How Colonialism Preempted Modernity in Africa by Olufemi Taiwo

By Olufemi Taiwo

Why hasn't Africa been capable of reply to the demanding situations of modernity and globalization? Going opposed to the traditional knowledge that colonialism introduced modernity to Africa, Ol?f?mi T??w? claims that Africa was once already changing into smooth and that colonialism used to be an unfinished undertaking. Africans aspired to liberal democracy and the guideline of legislations, yet colonial officers aborted these efforts whilst they demonstrated oblique rule within the carrier of the ecu powers. T??w? appears heavily at glossy associations, similar to church missionary societies, to acknowledge African business enterprise and the impulse towards growth. He insists that Africa can come again on target and advocates a renewed engagement with modernity. Immigration, capitalism, democracy, and globalization, if performed correct this time, will be instruments that form a confident destiny for Africa.

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Only because he paid little attention to this qualitative difference was he able to assert that both colonialisms “tended to organize and transform non-European areas into fundamentally European constructs”; that is, he ended up talking about generic colonialism Colonialism 27 even though he had apprehended historicized colonialisms. It is not enough blithely to refer to the historicity of colonialism and the multiverse forms it has manifested and outcomes it has yielded. We need to work through the philosophical dimensions of “the historical experience” of colonialism in Africa and the many contradictions that it enfolded.

Rather, its peculiar features held Africa back. Here is Demangeon: So far as economic development is concerned the African tropical colonies are the reverse of the Antilles. They comprise vast territories in which cultivation has always been carried on in accordance with ancient extensive methods, or even on primitive fruit-picking lines. Apart from Egypt and the islands of Zanzibar and Mauritius, where old trading relations and contact with advanced civilizations were favourable to the plantation system, the colonization of Africa has hardly begun, retarded as it is by the obstacles that the “Dark Continent” opposes to white penetration.

Similar considerations apply in the sociopolitical arena. If the colonial authorities truly believed in the principle of subjectivity and in its applicability to the colonized, then they would have required the consent of the colonized to be governed. But rule by consent could not have been an instance of colonialism. One can envisage a period of educating the colonized to consent following the underdevelopment of agency owing to, say, the natural progression that allows us to bend the will of children in the socialization process or sociohistorical processes when an injured or traumatized people have had their autochthony challenged and damaged, if not impaired.

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