Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-jn8rn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-01-03T13:54:59.605Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Cultural Dimensions of Development in Africa

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 May 2014

E. S. Atieno Odhiambo
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract:

This article highlights and interrogates the recent resurgence of the view, both in the academy and in international financial institutions, that African culture has been a stumbling block to development. It argues, instead, for a development perspective that is informed by the realities of Africa today. The views of African humanists and philosophers on development are highlighted. The case is made for a return to building on the indigenous roots of African culture as a way forward.

Résumé

Résumé

Cet article souligne et soulève la question de la résurgence récente, à la fois dans les universités et les institutions financières internationales, de la thèse selon laquelle la culture africaine a été un obstacle au progrès du développement. Nous cautionnons au contraire une perspective de développement fondée sur les réalités de l'Afrique d'aujourd'hui. Nous mettons en valeur les opinions des humanistes et des philosophes africains. Nous présentons des arguments soutenant le retour aux racines indigènes de la culture africaine comme fondation du progrès.

Type
Articles
Information
African Studies Review , Volume 45 , Issue 3 , December 2002 , pp. 1 - 16
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 2002

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Agyeman, Opoku. 1997. Pan-Africanism and Its Detractors: A Response to Harvard's Race-Effacing Universalists. Lewinston, Me.: Edwin Mellen Press.Google Scholar
Ake, Claude. 1993. “Building on the Indigenous.” In Fruhling, Pierre, ed., Recovery In Africa. Stockholm: Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs.Google Scholar
Appiah, Kwame Anthony. 1992. In My Father's House: Africa In the Philosophy of Culture. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Atieno Odhiambo, E. S. 1972. “The Rise and Fall of the Kenya Peasant, 1888–1922.” East Africa Journal 5 (2): 5–11.Google Scholar
Atieno Odhiambo, E. S.. 1975. “Seek Ye First the Economic Kingdom”: A History of the Luo Thrift and Trading Corporation [LUTATCO], 1945–1956. “In Ogot, B. A., ed., Hadith 5: Economic and Social History of East Africa, 218–56. Nairobi: East African Literature Bureau.Google Scholar
Atieno Odhiambo, E. S.. 1976. “The Movement of Ideas: A Case Study of Intellectual Responses to Colonialism among the Liganua Peasants.” In Ogot, B. A., ed, Hadith 6: History and Social Change in East Africa, 165–85. Nairobi: East African Literature Bureau.Google Scholar
Bennett, Oliver. 2001. Cultural Pessimism: Narratives of Decline in the Postmodern World. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.Google Scholar
Berger, Iris. 1997. “Contested Boundaries: African Studies Approaching the Millennium.” African Studies Review 40 (2): 1–14.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chabal, Patrick, and Deloz, Jean-Pascal. 1999. Africa Works: Disorder as Political Instrument. Oxford: James Currey.Google Scholar
Cohen, D. W., and Odhiambo, E. S. Atieno. 1989. Siaya: The Historical Anthropology of An African Landscape. London: James Currey.Google Scholar
Cohen, D. W., and Odhiambo, E. S. Atieno. Burying SM: the Politics of Knowledge and the Sociology of Power. Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann Google Scholar
Cohen, D. W., and Odhiambo, E. S. Atieno. Forthcoming. The Risks of Knowledge: The Murder of RobertJohn Ouko, Kenya's Foreign Minister, Kenya 1990.Google Scholar
Cooper, Frederick. 2001. “What is the Concept of Globalization Good For? An African Historian's Perspective.” African Affairs 100: 189–213.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
de Certeau, Michel. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Desai, Gaurav. 2001. Subject to Colonialism: African Self-Fashioning and the Colonial Library. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Diawara, Manthia. 1998. In Search of Africa. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Feierman, Steven. 1990. Peasant Intellectuals: Anthropology and History in Tanzania. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.Google Scholar
Feierman, Steven. 1999. “Colonizers, Scholars, and the Creation of Invisible Histories.” In Bonnell, Victoria E. and Hunt, Lynn, eds, Beyond the Cultural Turn. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Ferme, Mariane C. The Underneath of Things: Violence, History, and the Everyday in Sierra Leone. Berkeley: University of California Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Frijhoff, Willem. 1998. “Conceptual History, Social History and Cultural History: The Test of ‘Cosmopolitism.” In Monk, I. H. et al, eds., History of Concepts: Comparative Perspectives. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.Google Scholar
Gyekye, Kwameh. 1997. Tradition and Modernity: Philosophical Reflections on the African Experience. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hountondji, Paulin. 1983. African Philosophy: Myth and Reality. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Jordan, Vernon E. Jr. 2001 Vernon Can Read! A Memoir. New York: PublicAffairs.Google Scholar
Lindsey, Lawrence. 2001. “The Generosity of Capitalism.” Financial Times, 11 22, p. 15 Google Scholar
MacGaffey, Wyatt. 2001. Kongo Political Culture: The Conceptual Challenge of the Particular. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Maddox, Gregory. Forthcoming. Writing the Gogo: An Intellectual History.Google Scholar
Mamdani, Mahmood. 2001. When Victims Become Killers. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Masolo, D. A. 1994. African Philosophy in Search of Identity. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Mbembe, Achille. 2001a. “Ways of Seeing: Beyond the New Nativism.” African Studies Review 44 (2).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mbembe, Achille 2001b. On The Postcolony. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Mudimbe, V. Y. 1988. The Invention of Africa. London: James Currey.Google Scholar
Mudimbe, V. Y.. 1992. The Surreptitious Speech: Presence Africaine and the Politics of Otherness, 194–1987. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Nyamnjoh, Francis B. 2001. “Expectations of Modernity in Africa, or A Future in the Rear-View Mirror?” Journal of Southern African Studies 27 (2): 364–66.Google Scholar
Ogot, B. A. 1999a. “Informal Cultural Education in the Kenya We Want.” In Ogot, B. A., Reintroducing Man into the African World. Kismanu: Anyange Press.Google Scholar
Ogot, B. A. 1999b. “Building on the Indigenous: Reflections on Culture and Development in Africa.” In Ogot, B. A., Building on the Indigenous: Selected Essays 1981–1998. Kisumu: Anyange Press.Google Scholar
Ogot, B. A.. 2001. “African Culture and the Future.” Paper presented at the Second Association of Third World Studies, Kenya Chapter, Egerton University, Njoro, 09 18, 2001.Google Scholar
Scott, James C. 1998. Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Sichone, Owen. 2001. “Pure Anthropology in a Highly Indebted Country.” Journal of Southern African Studies 27 (2): 369–79.Google Scholar
Taylor, Peter J. 1999. Modernities: A Geohistorical Interpretation. Cambridge, U.K.: Polity Press.Google Scholar
van Hensbroek, P. B. 1999. Political Discourses in African Thought, 1860 to the Present. Westport, Conn.: Praeger.Google Scholar