African Underdevelopment Research Articles

An Assessment of the Partition and Scramble of Africa and the Effect of Slave Trade in the Continent

The scramble and Partition of African countries began in earnest with the Berlin Conference of 1884-1885, and this was the cause of the most of Africa’s borders today. The conference was called by German Chancellor Bismarck to settle how European countries would claim colonial land in Africa and to avoid a war among European nations over African territory. All the major European States were invited to the conference which includes the Germany, France, Great Britain, Netherlands, Belgium, Portugal, and Spain were all considered to have a future role in the imperial partition of Africa. The United States was invited because of its interest in Liberia but did not attend the conference because it had no desire to build a colonial empire in Africa. Also invited were Austria–Hungary, Sweden–Norway, Denmark, Italy, Turkey, and Russia who all were considered minor players in the quest for colonizing Africa, though Italy has claim some colonial possessions in Northeast Africa. Most notably there were no Africans present at that conference, nor were any Europeans present to ensure that native Africans had any say in the proceedings. This paper has adopted secondary source of data in the process of data collection. The findings of the paper have revealed that partition in Africa has led to emergence of colonialism, slave trade and other related contemporary imbalance that led to for present African underdevelopment. The paper recommended that African countries needs to be allowed to run its affairs as an independent sovereign countries to manage both their mineral and human resource to compete with every continent of the world interterms of development dynamism and African countries should develop an approach that will help them to fight social menace of poverty, corruption, insecurity and unemployment.

#TheAfricaTheMediaNever ShowsYou: An Afrodiasporic Subaltern Counterpublic

Media representations of African underdevelopment are central to the communicative potential and reach of international development in the mainstream public sphere, but they are not without sustained critique and confrontation. By conceptualising the humanitarian-themed campaign – #TheAfricaTheMediaNeverShowsYou on Twitter, as an Afrodiasporic Subaltern Counterpublic, this article considers how UK African diasporic communities have utilised this digitalised environment to oppose the popular but problematic ‘face of development’. Applying Nancy Fraser’s counterpublics theorisation and drawing on social media ethnography and multiple participant interviews, it shows how oppositional counter-discourses among these online diasporic communities challenge problematic African representation within ‘white media’. This is realised in three distinct but interrelated discursive practices: (1) Afrodiasporic solidaristic orientations; (2) Diasporic solidarism as an assemblage(d) response to development’s institutionalised whiteness; and (3) Countering Africa(n) misrepresentations.

Africa rising? Ian Taylor’s legacy in the study of African underdevelopment

Africa rising? Ian Taylor’s legacy in the study of African underdevelopment

The History of Gender Inequality: Analysis of Gender Inequality as a Colonial Legacy in Africa

The colonial legacy of African underdevelopment is widely debated but hardly written. Boserup’s theory advances the argument that African system of government prior to the colonial one had a deeply encultured notion of gender inequality. However, this work is set forth to argue that colonization was a radical disruption that brought serious imbalances that include gender inequality. Within the process of colonization, gender inequality helped as one of the tools to advance Africa’s underdevelopment. Against Boserup’s view, this paper will investigate the hypothesis that African gender inequality and female disempowerment are rooted in the colonial epoch. It is argued that the arrival of Europeans in Uganda ignited a century-long transformation of Kampala including a gender Kuznets curve. Boserup’s theory relates that as men rapidly acquired literacy and quickly found their way into white-collar employment in the economic system built by Europeans, women took longer to obtain literacy and enter decent jobs. Among other factors, this is one of those that gravely created a noticeable gap which aided gender inequality between the African men and women. Different works by African scholars will be consulted in attempt to clarify the argument that Boserup’s theory provides the incorrect view about African normative culture. Boserup argues that after Uganda’s independence in 1962 another wave of inequality took place as some women got educated and got decent jobs while some continued operating within the informal traditional economic system. In her writings, Boserup seems skewed towards the argument that African traditional system always had gender inequality embedded in it, but she does not care much to elaborate the background framework that makes her have that view. It seems somewhat indefensible to argue that brutal elements of the society like gender inequality are rooted within the traditional norms because that may create a situation whereby the underdeveloped gender, due to love of their tradition, do not make effort to better themselves. It is for that reason that this paper adopts analytic theoretical framework to critically analyse Boserup’s theoretical view that gender inequality was rooted in the indigenous African norms.

