Kwesi Kwaa Prah
The Centre for Advanced Studies of African Society (CASAS)
Cape Town
Paper
Presented at the Roundtable Discussion on; Mainstreaming Human
Security and Conflict Issues in long-term Development Planning
in Africa: A New Development Paradigm? Accra, 9th-10th July
2001. SAPEM.
Vol. 14. No. 6. 2001. Appears also in, Kwame Karikari (ed).
Where Has Aid Taken Africa? Re-Thinking Development.
Media Foundation for West Africa. Accra. 2002.
Introduction
Over the past five
hundred years no single phenomenon has impacted as definitively
and indelibly on the making and shaping of current realities
in Africa as the experience of the African encounter with the
West in general, and the colonial experience in particular.
In this day and age, at the beginning of the 21st century AD,
or the commencement of the 3rd millennium, it is often considered
to be in bad taste, or intellectually suspect, to suggest that
colonialism as a heritage has been the root detractor of recent
efforts of Africans to move forward in social advancement and
development. The argument is that it is too easy to put the
blame for African failure on outsiders, when Africans are supposedly
in control of their own affairs since the end, some decades
ago, of the colonial era. Certainly, as Africans, we should
take responsibility for our own failings; bad, inept, corrupt,
inane, dictatorial and undemocratic practices have been the
hallmark of life in almost all African post-colonial states.
But everything that is happening in Africa is not under the
control of Africans. We do not control the prices of the commodities
we sell on the global markets, we do not have any real say in
the setting of the prices at which we buy from the developed
world. Despite the endless propaganda trumpeted from the west
about free markets, the reality for us is that most markets
for the things, largely agricultural, which we can produce cheaply
and easily are closed to us. The European Union is the supreme
case in point. What we face are quotas, tariffs and cartels.
For Africa, free trade remains a pie in the sky. The minerals
we produce in abundance are controlled by western capital from
source of production of the raw materials, their sale, and destination
of sale, with no value added at source. Our economies are perpetually
under siege through pernicious and unequal trade practices managed
by the West and the related Bretton Woods institutions. These
latter institutions have become de facto parallel governments
in many African states.(1) With stagnating, shrinking economies
and diminishing resources it is not difficult to see (without
condoning this) why the elites in Africa become so prone to
corruption, pilferage and looting of the state. What I am saying
is that, a concert of internal and external forces are responsible
for the current societal malaise in Africa. But the deep structure
of our malaise is largely entangled with the general impact
of the colonial experience. While the west introduced modern
techniques into pre-colonial and pre-industrial Africa, putting
Africa on the road to modernity, it also distorted the autonomous
nature of the processes of African development.
In the 50-odd years of post-colonialism in Africa no single obsession
has been as overriding in our preoccupations and concerns at the
collective level of social life on this continent as the question
of development. It is, the single most obsessive object of all
governments and ruling elites in Africa. It is hard to find a
single regime in the post-independence experience of Africa which
has not set its highest sights on the development objective.
What is noticeable after half a century of post-independence
is that it continues to be an enduring feature of the rhetoric
and espoused raison d’etre of African regimes. There are
no exceptions to this, for the language of desired development
is flaunted by military regimes, one-party states, so-called no-party
states and multi-party states. The tragedy of the situation however
is that despite the copious verbiage and the related ceremonial
fanfare which goes with high-level state events, the sanctimonious
pronouncements of state authorities about development, the frequently
touted imminence of expected successful outcomes of the endeavours
of these regimes, little has been achieved in the 50 years of
African independence which can be seriously described as developmental.
The notion of development prominently implies, the improvement
and upliftment of the quality of life of people, that they are
able, to a large measure, to attain their potential, build and
acquire self-confidence and manage to live lives of reasonable
accomplishment and dignity. The related idea of sustainable development
which emerged in the late 1970s and early 1980s, can be understood
as a process of social transformation in which the exploitation
of resources, patterns and strategies of investments and capitalisation,
the ethos and direction of technological advancement and attendant
institutional adaptation are in relative harmony, and facilitate
both current and strategic potentials to satisfy the needs and
aspirations of members of the society concerned. This concept
was more European than American. In our times, increasingly, environmental
and "green" concerns have assumed, quite rightfully,
centrality in how development objectives are pursued and implemented.
Development efforts which show environmental sensitivity have
become the prized approaches in development thinking.
