I. Economy and Development1. Economic Reform
Almost all countries in Africa have implemented a version of structural adjustment, fiscal and institutional reform largely designed by the international financial institutions. The objective of such reform has been to induce greater economic productivity. The lack of such productivity is usually attributed to lack of infrastructure, inappropriate regulatory policies and deficiencies in financial, technical and government services and institutions. Alleviating these constraints purportedly creates an enabling environment in which households, firms and community groups can increase their economic activity and well-being. As such, reforms are intended to be more than fiscal interventions—more than getting the prices right for goods and services, more than resolving balance of payment difficulties, reducing public debt, and instituting cost-recovery.
Economic reform packages have exerted major effects on marketing patterns, the disposition of land and finance capital, public and private sector articulations, the use of financial resources, and access to various credit instruments and other external resource inputs. These packages attempt to institutionalise principles of subsidiarity, decentralisation and inter-sectoral partnerships, which act to convert the state into a co-ordinator of budget rather than the provider of inputs and services. This is a process that relocates governance to a broader range of transactions among public, private and civil institutions. At the same time, there has been an emphasis on institutional rationalisation and re-ordering in all sectors, i.e. a focus on structuring clear institutional boundaries, entrenching differentiated functions and roles, and engendering particular organisational cultures within and across distinct institutions.
How are these various reforms to be assessed, especially as their articulation to particular economic practices and modalities of social organisation in different African societies have produced largely confusing results? What are the grounds for assessing their effectiveness, especially as the reform process has contributed to a restructuring of the moral underpinnings and social solidarity of many societies? How are the economic presumptions on which reform packages are based assimilated by actors working in specific economic institutions, and what are the decision-making processes through which specific policies and programmes are implemented?
2. Local Economic Initiative
Much effort has been made by both African and non-African actors to identify the root causes of economic crisis. But this search may do little to generate the kind of domestic investments and popular initiatives necessary in order to help bring about real macro-level reform and large-scale investments in African economies. Only talking about what African lacks does little to examine how the present circumstances are brought about. By seeing underdevelopment and poverty as primarily economic problems amenable to policy solutions, the power of different local initiatives to overcome scarcity is curtailed. It also marginalises alternatives and neglects a broad range of provisioning strategies—in terms of food, income and opportunities. The related emphasis on sectorisation—where the causes of material deprivation are sought from within the distinguishing characteristics of a specific sector—also constrains efforts local communities and households make to try and circumvent the insecurities of scarcity. Mainstream sectoral models about household functioning and local production systems don’t adequately explain how social institutions are developed to organise labour and everyday economic activities. How labour is recruited, wages are determined, discipline is maintained, and production-consumption conflicts resolved draw upon social, cultural, religious, and historically-developed relations that are largely local in character.
How are such local initiatives best supported? Can they be linked together in such a way as to attain economies and regulatory systems of scale without undermining their local specificity and relevance? How can Africa better engender structures of entrepreneurship from within more capable of securing strategic niches within the global economy, which, at the same time, remain rooted in the values, strengths, aspirations and references of African economic actors?
3. In-between economies
Tensions between competing efforts to bring about development in Africa, as roughly represented by the World Bank’s various and revised agendas for Africa and the Lagos Plan of Action, also create a space for economic activity which falls “in-between” the competing solutions posed by these models. Liberalisation and deregulation projects have had a significant effect in changing the ways both public and private actors think about property, power, security, authority, and what is to be considered normative and appropriate. These changes intersect with those produced by internal dynamics within African societies themselves to open up an intensified contestation over who has access to and controls what resources under what circumstances and in what space. New economic practices and ways of managing natural and social resources are produced—some of which adhere to existing market paradigms and others that do not comply with market paradigms. New values, strategies of accumulation, norms and ethics also come to the stage—all of which increasingly problematise the issue of what it means to govern and develop African societies and economies.
