Making a Nation Modern

Abstract

Abstract In the period after World War II, Cold War politics and the rising tide of the decolonization movement propelled U.S. leaders and social scientists to intensify their involvement on the African continent. As imperial power shifted from Britain and France, the United States became the new hegemon. Like the Europeans who believed in a divine mandate to civilize the “backward” people of the world, the United States found that its financial capital and economic power gives it the authority to intervene in the affairs of the Global South and shape these emerging nations into a new image. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the Center for International Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (CIS) created what was known as the “African Economic and Political Development Project” to study emerging democracies in Africa. This article examines the role played by CIS in the design of Nigeria’s first national development plan and in influencing the Kennedy administration to pledge $225 million aid to Nigeria’s program. It argues that the modernists’ vision of making Nigeria a model modern state in Africa failed because of regional/ethnic politics and differences, the reliance on international experts over local Nigerian economists, and the economic prescriptions that favored short-term gains over long-term investments.