Editorial
Editorial
While the colonial rule in Africa formally ended in the previous century, the shadow of colonial hegemony still lies in the forms of knowing and understanding the world that are practised on the continent, and the imperial power holds an iron grip over the socio-economic realities of Africans. Colonial powers constructed their culture and values as universal, denigrating the ways of being, having and doing of the peoples they subdued and oppressed. The economic and political systems of the colonised societies have been reconfigured to exploit local populations and through their labour accumulate capital for the benefit of the West. African cultures, deemed useless, were mostly neglected, often negated and excluded, which eventually 'allowed them to survive in silence, in the shadows, simultaneously scorned by their own modernised and westernised elites'.1 Today, the challenges posed by economic and cultural imperialist designs, such as globalisation or the capitalist development model, further threaten African cultures, which risk erosion as a result of imbalanced cultural interactions between the local and the global, and lack of validation of African axiological categories among the people of the continent themselves, which leads to the process of acculturation. Few are the communities that, in the face of globalised culture, still carry remnants of economic and political models different from the European 'norm' and reveal scientific and technological innovations created in response to the real needs and experiences of the people more than the commercial desires enthroned by modernity.
CITATION: Bialostocka, Olga. Editorial . Pretoria : Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) , 2022. Africa Insight, Vol. 51, No. 4, 2022, pp. 1–5 - Available at: https://library.au.int/editorial-4