Africa Must Be Modern: A Manifesto by Olúfémi Táiwò (review)

Táiwò’s sweeping argument is designed effectively to invite debate, an invitation that this review will entertain, but only briefly, after an overview of the manifesto itself. The new preface indicates that the US edition’s envisioned audience is different from the original one. Táiwò originally published his manifesto several years ago in Nigeria in order to confront African scholars who insist that the “modern” habits and institutions considered to undergird the prosperity of Euro-America are unsuitable for Africa. Typically, these scholars identify “modernity” with colonization and westernization and they either reject it outright or propose a distinct, African revision of it. Let us call them particularists, as opposed to a universalist like Táiwò who envisions a single trajectory that can usher an individual or a society toward being “modern.” Táiwò prepared a US edition not only because particularists—his opponents—are numerous outside Africa, but also because he came to fear that modernity in the US was being rolled back, particularly in the legal system, and its legacy treated with contempt. This is cause for alarm, because to be modern is, for Táiwò, to be free and to become prosperous.

Many mutually incompatible understandings of “modernity” appear in contemporary scholarship (as Frederick Cooper and Frederic Jameson have demonstrated), which might justify the use of scare-quotes. But Táiwò makes this precaution unnecessary. When he says he wants Africa to be modern, he has in mind a short and clear list of characteristics. He makes general suggestions about policies African institutions could utilize to help their societies become more modern, such as budgets for curiosity-driven research at universities, repudiation of dress codes, and decriminalization of homosexual activity. But these policies are not his focus. Instead, he wants to convince his readers that Africa becoming modern would be a good thing, regardless of the path its modernization might take.

Táiwò outlines five characteristics of a modern society: the individual’s rights trump the group’s, reason is cultivated and knowledge is pursued for their own sakes, careful quantitative measurements are kept for all manner of phenomena, desired outcomes are never allowed to interfere with correct processes (which means prioritizing procedural over substantive justice), and there is a steady and confident focus on building the future. Táiwò suggests he is well aware that both in theory and in historical implementation these modern tenets do warrant some criticism, but he does not want to fill his manifesto with this. And the impression he gives is that the problems are minor. Here, his argument is directly opposed to particularists such as Dipesh Chakrabarty, Jean and John Comaroff, and James C. Scott, who see Western modernity as having done violence to non-Western societies; Táiwò’s How Colonialism Preempted Modernity in Africa (2010) is in this sense a valuable accompaniment, since it argues with plenty of examples that colonialism’s destructive legacy for Africa was the denial, rather than the forcible imposition, of modernity. Unfortunately, though Táiwò lauds the rational analysis, the diligent counting, and the faithfulness to agreed-upon procedures that help define modernity, his manifesto is sometimes so hyperbolic and at all times so weak in specific examples and citations that his critics will have an easy job critiquing it. It is unclear why a modernizer would have “deliberately resisted the temptation to be systematic” (152).

Because the manifesto takes a minority position on the causes of Africa’s undevelopment and the road to Africa’s development, it will have many critics. They might wish to begin by picking a few of the millions of examples—past and present—of Táiwò’s kind of modernity that can be found in Africa. The World Bank for instance, as of 2014, considered Rwanda and Mauritius to be more efficient places to do business than France or Belgium, which must say something about the rule of law, record-keeping, and future-thinking...