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The Overlooked Spiritual Factor in Africa

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 November 2008

Opoku Agyeman
Affiliation:
Lecturer in Political Science, University of Dar es Salaam

Extract

There are various explanatory analyses of the instability and persistent underdevelopment in Africa. The general presumption points to a case of arrested development to begin with – the product of slavery and colonialism – a retardation that constitutes the inauspicious legacy on which newly independent African states have to build. It is argued that this ill-augury of colonial inheritance exerts a momentum of its own, intensifying in the post-independence era the cancerous growth of ethnic fissures, constitutional disequilibrations, economic disasters, and fresh dominations.

Type
Africana
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1977

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References

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page 481 note 2 Claude Ake, ‘Explaining Political Instability in New States’, in ibid. XI, 3, September 1973, pp. 347–59, and ‘Explanatory Notes on the Political Economy of Africa’, in ibid. XIV, 1, March 1976, pp. 1–2

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page 483 note 2 If it has been possible for the propertied in Sweden over 40 years to submit to an astronomical 85 per cent taxation in the cause of social justice for all, what is left of the thesis of an automatic adherence to ‘class interests’?

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