Among the many eye-catching events like the much talked about Swedish midsummer dance which drew my attention this summer, was the topical theme of the 2024 Canadian Association of African Studies (CAAS) Annual Conference. The organizers chose a pertinent theme “Sustainability and Sustainable Development in Africa: Past, Present and Future,” highlighting the conundrum of Africa’s state-led development efforts. This attempt to review the structure and programs of current development bureaucracies in Africa is not new. According to historian Bonny Ibhawoh, there has been a fierce and largely polemical debate amongst states, scholars, and practitioners since the concept of the right to development first surfaced in the early 1970s. On December 4, 1986, the United Nations formalized the discourse with the Declaration on Human Right to Development (DRD) with the hope, perhaps, that it would “place people at the center of the development process and support their inalienable rights to participate in, contribute to, and enjoy economic, social, cultural and political development.” Most scholars, including Peter Uvin and Philip Alston, argue that the DRD has not accomplished its stated goals. The 2024 CAAS Conference organizers affirm this position.
But the issue, as Ibhawoh observes, is not merely dismissing the DRD as incompatible with local forms of civil and political organization, but providing a lasting, workable framework for development in the continent. From a historical perspective, the problem is traceable to the conceptualization of African-European relations by pioneer Africanist scholarship with its view of the external manufacture of social transformations in Africa during the colonial moment – and even after. Among other things, this thinking reinforces the North-South dichotomy and supports the perception of a hegemonic global economic system that must be resisted or replaced. Apart from blurring Africa’s longue durée connection with the global north, this perspective glosses over local agency in routinizing colonial societies. Thus, many forms of local actions which foster(ed) cultural continuity and social reproduction within local and trans-local spaces are rarely recognized as powerful vehicles for the actualization of sustainable development in Africa.
A good example is the role of town unions in community building. The dominant view in the Nigerian context is that town unions were primarily organs of anticolonial resistance and a platform for social welfare for migrants in bourgeoning cities from the early 1920s. This framing, though not unsupported, simplifies the actions of local agents in navigating the changing social dynamics of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, thus undermining their important contributions to the institutional frameworks of the colonial and postcolonial states. Were town unions really instruments of anticolonial resistance or simply platforms for social welfare? Why and how did they thrive despite evasive colonial presence? What are the legacies of town union activities, and what do they tell us about indigenous approaches to sustainable development?
My next blog will unpack these questions by analyzing the role of a prominent town union in Southeastern Nigeria, the Enugwu-Ukwu Community Development Union (ECDU). This is important to understanding the often overlooked, yet critical indigenous approaches to social sustainability in Nigeria, for instance, where the apparent failure of political leadership and lack of visionary economic policies have meant that non-state actors have become surrogates for the state. It will also question the dichotomous view of local and global forms of civil society, and try to recenter African perspectives on development through the lens of local town unions.