There are also calls from the international community for investment capable of generating employment. As employment opportunities have largely been created in the so-called “informal” or “parallel” sectors, and as these sectors have become increasingly overcrowded and less competitive under new trade regimes that have saturated local markets with low-cost imports, where can such employment-generating investment be made? Responsibility for identifying and managing such investment, however limited, increasingly falls to local governments under the rubric of local economic development—i.e., where localities must cultivate their traditions and resources as essential ingredients in the gestation and irrigation of growing enterprises. Here, entrepreneurial activities must be based on a comprehensive assessment and capacitation of a locality’s singular strengths and features. This is done, not so much in order to attract foreign firms capable of taking advantage of these features (although it is not precluded), but to give rise to a specific structure of entrepreneurship from within, that then searches for alliances and linkages with economies at larger scales.
What is the basis for such an approach in Africa, especially as it relies on entrepreneurial activities that mostly remain at the level of small and medium scale enterprises? What are the niche production activities and markets available to such economies? Responses to this question require addressing other questions: where is accumulation presently taking place; where are resources being generated; opportunities maximised? What are the relations between new modalities of citizen participation in local affairs, new forms of decentralised governance, local entrepreneurship, and resource generation?
Do these economies which fall roughly “in-between” the standard models and alternatives constitute a viable platform for long-range developments or are they simply compensations for a lack of macroeconomic integration at national and global scales?
4. Regionalisation
There is an emerging consensus around the need for some kind of grace period for Africa, i.e. where nations are excused from having to fully open up their economies to globalised trade flows. Such a period is seen as necessary in order for the incubation of new industries and niche production to occur while taking advantage of newly reformed domestic economic environments. Conventional wisdom also states that such incubation works only if it facilitates regionalisation—gives rise to exteriorities in national economies and co-ordinated collaboration among these exterior relationships. Here, there is a regrouping of “neighbours” that facilitates the reorganisation of domestic economies—making them more differentiated and competitive—while at the same time privileging well-demarcated blocs which simplify the frameworks through which multilateral transactions take place.
The record of African efforts at regionalisation—via SADC, ECOWAS, COMESA, for example—points out many problems and impediments. Intra-African trade flows are less now than at independence despite a progressive relaxation of trade barriers and other constraints. The capacity of countries to act regionally in the context of multilateral negotiations around fundamental issues of trade, such as the GATT round and the procedures governing the WTO, is also highly limited.
Development through trade appears to be the ascendant point of view. Current heightened U.S. interest in Africa largely centres on prospects for taking advantage of the continent’s untapped markets. While it is acknowledged that substantial investments in infrastructure, physical and human capital are required to substantiate meaningful trade relationships between Africa and the rest of the world, it remains unclear who will consequently control the benefits of such investments. Particularly if such investments are primarily geared toward configuring trade flows with countries of greater economic capacity?
What kinds of regionalisation make sense given the heterogeneity existing among discrete African nations—in terms of territory, geography, culture, history and economy—and the relative commonality of their marginal position within a global economy? What are the relative advantages and disadvantages of this heterogeneity? How are competing aspirations to maximise uncertain benefits through participation on the global economic stage balanced with the possibilities of some temporary and protected removal from it? What possibilities exist for networks configured through unconventional cross-border trade to act as a platform for the elaboration of more formalised intra-Africa trade flows?
II. Democracy and Human Rights
1. Active citizenship
The institutionalisation of democratic processes within African societies has combined with globalisation to exercise profound changes in local notions of citizenship, entitlement and sociality. As demands for rights and opportunities both proliferate and diversity, multiple spaces of action and contestation are opened up which affect the production and disposition of resources of all kinds. In part, this has led to the mobilisation of so-called civil society organisations. But there have also been more broad and diffuse effects as well. New ways of acting upon economic life are established, as are the social vehicles that attempt to cohere those actions.
What kinds of choices are citizens—youth, children, women, men, the disabled—actually empowered to make in terms of giving direct shape to the communities in which they live and operate? Is democracy at national and local levels opening up spaces and opportunities for citizen participation in the management of public affairs? How do citizens understand their “place(s)” in society, and how have changes in these understandings led to specific courses of action and affiliation? What are the implications for economic planning and management, as well as for governance in general?
