Keynote address for 4th IDIA Conference 2010, UCT, Cape Town South Africa
Introduction
Development for Africa is fraught with a multiplicity of exogenously generated ideas, models and research paradigms, all with the purported goal of ‘alleviating’ or bringing about ‘the end of poverty … in our lifetime’ (cf. Sachs 2005). This discourse, which like fashion, goes round in circles, is carried on mainly by ‘development’ agents and ‘experts’ (mainly social and pseudo-social scientists moonlighting through consultancies) and who often limit the question of development to the problematic of achieving growth or ‘the end of poverty’ within the context of neo-liberal economic principles.
Notwithstanding the rise of ‘alternative development’ thinking and practice, the problem is rarely studied in a holistic manner. This is especially true of Africa, where problematic ‘expectations of modernity’ (Ferguson 1999) have engendered technicised, disembedded, depoliticised and sanitized approaches to ‘development’ as a unilinear process of routinised, standardized, calculable and predictable practices (Ferguson 1990). There is more emphasis on teleology and analogy than on the systematic study of ongoing processes of creative negotiation by Africans of the multiple encounters, influences and perspectives evident throughout their continent. Africans are actively modernizing their indigeneities and indigenizing their modernities, often in ways not always obvious to scholarly fascination with dichotomies.
This was wonderful.
Proud of you.
Posted by: NJI Blasius Charles | July 26, 2011 at 08:49 AM