An Aimless Blind Quest For Knowledge

Here are just some of them. Egypt is suspended from the AU amid the ongoing political violence there. Then seven UN peacekeepers are killed in Darfur, ethnic fighting in Guinea, while the M23 and Boko Haram rebels continue battling the DRC and Nigerian governments, respectively. So, Quo Vadis Africa? More broadly, what is Africa’s place and role in the broader structure, process and trajectory in contemporary world development?

Before independence Africa seemed poised for greatness. The legendary singer, Jackson Kaujeua, sang proudly of the winds of change blowing across the continent. The great statesman Kwame Nkrumah, enthusiastically spoke and wrote at length about how Africa’s political independence would herald on the continent economic development to benefit its people. It was actually Nkrumah who coined the term ‘African Renaissance’ but Thabo Mbeki gave it academic respectability – there is now an Institute of African Renaissance at Unisa.

But where is the continent after more than half a century of independence at least for some of the countries? I was in Accra in 2007 when Ghanaians and the rest of Africans and other well-wishers were celebrating Ghana’s 50th anniversary of her independence.

Africa got her political independence and that’s important. That is to be applauded and need to be celebrated – that’s political change, but are we free as yet? How can we be free while the majority of our people are mired in abject poverty?

What happened to Nkrumah’s political kingdom that was supposed to have heralded economic kingdom and thus prosperity? In my view a good part of Africa is now just a shadow of its former past. And the politics of rhetoric and symbolism seem to weigh heavily on our shoulders.

There are, of course, some bright spots here and there but these tend to be overshadowed by the bigger picture. Former President Nyerere, for example, was an early advocate of a self-reliance development policy in Africa. Put in simple terms, this quest for Africa’s place in the sun has centred on the search for capital, knowledge and know-how.

But ironically that meant Africa has looked to the outside world for help. At independence most African students graced the halls of universities in the countries of their former colonial masters and they still continue to do so, perhaps even in much greater numbers than before.

Remember how in the 1970s and 80s everyone, including Africans, saw Japan and the five Asian Tigers as models of development to emulate? The conventional wisdom was that the Asian Tigers shared the same characteristics as Africa and therefore we could learn from them.

But those countries have moved on to another level of economic development. And Africa is now once again caught in the vortex of having to search for direction in terms of political and economic direction and alignment. We are now told China and India have been the missing link in the continent’s quest for knowledge, renewal and development. I remember various Namibian delegations that went to India, for example, to study their green schemes or how their electronic voting machines work – which hopefully will be used in our next elections.

But Africa’s belief that it can learn from somewhere in order to spur its own development continues unabated. So, you have endless trips by high-ranking Africans to foreign lands in search of this rare commodity called knowledge. There is one lesson that Africans need to learn and is pretty simple: that no outsider can develop Africa. So, let’s learn from our own mistakes.

Unless we do that Africa will remain what it has been since colonial times – a reservoir of raw material and cheap labour for others. We are now witnessing fierce competition between China, India and the West over Africa’s rich natural resources. But the promises that Africa would reap from a greater India, China’s engagement in terms of high commodity prices, technology transfer and capital injection are minimal.

But how we easily tend to lose track of history? Are these not the same benefits that Western multi-nationals used to promise? So both China and India are just joining a long tradition of exploiting Africa with the connivance of African leaders themselves.

The collapse of socialism and the subsequent onslaught from an animated capitalism – aka globalisation – explain this scenario. But people have to distinguish between internationalism and globalisation.

The former was a way of looking at the world through the lenses of humanity; whereas globalisation is an ideology about the market and the centrality of capital and its disrespect for national boundaries and national labour laws. Unless we understand the dynamics of the international system, we will remain on the margin of contemporary world development.