Imperialism and the Democratization Process in Africa

Laying the Foundations for Backwardness and Vulnerability

It is striking that in many of the literature published on Africa in the last decade, very few contain sections or chapters dealing with colonialism and imperialism in Africa. There is a conscious effort by western scholarship to obliterate this period in Africa’s history and to delink it from explanations of contemporary coalitions, crises, contradictions, and conflicts. Even within academic institutions, African politics is taught with scanty or no reference to slavery, the period of informal empire, colonialism, and the programmed transition to neo-colonial dependence and underdevelopment. It is therefore not unusual to see a discussion of the African predicament beginning with the so-called economic crisis and moving on to structural adjustment with an unabashed prescription of commercialization, devaluation, desubsidization, and other misplaced monetarist prescriptions which are supposed to lead Africa onto the path of economic growth and development.
Such ahistorical explanations of the African reality have only succeeded in confusing issues and moving attention away from how difficult it is to change and restructure the imposed structures which currently benefits imperialism and its local agents. What follows is that such modes of analysis enable the donors, lenders and some western scholars to blame the victims of centuries of domination, brutalization, and exploitation. The African state is thus an easy target and the realities of the West are touted as models which Africans and their governments should learn to copy. It is presented as if the West was always developed, the market is super efficient, every westerner subscribes to the market, the West was always democratic, the West always respected human rights, and communism failed because it was an inferior ideology to capitalism. People like Samuel Huntington and Francis Fukuyama have even celebrated the demise of communism and the end of history and argued that nothing could stand in the way of a universalization of Western liberal democracy and market relations. Such ahistorical and narrow interpretation of the dynamics of ideological discourses and development confuse structure with process, and remove the ability to make history from the people (Fukuyama 1989; Huntington 1993; Kaplan 1994).
We would like to contend that any discussion of the current African predicament which overlooks or downplays the place of history and historical experience in any way is not only fraudulent but completely dishonest. Such an approach will not only be ahistorical but completely incapable of understanding and effectively explaining the struggles of African peoples for liberation and the sort of fundamental alignment and realignment which goes on daily below the surface of visible politics. This is why the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank have never succeeded much in Africa because their prescriptions, often designed by the 80,000 consultants who work on Africa alone (Ayittey 1992), are ahistorical and only address the symptoms and manifestations rather than the causes of the African reality. Very few were amazed when in 1989 the almighty World Bank (1989: 27) confessed that “A 1987 evaluation revealed that half of the completed rural development projects financed by the World Bank in Africa had failed.”
To understand the African reality therefore, scholarship must move away from the westernization of African political thought and praxis to consider the nature of pre-colonial formations; the period of informal empire of relatively interdependent exchange; the period of slavery and its devastation of African societies; the impact of colonization; and the transition to neo-colonial dependence, and underdevelopment. The point is that the suffocation of civil society, dependent accumulation, political instability, corruption, mismanagement, declining productivity, non-accountability of leaders are not natural to Africa. They are direct precipitates of the colonial and neo-colonial experiences of Africa which terminated endogenous and natural processes of state and class formation and imposed alien and exploitative structures, modes and relations of politics, power, production and exchange.