5 - Afrocentricity on the Significance of Culture in the Conceptualization of an African Development Paradigm

Summary

Culture stands out as a critical aspect of Afrocentricity in terms of an analysis of what should inform the Afrocentric development trajectory in Africa and for Africans in the diaspora. The European invasion of Africa set in motion cultural imperialism that resulted in the dislocation of African people from their own cultural grounding.

As I have mentioned in Chapter 3, the discourse of development in Africa has remained deeply entangled in colonially imposed matrices of power. It has not enabled Africans to imagine development from the perspective of their own history and cultural experiences. Such a perspective on development has only imposed on Africa a tendency to mimic the European modernization project as the sole model that should define what development is for Africa because the conceptualization of mainstream development in the aftermath of World War II was guided by modernization theory, with its extension as a neoliberal framework derived from the experiences of Western countries.

The main challenge facing Africa since the fifteenth century, which marks the start of mercantilism and Christianization, is the need for Africans to find their own voices and a cultural anchor for their endeavour to shape Africa's development prospects. Epistemic colonization by European scholars produced a continent dependent on Europeans to define the value of African's culture, including what that culture meant for the development future of Africa. Their agenda was to create Africans who think from a European perspective and who will forever remain dependent beneficiaries of Europe. Marimba Ani in her book Yuguru: An Afrikan-Centered Critique of European Cultural Thought and Behaviour, therefore, attacks European cultural imperialism in her reference to the concept of asili, the central seed or germinating matrix of a culture, to expose how European white supremacist thought believes in its own superiority to the denigration of African culture and humanity. As a result of the Eurocentrism of development discourse, African development discourse has for too long accepted the idea of the ‘catch-up thesis’, as Mkandawire calls it, which presents the development in Africa as seeking to be like the West – industrialized and modern.