Too often skyscrapers, beautiful residential areas, cinemas and
hotels are seen by some to represent development. The availability
of champagne and whisky, ham and sausages, BMW’s and Mercedes-Benz
cars are equated with evidence of development. Ironically, the
champagne and caviar life style invariably in Africa coexists
with sprawling, disease-infested bidonvilles pervaded by unspeakable
stench spawned by open drains and sewers. Development as a sustained
socially engaged socio-structural transformation paradigm, which
augments the productive capacity and economic returns of mass
society, and provides scope for the socio-economic amelioration
of the quality of life of mass society has largely eluded Africa.
The elites have been content to gorge themselves on the latest
choice commodities of Western consumer culture, and for as long
as the availability of consumer-goods are assured, the song and
dance, and the make-believe of development rhetoricians continues.
Development in Africa must make a difference, firstly, to the
lives of the masses. This difference must mean that in all areas
of the social life of the masses, perceptible and incremental
growth of possibilities and opportunities, in both material and
non-material senses, would need to be registered. Development
must optimize the capacity of mass society to intervene intelligently,
creatively and knowledgeably on the environment in pursuit of
its mode of livelihood. An anthropological colleague, Prof. Simon
Simonse, who had spent some years in Asia, more specifically in
the Indonesian archipelago, once remarked to me that the striking
feature about developing Asia is that the development and transformation
of Asian societies are noticeable, first and foremost, at the
village level. The significance of this point is that in the transformation
and modernization of agrarian society in Asia, the bottom line
has been that, social change should transform the lives of the
teeming rural underclasses. The leaps forward we have seen in
Asia over the past three decades demonstrate the fact that development
at the level of mass society for the Third World today is at heart
an agrarian question.
In Africa the often vaunted example of successful development
is Botswana. As compared to the Asian experience what we see in
Botswana is a society awash with revenue from diamonds and which
has provided lavishly for the elite to live and express themselves
materially in a style largely incomparable on the whole continent.
Botswana is one of the major beef producers in the world. The
human-livestock ratio for cattle is also one of the highest in
the world. Botswana beef has a lucrative market in the European
Union. In rural Botswana, the effects of these enormous revenues
have not been felt as a structural socio-economic process which
is transforming the productive capacity of people and which is
scientifically and technologically transforming the country-side.
The semi-feudal Mafisa/cattle-loaning system is still prevalent.
Botswana, with a population of about 1.25 million, has reserves
totalling about 7 billion US dollars invested in US government
bonds. Such reserves could transform the society, if transformation
was measurable by or a factor of US dollar revenue. Outside Africa,
Saudi Arabia provides another classic case in point, where enormous
oil revenue has not meant the scientific and technological transformation
of the society, but rather this wealth has created a basis for
an opulent and vulgar consumerist life-style dominated by a feudalist
aristocracy, backed-up by one of the most sophisticated and expensive
military machines of the contemporary world. This latter is purchased
at a price from the west.
The Search for the Development Formula
Since some of us first
got into universities during the early 1960s, as Africans, we
have been intellectually smitten by the search for answers to
the development challenge facing Africa. It has been an almost
half-century of search for the cure to the malaise of economic,
scientific and technological backwardness of African society.
During the early period of our quest for the nostrum for African
under-development, some were persuaded by the then dominant
theory flagged under western scholarship with the label of "modernization".
It was particularly popular with American scholars, who with
considerable ingenuity, constructed a baseline model for understanding
and tackling the problem of under-development. The philosophical
matrix in which the theoreticians of modernization grounded
their formulae was functionalism. For some of them, modernization
was ultimately a question of attitudinal change. The global
inequities of our times were identified as springing from differences
in levels of technological development and industrialization.
Invariably, in the thinking of the modernization theorists,
tradition and cultural constraints were the prime inhibitors
to modernization, what has been called cultural blockage.(2)
They were generally, almost, totally silent on the global structure
of production, distribution, exchange and the roots of the lopsidedness
and unfavourable terms of trade under-developed countries found
themselves, in relation to the developed ones. These theories
which had their heyday in the late 1950s and early 1960s were
best championed by, W. W. Rostow, David Apter, Wilbert Moore,
S. N. Eisenstadt, Coleman, and many other largely American academics.(3)
They created African and other Third World acolytes and afficionados.
