[afro-nets] Eliminating world poverty: making governance work for the poor (33)

["Robert Karanja" <RKaranja@kemri.org>]

Eliminating world poverty: making governance work for the poor (33)
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Dear Craig,

I am very much in agreement with you on disabusing the notions of equality. It is simply not practical.  However, you end up advocating for someone to force Africa into development.  Do you mean dictatorship?

I love Africa and I'm also very passionate about it, but I don't believe what Africa needs is another dictator.  I think we need to address some fundamental issues that the rest of the world assumes are already settled.

Precolonial Africa lived a charmed life oblivious to the rest of the world; probably the closest humanity has ever gotten to a sustainable utopia. Our economic, social and political matrix hit a plateau (after all, the optimum balance was already achieved with the environment, individual vis a vis society rights and freedoms, no poverty and malnutrition etc.,).  Consequently, African civilization became one of the most dogmatic where all elements of change were arrested even at conceptualization through adherence to social norms, taboos and superstition.  However, colonization (which I will define here as Africa's articulation into the global economy) came a knocking and would not take no for an answer, dragging Africa down the road of raw products exporter and manufactured products importer.  A road we are still goaded to walk down to this day.

Nevertheless what concerns me most is not the sustained trade imbalances, but rather the toll colonialism has taken on the African psyche.  To the mainstream view, the indigenous African matrix i.e. social-political systems, were presented as incomprehensible rubbish that could only be deleted or treated as a vacuum.  As a result, our integration into the global economy and mainstream social-political matrix such as nation-state etc were all done with little thought to the existing indigenous matrix.  Our education system presumptuously assumes that no matrix is possible outside of the Prussian education system. Needless to say, the indigenous matrix is rather shabbily treated in the glorification of empire and the white man's noble or not so noble burden, leaving the contemporary African at great pains to explain him/her self virtue.  Should I consider myself of no value without Western civilization, or is there value in African 

Robert Muhia Karanja, PhD cand
Research Officer (Medical Parasitology & Entomology)
Centre for Biotechnology Research & Development
Kenya Medical Research Institute
Mbagathi Way
P.O. Box 54840
NAIROBI, 00200
Kenya
Tel: +254-020-3003115; 2722541/4 Ext 2246 (Office)
Fax: +254-020-2715105/2720030
Website: http://www.kemri.org
mailto:RKaranja@kemri.org