Africa Betrayed: The Challenges of Underdevelopment in Sub-Saharan Africa

Description

Africa: From the Betrayal of the Past and Present to a Future Focused on Progress Built on Knowledge-Based Devotion

Africa Betrayed offers a very authoritative narrative of the challenges of development in Africa. What makes the work a seminal one, however, is its focus on the cultural, mental, and other “intangible” dimensions of the evolution of the challenges of the African past and present. This focus provides for the author, an African intellectual with wide ranging experience in, and insightful perception of the theoretical, empirical, practical and policy dimensions of the African realities gleaned from decades of hands-on contemplation, a unique take on his subject.

The book is a sequel to the author’s Africa: Realities for Survival and seeks to lay bare in incontrovertible terms how Africans themselves have “betrayed and become instrumental to undermining the potential greatness of Africa” with a view to show “how Africa’s emergence, growth and greatness have been bounded by… various tenets of conformism, reaction and retrogression.” It is very successful in its goal of laying bare the betrayals and mishaps of the African past as a measuring rod for the present and the future with a view to provoking further debate and research on the need and how to salvage Africa from those who hold her in bondage at home and abroad so that they can repay their debt to the continent.

Unlike the “usual” book, therefore, this volume, set for itself, and successfully delivers on the task of providing not only intellectual fare of an engaging nature but also to provide a rallying cry for engagement directed at action to address the continent’s long-standing betrayal and thereafter engage it along a path of progress sustained in the enrichment of the continent and its long-suffering peoples. Steps in this direction include an unearthing of facts and assessment of their implications for a better understanding of the future. In this regard, it is important to emphasise the non-tangible foundations of the African predicament in its cultural and mental firmaments. Although it is one of the oldest and most varied, it has, quite unlike other continents in the non-western world continents, been vulnerable to external cultural and related impulses and quick to accommodate and prefer such to those home-grown through immemorial usage. This capacity encouraged preferences for imported values, institutions, processes and practices.

The book thus encourages a return to a more comprehensive evaluation of the African journey so far with a view to salvaging the continent from those who have hold it in bondage, be they local or foreign. It will be an invaluable addition to the libraries of those in academia, practice, policy, and friends of Africa and Africans themselves interested in a fuller understanding of how Africa arrived at its current conjuncture of challenged or arrested development – and how it can construct new pathways to meaningful and sustained development for itself and its peoples.

Adigun Agbaje, PhD Professor of Political Science University of Ibadan, Nigeria

THE AUTHOR

Tunde Adeniran is a Professor Emeritus of International Relations and Strategic Studies. He once served his country, Nigeria, as Minister of Education and later as Ambassador Extraordinaire and Plenipotentiary to the Federal Republic of Germany. He is a renowned author who has published extensively. His passion for Africa has yielded well-researched, insightful, evocative and seminal publications. AFRICA BETRAYED is one of them.

ISBN: 978-978-61154-7-4