2. Local strategies and global norms
The seeming global consensus on democracy is that government will not act with the transparency, accountability and efficiency required for it to mobilise public resources and energies without the existence of strong civic associations, private sector organisations, community groups or social movements. With a strong civil society a mutual reinforcing dynamic is assumed to take hold, which brings about a regulatory environment characterised by the rule of law, democratic expression and rational administration.
Yet, how civil society in Africa is actually shaping the public sphere remains highly problematic and contested. New civil institutions have emerged from a broad range of local processes, at the same time, as they constitute new vehicles of operation for the political elite and the agendas of external actors. The accelerated decentralisation of state functions to both local governments and the civil sector often takes place without the devolution of real power or the establishment of a broader base of decision-making. In many cases, decentralisation simply increases political clientelism. The formation of new civil society organisations also proceeds with an often limited understanding of how various populations organise themselves to address their everyday life situations.
The efforts to rationalise public institutions and open-up spaces for private initiative have compelled both the undermining and reassertion of so-called traditional forms of authority and legitimacy. Old forms of association are resuscitated to embody new transactions and operations, as new institutions often find themselves accommodating traditional ways of doing things that have been around a very long time. While the aspirations for democratic processes are widespread, the desire to make something happen often supersedes just exactly how it is to happen. There is a broad sense of urgency across the continent to see something, sometimes anything, change in the current African condition.
If specifically local ways of doing things and managing public affairs is what makes real sense in many African societies, and if problems of governance arise through both the manipulation of local traditions and practices by a political elite interested only in their own power and the imposition of foreign norms, how are the “real” aspirations of local communities best identified and supported? How do local processes of decision-making, regulation, power-wielding, and social mobilisation best orient themselves to emergent globalised assumptions about “good governance?” How do these global assumptions and consensus of good governance best strengthen local practices? How can diverse African notions and experiences of civil society and democracy help shape these global assumptions?
3. Elections
As almost all African countries have experienced some form of democratic elections, both at national and local levels, many questions have been raised as to what elections actually mean within various African national contexts. Closer scrutiny of the various meaning of elections in different contexts is warranted if for no other reason than the practice of holding elections is increasingly something that results in some kind of conflict.. In Mali, Senegal, Kenya, Nigeria, Togo, , for example, how elections are to be conducted have turned out to be prolonged and hard-fought struggles—the terrain on which various actors attempt to consolidate their power long in advance of testing any mandate or legitimacy within the public arena. Election procedures, therefore, embody the escalating social tensions to which societies are subject. At times, the actual staging of elections represents a patchwork of compromises which in many cases does not allow the election to give any fundamental popular mandate to what governments should do in the future.
In many instances, elections have taken place as contests between parties, with a proliferation of opposition parties usually not sufficiently co-ordinated to bring down ineffective existing regimes. What parties actually represent may be melange of interests combining powerful patrons with often narrowly ethnic, regional, or occupational concerns. Accordingly, there is an important debate as to how involved civic associations and private organisations should be in the political process. At what point does expenditure of energies and resources on democratisation simply redefine the game whereby real social transformations are continuously deferred and the political elite simply renews their hold over critical material and symbolic resources? To what extent do ways of holding elections emerge from considerations as to what makes-up appropriate decision-making processes? To what extent are elections reduced to simply appeasing external actors? How can democratisation avoid reinvigorating debilitating forms of social conflict which polarise sectoral or population groupings and, instead, act as a basis for dialogue and consensus? Does electoral competition open up new opportunities for decision-making, creative input into public processes, independent initiative and action? Or, does it disrupt the actual social and political interdependencies through which a basis for social cohesion has been forged?
4. Strengthening civil society
Conventional wisdom says that strengthening civil society is a prerequisite for real democratisation and growth in Africa. Indeed, new complementary relationships are emerging between civil society and the state in much of the continent. The state is increasingly relying upon civil societies, and the broader range of engagements, alliances, and collaborations, as a means of getting a better grip on the shifting and multiple networks of power which shape how it is able to operate, both at home and in larger arenas. At the same time, civil society cannot function without considerable autonomy and “respect” from the state, while relying on the state to guarantee the integrity and coherence of the political and socio-cultural framework in which it operates.
