Jean-Marc Ela: A SECOND LOOK
The paradigm of bankruptcy has become the context for every analysis of modern Africa’s economic and social history.
Samir Amin evokes this picture: “The 1960s were marked by the great hope that we were at the start of an irreversible process of development throughout the Third World, and especially Africa. But ours has become the age of disenchantment. Development is at a standstill, its theory is in crisis, its ideology in doubt. It is generally agreed that development in Africa is bankrupt.”
And yet, was it not the aim of the aid organisations to promote “integrated, auto-centric, endogenous, community” development? How many destitute regions, now the vast graveyards of projects and programmes costing billions of dollars, have seen streams of “co-operators”, “experts” or “technical assistants”?
In these days of all-pervading revisionism, it is no doubt convenient to remove any reference to the structures and effects of domination. But they are with us again, nevertheless, as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank strangle Africa, forcing it to dismantle its production systems and its states. Georges Balandier rightly says that “the powerlessness of the Third World is maintained by the inequalities and dependence on which those countries base their power and, for the time being, hold on to it”.
Most of the wars and conflicts that have ceaselessly impoverished Africa can only be understood in the context of the geopolitical stakes and strategic economic resources fought over by powerful interest groups: oil, uranium, copper, diamonds, cobalt, gold or aluminium. Such takeovers and interventions are the stock-in-trade of socio-political systems where the ruling classes manipulate ethnicity as part of their strategy of conquest or seizing power.
One need only look at the political economy of Africa’s mineral resources, now caught up in the conflicted dynamics of globalisation. In the same way, the continent’s pauperisation is inseparable from the criminalisation of the state and the economy at a time when the IMF and World Bank are using debt as a weapon to weaken the state and force Africans to embrace the religion of the market.
The African crisis inevitably brings us back to the crisis of know-how surrounding the importing of “outside dynamics”. Since the end of World War II, notes Balandier, “the Third World countries’ own theories of development have been first of all modelled on external theories: those formed and tested in so-called advanced societies and which are now being called into question”.
Those theories were developed from a pattern of social change peculiar to the specific paths taken by Western societies that claim a monopoly on modernity. It is a point of view that says African societies can only reproduce the model of the societies that are trying to modernise them. In order to “succeed”, they have not been asked to innovate using their own internal dynamics or to steer change in line with their own frames of reference.
If development is a “Western belief”, its bankruptcy also spells the bankruptcy of capitalism in sub- Saharan Africa. In African societies, the truly poor person is the one who has no kindred: the family spirit and the principle of reciprocity underpin economic ties within the mesh of social relationships.
Given the weight of this social and cultural framework, Africans tend to distance themselves from a development model in which socio-economic inequalities are considered engines of progress. They question an economic modernisation that involves the destruction of social ties. Few Africans take on an alienating modernity that brings in a way of being based on the individualism so typical of the West.
The capacity for innovation, reinvention of traditions and resurgence of native skills are these societies’ responses to the tightening of structural constraints and the demands of unbridled capitalism. More than just a means of “getting by”, these popular practices are the concrete manifestations of a society and economy rooted in local culture. Friendly societies or “tontines” form a system where people can exchange money and work, as well as meals, rites and advice. Access to economic modernity is not therefore incompatible with the forging of links between money and kinship.
In fact, the rebirth of associations in sub-Saharan Africa is resulting in experiments in co-operative development. These experiments must be seen as a genuine alternative to the building of a new barbarian economy on the ruins of society. The forms of creativity that are spreading on the margins of the dominant system by means of a kind of “intelligence of cunning” are a means of subverting the Western system of development.
Africa is not against development. It dreams of other things than the expansion of a culture of death or an alienating modernity that destroys its fundamental values. At the same time Africa wants to be party to new developments. This will make it the continent of the future. Africa sees further than an all-embracing world of material things and the dictatorship of the here and now, that insists that the only valid motto is “I sell, therefore I am”. In a world often devoid of meaning, Africa is a reminder that there are other ways of being.
Translated by Malcolm Greenwood. This article appears in a new English- language edition of Le Monde Diplomatique, to be published in the next issue of The Guardian Weekly. It can also be found on Le Monde Diplomatique’s English website at