Development and Modernity in Africa: An Intercultural Philosophical Perspective

Joseph Agbakoba’s Development and Modernity in Africa is at once courageous, deeply self-reflexive, epochal, and thoroughly awakening. It achieves a foundational representation and reconstruction of human agency in traditional Africa to guide contemporary Africa. This huge achievement is anchored on two main features that run throughout the text. One is that it refocuses Africans’ attention on themselves as the primary agents of every bit of their historical experiences—past, present, and the future. The other is that it highlights a connection among Africans’ existential concerns, epistemic concerns and creativity, and lingering epistemic orientation. These drive knowledge generation and research agenda on the continent. The book therefore qualifies as a mirror for self-understanding by Africans—about themselves, their actions, and what they have made or can make of themselves and context. The book contains an elaborate Introduction and seven tightly argued chapters. Chapters 1 to 3 focus on conceptual clarifications and philosophical analyses of concepts. Chapters 4 to 6 are a historical presentation of and hermeneutic engagement with facts and fictions. Chapter 7 is a reconstructive project. There, Agbakoba highlights how to improve trans-cultural, complementary, and just understanding of Africa’s possible self-improvement today and in the future. In this book, which for now qualifies as his magnum opus, Agbakoba responds to several burning issues in African studies generally and philosophy in Africa, in particular. For each issue, Agbakoba highlights paths to improved human agency and development in Africa. By doing this, he weakens the lure of old and new scholarly trends that sustain irresponsibility and blame-gaming on the continent. The most recent of such trends is the search for what is described as decolonization. Four of the issues he responded to stand out. They are closely related, but I will try to keep them separate. First is the lingering question of Africans’ contributions to and degree of culpability for their past and present predicaments, and development crises. Agbakoba explains that transatlantic slavery would not have Philosophical Papers