POST-COLONIAL DEVELOPMENTAL EPISTEMOLOGY AND BORDER THINKING IN THE AFRICAN CONTEXT

Résumé

The decline and failures of developmental epistemology recorded across many countries in sub-Saharan Africa following the political independence is the focus of this paper. It seeks to interrogate the kind of epistemology upon which developmental efforts in some of these post-colonial African states have been predicated. It argues that the nature and structure of knowledge production and dissemination within such context are largely responsible for the slow pace in the achievement and quality of development (structural and human) in these countries. The assumption here is, most of these epistemologies of development seem at variance with the various African cultural contexts within which societal transformation and development were anticipated. As a consequence, the continuous failures with respect to development and the fact that the story of development in Africa compared to the significant developmental feats in other parts of the world with similar historical experiences. This observation necessitates the need to probe the nature and quality of epistemology of development that has served many of these post-colonial African states. In this paper I seek to explore the benefits of border thinking which reflects a critique of capitalist epistemology of development that recognizes, attentive to and inclusive of the cultural setting within which discourse on developmental epistemology is problematicised. To achieve this goal the paper adopts and appropriates the analytical and evaluative tools of philosophy to examine the state of developmental epistemology in post-colonial Africa while drawing on the relevance of border thinking for this project. As an exercise in philosophy therefore, it prefers the inferential model of reasoning to the empirical data gathering model.