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the Column
Studies and reports

The world trade system leaves poor countries too little scope

Slight rise in German ODA

Africa: back to the roots is the wrong direction

Humanitarian aid can be impartial, but not neutral

Immunisation initiative: Nelson Mandela calls for participation

German hearing on GATS: different positions

Proposal for insolvency rights buried quietly

An oil pipeline


 

Conference in Loccum

Africa: back to the roots is the wrong direction

Reinold E. Thiel

"Ever so often African leaders and thinkers rediscover and reaffirm the future, which is invoked by all sorts of names, names of hope and redemption: the African revolution, reawakening, reconstruction, rebirth, regeneration, renewal, resurrection, revival and renaissance. These proclamations are part political propaganda, part cultural puffery, part collective prayer for new beginnings.… What African intellectuals are saying today is not new; it has been said for the last 100 years." The man who formulates this verdict is not a European critic but an African intellectual: Paul Tiyambe Zeleza, currently Director of the Center for African Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana. He was speaking during a conference on 'The Role of the Intellectual Elites in Africa' at the Evangelische Akademie in Loccum, Lower Saxony, March 21-23. The first African to whom Zeleza ascribes talk of "Renascent Africa" was in 1937 the pioneer of Nigerian independence, Nnamdi Azikiwe (whom his fellow countrymen affectionately called 'Dr. Zik'). At that time the term may still have had a real background. But after only a short period as an independent politician Azikiwe lapsed into silence until he died in 1996.

Yet this talk is still alive among the group of African intellectuals that Zeleza scornfully calls "the African chattering classes". They were also represented in Loccum, such as by the demand "We need to affirm our Africanness" – put by Tselane Morolo, of the National Research Foundation in South Africa. Long debates followed that: do we want to, must we, go back to our roots? But, asked Zeleza, what point in our tradition should we then define as the one to which to return? And above all, he said, we must not go back but forward, and our task is to define where forward is. But that has hardly been done so far – for the first time, said Seithy L. Chachage, of the University of Dar-es-Salaam, in creating NEPAD, the New Partnership for Africa's Development. NEPAD no longer makes colonialism responsible for the shortcomings in Africa's development, but the Africans themselves, who should stand up and strive instead of lamenting their lot. Today it is the donor agencies with their power of definition that determine which path African development should take. They were only able to do that, said Zeleza, because African intellectuals did not make it their task, having given up the power of definition. Cassandra Veney, Director of the Unit for African Studies at Illinois State University, described the danger she sees in the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) passed by the US Congress in May 2000: Under this law African politicians were no longer responsible to their own people for their development policy, but to the President of the United States.

That in Africa a new generation of goal-oriented intellectual politicians is about to grasp the levers of power was made clear by the striking appearance of P. Anyang' Nyong'o, the Planning Minister of the new Kenyan government, who is also a member of the African Academy of Sciences. His model is the Asian tiger states and Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore's former Prime Minister. Nyong'o said governments must define development goals and design a policy to achieve them. He illustrated that by the example of Kenya's new education policy and by his pledge not to rely solely on money from outside but to improve the tax collection systems and put to use the country’s own resources. Africa should, however, distinguish itself from the Asian states by a higher level of democracy; concepts for that had been developed by many years of work in the Dakar-based Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA), the most important think-tank, according to Nyong’o, in conceptual work for Africa's future and a potential provider of ideas for NEPAD.