Thus, the dynamics of this relationship are uneasy. Civil society must consolidate its strength and position, but remain flexible and experimental. Civil associations need not embody or represent the various dimensions of local community life in any juridical or formal sense, but provide conduits for different communities and identities to interact with each other and produce alternative or possible local realities for all. In other words, they must maximise access and opportunity across a broad range of actors and groupings. The state must continue to provide a kind of overarching national leadership, but do so more as the co-ordinator, legislator, and mediator of relations among discrete sectors and walks of life. Notions of accountability, influence, responsibility and leadership thus change for all actors, whether one works for the state or civil society.
There is a great diversity among ways of doing things and organising at the local level. The institutional boundaries between religion, politics, culture, and social economy are often blurred, giving rise to a proliferation of ad hoc citizen initiatives—especially when people feel that they have to fend for themselves. Often more formally organised NGO structures and civil society organisations (CSOs) are either out of touch with such initiatives or attempt to control them. This does not mean that CSOs are not playing important roles, but their emphasis on targeting specific populations, identities, sectors or themes often means that they cannot extend themselves to work among other actors or processes.
If an important task for African civil societies today is to facilitate the reshaping of collective interest and the ways such collective interest is expressed, it must do so in the context of concrete actions. These concrete actions include lobbying, community development, education and training, culture-making—that is, collective actions in the public sphere. The state, in turn, must demonstrate its leadership primarily through the capacity to take charge of forming effective partnerships. It must exert control in part through giving up control—and by ensuring that different social groups feel they have opportunities to participate in making important decisions and maintaining important values. How then do states and civil societies best work together for the common good—a common good increasingly pieced together and negotiated by a larger diversity of actors and ways of doing things?
1. Civil and uncivil orders
Any discussion of peace and security must focus on the nature of the strains placed on the maintenance of civil order in many African societies. Political and other forms of internecine conflict are primarily generated by intensified competition over scarce resources. But a functional sense of what is commonly viewed as good governance, economic growth, democratic participation or more equitable and secure access to basic resources does not necessarily restore “civility”. Africa has lived with poverty and relative conflict for so long, that generations and communities have accustomed themselves to not only adapting to but also making lives on the basis of uncertainty.
Combatants of various stripes may use conflict as a way of securing new footholds on valuable goods and services. But it is also the case that political conflict has, in many societies, opened up spaces of deregulation that offer new forms of security and welfare that compete with the state, but which may also enable the continuation of weakened states. Loosely secured national borders combine with often tightly controlled urban neighbourhoods to produce a patchwork of sovereignty. Here, the state is only marginally able to have an effective impact over the entirety of a national territory. Competing power formations both limit and enhance the mobility of citizens, depending on who they are and what they are doing.
What kinds of processes, deliberations, formulas and decision-making frameworks are necessary to provide some functional, if minimal, cohesiveness to national territories? What steps can regional organisations, such as the OAU, practically take to ensure a minimal standard of national cohesion, conflict prevention and resolution? How are external influence and resources best deployed for the purpose of national reconstruction following prolonged civil conflict? How can the access to weapons be curtailed, as well as the “militarisation” of local communities who increasingly find themselves under the influence, threat or control of various armed bodies? What is the proper role and mission of the armed and security forces within the development process, as well as the oversight functions of key civilian institutions?
2. Social conflict, identity and legitimacy
While a new generation of regulatory mechanisms and norms for governing society and economy have been implemented, so are new ways of circumventing the “rules” and of finding extralegal ways for states to insert themselves into an international system which tends to marginalise them. Prior mechanisms for stabilising societies, knowing who is who, and who has the authority and legitimacy to take specific courses of action and legitimately have access to specific goods and services are disrupted. The “platforms” relied upon by groups to secure a sense of their own identity become increasingly precarious. Thus, the reiteration of the integrity of group identity becomes increasingly a defence against “contamination” and the blurring of boundaries (as was in part the case in Rwanda).