Dancing on a knife-edge: European colonisation of Africa and Nigeria’s cultural crisis

ABSTRACT At the centre of African underdevelopment are slave trade and colonization. Expectedly, these two issues have been in the front burner of academic discourse, especially in Africa. While the literature is stuffed with forms and causes of colonialism, this current article contributes to the existing literature by interrogating the relationship between colonialism and some selected parts of Nigerian culture. The paper therefore examined the effects of colonialism on African culture, the relationship between colonisation and Nigeria’s cultural crisis, including the challenges it poses for her identity. Using descriptive analysis and evidence-based research method, the study found that certain aspects of valued Nigerian culture were being eroded, especially as it related to the role of purity in religion and marriage. Findings further showed that the enthusiastic assimilation of Western culture by the younger generation was suggestive of a culture whose future is on a knife-edge.

Critical Reflection on the Human Nature and the African Underdevelopment

African countries can at best be said to be underdeveloped. Graciously, however, they are said to be developing countries. But the indices of underdevelopment far outweigh the ones that designate them as developing. Compared to the developed world, African countries appear to be retrogressing by the day. This is worrisome. And many have wondered aloud the source of this precarious and parlous situation in which the Africans have found themselves. Some have identified it as a lack of true and committed leadership; for others, it is the faulty constitutions, lack of respect for the rule of law, corruption, etc. Some solutions have been proffered on how to burst the shackles of African underdevelopment. But the more fundamental question is to ask whether there is anything in African man that resists development. Is the nature of the African man different from the rest of humanity? This paper reflects critically and analytically on human nature. It notes that Africans do not possess anything less of all that make up the contents of human nature. They simply have to begin their development process through the use of their indigenous economic model, just like the rest of the developed world did.

The Unending Development Question of Nigeria

Nigeria is not just a country in Africa but a major and critical one. This is given its massive population size (human) and other important resources. Nigeria is the most populous country in Africa and it is among the most natural resources endowed nations on the continent. Nigeria is strategic to leadership provision in Africa as this has been proven over the years by its frontline roles in ECOWAS (Economic Community of West African States), AU (African Union), NEPAD (New Economic Partnership for African Development) and African Commonwealth for instance. This is why the negative multiplier effects of Nigeria’s continued underdevelopment have been widely acknowledged and remain great concern since the consequences of the underdevelopment not only impact the country and Africa but also the world at large. Old and recent developments in Nigeria make another interrogation compelling. Given the lingering disjuncture between democratic expectations and development results in Nigeria, as a good African underdevelopment case study, there is a need for continued examination and engagement of the development question that has remained unanswered. It is against this background that this article contributes to the burgeoning body of literature on the persistent underdevelopment of Africa, through Nigeria’s case study, with a view to further understanding the trajectories. This is particularly important as existing narratives, tales, explanations and practices appear to insufficiently account for the development realities of Nigeria, as it remains deeply rooted in underdevelopment. Methodologically, based on primary insights and secondary data through systematic review of literature and databases, the article addresses pertinent issues about Nigeria's development and articulate lucid descriptions of the development challenges faced by Nigeria. The article reviewed Nigeria's past experiences of failed development policy and examined the factors responsible for development failures with conclusions and recommendations on how Nigeria can overcome the obstacles to development as best practice for developing countries.

Western Exploitations and the Nexus of African Underdevelopment

This paper examines Walter Rodney’s argument of How Europe Underdeveloped Africa and its justification years after political independence. The paper has adapted Dependency Theory. The paper has reveals that widening gap between Developed and Underdeveloped States is as a result of both external and internal factors especially the colonial integration of African economies in the World Capitalist System and its exploitative institutions and programmes and internal factors of both systemic and institutional corruption, political instability, colonial mentality of consumption and other factors are responsible for underdevelopment of Africa with attendant effects of poverty, inequality, unemployment, disease and infrastructural decay etc. on basis of conclusion. The paper recommended that visionary and purposeful leadership that surrounds itself with experts will initiate and sustain revolutionary development in Africa. Also proper planning and continuity in developmental policies and programmes and united front against corruption be strictly adhered to for the continent to develop. Keywords: Development, Underdevelopment, Exploitations and Good Governance. DOI: 10.7176/JAAS/64-06 Publication date: May 31 st 2020

The Integration of West Africa in the Global Economy, 1842-1938

Despite the essential role that international trade has historically played for resource-rich African economies, growth possibilities have been hindered by considerable trade barriers. Yet, in the large literature on commodity market integration, Africa is a blank spot and little is known about the origins of high trade costs in the African export markets. In this article, we contribute to fill this gap by analyzing West African trade costs from the mid-nineteenth century to the eve of World War II. We construct estimates of international trade costs by applying a flexible threshold model to a representative sample of West African export prices and European import prices. Our results show that trade costs for West Africa experienced a substantial reduction from the 1840s to 1880, similar to the one we observe in other areas of the world. After the 1880s, however, they declined in the rest of the world, but not in West Africa. Consequently, since the late nineteenth-century, trade for West Africa became relatively more expensive than for other world regions and Africa became relatively less integrated into the global economy. Our findings shed new light on the debate about the origins of African underdevelopment by emphasizing the role of increased trade costs and limited access to global markets.

