Globalization, Culture and Development: Perspectives on Africa

The idea as well as the extensive practices linked to globalization, have had important impacts on the lives of people over the past few decades. The constructiveness or otherwise of this impact seems to have been determined by one’s geographical and, by extension, cultural, educational and developmental locations. In the case of Africa, the majority of the people should be characterized as pragmatically discontented with the phenomenon. Because it contains so much of Western ideological exportations into Africa and elsewhere, it may be intelligent to argue that in most life contexts, especially at the cultural level which defines and sustains so much about people’s lived realities, and which also determines the quality of social development achieved in given time-space intersections, globalization has not been ‘nice’ to Africa. It is in response to globalization’s de-culturing and under developing effects therefore, that this article locates globalization as potentially representing the continuities of Western hegemonic and colonial practices in the continent, and discusses the possible re-routing of the current trajectories of globalization so as to achieve more inclusive cultural, educational and developmental spaces.