There is no direct correlation between the onset of violent social conflict and regimens of deregulation and economic liberalisation. Yet, societies are made vulnerable to conflict as the privatisation of the state—where former state functions are commercialised—and proliferating forms of criminalisation (made possible in a context of liberalisation) exert a profound affect on people’s access to income, resources and opportunities. The social fabric becomes increasingly fragmented, and a weakened state is less able to suppress emerging conflicts.
Sudden and inexplicable accumulations, opportunities or losses on the part of particular people within a community generate additional confusions as to who is doing what to who, who has access to resources, and the extent to which these changes are attributable to things not being what they appear to be. If households, extended families, social networks or neighbourhoods are increasingly uncertain as to just what dynamics are limiting their life chances and, as a result, must now pay attention to other realities and situations which they used to see as “distant”—but which are now viewed as possibly salient—the field of social affiliation, loyalty, trust and co-operation is narrowed.
The fluidity of the African environment also reinforces the sense that anything and everything can be negotiated. Such negotiability introduces greater flexibility and access to problem-solving, but also raises the issue of when do negotiations end. If everything can be negotiated, then predicting the outcomes of any given transaction is uncertain. Thus, it is difficult for individuals to assess what implications their actions will have for others or to clearly ascertain what it is possible or feasible for them to do. As another instance in which uncertainty is maximised, there is a tendency to limit the range of social exchanges and narrow the field of those with whom one negotiates.
These processes have become increasingly politicised, as groups are mobilised to recognise their differences from other groups—especially in terms of their unfair access to resources, political institutions, and opportunities. This often is done in order to advance the power of a particular faction of the political elite. As major transitions in the political and economic field have taken place in recent years, conflict is also pursued as a mechanism through which the privileged seek to hold onto power.
Much of the political and economic reform process, while it may have emphasised democratic procedures, has not focused on political inclusivity—where all major social groupings find ways to participate in political and economic institutions. Because the pursuit of horizontal equity may often not correspond with vertical equity and efficiency considerations, such a pursuit has rarely been factored into aid allocations. As more aspects of economic life are relegated to private sectors, there has been little consideration on how to promote balanced access to agricultural and industrial assets, capital, as well as employment. In an environment of escalating conflict, poverty reduction which relies simply on economic efficiency and long-term growth may face insurmountable obstacles without more thought as to how social groups are being reshaped in Africa today and the nature of relationships among them.
How is possible to cultivate a sense of social solidarity—i.e., a capacity to act in concert--without demonising those who are different? How is it possible to institutionalise spaces of autonomy for ethnic, religious, political or regional groups who value their difference from others with whom they share a nation, but at the same time, keep the nation as a whole focused on a functional set of common development objectives and national institutions? How can a series of norms regarding human rights be instituted, but at the same time recognise that diverse people and communities may come to adopt those norms with different motivations and values in mind? How can the need for social and community solidarity be reconciled with mutual respect for independent action? How can individual initiative be encouraged while respecting the values of certain communities which emphasise collective action and good. How are multiple centres of authority, which come to the fore in state’s diminishing control over social, political and economic life in most all national communities, most effectively co-ordinated to advance equitable development?
3. Complex Humanitarian Emergencies
Peace and security is also mitigated by the vast internal displacement of populations occasioned by civil conflict—which is just one aspect of complex humanitarian emergencies. The increased use of civilians as targets, instruments, and strategic resources of warfare, coupled with the inability and/or unwillingness of major powers to forge effective mechanisms of intervention into violent political conflicts can substantially distort the outcomes of humanitarian assistance. In some instances, assistance prolongs the conflict through the unwitting infusion of resources to warring parties and through increasingly the vulnerability of civilians. At the same time, it is very difficult to determine the negative consequences of assistance prior to an agency being engaged in its provision.