The tomato paste tin can: An African journey (Burkina Faso)

In Burkina Faso, where imported goods now constitute the basic ingredients of the daily urban diet, tomato paste seems to epitomize the country’s position at the end of the globalized food chain. With the expansion of this manufactured comestible, the empty tomato paste tin can also has gradually replaced previously used calabashes and plastic bowls to become the sole recipient used by child beggars for receiving food donations. As such, it has become the primary graphic symbol for child begging, in particular, and for African underdevelopment in general. But this iconic status should not eclipse the fact that most Burkinabe households use this same can for a large array of daily tasks. This article patiently follows ‘the can’ through the variety of its uses, from tomato paste container to water recipient, measuring instrument, begging device, seat or cooking pot, thus offering a contribution to the social study of objects. It reveals that street children and Koranic students are both marginalized by using it, and also included in the various informal networks it ties together. Usually framed as an emblem of ‘underdevelopment’ and ‘poverty’, the can becomes a symbol of the transformations of the Burkinabe economy and of the rapid changes of consumption patterns the country is experiencing.

The Euro-centric narrative of African underdevelopment : an exploratory anatomy

The Euro-centric narrative of African underdevelopment : an exploratory anatomy

Measuring extractive institutions: colonial trade and price gaps in French Africa

Abstract Colonial extractive institutions are often blamed for current African underdevelopment. Yet, since colonial extraction is hard to quantify, the magnitude of this phenomenon remains unclear. In this paper, I use new archival data to estimate colonial extraction through trade, measured as the gap between prices that the monopsonistic French trading companies paid to African producers and prices that should have been paid in a counterfactual competitive market. The results show that African prices were only a small fraction of competitive prices, implying an annual loss of almost 2 percent of GDP during colonial rule.

The Crisis of Underdevelopment in Sub-Saharan Africa: Multi-dimensional Perspectives

This paper compliments the literature of underdevelopment in Sub-Saharan Africa. Besides adopting the qualitative method, the paper hinges on Modernization Theory, the Dependency Theory and the Center-Periphery Theory. There are divergent perspectives on the crisis of underdevelopment in the Third World. Plausible as these theories may appear, they seem not to have taken into account the contemporary factors responsible for underdevelopments in post-colonial Africa; they failed to explore the endogenous causatives of African underdevelopment. That is where this paper departs, by attempting a multi-lineal perspective to the underdevelopment discourse in Sub Saharan Africa. This paper concludes that the orientation of the political leadership in Sub-Saharan Africa is incompatible with peace and development; endogenously, the values they stress and the governance priorities they pursue impede development. As a way forward, African political leaders must reconceptualize their notions of leadership anthropocentrically to bring the people to the policy agenda of governance (the region’s greatest resource is its people).

English

The mission statement of US African Command (AFRICOM), articulated by President George Bush in 2007, declared African underdevelopment and human insecurities as a threat to US national security. Since 10 years have elapsed from the time of AFRICOM’s inauguration, this paper seeks to highlight that the organization has fallen short in realizing its mission statement. This unnerving reality has given credence to intellectuals who adopt an apocalyptic position vis-a-vis the organization. Intellectual skeptics disconcerted with AFRICOM located in the Global South and Global North have come to the conclusion that AFRICOM’s actuality as an organization primarily advanced American economic interest and perceived issues of African development as trivial. In the 21st-century, US security experts discursively shifted Africa from being a politicized issue to a securitized issue thereby constructing the continent as posing an existential threat not only to American geostrategic interest, but also American identity of exceptionalism. By using the work of New Left historian William Appleman Williams and by referencing speech actors with political capital, this paper highlights that the process of securitizing Africa using exceptional speech acts to expand corporate capitalism is not unique to Africa since there are historical discursive parallels between early and current speech acts deliberated during junctures involving US foreign ventures. Key words: US African Command (AFRICOM), African Union (AU), securitization, speech act, exceptionalism, expansionism, economic-frontier, security-development discourse, US informal empire, William Appleman Williams, apocalyptic-complementary positions.

Colonized Curriculum

Although U.S. scholars have long documented the stereotypical appearance of Africa in textbooks, scant research does so in the Netherlands. The Dutch, internationally recognized for generous aid, contributed to Africa’s historical underdevelopment by kidnapping, trading, and enslaving Africans. In this study, the author uses content and discourse analysis to examine how Africa, African independence, and European, particularly Dutch, aid organizations operating in Africa are represented in all Dutch primary school history textbooks published since 1980. A Eurocentric neocolonial master narrative homogenizes and essentializes Africa as a poor, primitive, and violent continent; discursively denies Dutch historical responsibility for African underdevelopment; excludes African nationalist efforts; and depicts the Dutch engaging in benevolent aid efforts toward African nations and peoples unable to help themselves. These textbooks, in constructing and perpetuating racialized conceptions of Africa and African peoples, constitute a continued legacy of colonialist conceptions that justify neoliberal intervention and exploitation. Given the denial of race and racism among both academics and the general populations in the Netherlands, these findings have critical implications for contemporary conceptions of Africa, Africans, and Afro-Dutch people living in the Netherlands today.

