Dialectics to the rescue: Critical insights into Africa’s (under)development

Abstract

That dialectics, as a mode of reasoning, is routinely used to explain the worlds of both nature and society per their inherent complexities, contradictions, and states of flux makes it quite amenable to robust theorizations of development. However, since many are those who see Africa(ns) in simplistic and wholly pessimistic terms, it is unsurprising that there is a conspicuous dearth of dialectical analysis of Africa’s development challenges and prospects. This paper examines Africa’s development from the standpoint of dialectics, showing how the key tenets and concepts of dialectics—including negation, sublation, the transformation of quantity to quality, the interpenetration of opposites, and the interchangeability of causes and effects—could help us understand the trajectory and dynamics of Africa’s development. The paper conceptualizes development as a dialectical process and, consequently, sees efforts in development discourse to set Africa (or any other part of the world, for that matter) in strict binary opposition to another region as unsustainable.

Introduction

Over the years, “dialectics” has been used as a mode of reasoning in the social sciences and humanities, with philosophy, cultural studies, sociology, postcolonial studies, and geography taking the lead in this endeavor. A striking feature of the burgeoning literature on dialectics is neither the diversity nor the characteristic density of some of the writings on it, but rather the lack of its application to the discourse on contemporary African development. Perhaps this lacuna is unsurprising, since many are those who see contemporary Africa as the unambiguous polar opposite of the developed world. The Economist (2000: 15 ) once had a cover story that depicted Africa as “the Hopeless Continent,” and argued that African societies are “especially susceptible to …brutality, despotism and corruption…for reasons buried deep in their cultures.” Such derogatory views about Africa(ns) are nothing new; GWF Hegel (1902), in his The Philosophy of History, excluded Africa from world history, with his view that Africans, then, did not have the ability to think critically. With such a simpleminded outlook on Africa, it is unsurprising that scholars would avoid dialectics when it comes to discussing contemporary African development.

The purpose of this piece is not to show the (de)merits of dialectics per se, but to evince its utility for our understanding of Africa’s development. Expectedly, the paper conceptualizes development as a dialectical process, imbued with internal tensions, contradictions, contestations, and a tacit subversion of Manichaeism. Before we delve into how dialectics can be used to explain Africa’s development, we offer some insights into its theorization and that of development in the next section.

Theorizations of dialectics and development

Dialectics

Coined by Plato to describe the method of argumentation used by Socrates in his Socratic dialogues, “dialectics” was popularized in the 18th and 19th centuries by German scholars, including Kant, Fichte, and Hegel, with the latter producing its most idealist account. Hegel’s dialectics comes in three stages. The first, or “universal,” stage of Hegelian dialectics is one of “naïve self-certainty”—a stage in which only a single, complacent, secure entity exists in a world of pure subjectivity. In this first stage, people are ignorant because of the lack of differentiation. The second, the “particular” stage, is where humanity (or the child) encounters the external world, which invariably yields contestation, leading to the creation of the “Other.” The encounter between the subject and the object, though conflictual is a fruitful source of progress. In the final stage, the subject comes to see itself in the object, leading to a return to the universality of the first stage, but this time with a better understanding of the self. Marx also used a tripartite model in his dialectical account of human history. According to Marx, history began when humans broke out of the “naïve universality” of the tribal society, characterized by a unity that excluded differences, into a second stage of a class society. This class society involves both unity and differences; it is here that humans make history, but not under conditions of their own choosing because of class conflicts and exploitation. The final stage in Marx’s dialectics entails communism, where class tensions are lessened, with the rule of the proletariat. Whereas Hegelian dialectics is idealist, Marx’s is manifestly materialistic.

