Africa Must Be Modern: A Manifesto

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments This book has been a long time coming. It originated from my desire to make sense of my place in the scheme of things where putting my intellectual training to use is concerned. For as long as I can remember, I have always been exercised by the prostrate position of Africans in the world, beginning in Ibadan, Nigeria, where I was born and raised. I have always felt shamed by human suffering wherever in the world it occurs. And if there has been a single thread that has supplied the unifying theme of my life so far, it is this: to help birth a world in which poverty, ill-health, and ignorance no longer have a place and all humans possess and are enabled to exercise that freedom that undergirds the dignity that pertains to our status as humans. I have lived all my life seeing this freedom denied and humanity battered even as it is made poor, illiterate, xx Acknowledgments and unhealthy all across the African continent. I grew up in the early years of Nigeria’s independence and was conscious enough to witness, even if I could not fully understand then, the propagation in political campaigns and in various mass media of the lofty ideals of freedom and a better and more humane life that had driven the struggle for Nigeria’s independence. My studies would later make me more acutely aware of the failure to realise those dreams in various places in the continent; a failure that has multiple authors—politicians, business persons, leaders of various stripes, and, most significantly, intellectuals . This book represents my attempt to offer one way of moving forward that is distilled from my reading of history, philosophy, economics, and other disciplines as they have been put to the service of liberating humanity in different parts of the world. In a sense, therefore, many friends, acquaintances, students, teachers, comrades, opponents , and others, whose paths it has been my fate to cross and intersect with over time, have contributed to the case made in this manifesto. Simultaneously, none but I should be held responsible for its contents. Aware as I am of how much the case made in the following pages riles many in the global African context, especially in the continent, I have, over the course of the time that it has taken to complete the manuscript, refrained from sharing portions of the manuscript with my usual group of interlocutors , dear friends, who would otherwise have read it and saved me from all the follies it contains. I simply did xxi Acknowledgments not wish for any one of them to be guilty by association or accused of not restraining me from going ahead with what might turn out to be utter folly. I can only hope that whatever folly it represents is instructive and illuminating . Dear reader, in light of what I just said, please resist any and every temptation to hold responsible for any of the views in this book any of the people that I now proceed to acknowledge hereunder. Adéyínká Táíwò often was a one-person audience for many of the snippets that later became significant parts of the text. She has more than earned its dedication. Saheed Yinka Adejumobi comes a close second to being a captive audience for many formulations that now populate the book. Tejumola Olaniyan and Kunle Ajibade weighed in at crucial stages in the development of the work. Tunde Bewaji provided me with a foretaste of how some might react to its central claims. Catherine McKinley provided crucial advice on where this might fit in my exile journey. I hope someday to write the book she thinks I should write for my American audience. When there is life, there is hope. Mawuena Logan and Lisa Aubrey, at different times, and independently of each other, forced more clarity on me than they realised. Rick Simonson provided much encouragement regarding the relevance of the work beyond Africa’s borders. I thank them all. Bankole Olayebi, my publisher, deserves gratitude and not just for publishing the book. He never hesitated to adopt the book for his imprint and he has been xxii Acknowledgments a very enthusiastic promoter of it. I look forward to more great conversations with him. I am thankful that he is the manuscript’s primary publisher: I did not want it published outside the continent. Finally, I would like...