It was an approach which, in those years, found much favour
in American government circles. Furthermore, it was an strategy
which was uncritical of the role of the West in the construction
of the premise of inequality in the global affairs of contemporary
states. The two contrasting poles of opinion with regards to
modernization theories are exemplified by the following two
opinions from Mark Weigand and Manjur Karim.(4) Weigand wrote
that;
In my own experience,
sociologists I have know who worked for the government usually
were involved in "social change" projects, which usually
meant "helping" Third World countries "modernize"
and become more like the US. Nothing too sinister, just ethnocentric
projects.(5)
Karim’s sharp and pungent rejoinder was that :
But weren’t the
modernization theory related research project integrally connected
with Cold War geopolitics? Third World countries were advised
to modernize themselves after the western model. A not so subliminal
subtext of the modernization theory was to present a paradigm
of development that is opposed to the socialist model of development
that some post-colonial countries were attracted to. Whether
individual researchers were aware of this political agenda or
not is not the issue here. The issue is a larger one. Any one
who reads one of these works carefully whether it is about the
lack of "achievement need" (read profit motivation),
or "modern and universalism" as opposed to "traditional
particularism", or "formalized and impersonal rules
of governance" in the "traditional" societies
will know that the only kind of modernization these folk were
talking about is capitalist modernization. Third world countries
are backward because they haven’t attained the illuminated
path of capitalist modernization, not because they are forcefully
articulated into a subordinate position into the world capitalist
economy and locked into peripheral capitalist (or semi-feudal,
or semi-colonial or whatever ...) (6)
Implicit in most modernization
theories of the past has been a replay of the Victorian unilineal
euro-centric view that all societies are evolving and developing
to become western type societies; that non-western societies
were at various levels of development or rungs below the West.
As a corrective, the way Kurimoto goes round this implicit weakness
is to suggest "multi-lineal modernization".(7)
What 50 years of post-independence
history teaches us however is that the much vaunted modernization
theories of the 50's and 60's nowhere provided successful cases
which can with any seriousness be emulated. In spite of years
of the much extolled virtues of "Structural Adjustment
Policy (SAP)" of The Bretton Woods institutions, the International
Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank have dismally failed
to produce any unimpeachable success stories in the Third World.
We still have to see the first case in Africa of a country which
has achieved economic and developmental success through the
IMF SAP formula. Takahashi Motoki has made the observation that,
by the "mid-1990s, the failure of orthodox SAPs to save
Africa from rampant poverty and stagnation became unquestionable".(8)
Visibly, some societies particularly in Asia (the Asian Dragons)
have succeeded in considerable measure to achieve development
processes which in some instances have been remarkable. But these
achievements have been made largely through the economic creativity,
judicious institutional arrangements and political astuteness
of the leadership of these countries, not through the medicine
of the Bretton Woods institutions.
The failure of the
modernization theories to produce success, during the Cold War
era, cannot be criticized on the basis of better theories or
ideas emanating from the East. Indeed, the alternative paradigm
offered by Soviet thinkers at the time was, what came to be
known as, the "non-capitalist road to socialism".
This idea was the officially blessed paradigm suggested by Soviet
social scientists, their ideologues, and their other Third World
neophytes. In brief, it suggested that Third World countries
could move to scientific and technological development under
a Soviet-type socialist political system which would avoid capitalism
and which, as it were, would take them from where they were
to socialism through Soviet tutelage. In practice these ideas
led to state capitalist approaches with nationalization under
large state bureaucracies.(9) This idea like the modernization
theories from the West proved, through historical experience,
to be of little use to the challenges of the Third World. Indeed
the whole edifice of Soviet economy and politics has collapsed
around us. In my experience, in Africa, by the late 1960s and
early 1970s, modernization theory was being pilloried in lecture
halls, conference rooms, symposia and workshops by African academics.
Historically, almost surreptitiously, economic neo-liberalism
took centre-stage position in discourses on African development.
But various types of Marxists who, generally, had challenged
modernization theories were again back in the fray, assailing
neo-liberal fashionability and its approval and blessing of
IMF-World Bank solutions. As we moved close to the end of the
1980s, in African academic circles, the assault on neo-liberalism
became more philosophically generalized, at the same time, many
erstwhile Marxists (particularly those who had in the past been
disposed to Soviet orthodoxy) were theoretically running for
cover as the Soviet system collapsed.
Bates put the blame
for Africa’s incapacity to economically move forwards to
the African state’s "anti-developmental policies and
urban bias".(10) For Gunnarsson and Lundhal the post-colonial
state was "predatory" and prone to a developmentally
negative disposition.(11) A glaring weakness in the views of
these observers is their relative silence on the role of international
and globalizing interests in the creation of the African malaise.