In order to provide assistance, NGOs are now usually subject to extortion, theft, political control and informal taxation. At worst, as in the Democratic Republic of Congo, relief supplies and NGO presence were used to lure refugees out of hiding so they could be killed. Relief agencies are also subject to a range of prevailing criticisms: that donor countries use assistance provision as a mechanism of political control; that agencies are unaccountable and; that they should focus more on preventive measures through providing “early warning.” All of these criticisms have elements of accuracy but basically fail to take into consideration the conditions under which agencies work.
NGOs are highly dependent upon and act on behalf of a small number of donor UN and domestic agencies; and even these are usually sectorally based which limit contracting options. Contractor agencies thus have the ability to enforce what are often highly constricted and inflexible terms which can lessen the ability of NGOs to adapt practices of providing relief to the very messy particulars of a given emergency. As local resources are usually severely incapacitated, NGOs also have few reliable sources of local intelligence and partners with whom to work.
Given the increasingly politicised nature of humanitarian assistance and the reluctance of other external actors to deter the escalation of political conflict, which produces complex emergencies, how can NGOs be more self-conscious of the political responsibilities incumbent in their work? How can they increase their capacity to negotiate effectively with the broad range of international and local organisations and forces which they must engage, and focus on more strategic understandings of the political economy of assistance in which they are embedded in order to enhance their manoeuvrability and options? How is assistance best withdrawn from an emergency—where it is doing more harm than good?
1. The costs of education
Real costs of education have risen dramatically in recent years, and provision has for some time relied extensively upon various forms of financial and in-kind support from local communities and households. The extent and coverage of such social support various radically within and across communities. The introduction of cost-recovery mechanisms has in some instanced placed untenable strains on households already making substantial contributions to educate their children. These strains lead many households to selectively educate only a portion of their children, and then, usually boys. The highly varied pattern of household and community support to education reveals the substantial diversity of local communities within African nations. It also reveals the difficulties encountered in thinking about schooling as a platform of socialisation and society-building.
As U.S. educational systems have also experienced substantial segmentation, variation in quality and relevance, and inequality in the opportunities provided, schooling in many parts of the world appears to confront what has been a prolonged crisis of confidence and applicability. Escalating costs, rapid technological advances requiring investments in new skills and pedagogy, shrinking public budgets, and changing economies all combine to raise fundamental questions about the appropriateness and efficacy of conventional modalities of education everywhere. Public education in Africa remains linked to the colonial function of producing government bureaucrats, even though schools did provide an arena for the consolidation of a professional class committed to self-determination. African schools no longer either produce the skills requisite for a transformed and smaller public sector. They generally lack a compelling vision of where societies are going and what kinds of minds and capacities are necessary to get there.
What is the place of schooling within increasingly globalised societies? While the advancement of human capital does significantly contribute to the economic well-being of societies, why is education too often seen as a panacea for underdevelopment and how does such a status actually limit the effectiveness of education? Does the concept of a general education make sense, and for who? Should formats of education be allowed to vary, tailored to the needs and characters of specific communities who assume the primary burden for financing them? Do societies have a general obligation to provide some minimal form of universal and standardised schooling, and if so, what is a functional minimum? How is such a minimum to be measured and assessed? Can schooling provide opportunities for greater social equality and upliftment, and in what form? How are educational systems best funded, and what are the prospects, for example, of tying various forms of debt reduction to new investments in education? Who is eligible to participate in defining and managing the educational process, under what circumstances, and at what levels?
2. The impeded and unmotivated involvement of key actors
Teachers, pupils, parents and administrators are substantially constrained from effective participation in education.. The constraints vary according to roles but combine to produce significant demoralisation and little learning. The overarching constraint is that the structure and experience of schooling does not substantially correspond with either the cultural practices and values of everyday household and community life, a changing job market, national socio-economic realities and aspirations, or a larger social world of new valuations and skills. In many settings across the world, educational systems are unable to functionally balance or prioritise multiple and usually operationally discordant objectives. This ranges from the use of education to find jobs, facilitate economic development and national productivity, promote citizenship and socio-cultural integration, encourage self-discovery, institute mechanisms of certification and competitive job selection, to instilling a conscientiousness in regard to shifting socio-economic and cultural conditions.
