Afro-centric Ethics of Development in a Global Capitalist Order

Abstract

As African scholars interested in Africa’s development, we have consistently attributed the problems and complexities of Africa’s development to the exogenous programmes and policies from the West. There is always the claim that the values that promote development in the African continent are foreign and strange to African cultures and that accounts for the slow pace of development in Africa in spite of the enormous efforts towards improving Africa’s situation. This work acknowledges such sentiments of foreign invasion on African cultural values in the quest for Africa’s development. But the problem that Africa faces in this situation and the subsequent goal to overturn the present development logic in which foreign parameters are exclusively applied on African situation is that Africa has no articulated development ethics as we find in the West as being advanced by Denis Goulet and Des Gasper. Theories, policies and programmes of development in Africa which originate from the Western-based multilateral and multinational organizations have conformed to the logics of development advanced by these scholars. Adopting the analytical approach, we argue that African cultures are rich in values and have capacity to drive Africa’s development with their own standard ethical framework that can answer the questions of development confronting Africa. This way, African agents of development would embrace policies and programmes with more commitments towards Africa’s development activities. Keywords: African situation, development logic, cultural values, Afro-centric ethics development, Africa, Indigenous values