In contrast to the concept of modernization, which for the reasons
I have given above and others is tainted by both theoretical inadequacies
and practical failures, some observers favour the notion of the
search for "modernity". When applied to the problems
of the Third World, this notion generically alludes to the search
for the same objectives and goals as the modernization theories
of old, but is not bound to any particular school of thought,
and is therefore open to diverse theoretical structurization.
It is used to denote the mix of ideas, ideals and practice which
has emerged out of Western progress since the European Enlightenment,
although some scholars, variously, choose different time span
as its historical record. While some prefer to restrict it to
the whole of the post-Enlightenment West, others relate it to
the West since about the 1860s while some have narrowed it further
down to the post-world war 11 era. Post-Modernism is defined in
reaction and contradiction to this. What for us in Africa needs
to be remembered is that, the concept of modernity is also heavily
loaded with Euro-centrism and cannot serve well our understandings
of African realities unless its relevance for each scholar-user
is clearly defined, with its relevance for Africa amply demonstrated.
The message which has over the past few decades of experience
filtered through to us is that whatever developmental formula
we may be disposed to, unless we build on what people have and
know, not much headway will be made. Needless to say, what people
have and know are constructed in their languages and cultures.
For one thing it is important to make a point that people best
develop from the foundations of their indigenous knowledge. African
societies like all non-Western, non-industrialized societies of
Africa, Asia and Latin-America are made up of populations which
have ancient collective memories and funds of knowledge about
their environments and which they utilize in the implementation
of their modes of livelihood. Such knowledge has deep and penetrating
roots embedded in the cultures of the people. Development, to
be meaningful, needs to acknowledge this fund of indigenous knowledge
and construct new knowledge on the foundations of what the people
already know. That way new knowledge is integrated into the indigenous
cultures of the people. The new knowledge thus does not bypass,
avoid or diminish the relevance of the old knowledge which the
people already have, but acknowledging the old, the new is added
on, respecting the cultural centrality of the indigenous for their
confidence and ability to relate the new to the old.
In the past, in the literature, a great deal of attention was
given to what was always described as appropriate technology.
While the term has semantic propriety, in practice it has tended
to be utilized to often describe inferior technology and unimaginative
technological innovations which do not significantly increase
the productive capacity of poor countries. This is not to say
that, as already said, the idea of appropriate technology is semantically
inappropriate to describe what needs to be done. Obviously technological
innovations and scientific inputs into the development efforts
of poor countries, like African countries, need to be environmentally
friendly, should be within the economic grasp of the people who
need such technology and scientific input, should be understandable
by the users, and should make a difference to their quality of
life. But this must not mean inferior or mickey-mouse technology.
Culture is a large and encompassing concept. It implies the totality
of products which have resulted from the creative ingenuity of
humans. Some of these products are material and are therefore
tangible while others, in such areas of social life like religion,
language, beliefs, customs and values are intangible, but are
often more instrumental in the guidance of behaviour than the
more recognizable material products of culture. While culture
is the result of human creativity, it is also the key factor which
shapes the way people behave. In as far as it is a historical
and social product often tied to geography and environment it
tends to have specificity with respect to the peoples who create
particular cultures. Thus, while cultures vary from one society
to the other, there are also features of different cultures which
are common to humanity as a whole. In an increasingly globalizing
world, where we are all becoming global villagers, living cheek
to jowl with everybody else, those cultural features which are
shared collectively by humanity as a whole are increasing by the
day. Coca-Cola has culturally globalized in much the same way
as Chinese food has. But, in spite of the universal cultural features
which we increasingly all share, the specifics of culture and
the particularities of cultural traits, values, artefacts, science
and technology remain. Some technologies are more prevalent and
are created more easily in some societies than others. In South
Africa where swimming pools have a higher per capita ratio than
anywhere else in the world the country also creates the best swimming
pool technology in the world. In Japan, bathroom technology is
more sophisticated and adapted to Japanese cultural values and
practice than anywhere else. The adaptation of science and technology
to suit the cultural and institutional foundations of the social
life of a given people affirms the sense of confidence and cultural
well-being of the people concerned.
The Peculiarities of Africa
In Africa, the history
of the process of the production and reproduction of knowledge
since the advent of colonialism, is for our purposes here instructive.
