AFRICA MUST BE MODERN

Description

Africa must be modern. Put simply, Africa must embrace individualism as a principle of social ordering; make reason central in its relation to, activity upon, understanding of, and producing knowledge about the world, both physical and social, that it inhabits; and adopt progress as its motto in all things… there is no doubt that with the widespread diffusion of white supremacy in the world s relations with Africa, the roots of which can be traced to the slave trade and slavery as well as the peculiar form that colonialism took in Africa, it is almost required of an African intellectual that she or he be hostile to modernity and its suppositions…much of the hostility towards modernity abroad in the continent is due to the conflicted nature of the relationship between Africans and modernity once colonialism was clamped on the continent. From then on, many Africans came to misidentify modernity with colonisation and westernisation and a plague-on-all-your-houses attitude sedimented in much of the continent towards modernity-as-colonisation-and-westernisation….[B]eing an ex-colony is no insurmountable barrier to building a modern economy and giving the old capitalist economies a good run for their money.

Product details