Suchergebnisse

DESPITE THE CONSIDERABLE INTELLECTUAL BASES FOR AFRICAN ATTRACTION TO MARXISM THERE ARE IMPORTANT SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC CONDITIONS THAT MAKE AFRICA INHOSPITABLE TO MARXISM. THE 1980'S ARE LIKELY TO REVEAL MORE FULLY THE BASIC TENSIONS BETWEEN CULTURAL MYTHS AND STRUCTURAL REALITIES IN AN AFRICA CAUGHT UP IN THE UNCERTAINTY OF CHANGE. THIS ARTICLE BASED ON BOOKS BY SEVERAL EXPERTS.

The author's interest in Africa's relations with India goes back to his doctoral thesis at Oxford University, published under the title of Towards a Pax Africana. The impact of India upon twentieth century Africa has a special place for Gandhi's strategies of civil disobedience and Nehru's principle of nonalignment. Gandhi's satyagraha (soul force) inspired African political figures as diverse as Nobel laureate Albert Luthuli of South Africa and Ivorian president Houphouet-Boigny. Nehru's ideas about what used to be called "positive neutralism" helped to shape African approaches to foreign policy in the entire post-colonial era. The essay, published almost two decades ago, explored these historical dimensions in this prescient analysis.

We argue in this article that the African continent has so far achieved less than it might have done because of three phases of technological constraint: a phase of Ecological Impediment, a phase of imperial impediment, and a phase of attitudinal impediment. Just as formal education (both colonial and post-colonial) has played a role in this process, it can be part of the solution, starting with educational policies seeking to overcome technological amnesia. Indeed, Africa needs to recover those aspects of its creativity (in medicine, technologies, etc.) which had flourished before, but were destroyed by the colonial regimes. The solution to the impediments includes also reconsidering the interrupted symphony of the Federal University of East Africa and mobilizing pan Africanism in pursuit of greater intellectual and academic cooperation.

The point of departure of this article is Ernest Renan's observation that the secret of nation-building is to get one's history wrong. We critically analyze – in the broader and historical context of the encounters between Africans and Europeans – the role of collective memory in its four functions of preservation, selection, elimination and invention. We focus on the first function to examine in depth how positive preservation of memory can become a form of nostalgia and how negative selection by memory can lead to elimination and amnesia. We argue that both nostalgia and amnesia can be forms of "getting one's history wrong" in order to get one's national identity right. We also attempt to show how historical invention can be consolidated into a false memory – placing something in the past which was never there before.

The aftermath of September 11, 2001, may certainly be on its way toward affecting the "brain drain" from Africa. The 19 dead Arabs who were accused of having blown up the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and of hijacking the fourth plane were all cases of the brain drain from their own countries in one way or another. The effect of September 11 on immigration policies in the Western world appears to be greater scrutiny and reduced Western hospitality. There was a time when high scientific and technological qualifications were regarded as attractive credentials for immigration into the West.