Category: Africa Development

CODESRIA JOURNALS

Protecting intellectual property rights has become essential in encouraging cutting- edge scholarship that advances the frontiers of knowledge. For a long time, the majority of Africa’s intelligentsia has worked in local and international environments that have exploited the continent’s intellectual capital. Even in contexts where intellectual property rights are enforced, certain constituencies remain at high risk for exploitation. In this paper I use three case studies to argue for a more comprehensive conversation on this issue encompassing intellectuals working in different contexts and with diverse agendas. The first of these involves the unequal power dynamics between individuals working in different kinds of institutions, in this particular case, complicated by the global North/ South divide.

The second explores the dynamics of power in intellectual relationships while the third deals with the challenges emanating from the development and use of endogenous epistemologies in conversation and confrontation with modes of scholarship traditionally privileged in the western(ised) academy. How do we move towards a comprehensive intellectual property rights regime that does not inhibit intellectual freedom of exploration as it protects even the most vulnerable from exploitation? How do we foster a vibrant intellectual environment that is especially nurturing to communities traditionally marginalised within the academy?

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Land is a very important asset and a means to sustain livelihood. In the face of a rapidly growing global population, increase in technological capacity, and affluence, the earth’s land cover has been transformed, especially in developing countries. At the same time, social organisation, attitudes, and values have also undergone profound changes. In contemporary times, issues of sustainable development, pollution prevention, global environmental change and related issues of human-environment interaction have been a major concern globally.

This concern has largely been sparked by the phenomenon of global warming and its consequences, which are threatening the very existence of humans on the surface of the earth. Remotely sensed data (mainly from aerial photographs and satellite images) in combination with Geographical Information Systems (GIS) have been observed to have potential scientific value for the study of population-environment interaction. This paper provides an account of how Remote Sensing, GIS, census (mainly population and agricultural) and socioeconomic (household, district and regional) survey data have been integrated in studying the population land-use/cover nexus in Ghana. It also identifies the major methodological challenges, and solutions.

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In this book, Messay Kebede attempts to unravel the fundamental problems of African philosophy by examining different trends in contemporary African philosophy. Walking us through the terrain of a rapidly growing field of study, Kebede’s book uncovers, widens and enriches our understanding of African philosophy. He notes that European colonialists adopted the hierarchical notions of human races with its blunt promulgation of the superiority of the white race over all other peoples in order to justify slavery and colonialism. He persuasively demonstrates how the idea of the ‘white man’ was an invention, and the mental architecture of the postcolonial African the major cause of underdevelopment in Africa. He has a firm belief that philosophy has a role to play in understanding Africa and decolonising the African mind. According to Kebede,

• The rethinking of philosophical concepts in the direction of deconstruction for the purpose of achieving mental decolonization teams up modernization with philosophical questions. Nothing can be accomplished in the direction of overcoming marginality unless Africa repositions itself by means of philosophical premises free of Eurocentric conditionings. Decolonization is primarily a philosophical problem, given that the emancipation of the African mind from the debilitating ascendancy of Western episteme is its inaugural moment (p. xii).

Kebede thus makes a strong case for his view that freedom and development presuppose prior decolonisation of the African mind. He believes that decolonisation is unthinkable so long as we endorse Eurocentrism, that is, the conception that there is a unlinear history and that the West is the driving force of that history while other cultures are either lagging behind or frankly inferior or primitive. Mental liberation requires the radical dissipation of Western categories. ‘What comes first is thus subjective liberation, the decolonization of the mind. The gateway to liberation is the prior and complete deconstruction of the mental setup, not the adoption of a revolutionary theory, as African Marxists believed wrongly. Some such dismantling alone is liable to initiate an authentic, unspoiled comprehension of African traditionality’ (Messay 2004:125).

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As the blurb on its back cover indicates, Globalization and Social Policy in Africa ‘examines the different areas of significant contact between globalization and the lives of ordinary people in Africa’ through the use of ‘empirical and historical studies.’ The book contains fifteen chapters divided into four different parts that specifically address the following: economic and regional trends; poverty and social services provision; globalization, women’s work and citizenship; and higher education and globalization. Published at a time when globalization has become the buzzword for international development, this book adds an important voice to the growing critiques of the whole project of neo-liberal economic models often deemed the panacea for socio-economic development in the global south. Contributors to this volume are aware of the failure of the ‘development’ project fifty years after it was introduced in Africa and other regions of the world.

The trouble with this kind of ‘development,’ as the authors note, is that it is simply another name for economic growth that is devoid of any consideration for the social. It has long been assumed that economic growth will get rid of poverty by creating wealth that in turn will be used to solve social problems. As contributors to the volume show, this has not been the case and the era of globalization (which has come to be associated with economic liberalism), has indeed hurt many African nations and communities. Globalization, for instance, has undermined the legitimacy and power of the state in Africa. Given that for a long time the state has been the primary provider of social services, this globalization agenda of trimming the state has had very negative effects on the lives of the vulnerable majority in Africa. A few examples from the book illustrate this phenomenon.

Analyzing globalization in the Maghreb, Hammouda highlights the tightrope that has to be walked between citizenship and religion where the former allows for a process of secularization that almost undermines the latter. With the push for democratization came the need for the state to relinquish some of its grip and monopoly on politics and a greater focus on individual freedoms that sought to free people from their communal obligations and relations. Thus, a specific Western economic thought has been mobilized as a universal human condition devoid of any historical particularities and shoved down the throats of a culture where religion is inseparable from the everyday. In a related case, Gimode argues that globalization has redefined the role of the state and allowed Islam (which has always sought to step in and redistribute wealth among the poor) to offer social services especially in arid and semiarid areas in Kenya where even government services are hard to deliver.