1983), Dipesh Chakrabarty (1992), Dwaipayan Bhattacharyya (2004) and SEPHIS Electronic Magazine (2004).

³ Partha Chatterjee provides a compelling account with telling evidence of some of the epistemological violence that the modern world has witnessed with nationalism. See Partha Chatterjee (1986, 1–35).

⁴ For a more elaborate account of these, see Karuna Mantena (2010).

⁵ For a detailed articulation of the Hamitic hypothesis, see ER Sanders (1969).

⁶ For elaborations on this theory, see Walt W Rostow (1960).

⁷ On the influence of the utilitarians on the British colonial policy in India as well as the underlying assumptions of that policy, see Eric Stokes (1959).

⁸ In 2007, a special issue of The Economist described Africa as ‘a totally penetrated society’, ‘the land that time forgot’. See The Economist (2007, 18–21).

⁹ For a list of the works of each of these authorities on this subject, see Archibald BM Mafeje (2008, 115–116).

¹⁰ For an articulation of its theoretical position, see Robert Redfield (1953; 1955) and Oscar Lewis (1961).

¹¹ One of the strongest critiques of modernization theories was provided by Andre Gunder Frank (1969; 1978).

¹² A major study that speaks to this issue, drawing on Latin America, is Osvaldo Sunkel (1969). Taken together, this and other works within this mode established that modernization theories were empirically invalid and theoretically wanting even by their own standards.

¹³ Claude Ake was part of the first generation of post-independence African academics trained in the United States; this group was meant to be the intellectual shock troops of the United States' project across the continent. Ake's doctoral dissertation—from Columbia University in 1966—published as A theory of political integration (1967)—is as focal and mainstream from the right as it could get. His middle scholarship signalled by his second book, Revolutionary pressures in Africa (1978), was in a sense a rejection and repudiation of his early scholarship and an atonement for his ideological naivety. It reflects his voluntary re-education at the University of Dar es Salaam in the 1970s. Revolutionary pressures in Africa is in many ways a work of apprenticeship in Marxist scholarship—overtly tentative and trenchant. By contrast, The feasibility of democracy in Africa, published posthumously in 2000 by CODESRIA, reflects a confident and mature scholar with a magisterial command of his subject matter. It reflects Ake's late scholarship. For an account of Ake's biographical and theoretical orientations, including further details on his paradigm shifts, see Jeremiah O Arowosegbe (2012).

¹⁴ Claude Ake's works are not without their limitations. For example, Ake (1979) spoke of the ‘Western social science’—in the singular. There are, however, several other strands within Western social sciences—from the social democratic to the radical Marxist. In this sense, the foundation of Ake's counter-narratives, developed and foregrounded within Marxism, is a strand of this broader Western intellectual archive—anchored mainly on the dominant aspects of the emancipatory counter-narratives. Even here, it should be understood as heterogeneous. However, an engagement with such weaknesses is not the focus of this study.

¹⁵ For a list of important works that have examined aspects of Claude Ake's works, see Jeremiah O Arowosegbe (2008a; 2008b; 2011a; 2011b).

¹⁶ For a detailed explanatory note on differend, see Jeremiah O Arowosegbe (2014, 309–310).

¹⁷ The option of autarky in Africa, once advocated by Walter Rodney (1972) in the 1970s, has been the subject of numerous criticisms, especially within the theoretical literature on development in African and Latin American studies.

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Jeremiah O Arowosegbe

Jeremiah O Arowosegbe (PhD, University of Ibadan) is a Senior Lecturer in Political Science at the University of Ibadan, Ibadan, Nigeria. His major areas of research and teaching interests include African development, African intellectual history and African studies. His most recent publication is an edited special section of Social Dynamics (40:2) on the theme ‘African studies and knowledge production in the universities in postcolonial Africa’. Email: [email protected]