Similarly, in the context of Africa’s colonialism and (under)development, Nkrumah (1964) uses dialectic to examine the tensions between positive and negative actions toward social development in Africa, just as Samir Amin uses it to espouse his notion of regional delinking, or a dialectical relationship with capitalism, which entails a simultaneous selective cutting-off (or delinking) and selective engagement with the capitalist world-system, while Frantz Fanon, on his part, used dialectics in many of his writings to challenge the entrenched Manichaeism of the colonial logic (which asserts that simply belonging to one race determines your place in society) toward his liberatory idea of a new humanism. More recently, Harvey (1996: 49–54) formulated what he calls the principles of dialectics, which include the following six key propositions: (i) That change and instability are characteristic features of all things or systems; (ii) that dialectical thinking gives priority to the understanding of processes and relations, rather than to things, elements, and structures; (iii) that parts and wholes are mutually constitutive of each other in dialectics; (iv) that things are always assumed to be internally heterogeneous in dialectical thinking; (v) that, in dialectics, entities are internally contradictory; and (vi) that “causes” are interchangeable with “effects” (Harvey, 1996: 49–54).

The cruces of the dialectics advocated by Nkrumah, Harvey, Fanon, and Amin are not that different from the long-standing laws of dialectics (Wood and Grant, 2002: 42-46), which include the following three propositions: (i) The law of the transformation of quantity into quality: That under certain conditions, a small quantitative change can lead to a big transformation or a qualitative change. (ii) The law of the interpenetration of opposites: That power, motion, or life, in general, is possible only when there is unity of opposites as in the unity between light and darkness, capital and labor, master and slave. (iii) The law of the negation of the negation (or the second negation): That life, progress, or development occurs through a complex transcendence, by which what is already negated is subject to another negation, but at a higher level (Wood and Grant, 2002).

From the preceding, we learn that dialectics is highly skeptical of Manichaeism, and espouses the primacy of process, contradictions, change, and relations, as opposed to stable elements and structures.

Development

Depending on one’s disciplinary tilt, development can be seen as a matter of economic growth, modernization, distributive justice, freedom, empowerment, environmental sustainability, and so on. Historically, neoclassical economists such as Lewis (1955: 9) saw development as economic growth. However, by the time of the first UN Development Decade (1960s), it was clear that growth alone was not enough, with the likes of Dudley Seers (1920–1983) offering a critique of the development orthodoxy, then. Seers (1969: 3–4) argued that economic growth without a reduction in unemployment, poverty, or inequality is not development. Incidentally, it was around the start of the first Development Decade (1960s) that the infamous modernization theory gained currency, especially through the work of W W Rostow, a counterpoint to which yielded various Marxian dependency and world-system theories—a particular version of the latter, the theory of uneven geographic development, deserves mention here. Popularized by notable geographers, including David Harvey and Neil Smith, with concepts such as spatial fix and capital switching, respectively, this theory highlights the disparities in development at various geographic scales—from intra-urban, through national and regional differences, to uneven international development. Couched in Marxian political economy, this inequality is seen not as an aberration, but as the norm under capitalism. According to this theory, economic development in one area is inexorable linked to underdevelopment in another area.

By the mid-1980s, disillusionments over the modernization, dependency, and world system theories plunged development thought into a conspicuous impasse, which culminated in the proliferation of new theories, such as neoliberal development, post-development, development as freedom, and sustainable development. The latter is not only relevant here because of the primacy of human–environment relationships in geographic analysis, but also because of its dialectical underpinnings as well as its interconnections with uneven development. At its core, sustainable development sees inequality as both the cause and effect of environmental vulnerability and unsustainability. And like uneven development, this dynamic operates at multiple geographic scales. For our purpose, development is conceptualized as a complex, multifaceted, and dialectical process which seeks to reorient the socioeconomic and cultural systems of societies to improve the quality of life in sustainable ways. The next section shows the utility of dialectics as an analytical construct for understanding contemporary African development.

