| BOOK
REVIEW
Africa In Chaos
By George B. N. Ayittey
Publisher: St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y.
10010. 1998.
Pages: 399; price: not stated
Reviewer: Kofi Akosah-Sarpong
in Montreal, Canada
This is an economic development work written from the perspective
of African tradition and culture, making Africans themselves talk via
newspapers and magazines articles, quotations, speeches, radio and
television instead of any heavy academic style of writing. The outcome
is a movingly touching work with broad strokes here and there. From the beginning he makes clear that he takes the position of
what he calls internalist stance, which locates African problems
internally and attempts to find internal solutions, instead of the
much known externalist stance, which blames all of Africa’s troubles
on external factors like colonialism. Ayittey, a member of the growing number of reconstructionists like
Nigeria’s Wole Soyinka, writes angrily but beautifully, ranting that
the reason for the on-going chaos in Africa is due to the fact that
since independence 40 years ago, African leaders and their hangers-on
have overtly taken the externalist stance, thus making them
simultaneously blame excessively Western countries for Africa’s
troubles and ignoring Africa’s indigenous systems and themselves for
the physical and metaphysical chaos sweeping the continent. Ayittey calls on African leaders, especially the new generation of
leaders, to find solutions to Africa’s problems inside Africa, and
not from anywhere else. Ayittey is the man who coined the now
continental buzzword "African solutions for African
problems." For this reason, he carefully takes from some African
states such as Ghana and analyses their economic development policies
since independence in the context of African history, culture and
tradition. But he did generalise; only that he walks the common lines. From here he alludes that the failure of the African nation-state
stems from the fact that her leaders have aped more and more Western
history, culture and tradition instead of its correct appropriation
into the African indigenous systems, thus resulted in long-running
crises. The reasons, he writes, is that the African intellectual
cannot differentiate "between academic intelligence and common
sense." For Ayittey, such development has made the independent African
state not different from the one which was under colonial rule—there
is some sort of continuity of colonial rule, the only difference being
the colour of the rulers, instead of white faces we have black faces
but everything inside the vehicle remains the same. The result is some
sort of another round of independence struggles via coup detats, rebel
incursions, separatist agitations and general malaise. A Ghanaian teacher of economics at Howard University in Washington,
D.C, George Ayittey puts such state of affairs on African
intellectuals, who haven’t being educated in the Western tradition,
have come to be hooked inextricably into Western tradition. He blames
all African intellectuals, sparing no one including such giants like
Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah and Zambia’s Kenneth Kaunda down to the new
generation of African leaders for the crises sweeping the faces of the
over 2,000 ethnic groups in Africa. For Ayittey, the first priority in creating an enabling climate in
Africa for sustainable development is to root out "corruption,
political chaos, repression, civil wars, and capital flight." He
gives solutions to the various criticisms levelled against the causes
of Africa’s chaos, a Ten Commandments of some sort towards these
effects. In a way Ayittey’s work is a welcome addition to the on –going
continental project of African Renaissance, which seeks to revive
African culture and tradition and fuse it appropriately with
globalisation via accent on technology as the motor to fire Africa’s
development.
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