Colonialism and Victimization Narratives in the Context of Africa's Development

Introduction

In spite of the extent to which nature favours Africa with enormous natural resources, it is a tragic paradox that the continent remains underdeveloped. At the root of Africa’s underdevelopment narrative is her unique history of how slave trade facilitated the forced removal from the continent of millions of African people. Slavery was used to strengthen and enrich the declining economies of the West, but colonialism later dealt a deadlier blow on the development profile of Africa. Without the European intervention, Africa’s development experience would not have included the norms of colonialism that have permeated the African psyche, sustains the spirit of underdevelopment and cushions its attendant poverty on the continent. The problems of colonialism transcend politics and economy to involve the socio-cultural issue. These concerns cause its multiplier effects that are anchored on meta-colonialism, justified by globalization and driven by cognitive imperialism difficult to separate from Africa’s underdevelopment. The decolonization that the colonized Africans trusted failed to deliver on its mandate because it was bourgeois.

Rodney (2009) insists that the principal agencies of Africa’s underdevelopment over the past five hundred years are the slave trade and colonialism. Other scholars have examined the ethnic fragmentation of the continent (Easterly & Levine 1997) and Africa’s adversarial geography (Sachs & Warner, 1997). Nkrumah (1963) emphasized the borrowed-foreign solutions that Africans failed to “brew … with home-grown ones” (p. 12) and harmful impact of the slave trade (Inikori, 1992; Nunn, 2008). It is instructive that the African countries from which the Europeans took the most slaves remain the poorest today (Nunn, 2008). Despite this, the claim that Africa is more underdeveloped today than it would have been had the predatory colonialism not intervened (Heldring & Robinson, 2013), may seem irrational. Nevertheless, the problem of constructing a persuasive research design to investigate its impact permits diverse assessments of the role of colonialism (Heldring & Robinson, 2012). Having coexisted with racism, cultural domination, and systemic violence in Africa (Bulhan, 2015), the effects of colonialism have imposed criminal victimization on the welfare of critical stakeholders (Justice Canada, 2013). Africans must strip false decolonization of its deceptive sense of independence. Its associated “fancy dress parade and the blare of the trumpets” (Fanon, 1963, p. 59), must give way to the decolonization of African minds (Senghor, 1957). With the removal of all these hindrances, any intervention will transcend the issues of territorial autonomy (Bogaerts & Raben, 2012), to deliver on its mandate.