The object of education under colonialism was not as altruistic
is it is often made out to be. The idea of a civilizing mission
through which Africans were christianized, and taught to read
and write, was first and foremost an attempt to produce Africans
who would be serviceable for the project of colonialism; Africans
who will acquiesce to the strategy and tactics of the colonial
project.
The language of altruism and christian morality was one part
of the mind of the colonizer. There was another area of this mind
which accommodated institutionalized racism, military patrols,
punitive expeditions, genocide, looting and land-grabbing. Development
under colonialism was geared towards developing the sort of infrastructure
which enabled the exploitative extraction of minerals and the
production of colonial agricultural produce, the disengagement
of the colonized from their traditional modes of livelihood through
the imposition of taxes requiring wages and the engagement of
the labour of colonial subjects, their submission to the colonial
consumer market, and their compliance with the laws and by-laws
promulgated under colonial sponsorship and sanctioned by police
and military force. Colonial railways and roads ran from mining
and agricultural cash-crop production areas to the harbours.
The educational systems established under colonial tutelage in
practice produced social types who were culturally removed from
the cultures from which they sprung. The first and most important
vehicle for the removal and alienation of the educated African
from his or her original cultural moorings was the use of the
colonial language, English, French or Portuguese. Africans were
taught to be ashamed of their own languages and in some areas,
particularly in the French and Portuguese colonial areas, the
use of indigenous languages at school was punishable, sometimes
by flogging. The acquisition of knowledge was therefore right
from the start linked to the use of the colonial languages, and
this lent further spurious status of truth to the idea that knowledge
is available and accessible only in the colonial languages; the
other side of the logic of this argument was that, it was not
possible to learn science and technology or acquire knowledge
of any superior kind in the languages of the people. Those who
worked in colonial languages and who had acquired skills in the
use of these languages were the socially elevated, they represented
the basis of elite formation in the colonial order.
Western languages (like all languages) were not merely vehicles
of communication. They were, and continue to be cultural packages.
Packages through which in addition to the acquisition of the skills
of language use, one learnt to accept the values of Dickens. The
English or French language are also registers of the histories
and cultures of the people. Immersion in these languages from
the position of a colonial subject was therefore, to use a Malinowskian
term, an "acculturating" process.
This pattern of education and knowledge production was inherited
with only minor revisions by the post-colonial state. Indeed,
in post-colonial Africa apart from weak attempts in Tanzania and
Madagascar to use African languages as languages of education
at the post-primary levels, no country has made any serious attempt
at developing African languages as the basis for the production
and reproduction of knowledge. In the case of both Tanzania and
Madagascar, after some years of half-hearted trial and error the
policy of using indigenous languages consistently in the educational
system has been, in both cases, abandoned.
Language is the main pillar in any cultural system, and literacy
in a given cultural system represents the most important feature
in the development of a capacity for a language to work either
as a repository of past knowledge or as a basis for the development
and integration of new knowledge into the society or cultural
system. In all societies which are able to advance forward scientifically
and technologically, primacy is vested in the development and
use of languages indigenous to the people. This is true not only
for non-Western societies like China, Japan, Thailand, Cambodia
or Indonesia, but is equally true for countries, in the west,
like Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, France or Germany. Each
case that can be referred to as an example of an advancing and
developing society would be a society which works with its own
language and develops its culture and knowledge on the basis of
the language or languages of the masses. It needs also to be said
that the transfer of knowledge from outside a given cultural system
into an indigenous cultural system, to be efficacious, needs to
adapt the imported knowledge into the cultural system of a people
in such a way that the imports and adaptations blend into the
existing culture of the people. Development cannot be achieved
in circumstances where the cultures of the masses are steadily
abandoned in favour of cultures which are totally foreign to the
masses and which are familiar terrain for only small sections
of the elite. This point needs to be emphasized because it is
the absence of cultural relevance and the need for cultural adaptation
of external inputs into African development planning which in
our minds constitutes the major obstacle to success in development
planning and implementation in Africa.
Globalization, Culture and Development Planning
It is currently frequently
argued that, never in the history of humanity has the lot of
the human community been as intertwined as is presently the
case, with globalization and the integration of all into one
as the emergent order in the world.These days, the term"globalization"is
easily bandied around by all and sundry. It means different
things to different people. Some perceive it as a process that
is desirable; the inevitable and unalterable future of the world.
Others regard it with various degrees of scepticism, aversion
and apprehension. Such minds argue that it is, in fact, increasing
global economic, political and social inequities between countries,
that it undermines employment and living standards and frustrates
social progress.
