India is not an under developed country but a highly developed one in an advanced state of decay
Africa Studies Journal entry 4-
I have been working on an assignment for my post- colonial history course that requires I look into the dangers of nationalistic/triumphalistic historiography. The reading is a sin qua non for my degree,but is also a little bit of leisure reading.
I try to make sure that a lot of the sources I refer to in these academic assignments are either by Africans or at least Afrocentric in their perspective. On issues of colonialism I have come to find that Asia and Africa are faced with same plight. So Indian politician Shashi Tharoor wrote a book called the Great Indian Novel in which he uses satire to retell the history of India. This is somehow an attempt to take back the history of the Indian people from the politicians, a lot like African scholars like Cheikh Anta Diop and Ali Mazrui have tried to do.
The issues of development, and who was ahead during the era of modernization seems to have shaped a lot of historians and the way they write history. Anyway, Tharoor in his novel apparently says this: “India is not an undeveloped country but a highly developed one in an advanced state of decay” I found this to be true for the entire African continent too. I don’t think that the rest of the world understands that there was a living and thriving Africa before colonialism. Civilizations have come out of this continent, world changing philosophies and natural resources.
The African continent and it’s people have always been developed. That development has been either against European norms or covered up in the mess that colonialism has left behind. We truly are in an advanced state of decay. The issue with our continent, whether political, economic or otherwise is not that we do not know enough, it is that oppression has soiled and broken everything that this continent stands for almost beyond recognition. I think it is important that the remembers of this when facing any issue of global interaction with Africa. We are a land scorned.
