2 - Variations in Postcolonial Imagination: Reflection on Senghor, Nyerere and Nkrumah

Abstract


 
 
 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
 
 

Purpose of education in former British African colonies: From contestation to bureaucratization

“…He published Education for Self Reliance in 1967 to reaffirm education as a cooperative endeavor, linking it explicitly to his wider socialist development objectives. It aimed to transform the content and pedagogy to develop the social competencies and critical thinking needed for self-reliance, explicitly breaking with the colonial education system inherited from England (Adesina, 2022). This was the same strategy proposed during the fight for independence, but the UNESCO planning commission report described above illustrated the indifference with which it was met by early governmental planners in Tanzania's own bureaucracy (Stabler, 1979).…”

Towards a Global Social Policy Otherwise: Decoloniality, socialist worldmaking and an ethics of translation

“…This is particularly important in terms of the pan-African space and the principles of Negritude, which, compared to, say Confucianism, has had far too little attention devoted to it as a source of social imaginaries not derived from the Global North. In a fascinating recent piece, Jimi Adesina develops a critique of the tendency to flatten postcolonial imaginaries and the danger posed by variants of postcolonial theory and cultural criticism ‘pursued with splendid disregard for what anti-colonial/anti-imperialist activists and intellectuals have written and said about the nature of imperialism and neo-colonialism’ (Adesina, 2022: 33). Focusing on Senghor, Nyerere and Nkrumah, intent on building a new African socialist developmentalism based on a distinctly pan-African ontology, is an important take-off point here.…”

“…Focusing on Senghor, Nyerere and Nkrumah, intent on building a new African socialist developmentalism based on a distinctly pan-African ontology, is an important take-off point here. This seeks ‘to ground development in ethics of equality and mutuality’ encompassing, in ways that Getachew also discusses, a complementarity between autonomous national-sovereign and transnational projects, ‘underpinned by deep visions of epistemic emancipation’ (Adesina, 2022: 52). As I stated, this is not, at all, an exhaustive list but merely illustrates how a longer-term historical frame in terms of counter-hegemonic worldmaking can bring other practices and imaginaries of global social policy into focus.…”