NEPAD, narrative and African integration.

Abstract

The untenable inequalities and suffering experienced by Africans blatantly exposes that a lot more than simple developmental ‘lag’, lack of economic ‘growth’, ‘governance’, or a shaky ‘investment climate’ inhibits Africa’s legitimately progressive human development. This dissertation calls for and probes a serious reflection on the roots of the concepts broadly understood as ‘African Integration’ and ‘African Renaissance’ in light of how the space we call Africa has been constructed across centuries, serving very particular interests to effect modernity’s meta-narrative into reality, subsequently positioning Africa at the periphery of the periphery of its hierarchical ordering. Narratives, defined as a distinct form of discourse as retrospective meaning-making are effective stories manifesting the conscious experience of every ‘thing’ in the universe. How Africa’s ‘story’ has been constructed, and how its actual story diverges from the convergence theories of the colonial-imperial-globalisation project are this dissertation’s major focus. It deeply mines what Foucault exposed as global technologies-of-power, to elucidate the negative impacts of northern-centric discourses on Africa’s ‘self’, from individuated to collective aspects of that ‘self’. This dissertation draws attention to how Africa’s eco-social justice practices vindicate particular scientific, cultural, and social emancipatory discourses, and democratic theories emphatic that the monumental task of de-colonising Africa’s minds from meta-narrative constructions should prioritise, and inform developmental continental policy design.