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The Role That The West Can Play (which May Include, For Example, Technical ...

The role that the West can play (which may include, for example, technical advice or a certain kind of intellectual input) should be determined and defined by Africans themselves.
Chapter 3: indigenous solutions to the failure of development in Africa
Englebert (1997, 769) explains that ‘it is a mistake to see the modern as dynamic and the traditional as static. Indigenous African institutions are themselves in constant evolution, as a function of changes in their environments, such as relative prices or relative resource scarcity. They may whither away or become agents of progress according to their own dynamics.' This serves as a reminder that looking to African institutions as a potential answer to African development problems need not mean a return to ‘traditional' or pre-colonial institutions. Indeed many indigenous institutions have continued to function and evolve throughout the colonial years and the post-independence years. These institutions may be functioning at local or regional levels and their structures and experiences could be drawn upon in developing a new model for African states.
Even before colonisation, Africa's relationship with Europe was arguably preventing the continent from industrialising. Alemayehu (2003, 72) explains that ‘there existed a reasonable degree of trade linkage with Europe in the pre-colonial period. Leaving aside the slave trade, the main feature of this trade was the export of primary commodities by African colonies to Europe. Thus, even before the onset of the colonial era, the seeds of Africa's subsequent role (as a supplier of raw materials and foodstuffs for Europe, and a market for European manufactures) as well as its dependence on external finance had already been sown.' Thus economic relations with Europe kept Africa firmly focused on primary sector production rather than secondary sector industry. This highlights the fact that not everything was perfect prior to colonization there were already some problems in the way economies were structured across much of Africa and in looking back to older institutions to secure the development future of Africa, it is important to be critical and selective.
Herbst (1996) argues that ‘[i]n precolonial Africa, a wide variety of political organizations-villages, citystates, nation-states, empires-rose and fell. However, the formal colonization of Africa and the demarcation of the continent into national states between 1885 and 1902 replaced that diversity of forms with the European model of the national state. After independence, Africa's heterogeneous political heritage was brushed aside in the rush by nationalists to seize the reins of power of the nation-states as defined politically and geographically by their European colonizers.

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