A colonial legacy of African gender inequality? Evidence from Christian Kampala, 1895–2011

The colonial legacy of African underdevelopment is widely debated but hard to document. In this article, occupational statistics from Protestant marriage registers of historical Kampala are used to investigate the hypothesis that African gender inequality and female disempowerment are rooted in colonial times. We find that the arrival of Europeans in Uganda ignited a century‐long transformation of Kampala involving a gender Kuznets curve. Men rapidly acquired literacy and quickly found their way into white‐collar (high‐status) employment in the wage economy built by the Europeans. Women took somewhat longer to obtain literacy and considerably longer to enter into white‐collar and waged work. This led to increased gender inequality during the first half of the colonial period. However, gender inequality gradually declined during the latter half of the colonial era, and after Uganda's independence in 1962 its level was not significantly different from that of pre‐colonial times. The data presented here also support Boserup's view that gender inequality was rooted in indigenous social norms: daughters of African men who worked in the traditional, informal economy were less well‐educated, less frequently employed in formal work, and more often subjected to marital gender inequality than daughters of men employed in the modernized, formal economy created by the Europeans.

English

One of the most fundamental questions bedeviling the African continent is the problem of underdevelopment which manifests in the forms of fears and despairs Africans face daily as they try to make sense of their existence in a world that has become a global village. Such a situation affects the level of confidence Africans have in terms of the relative opportunity to realize their potentials within the political and economic milieu they find themselves. This question takes on particular pungency when Africans try to make sense of the paradox of penury and hunger in a continent so richly endowed with natural and human resources. This paper argues the position that African socio-economic underdevelopment has its root in the prevalence of the knowledge of “what”, as opposed to the knowledge of “how”. The paper holds that this is the cause of our over reliance on others for thoughts and solutions to our pressing problems and our failure to make our mark in this new age of discovery and globalisation. While concluding that development of knowledge in praxis is a critical element in the achievement of the goal of social reconstruction in Africa, we emphasize the fact that unless Africans accept knowledge in praxis as an instrument for socio-economic revolution, development will remain an unachievable project in Africa. Key words: Knowledge, Africa, development, philosophy, praxis, globalisation, African renaissance.

Is the Fate of Africa a Question of Geography, Biogeography and History?

This paper dwells on the debate on the question of what is/are responsible for African underdevelopment and, by extension, what will influence African development. The debate currently dwells on how much of development is human and how much is environmental, extraneous and beyond human control. Joseph Agbakoba thinks that development involves both nature and human agency, acknowledges the effect of nature, equally sees philosophy as a critique of worldview and ideology, and African philosophy as saddled with the critique of the African worldview and ideology, which he sees as malfunctioning in the context of the modern African civic society imported from Europe and needs certain adjustments. In other words, he sees development in Africa as not beyond human control. J. Obi Oguejiofor attempts to refute Agbakoba’s claim that worldview has anything to do with the African predicament, and concludes that the African predicament is as a result of geography, biogeography and history, but his advancement of these factors as being solely responsible for the African predicament completely ignores the human agency in development and lands him in determinism raising the question of the very relevance of African philosophy to African development. Conceptual analysis informs the dominant method of the paper.

Philosophical Perspectives on the Politics and Crisis of Sustainable Development in Africa

Philosophical Perspectives on the Politics and Crisis of Sustainable Development in Africa

African Underdevelopment and the Multinationals – A Political Commentary

The paper examined the general operational mode of the multi-national/trans-national corporations in Africa with a view to addressing African underdevelopment. The methodology adopted was content analysis, where relevant records were critically reviewed and analyzed. The major findings revealed among others that trans-national corporations have not helped host nations; rather they have contributed to their underdevelopment. Profits maximized by multinationals are repatriated to the home countries instead of using it to develop the host nations. The so called technology they claim they transfer to host nations is obsolete. Essentially the paper recommends that all African nations where MNCs operate should insist that the indigenes have to occupy sensitive and policy making positions in the MNCs. Legislative incentives should be used to direct foreign investment to manufacturing sub-sector, instead of commercial and communication sub-sectors where the multi-nationals currently dominate. The paper concludes that the aspirations of the host nations to welcome the multi-nationals with the hope of drawing technology from them have become illusive.