The Entrapment of Africa within the Global Colonial Matrices of Power

Abstract

This article deploys world-systems analysis and the concept of coloniality to examine the experience of the African people within the modern world-system since 1492, a date that figuratively marks the birth of the modern world-system and its shifting international orders. Africa’s experience is contextualized within six international orders: the post-1492 order, the Westphalian order that emerged in 1648, the post-1884–1885 Berlin consensus, the post-1945 United Nations normative order, the Cold War epoch that ended in 1989, the current neoliberal dispensation as well as the post 9/11 anti-terrorism and securitization. While Africans have actively contested Euro–North American hegemony throughout these periods, they have not yet succeeded in breaking the strong global technologies of coloniality that continue to prevent the possibilities of African agency. This is why this article ends with a call for deepening the decolonization and deimperialization of the international order in the twenty-first century.