Globalization could, in the best of all worlds, offer capacious
promises for genuine development on a world scale, but as it is
currently unfolding, its progress is developmentally uneven. Some
grow fat on its spoils while others wilt, maintain stunted growth
patterns and face economic ruin and damnation. Some countries
are becoming integrated into the global economy more quickly than
others. Countries that have been able to integrate are seeing
faster growth and reduced poverty. Export-driven policies matched
with economic innovativeness has brought remarkable prosperity
to much of East Asia, transforming it from one of the poorest
areas of the world 40 years ago, to virtually unstoppable economic
tigers surging forward by leaps and bounds. And as living standards
improve, so has the ability to embrace more enthusiastically democracy
and pressing issues such as the environment and the conditions
of labour.
In considerable contrast, since the 1970's many countries in
Latin America and Africa in particular have been pitched into
the exigencies of stagnating economies, increasing poverty levels,
and runaway inflation in societies increasingly overwhelmed by
an enduring kleptocratic ethos. In many cases, in especially Africa,
adverse external developments have made the problems worse. The
crises in the emerging markets in the 1990s have made it quite
evident that volatile capital movements and the risks of social,
economic, and environmental degradation created by poverty are
not being helpful. In spite of the bull markets we have seen sweep
the Western world in the past decade, we still live with the threat
of crashes and meltdowns in the principal stock and money markets
of the world.
Of all the issues attendant on globalization, the one outcome
which has not received the requisite degree of attention and scrutiny
is the effect of globalization on cultures of societies on the
periphery of the West. Some of the developed countries of Europe,
particularly France, Denmark and Italy are sensitive to the dwarfing
effect of American and Anglo-Saxon culture in general on their
own. France is especially touchy about this. In Africa, the steadily
overwhelming and brooding presence of western culture is singularly
blighting and is fossilizing indigenous cultures. In this respect,
the structural difference between France or Denmark and African
countries is that, in these European countries, the linguistic
and cultural basis of social life of the elite and mass society
are not only coterminous but also largely shared, on an everyday
basis, as a common patrimony. In the African case, the elite is
culturally narrowing its base and steadily alienating itself from
the cultures and languages of mass society. For African elites,
the extent to which European cultural features are imitated and
reproduced is representative of status and social influence. They
live and exist in Africa, assuming and exercising leadership,
but culturally they integrate into western culture as marginal
consumers. The centre of gravity for the creation of western culture
remains in the west. In a sense, it is therefore possible to describe
African elites as surrogates for western culture in Africa. The
question that follows from this reasoning is that, can an elite
which is beholden to western culture in a more or less unquestioning
fashion become the architect for a culturally indigenously oriented
transformation process? This curiously is a question which only
the African elite can raise and answer.
In spite of the fairly homogenous and guarded interests of the
African elite, they cannot be construed to be in ideas, ideals
and strategy uniform. There are positions of the philosophical
right and left amongst them, reformers and conservatives, "Africanists
(cultural nationalists) and Non-Africanists (cultural westerners)",
in short what I call elites and counter elites. The way and the
pace with which Africa accepts its historical and cultural belongings
in the development process will depend considerably on the contestation
between the elites and counter elites. Ultimately, it is how these
contesting social elements engage the minds and actions of the
grassroots which will determine the trajectory of developmental
change in Africa.
Planners and African Developmental Options
It would appear to me
clear from the above argumentation that, African development,
to be successful, would need to be premised on the cultural
fund embedded in social life of Africans. The key to the door
of the cultural world of Africans is African languages. In the
first instance they provide the basis of social identification
and secondly accesses the knowledge of the people. It is in
these languages that the creative aptitude and inventive instinct
of Africans are articulated. It is also in these languages that
any attempt to introduce ideas on a mass scale can be achieved.
It is almost farcical to assume that by working in the socially
very narrowly based languages of colonialism it will be possible
to effectively achieve transformation of African societies.
If, we want to be able to place African languages and cultures
centrally in our development endeavours we however need to clear
up the myth of their extraordinary profusion. A good example
of the confusion we find in thinking about African languages
is provided by Dominic Milazi’s observations on South Africa.
He writes that :
Language is, of course,
the very medium and heart of communication, the mainstay of
cultural heritage. ... We can to some extent identify language
as the salient feature which demonstrates the presence of ethnicity.
