Search results

This article aims to strengthen contemporary efforts to construct and pursue a pan-African agenda by interrogating the postcolonial imaginings of Léopold Sédar Senghor, Julius Nyerere and Kwame Nkrumah. To counter the present-day tendency to erase and flatten the diversity of this period, the article explores the variations and similarities of the three leaders' approaches to socialism, pan-African unity, nationhood, economic development, epistemology and democracy. Through this contrast, the article derives some broad lessons for the contemporary period, including the importance of cultivating domestic resources (human, material and financial) rather than being dependent on external forces; the need for countries to construct a macro-vision that coordinates their economic, social and political projects; and the importance of maintaining sovereignty of thought in policy thinking on the continent to effectively break free from the universal, market-based prescriptions that now dominate under neoliberalism.






Jimi O. Adesina, Professor and the DSI/NRF Chair of Social Policy, University of South Africa / Post-Colonialisms Today researcher. Email: jotadesina@gmail.com

Professor Archibald Monwabisi Mafeje passed away on 28 March 2007. The meaning of Archie Mafeje, for three generations of African scholars and social scientists, is profound and about diverse encounters. For some it was personal; for others it was through his works, and for most in the community the encounter via scholarly works became personal and intimate. The meaning of Mafeje for generations of African scholars is found in his uncompromising aversion to the 'epistemology of alterity' – the 'othering' of Africa and Africans – and the ad- vancement of scholarship grounded in the centring of African ontological expe- riences. It is in this aversion to alterity and pursuit of endogeneity that we locate Mafeje's lasting legacy for new generations of African intellectuals. This paper, which is personal and intellectual, involves a close and critical engagement with these aspects of Mafeje's scholarships.

ABSTRACTThe title of this article draws on a Yorùbá aphorism that roughly translates into 'don't sell me a dummy'. The dark side of social policy, the theme of this Debate, has a distinct character in the African context. The transformation of the African public policy landscape, shaped by the 'counter‐revolution' in development thinking, has taken a new form with the donor 'policy merchandising' of cash transfer schemes. The stratified and segregated social policy on offer contrasts with the historical experience of 'donor' countries themselves. The policy instrument advanced is cast as 'a silent revolution in development', embodying the idea of development shifting from structural transformation to poverty alleviation. What is promoted is an impoverished version of development. Within the discourse of 'working with the grain of African politics', the politics of social assistance policy merchandising starts with a notion of politics as clientelist. It then deploys the instrumentality of clientelism — within an imperial deployment of power — in the manufacture of civil society and policy coalition, to ensure the local adoption of a policy instrument that the extra‐territorial donor actors offer. This modality of public policy formulation contrasts sharply with the historical experience of public policy making in the 'donor' countries themselves. The result is the subversion of the consolidation of democracy in the African client states.

The heated debate around Section 25 of the South African Constitution and the principle of "expropriation of land without compensation" is conspicuously missing the inextricable link between land, water, and gender questions. Within former settler colonies, the "land question" is a "water question" and, by extension, also a "gender question." The racially inequitable land distribution, codified in the Native Land Act of 1913, mirrored the unequal distribution of rights and access to water as codified in the Water Act of 1956. This was compounded by the gender question, in which lack of access to land for women mutated into lack of access to other productive resources. While secondary data analysis reveals that blacks control only 5.8% of agricultural water uses, Black women control less than 1%. Such intersectionality of race, class, and gender ought to remain a relentless focus of transformative social policy in South Africa.