The dialectics of African development

If “development” is indeed about improving people’s life, then every region of the world should have some room for it. However, over the years, analysts have often discussed development in bipolar terms in which countries of the global South, in general, and Africa, in particular, are seen as “underdeveloped,” and, thus, in need of development, while those of the global North are considered “developed” already. Even when the countries of the world are discussed in a spectrum, one finds African countries occupying the worst end of this continuum, with the “advanced” countries positioned at the best end, and the rest sandwiched between these polarities. Attend any conference on development and the chances are that most of the negative examples would be tied to Africa, without much attention to the specificities of the individual countries on the continent. Of course, many of the unflattering images about Africa are laced with racism and stereotypes, with questionable empirical base. Since the mid-2000s, Africa has been making strides in its development indicators, but the stereotypes of dysfunctionality and extreme poverty persist. Berman (2013) offers some reasons why Africa is on the path to development. According to him, not only does Africa have most of the world’s uncultivated land, a large market, and one of the largest workforce, but Africa is also becoming increasingly stable, politically. In what follows, we use dialectics to help us understand the complexities of Africa’s development. Our effort is to use dialectical logic to subvert the Manichaeism with which many approach the discourse on African development. In our view, the Afro-optimist who indulges in a dogmatic poverty-denialism is as mistaken as the unflinching Afro-pessimist who avers that all is negative on the continent—the reality is somewhere in the middle, and that is our insistent premise.

African development: An exercise in the negation of the negation

One of the cruces of dialectics is negation, which extends to the notion of “second negation” or “sublation” in Hegelian terms. “Negation” connotes getting to know a phenomenon through what it is not; to negate something is to nullify it. Sublation is when an entity is nullified and simultaneously transcended to move it to a higher plane. Clearly, development is imbued with sublation, which amounts to a Schumpeterian creative destruction in the sense that what is created comes about only after some form of destruction.

At the very least, negation and sublation suggest that development is nonlinear; it often assumes a spiral trajectory. Put differently, development is never all-positive, and its progressions are inter-mixed with retrogressions. A simple illustration with African development would be useful here: Prior to Africans’ encounter with Europeans, the former had their traditional culture(s), many attributes of which left much to be desired by today’s cultural standards (the practices of female genital mutilation and human sacrifice come to mind in this regard). With Africans’ encounter with Europeans, some of these cultural practices were eliminated from the African culture, with the embrace of some European cultural attributes which are deemed progressive—for example, new ways of industrial production. The encounter with Europeans amount to sublation, since some African traditional cultural practices were nullified, and out of their ashes emerged hybridized cultural practices. The intermingling of various African languages with English and French to form pidgin and creole languages, respectively, which now serve as lingua franca in many parts of Africa is a good example here. Such cultural hybridizations between Europeans and Africans have always been a two-way process. However, as Nkrumah (1964: 5) notes, it so happens that even some African scholars have a hard time recognizing the contribution of Africans to European culture.

Given that development entails creative destruction, it is never linear. Yet, this basic fact has eluded much of the discourse on Africa’s development, with analysts paying much more attention to the destructive or negative forces on the continent, and relegating the creative or positive ones to the background. This accounts for the widespread stereotype of Africa as a continent of poverty, and dysfunctionality. The orthodoxy seems to expect African development to be a linear progression, moving forward from one stage to another a la Rostow. Backward movements are generally considered aberrant and not inherent in development. However, development is never straightforward. It is high time we saw African development in new ways, and became receptive of its occasional backward movement. Indeed, if the African independence movement started in earnest in the 1960s, then most countries have been independent for only 60 years or so, and in the grand scheme of development, this is not that long a time frame. Still, African countries could have done better, considering how Asian countries such as Malaysia, South Korea, and Singapore have moved along the development continuum.

Undoubtedly, there are worrying levels of famine, poverty, unemployment, and so forth in some African countries; still, all is not negative. Even The Economist, which saw Africa as “the Hopeless Continent” in May of 2000, saw it as “the Hopeful Continent” in another issue in 2011. In the latter piece, it noted that “Africa now has a fast-growing middle class…The rate of foreign investment has soared around tenfold in the past decade. China’s arrival has improved Africa’s infrastructure and boosted its manufacturing sector” (The Economist, 2011: 2). Yet in the same article, it acknowledged that: “[o]ptimism about Africa needs to be taken in fairly small doses, for things are still exceedingly bleak in much of the continent. Most Africans live on less than two dollars a day. Food production per person has slumped since independence in the 1960s” (The Economist, 2011: 1,2). Additionally, much of the recent resource extraction-induced growth in African countries have come at a hefty cost to environmental sustainability. Presently, by all accounts, Africa is among the “luckiest” regions when it comes to the COVID-19 pandemic: While the continent has 17% of the world’s population, it has only 2.3% of the 65 million confirmed cases at the time of writing this piece—but who knows how things will turn up in the end? Still, there is no denying that as more activities move online, countries with reliable internet connectivity and digitization, advanced intellectual property, and sizeable repositories of data are poised to do better, and these are certainly not African countries, with few exceptions. This juxtaposition of positive and negative news about Africa points to the dialectical nature of African development—and this is our central thesis.

