HERMENEUTICAL DIMENSIONS OF AFRICA’S COLONIZATION: A ROOT CAUSE OF PERENNIAL UNDERDEVELOPMENT

Abstract

One of the endemic effects of the years of European colonization of Africa, complemented by the subjugative method of evangelization of the African territory, is the fact that Africans completely lost confidence in their capabilities, values and standards, accepting the contrived notion that only European tastes and values are worth aspiring to. Hermeneutical perspectives were carefully devised to rub in the impression that the African was, ab initio, imperiled by divine fate, and could not possibly amount to any good. In particular, these debilitating hermeneutical perspectives, by deriding the facilities in the African environment, have set, for the African, aspirations towards Europeanization, with a deep-seated intention to demean and diminish everything African; a situation which has grossly militated against African development. To make matters worse, European-influenced tastes have created in the African an intense craving for foreign goods, which has left Africa with a desperate import-oriented economy; a situation which has constituted a colossal drain on the African economy. This paper examines deeply the hermeneutical dimensions to Africa’s intrinsic colonization as the major cause of Africa’s perennial under-development, and proposes modalities for releasing Africa and Africans from a perpetual colonial mentality which is responsible for the non-exploration of the vast resources and opportunities in the continent, culminating in her perennial state of backwardness and under-development.