The challenge, of course, is to find a strategic role for indigenous
languages - a role in the national scheme of things. At the
same time this vexed question of the place of African languages
in national development must, in any future move designed to
deal with language policy in a comprehensive manner ... Given
the fact that national languages in many African states had
very little impact as far as paving the way for nation-building
- decolonization, promoting self-esteem and cultural integrity
- was concerned, the choice of eleven languages in South Africa
as national languages was the correct one. For one thing, it
gave expression to the principle of democracy and pluralism.
For another, it provides for the meaningful promotion of the
policy of national languages based on language rights, particularly
their recognition and application. This, in itself, should foster
the principle of intercultural tolerance.(12)
Milazi fails to register
the fact that in almost all African states, after independence
lip-service is paid to elevating the status of African languages.
Sometimes this is written into constitutions and at other times
not. Even when this is written into the constitution, in practice,
little is done to achieve this elevation, so that, in effect
the preeminence of the colonial languages have persisted, long
after the colonialists have left. It is also important to draw
attention to the fact that the so-called eleven languages of
South Africa are effectively four. The two clusters, i.e. Nguni
and Sotho/ Tswana consists of languages which are mutually intelligible
in both instances. Xhosa, Zulu, Ndebele and Swati are the same
language. Indeed, there are other dialectal variants of this
cluster as far north as Tanzania and includes speakers in Mozambique,
Malawi, Zimbabwe and Zambia. The same can be said for the Sotho/Tswana
cluster which has speakers in South Africa, Namibia, Lesotho,
Zimbabwe, Botswana, Zambia and Angola. I have elsewhere drawn
attention to these issues.(13) Why the role of African languages
in development must be a "vexed question" is unfortunate
because by his own account "Language is, of course, the
very medium and heart of communication, the mainstay of cultural
heritage". Fortunately, there is increasingly a realization
amongst some African academics and experts that the myth of
a profusion of African languages is empty. The argument has
been very well made by Hounkpati B. Capo in his inaugural lecture
at the University of Ilorin, Nigeria (Let us Joke Over it: Nigeria
as a Tower of Babel).(14)
Concluding Remarks
It needs to be emphasized
that all development planning and practical efforts in Africa
need to be undertaken with an eye on cultural relevancies in
general, and the language question in particular. The people
who need development, the African people in their masses speak
their own indigenous languages. If we need to reach them, and
need them to be able to understand and create with the innovative
ideas that are offered, then the language of communication and
transfer would need to be their own.
Westernization as a process of adaptation of Western thought
and techniques, the establishment of bureaucratic organizational
principles as ordering systems for production, distribution and
exchange, the institution and consolidation of democratic principles
of government, the sale of law and respect for human rights, in
our times, constitute basic and fundamental requirements for the
march towards modernity. But such ideas in the abstract remain
empty and vacuous platitudes unless they are translated in the
cultural and linguistic belongings of social majorities.
No ideas however lofty, well-meaning and humanitarian can resonate
with the broader classes unless these ideas find interpretable
entry points into the cultural familiarities of the people. In
other words, Western ideas must melt into African culture and
become African cultural adaptations of Western or universal modes
of thought and social practice. This requires a discriminative
and selective approach which while eschewing the backward conventions,
values and attitudes of archaic traditionalism is unhesitant in
absorbing practices and innovations which strengthen the cultural
basis of what African societies already have.
Institutions that have taken thousands of years to evolve should
be cast aside with great caution. It is possible and often more
useful to reform such institutions than to relegate them to the
dustbin of history, when, in fact, their significance in the individual
and collective life of societies is often, much larger than meets
the eye.
Notes
1. See, Guy Arnold.
Monitoring - The New Colonialism. In, West Africa. 20th-26th
November, 2000. P.2. A good example of this is provided by Abel
Mwanyungwe in the Business Day (South Africa) of Wednesday,
23rd May 2001. P.7. "The World Bank has asked government
not to increase funding to the foreign affairs ministry in the
2001-02 fiscal budget as an expenditure saving measure. In a
document, titled Malawi Budget 2001-02: Suggestions from a World
Bank Study, the bank said the squeeze on foreign affairs would
necessitate adopting measures to scale back foreign representation.
Malawi has 19 embassies worldwide, with an average of five Malawian
employees at each station."
2. I have looked at this issue in an earlier paper entitled
: The Notion of Cultural Blockage and Some Issues of Technology
Adoption Concerning the African Peasantry. In, K. K. Prah (ed).
Culture, Gender, Science and Technology in Africa. Schriftenreihe
der Deutschen Stiftung für Internationale Entwicklung (DSE).