African development: The interchangeability of causes and effects

A key tenet of dialectics is that causes are interchangeable with effects. This principle points to the interpenetration of opposites, a principle that is routinely overlooked in the contemporary discourse on African development. For instance, while analysts are quick to show that Africa’s development is hampered by the lack of education, only few are able to draw the recursive causality to see how the lack of development also hampers education in Africa, in a classic case of a cause and effect being interchangeable. Similarly, while it is intuitive to attribute the growing emigration of African youth out of the continent to the lack of employment, few are able to discern that the exodus can also be the cause of Africa’s unemployment challenges, in the first place. Also, just as African underdevelopment can be seen as the cause of poor health care, it can also be the effect of poor health care. This basic awareness points to the need to eschew simplistic, uni-directional causal attributions in Africa’s development. With causes and effects being interchangeable, it is not difficult to see how opposites can interpenetrate in our dialectical understanding of Africa’s development. Nowadays, Africa is in Europe, for instance, just as Europe is in Africa. Not only are Africans living in Europe and Europeans living in African, but the conditions of underdevelopment that are generally associated with Africa, through theorizations of uneven geographic development, for instance, are also common in some European cities and vice versa.

African development and the transformation of quantity into quality

Another intriguing tenet of dialectics with utility for Africa’s development discourse is the transformation of quantity into quality. According to this law, phenomena can undergo substantive qualitative change, following small and progressive quantitative increments. Consider the process of boiling water progressively to a temperature of 99°C, after which the addition of a mere 1° of temperature transforms the water into steam, which then vaporizes. This law undergirds the sorites paradox and the idea of a tipping point, popularized by Gladwell (2013). Development, like the boiling water, can sneak up on us, with a country moving, imperceptibly, from, say, among the category of less developed countries to that of the lower-middle income group. We thus find the United Nations Industrial Development Organization now listing several African countries among its lower-middle income countries and middle-income countries.

The change from water to steam is often so imperceptible that only the keen eye can spot it. This explains why people who have lived in specific African countries for a long time might not readily discern the gradual development underway. Meanwhile, to the transnational migrants to these countries, such gradual changes are usually perceptible. If there is a tipping point in development, then we cannot continue to boil our water of “underdevelopment” to 99°C and expect a transformation into steam, or into a developed country. The notion of tipping point has some resonance in the analysis of development assistance to Africa, also. For decades now, many African countries have received development assistance, but still languish in underdevelopment. Could it be that this assistance is usually below the tipping point? Even though one can mount a convincing anti-aid case when it comes to Africa’s development, it is hard to ignore the role of the tipping point hypothesis in any such analysis.

Conclusion

Clearly, to better grasp how African countries are faring in terms of development, we need to conceptualize development as a dialectical process, entailing creative destruction and internal contradictions. African development, like that of any other region, is hardly linear; rather, it is a spiral process involving negation and sublation. Moreover, African development, like that of others, exhibits aspects of the sorites paradox by which small quantitative increments can lead to dramatic qualitative transformations. Additionally, African development, like that of any other region, involves complex, cross-cutting processes, many of which have their causes and effects being interchangeable. With such complexities, what is the best way to assess contemporary African development? Our answer is simple, but hardly simplistic: we should eschew dogmatic Manichaeism if we are to gain deeper prescience into the development trends underway in Africa. Discursive practices on the African development that project an image of a know-it-all certainty betrays its own superficiality, since development is as spiral, mutable, and internally contradictory, as it is unending and patently dialectical.