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Development/Africa

Kofi Akosah-Sarpong continues his discussions with Prof. George Ayittey on his argument that US President Barack Obama's Accra speech that Africa's future is in Africans hands is an “intellectual vindication” for the “Internalist School” of African development

Q. How did the “Internalist School” came about?
A. It evolved rather slowly in the 1970s. When Africa gained its independence in the 1960s, the euphoria that gripped the continent was infectious. “Free at last!” was the chant that resonated across Africa. African nationalist leaders who won independence for their respe3ctive countries were hailed as heroes and deified. Currencies bore their portraits. Statues were built for name and every monument was named after them. It was even sacrilegious to criticize them. They outlawed opposition parties, declared their countries to be one-party states and themselves “presidents for life.” It was their intolerance of dissent, lack of democratic freedom and creeping despotism that sowed the seeds of internalist revolt.

Very soon in the late 1960s, the euphoria over independence and the honeymoon wore off. It became increasingly clear that Africa had traded one set of masters (white colonialists) for another (black neo-colonialists) and the oppression and the exploitation of the African continued unabated. Soldiers stepped in a spate of coups in the 1970s but the soldiers were themselves another batch of “crocodile liberators” far worse than the despots they replaced. Africa's post colonial story is one truculent tale of one betrayal after another. This has little to do with colonialism but leadership failure.

Q. But at the philosophical level from the 1960s on African leaders such

as Kwame Nkrumah, Julius Nyerere, Kenneth Kaunda, Sekou Toure and Mobutu Sese Seku came out with various developmental paradigms. For example, Kenneth Kaunda and “Capitalist Humanism,” where the humanist essence of the African culture should drive progress, or Mobutu Sese Sekou and “Africanization,” where African cultural values were highly encouraged and enforced in the Congo-Kinshasa's development process. In historical and

practical terms, how is the Internalist School different from all these

earlier thinking?
A. There is a lot of confusion surrounding the terms “internalist orthodox,” “development paradigm” and ideologies espoused b the first generation of post colonial leaders such as Nkrumah, Kaunda, Nyerere and others.

After independence, having rejected both colonialism and capitalism, the new leaders needed an alternative ideology. Although some elements of communism seemed appealing, its adoption would have entailed their nations' becoming satellites of the Soviet Union. European socialism, on the other hand, was a poor substitute. Its acceptance would have been interpreted as continued reliance on the European colonialists. Requiring a different ideology, the nationalists settled on "African socialism"--a nebulous concept that borrowed heavily from European socialism but with liberal usage of such terms as "communalism," thus enabling it to be portrayed as based upon African traditions. Further, the definition could be made flexible enough to permit different interpretations and applications to suit the social conditions prevailing in each African country.

As a result, a proliferation of socialist ideologies emerged in Africa, including some that were quite bizarre. They included: Julius Nyerere's Ujamaa (familyhood or socialism in Swahili) in Tanzania; Leopold Senghor's vague amalgam of Marxism, Christian socialism, humanitarianism, and "Negritude" in Senegal; Kenneth Kaunda's humanism in Zambia; Marien N'Gouabi's scientific socialism in the Congo (Brazzaville); Muammar Gaddafi's Arab Islamic socialism in Libya; Kwame Nkrumah's Nkrumaism ("consciencism") in Ghana; Mobutu Sese Seko's Mobutuism in Zaire; and Habib Bourguiba's Bourguibisme in Tunisia. Only a few African countries, such as the Ivory Coast, Nigeria, and Kenya were pragmatic enough to eschew doctrinaire socialism.

Regardless of their professed ideology, nearly all the leaders chose the same development paradigm: state-centered or state-led development model in which the state was to spearhead development, be the entrepreneur, the planner etc. This model was adopted by even “capitalist” countries such as Ivory Coast, Kena and Nigeria.

The internalist doctrine refers to the causes of Africa's current crisis. A crisis is a short term adversity and has to be managed before development, a long term process, is tackled. The internalist doctrine has not yet been converted into a development paradigm.

Q. As some of the names mentioned above show, such as Mobutu, is the

problem of hatching African-values driven development paradigms for

Africa's development with the nature of African leaders and elites

thinking or is it with the mindset of the leaders and elites or the

prevailing political climate that was to fertilize these ideas? How does

the Internalist School reconcile all these contradictions and float a new

African development paradigm?
A. The real problem is the fundamental lack of understanding of African values, cultural, political and economic heritage. These leaders were not taught about them in the colonial schools, which taught African students more about European history. As a result, the first generation of African leaders had only an imperfect understanding of their own indigenous African institutions. Even today, this anomaly has not been rectified. If you asked any educated African today how an African chief is chosen and removed from office, they will be stumped.

The problem was this: You had African leaders and elites who genuinely wanted to craft an “African-values driven development paradigm.” But they only had scant understanding of the indigenous sstem. The results were meretricious caricatures of what they thought were the indigenous. One egregious example was Sekou Toure's of Guinea's program of "Marxism in African Clothes.' Under that program, "unauthorized trading became a crime. Police roadblocks were set up around the country to control internal trade (The New York Times, Dec 28, 1987; p.28).

Markets and trading have been part of indigenous African economic heritage for centuries before the colonialists stepped foot on the continent. The supposedly "backward" chiefs of Africa seldom banned any market trading activity. But the most outrageous perfidy occurred in Ghana between 1981 and 1983. Continued    Source: Kofi Akosah-Sarpong

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