Development: Touting the “African Way”

Two articles in the July issue of the London, UK-based New African magazine about the need to think a new African development paradigm from within its cultural habits reminded me of President John Kufour at the recent BBC World Debate forum in Johannesburg, South Africa. Kufour envisage the coming of a new African development philosophy, informed from within its cultural idiosyncrasies, that will create a new thinking, among other progressive goals, that will make the over 2,000 African ethnic groups see themselves as one and not different.

The central thesis of the new thinking, as sparks from various parts of Africa indicate, is that African development thinking will be thought off from within its culture up to the global level, as other regions of the world have done, and not the other way round as has been the case for the past 51 years.

The New African pieces, like Kufour's views, reinforce the growing thinking among some Africans that an “African Way,” just like the “Asian Way,” of development paradigm is needed to drive Africa's progress. The “African Way” will draw from a mixture of African culture, its colonial heritage and the global prosperity process. The reason is that African culture is missing from Africans progress in their larger progress. In this approach, Africa's long-running problem with confidence, a development issue, will be transformed into self-assurance driven by Africa's rich cultural values as the Asians have done.

In China May be Right in Africa, Kwaku Atuahene-Gima, of the China Europe International Business School, drawing from his observations from the Chinese environment and their appropriation of the global prosperity values into their cultural values, argues that Africa has to learn from the Chinese ability to mix, and positively deviate, from the dominant Western development orthodoxy (more economic and democratic/political) and created a unique development process that has seen China emerge as global economic superpower. Atuahene-Gima teaches innovation and marketing and is aware that the promotion of innovation creates economic and social prosperity and part of Africa going the Chinese way is by appropriating African cultural tendencies in its development process.

In Obama Has Cleared the Way For Black Achievement, Cameron Duodu, a veteran journalist, analyzed that the US Democratic Presidential candidate Barack Obama, who has a Kenyan (African) father and a white mother, reflects Africa's need to mix its development process from its cultural values and the global development ones, so as to let Africa get to a progressive goal that is informed by where it comes from – its conventional values. In Obama, as is expected of Africa, his African culture wasn't denigrated (with all its psychological implications) but his white mother skillfully allowed him to “take in all cultures with respect” in his development process. The result is Obama balanced developmentally both emotionally and intellectually.

In Atuahene-Gima and Duodu, Y.K. Amoako, the former chair of the UN Economic Commission for Africa, observation of the troubles of Africa's development process is made clear: Amoako says that Africa is the only region in the world where its development process is dominated by foreign development paradigms to the detriment of its rich traditional values. For psychological reasons, the import of China and Obama is that Africa can re-tool its development process by creating a new “African Way” of development paradigm that mixes its traditional values and the global ones.

Such lack of clear and detailed “African Way” might have informed City University of New York's Steve Panford argument that African desires transformational elites to think out loudly from within African cultural ideals for progress. In Searching for Transformational Elites in Ghanaian Development, Panford makes the case that Ghanaian traditional values should also inform Ghana's progress as have been Western paradigms that currently runs, in an unbalanced way, Ghana's development progress. The thinking here is that Ghana pride itself as the “Black Star of Africa,” but hasn't demonstrated any attempts at an “African Way.”

The “Asian Way” was created by its transformative elites. Whether in Malaysia's Mahathir Mohamad, Japan's Akio Morita, South Korea's Gen. Park Chung Hee, Taiwan's Gen. Chiang Kai-shek, Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew or China's Deng Xiaoping, we see Panford's transformational elites as directors of progress who have a vast grasp of their cultural values and the global prosperity ideals. No doubt, though there are some rifts between tradition and capitalism in Asians' march to prosperity, since 1949, as Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw argue in The Commanding Height, “the Asian miracle is now sometimes called “Confucian capitalism,” a reminder of their elites' ability to play with their cultural values and the neo-liberal development paradigms. The result, as Robert Kagan indicates in The Return of History And The End of Dreams, is an “Asian arc of freedom and prosperity” stretching from Japan to Indonesia to India.

Minting an “African Way” doesn't mean abandoning the good parts of Africa's colonial heritage, but as Atuahene-Gima argues, Africa's progress necessitates the need to “develop systems of government that take into account the peculiarities of Africa without throwing away elements of other systems that may be useful to us.” What Atuahene-Gima is saying is mixing Africa's cultural idiosyncrasies with the global prosperity values that will suit Africa's historical and psychological context. Already, Botswana has shown the way and the result is prosperity in the last 20 years.

The World Bank has said this. South Africa's Thabo Mbeki's “African Renaissance” argues same. The time has come to tout credibly the “African Way” as a development paradigm.