Africa's development : the imperatives of indigenous knowledge and values

Abstract

In post-colonial Africa, conceptions of the nature and purposes of development as well as the theories and strategies for achieving them have remained a territory traversed predominantly by non-African social scientists. In this context, social scientists studying Africa's development proclaimed, at the dawn of the 1990s, a "paradigmatic crisis" and embarked on a quest for new paradigms .

In advancing this quest, a number of "homegrown" development strategies have emerged. This work argues that these are mere adaptations and reconstructions of dominant Eurocentic paradigms that exaggerate the value of economic goods and wealth creation founded on a competitive marketplace by making them immutable features of development. Yet the ethic of competition theoretically condones a trajectory of killing in the quest for wealth accumulation. In this way, internalist epistemologies perpetuate epistemicide and valuecide in Africa's strides towards development.

The stranglehold of internalist epistemologies has resulted in the impasse of rationality. By this we mean that Reason, apotheosized since the Enlightenment, has advanced humanity out of barbarism to "civilization" but has now placed humanity on the brink of unredeemable barbarism. Reason, through its manifestations in the philosophy of Mutual Assured Destruction and global warming, has condemned humanity to willful but avoidable suicide.

Since the subjects and objects of development must be one and the same, development is necessarily culture-derived and culture-driven, with the preservation and improvement of human dignity and welfare as its ultimate aims. Accordingly, we defend the thesis that it is necessary for a framework meant for Africa's development to be founded on indigenous knowledge and values, if it is to succeed. And at this moment of impasse reached by Reason, an African ethics-based development paradigm, predicated on humaneness and "life is mutual aid", can restore Reason to sober rationality and liberate Africa's development efforts from the intoxicating prison of profit making.

Hence the institutions and frameworks devoted to Africa's development, such as the Constitution and Strategic Plan of the African Union as well as NEPAD, must incorporate salient features of the philosophic ethic emanating from the knowledge and ontological systems of indigenous Africa into visions of the African future.