The resource mobilisation required to support children’s education is frequently not matched by satisfaction with the quality of education. Dissatisfaction partly stems from the fact that the administration of schools largely falls outside local control and thus is affected by the bureaucratic malaise that characterises many state and public institutions. This situation reinforces popular convictions that education is largely a state affair. These impressions are further reinforced by the perception that education, albeit necessary in order to access formal employment and better livelihoods, rarely guarantees such access. In many African countries the average lag time between the completion of a university degree and the attainment of initial employment is somewhere between 8-9 years.
Schooling and household life are the two primary institutional settings for child socialisation. In many parts of the U.S. and Africa, they are simply not reinforcing each other. There is thus a compelling need for close relations between local school management, teachers, and parent associations—relations that have for the most part become highly problematic. As parents become convinced that schooling has limited gains and that they are relatively powerless in terms of affecting what takes place in schools, their support of their children’s education wanes. As their interest wanes, often so does that of the children themselves. Without the active engagement of households and communities in the educational process, there is little additional incentive for low-paid teachers to intensify their own involvement, and to initiate or support teaching innovations. A lowered social status for teachers combines with deep-seated cultural norms to reiterate the impression that the teaching profession is for women supporting the scholastic achievement of boys. The lack of motivation on the part of all key actors is reinforced by and reinforces a teaching process still primarily reliant on rote memorisation and tasks that have little relation to life beyond the classroom.
As the majority of prospects for employment rest outside formal wage labour, what relevance does conventional schooling have for more varied, non-salaried employment? To what extent should educational systems be tailored to existing and likely social prospects, rather than a sought after social and economic norm. In other words, should education be tailored to trying to make the best out of predominant social and economic realities, or should it aspire to bringing about new social projects and agendas? To what extent should schooling be about education or capacity-building? Much of what passes for empowerment, in terms of training programmes in both the U.S. and Africa is getting trainees to adhere to certain professionally ratified mental, ethical and practical techniques for active self-management? The objective is that the “empowered” conduct themselves according to specified procedures of personal accountability. While powerful conventions for what is to count as real knowledge and skill must be taken into consideration, how is this balanced with educational processes that might enable an expansion and deepening of endogenous resourcefulness and its critical engagement with the larger world?
What have been the comparative advantages of different national language policies? What are the relative advantages of schooling being conducted in local languages? Is it possible to delink specific languages as the property of particular ethnic groups and incorporate them as national languages if the vast majority of citizens are able to speak them? What are the long-term implications of assigning specific languages to specific domains of everyday and institutional life?
How are educational innovations best rooted and sustained within given communities, so as to promote a sense of ownership on the part of key actors of these innovations? How can the educational process, in turn, promote the transformation of local attitudes and orientations which often act as constraints on the active participation of key actors and limit the scholastic achievement of pupils, especially girls? While households shoulder a large burden of the costs for education, it is often argued that public support for tertiary and vocational institutions should be reduced. But to what extent, especially as economic competitiveness requires the expansion of a more highly skilled labour force? Who can reasonably pay for the inculcation of skills; who should have access to attaining them? In many African cities, non-formal education has expanded rapidly at all levels, particularly in poor communities where households can no longer afford official school fees but are able to send children to unofficial schools that convene at all hours. To what extent should non-formal education be supported and how? Does this support further institute class schisms in terms of access to skills and opportunities? What kinds of regulations and standards are viable for non-formal schools? Is access to some form of education better than no access, and under what circumstances?
3. Educating about Africa
Despite clear yet problematic historical linkages between the Americas and Africa, U.S. awareness of African realities, cultures and knowledge remains highly limited. U.S. schooling faces many limitations in terms of its interest and ability in promoting knowledge and engagement with the larger world in general. But levels of inattention are particularly acute when it comes to Africa. In part, this situation can be attributed to the relative decline of active linkages in the aftermath of slavery and the effort to downplay the significance of slavery within the nation’s consciousness. The disregard of slavery also seemingly has circumvented the capacity of U.S. society to comprehensively acknowledge and examine specifically African contributions to American social development.
