Empire and Economics: Decolonising Colonialism and Its Legacies in Africa (original) (raw)

In order effectively to decolonise Africa we need to understand better the economic and political effects of colonialism in and on Africa today. To achieve that understanding we need to look beyond the tired, well-trodden themes in African historiography and political theory. Liberalism, communism, African and Afrikaner nationalism, localised cultural and social histories and related ideological conflicts of identity have failed to grasp and explain the relations of power that continue to operate at the level of economics, finance, education, war and politics. These factors have not adequately been thought through theoretically, precisely because they are treated as inevitable material circumstances separate from the longue durée of justifying ideas, enduring practices and relations of power and the persistence of institutions even, in many cases, sixty years after independence from colonial rule. More specifically there exist three major limitations in contemporary African political theory, historiography, intellectual history and development studies. First, there is not enough political theory and intellectual history in particular. These areas of study are marginalised, poorly supported and largely derivative on their richer and established northern, western and eastern cousins. As a result they are far from reaching critical mass and thus the courage and power to strike out on their own, speaking back to these more powerful discourses regarding the most important and explanatorily enlightening histories, concepts, fields and methods of inquiry. Second, dominant norms and methods of Western political theory have obscured empirical contexts by over-emphasising, on one hand, the historical significance of nationalism, liberalism and so on, or, on the other hand, historical materialistic readings of the necessary determinations of economic development. Such analysis often transposes presumptions about European conditions of state formation and development into an alien context. The formation of the South African state, for example, has little or nothing to do with considerations that underpinned state formation in Europe (that is, with securing the peace, well-being or freedom of South African peoples); and, in the main, everything to do with external (Western) theoretical paradigms and practical interests. Third, a strong reaction in contemporary South African historiography against such broad ideological brush strokes-the supposedly determinative role of liberalism or African nationalism, for example-results in narrow stud