Abstract

Pan-Africanism is a philosophy that postulates that African ideas and practices about development, economics, politics, art, religion, law, morals, science and technology are as equally valid as Western ones. Although Pan-Africanists do not condemn the democratic influences of African culture from Western culture, they detest and denigrate the treatment of African social realties as barbaric and inferior to the Western lot. In the 1950s, Pan-Africanists like Kwame Nkrumah and Patrice Lumumba embarked on the campaign to emancipate Black Africans from neo-colonialism. They argued that although the colonialists had physically left and allowed native Africans to take over the governments of newly independent states, the new states were still trapped in the racist politics and economics of the imperialists. They therefore advocated for socialism as an appropriate system for African development governance due its close affinity to African communitarianism. This chapter argues that African neo-colonies are still trapped in the Western racist paradigm of development conceptualisation and management. The chapter contends that neo-liberalism has fundamentally paralysed ethical Pan-African development governance by relegating development to the whims of the positivistic market which is deterministic and scientific. Consequently, neo-liberal capitalism has transformed a number of African leaders from Pan-Africanists to neo-liberal oligarchs.