The ongoing national contestation over the significance of race, as well as the struggles of African Americans to operate as full American citizens, also distances various dimensions of U.S. consciousness from its connections with Africa. The role of such a connection is re-examined as not only increasing numbers of Africans are present within the U.S., but as the interactions of blacks across the varied Diaspora also increase.
A limiting factor has also been the institutionalisation of a focus on Africa primarily in terms of African problems and challenges, rather than African societies being a singular and powerful contributor to reflections on the nature of human experiences and the global present as a whole. Thus, having an interest in Africa is limited to having an interest in the specificity of its historical, political, social and cultural dynamics—and whatever these many connote—rather than as a supplementary source of enrichment of potential benefit for everyone.
What are forceful ways to amplify and to promote the exposure of Africa’s contributions to general knowledge and general human issues as a whole? What strategies might best amplify the role of Africa in shaping the Americas beyond a broader examination of the history of slavery? What kind of African-based scholarship and research exists about the Americas, and how might such work be made better known?
4. The role of culture
A renewed emphasis on the role of culture in national and social development is seen as especially salient in Africa given the wide-ranging contradictions African societies face in terms of transforming political and economic processes. For example, African societies are viewed as experiencing wide gaps between state and society and , at the same time, a lack of separation between public and private powers. Power is seen as simultaneously overcentralised and dispersed. African markets are at one and the same time impenetrable and overly open. That Africans can live through these contradictions creates the impression that things don’t mean what they appear to mean, and that the specificity of African cultures must be engaged to sort it all out.
While this enlarged scope for what are conventionally economic considerations may seem to be a positive trend, it also carries with it disturbing aspects of essentialism. In other words, economic and political difficulties are to be explained by reference to African individual and collective character and that culture, itself, is a static straightjacket that arrests African development. Given this renewed attention to culture in considerations of economic development, it is critical to systematically assess the multifaceted operations of culture in African society today.
Culture is increasingly important, not as a by-product of economic concerns, but as a largely autonomous vehicle which impacts upon accumulation and productivity. National governments increasingly remove themselves as the guarantors of public welfare and become agents for the privatising of collective life. Multilateral relations and globalised relations become increasingly significant to local affairs. Citizens are increasingly uncertain as to what are the real and significant forces affecting their everyday lives. Given these situations, citizens are increasingly compelled to take their own initiatives. The general creativity of popular activity becomes a precondition for survival and opportunity. Thus the capacity for the elaboration of culture is progressively autonomous from the material bases of social existence, but at the same time , ever more important for the generation of material survival.
For whatever reason, many Africans have been on the move for a long time. Whether looking for places to make money, sell or buy with advantages, or securing space to accumulate some savings, migration and sojourning have played important roles in the dissemination of ideas and experiences, as well as the articulation of African societies to each other and to the larger world. What are the various ways in which such movement has been organised; what effects has it generated for local cultures--.e.g., what is opened up and what is defended against? What have been the interactions among distinct nationalities within the Diaspora? How have relationships among family and related networks been managed over long distances? How are assessments of the relative advantages of particular destinations made and communicated? What are the long-term implications of the so-called African brain drain?
What is culture at the present moment in African societies? How are various cultural practices and products at work configuring a particularly African orientation to continent-wide as well as global concerns? Far from being some essentialist framework of constraints or legacies, cultural production in Africa may be most appropriately viewed as an incessant process of remaking societies. It operates through the enormously varied agendas, values, points of view, interests and forces of power at work in the present. Too often, African culture is seen as something from the past, as if the continent’s relative marginalisation and precarious transitions invalidate its capacities to address various dimensions of life—not only as Africans have known them, but what they could be for everyone. What opportunities does globalisation provide for the consolidation and dissemination of African thinking? How does globalisation affect the process of cultural reproduction in Africa?
Africa Policy Information Center
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