Towards an Afrocentric development paradigm in Africa

Abstract

This study deployed the theory of Afrocentricity as a revolutionary epistemic and methodological framework relevant to challenging the dominance of Eurocentrism in the conception of development as an ideology, process and practice in Africa. The study argues that development as a field of study has remained hostage to Euro-North American-centric modernist and “civilizing” mission thinking. Due to this interpellation, it has become difficult for Africa to design alternative development models to replace the current Western-centric modernist and neo-liberal development model. This study analyses the discourse of development as a European epistemic creation and, in particular, as a product of European imperial strategies and a mechanism of conquest in the aftermath of World War II (from 1945 to 2020). “Development” masquerades as an emancipatory discourse, while in reality it is all too often a tool that serves the continuance of neo-colonialism and Westernization. The study hypothesizes that the post-World War II Truman development project, grounded within the modernization ideology, is derived from the logic of “voyages of discovery” and Enlightenment notions of salvation, progress, civilization, modernization, development and emancipation. These “voyages” opened the way for mercantilism, slave trade, imperialism, colonialism, and later, neo-colonialism in Africa. Consequently, development as an offshoot of the Enlightenment and modernity came to be used as a heuristic stratagem of domination entangled in a complex and long history of imperialism and colonialism. Informed by Afrocentric thought, this thesis proposes that African development debates need to be decolonized and indeed Africanized in order to help liberate the discourse of development from these parochial epistemic foundations. An Afrocentric paradigm which privileges Africa as the cradle of humankind, as a continent with a very rich history, culture and agency, is deployed in the re-conceptualization and re-definition of development as an endogenous process which is not foreign to Africa. The study posits that sustainable resolutions to the development impasse in Africa must be found in Africa’s own rich history and culture, and in asserting the significance of African agency. Afrocentricity as a guiding theoretical paradigm in this study argues that the main challenge confronting African people is their “unconscious” acceptance of Western colonial epistemology and its theoretical frameworks as their own. Afrocentricity seeks to liberate Africans to assert themselves intellectually and psychologically within their own historical and cultural experiences, thus breaking the bonds of Western domination and enabling them to become agents of their own change, as opposed to being objects of European development discourses. Thus the deployment of Afrocentricity in this study enables a decolonization of Development Studies in Africa from a Western hegemony and sets the path for its re-articulation within the African context. The thesis is underpinned and framed by three units of analysis: history, culture and agency, all drawn from an Afrocentricity as liberatory paradigm.