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 1  Colonialism A Philosophical Profile I would like to start with a question: What do Canada, the United States, South Korea, Nigeria, India, Australia, and the Republic of South Africa have in common ? They are all former colonies. This is not an insignificant fact. In both scholarship and everyday discourse we talk of the original colonies of the United States. American history sets aside a clearly demarcated colonial period. Our talk of the American War of Independence presupposes that at a certain time the relationship between the American colonies and their putative colonial master, the United Kingdom, was one of dependence by the former on the latter. Only if this is the case does it make sense to speak of the United States winning its independence from the United Kingdom. But then we have Canada and Australia as well as many Caribbean countries, including Jamaica, that regard themselves as “former colonies” while at the same time continuing to look up to the queen of the United Kingdom as their head of state. We adjudge all the countries concerned to be independent. Meanwhile, to the extent that India, Nigeria, South Africa, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand are members of the Commonwealth, they are former colonies of the United Kingdom and they all continue to acknowledge the nominal leadership of the queen. Here we come to the limit of the commonality of the countries that we routinely put under the stamp “former colonies.” Since the many countries that we often put under that rubric have traversed diverse trajectories both as colonies and former colonies, it is difficult to justify our thinking about them in their sameness, except nominally. Because whereas Canada, the United States, and Australia are obviously modern states with thriving economies built on intense industrialization (and South Korea, India, and the Republic of South Africa are not far behind), few will say that Nigeria or the rest of the former colonies in Africa either have thriving economies or can be judged modern states. What is more, although Canada, the United States, and Australia have thriving systems of rule of law as well as robust civil societies, in spite of the fact that many African countries are now ostensibly under representative democracies, few will deny that they are nowhere near modern polities. Why is this so? 22 Colonialism Colonialism is often cited as the principal cause of Africa’s continuing inability to move forward with the rest of the world. African scholars, even though it is increasingly unfashionable to do so, continue to resort to this causal factor more than any other in their diagnoses of Africa’s failure. Although I shall argue not just for the relevance of this explanation in the following essays but also its cogency, I believe that circumstances in the current historical conjuncture compel a reconsideration of its foundation. The reason is simple. When the rest of the former colonial world in Asia and Latin America shared Africa’s fate, it was very easy, comforting even, to either not see or ignore the defects in this explanatory schema. That is, as long as the former colonies exhibited a uniform picture of grinding poverty, widespread ignorance, and poor health care services—in short, a picture of what used to be called “underdevelopment”—it was hard for challenges to the explanatory orthodoxy of colonialism to gain any traction.1 This is no longer the case. In the last twenty years or so, we have witnessed the emergence of several former colonies on the world stage as industrial, financial, and even agricultural powerhouses. What is more, a few of those countries were much farther behind some African countries in terms of their potential for success in the development race on the eve of independence .2 But those countries have not only left their African peers behind, they have become the secondary exporters of investment capital to Africa and exploiters of the continent’s resources after the erstwhile colonial powers decided that Africa was not worthy of their precious capital.3 Given this new reality, it is meet to ask why Africa remains mired in the quicksand of underdevelopment while its fellow sufferers of the recent past have gone on to better lives for their citizens. The divergences in the career paths of countries that generically are all former colonies give us pause as we establish the etiology of Africa’s underdevelopment in colonialism. But these divergences are not the only reason that we need to renew the foundations of...

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