Harp Publications. Windhoek. 1991. Pp. 48 - 65.
3. A good sample of such approaches is provided by the following;
Marion J. Levy. Jr. The Structure of Society. Princeton. 1952.
Karl W. Deutsch. Nationalism and Social Communication. New York.
1953. S. N. Eisenstadt. Essays on Sociological Aspects of Political
and Economic Development. The Hague. 1961. S. N. Eisenstadt. Social
Change and Modernization in African Societies South of the Sahara.
Cahier d'Etudes Africaines. Vol.5. No.19. 1965. Appears also in,
John Middleton (ed). Black Africa. New York. 1970. Wilbert Moore.
Social Change. Englewood Cliffs. 1963. Gabriel Almond and James
S. Coleman. The Politics of Developing Areas. Princeton. 1960.
J. S. Coleman. The Emergence of African Political Parties. In,
C. Grove Haines (ed) Africa Today. Baltimore. 1955. David. E.
Apter. The Politics of Modernization. Chicago. 1965. 1969 edition.
p.18-19. Edward Shils. Political Development in the New States.
The Hague. 1962.
4. Http://csf.colorado.edu/mail/psn/2000/msg01185. html
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
7. See Eisei Kurimoto. Introduction. In, E. Kurimoto (ed).
Rewriting Africa: Towards Renaissance or Collapse. Japan Centre
for Area Studies Symposium Series. No. 14. P.3. Osaka. 2001. P.3.
8. Takahashi Motoki. The Creation of Developmental States:
Arguments and the Reality in Africa. In, Kurimoto. Op cit. P.60.
9. A good illustrative study of the theory of Non-capitalist
Development (NCD) is provided by Esmail Hosseinzadeh. Soviet Non-Capitalist
Development: The Case of Nasser’s Egypt. Praeger Publishers.
New York. 1989. Recently, Burbach and Nunez have advanced an argument
which harps on the notion of non-capitalist development while
meaning something different from the original Soviet usage. Burbach
and Nunez argue that, in the making, within the global context
is a new non-capitalist mode of production which, all things being
equal, will overwhelm capitalism from below. For these authors
this new mode of production, consisting of workers, peasants,
petty traders, small businesses, street vendors, casual labourers
who work in the twilight areas of the periphery of the globalizing
economy. For them, this growing informal economy will ultimately
dethrone capitalist hegemony. There is some perceptive analysis
of globalization and neo-liberalism, but the way forward as viewed
by the authors is mired by considerable wishful thinking. See,
Roger Burbach, Orlando Nunez and Boris Kagarlitsky. Globalization
and its Discontents: The Rise of Postmodern Socialism. Pluto Press.
London. 1997.
10. R.H. Bates. Markets and States in Tropical Africa: The
Political Basis for Agricultural Policies. Berkeley. University
of California Press. 1981.
11. C. Gunnarsson and M. Lundhal. The Good, the Bad and
the Wobbly: State Forms and Third World Economic Performance.
In, M. Lundhal and B. J. Ndulu (eds) New Directions in Development
Economics: Growth, Environmental Concerns and Government in the
1990s. London. Routledge. Pp. 251-281
12. See, Dominic
Milazi. Ethnicity and State: Revisiting the Salience of Ethnicity
in South Africa. In, Kwesi Kwaa Prah and Abdel Ghaffar Mohammed
Ahmed. (eds). Africa and Transformation. Volume One. OSSREA,
Addis Ababa. 2000. Pp 114 - 115.
13. K.K. Prah
(ed). Between Distinction and Extinction. The Harmonization
and Standardization of African Languages. Witwatersrand University
Press. Jo’burg. 1998. See also, African Languages
for the Mass Education of Africans. Deutsche Stiftung fur Internationale
Entwicklung (DSE). Bonn, Germany. 1995. See also, Mother
Tongue for Scientific and Technological Development in Africa.
Deutsche Stiftung fur Internationale Entwicklung (DSE). Bonn,
Germany. 1995. See also, In Tongues: An Edited record
of the Accra Symposium on African Languages and the Challenges
of African Development. K.K. Prah and Y. King (eds). The Centre
for Advanced Studies of African Society (CASAS). Cape Town.
1998.
14. Hounkpati B. Capo. Let Us Joke Over it: Nigeria as a
Tower of Babel. Inaugural Lecture Series (44th). Unilorin Press
(Nigeria) and Labo Gbe (Int) (Benin). 1992.
