Iron Cages

In Iron Cages, Alison Jones argues that the social sciences in their ideological capacity are implicated in the crisis of the postcolonial state. During the Cold War era, two paradigms in particular - modernisation theory and Marxism-Leninism - operated in hostile competition with one another. Each defined the boundaries and trajectories of 'legitimate knowledge' in the sphere of Third World development. Paradoxically, they shared a common endeavour: that of banishing 'illegitimate' knowledges and life experiences to an epistemological limbo. Thus, the iron bars of expert knowledge systems imported from the United States (the West) and the Soviet bloc (the East) competed to enclose the lived worlds of Africans within rigid 'scientific' parameters, in the process materially contributing to the coercive configurations of African states.

The post-Cold War dominance of liberal (capitalist) democracy has brought little relief to a beleaguered sub-continent. The locus of global truth continues to correspond with the locus of global power; in consequence, alternative knowledge systems and historically specific political and social experience continue to be marginalised. However, a monolithic African nationalism does not provide a credible alternative. On the contrary, when African elites define an exclusively African 'truth', they merely succeed in deepening the legitimacy crisis of the postcolonial state.

According to Jones, the search for substantive territory somewhere between African specificities and global imperatives was taken seriously by two Cold War era African leaders - Amilcar Cabral of Guinea-Bissau and Julius Nyerere of Tanzania. Both leaders made innovative attempts to construct political ideologies that meshed sufficiently with local realities - yet neither focused exclusively on Africans (as distinct from a non-African 'other'). Rather, they spoke inclusively of human beings, and located their countries and peoples within a universal humanist discourse. By situating local specificities within global contexts, they flagged a way forward for the state in Africa.