Africa Development, Vol. XXXVIII, Nos 3 & 4, 2013, pp.

1 – 19
© Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa, 2014
(ISSN 0850-3907)

Claude E. Ake and the Praxis of Knowledge

Production in Africa
Jeremiah O. Arowosegbe*
Abstract
South-driven initiatives on endogenous knowledge production owe a great debt
to Claude Ake. This article discusses the strengths and weaknesses of Ake’s
account of the social sciences and knowledge production on Africa. It evaluates
his legacies and presents him as one of the most fertile and influential voices
within the social sciences community in Africa. Claude Ake, being a political
scientist with an unusually broad intellectual formation and horizon, the article
examines his production – over the last four decades – of a wide ranging body of
works, which have been instructive, not only for their analytical acuity,
methodological rigour and theoretical sophistication, but also for being remarkable
products of a magisterial erudition, the creations of an exceptionally great mind,
written with a deft and profound authority. The works also constitute a sigficant
attempt to adapt the intellectual legacies of Marxist scholarship towards
understanding the political economy and social history of contemporary Africa
from a broadly critical perspective. The leitmotif in doing so is ‘to establish a
specific relevance of studying Ake’s works’. Through an examination of the
epistemological bases of policy, practice and theory in his corpus, this article
establishes an important area within the social sciences in Africa positively
affected by Ake’s intellectual involvement.

Résumé
Les initiatives enclenchées dans les pays du Sud sur la production du savoir
endogène ont une dette importante envers Claude Ake. Dans un tel contexte,
cette étude évalue les points forts et les points faibles de l’exposé que fait Ake
des sciences sociales et de la question de la production du savoir en Afrique.
L’article examine son héritage et le présente comme l’une des voix les plus fertiles
et influentes au sein de la communauté des chercheurs en sciences sociales du
continent. Il fait un bilan de la production, couvrant les quatre dernières décennies,
d’un corpus étendu de travaux de ce spécialiste des sciences politiques doté

* A. C. Jordan Research Fellow at the Centre for African Studies, University of

Cape Town, South Africa. E-mail: [email protected]

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 2 Africa Development, Vol. XXXVIII, Nos 3 & 4, 2013

d’une formation intellectuelle singulièrement vaste, et dont la valeur ne tient pas

seulement à la sophistication théorique de l’œuvre, à sa rigueur méthodologique
et à son acuité analytique ; il s’agit de travaux remarquables de par leur érudition
magistrale, car ils sont dûs à un esprit exceptionnel maîtrisant à un degré élevé les
théories de la langue et de la critique ; ils sont ciselés avec une autorité profonde,
et constituent aussi des aspects significatifs des tentatives d’adapter l’héritage
intellectuel des études marxistes en vue de comprendre l’économie politique et
l’histoire sociale de l’Afrique contemporaine dans une perspective largement critique.
L’idée générale ici est d’établir la pertinence spécifique de l’étude de l’œuvre
d’Ake. Grâce à l’examen des bases épistémologiques de la théorie, de la pratique
et de la politique dans ses travaux, le présent article trace les contours d’un
champ important dans le domaine des sciences sociales africaines et du monde,
champ qui a été affecté de manière positive par l’implication intellectuelle d’Ake.

Introduction
This article discusses Ake’s contribution to the enterprise of knowledge
production. It addresses the question of Africa’s epistemological and
philosophical lag in the area of knowledge production. To clarify, while the
academies in Asia and Latin America shifted to postcolonial studies in the
1980s, Africa remained – trapped – within the dependency, political economy
and underdevelopment paradigm as the dominant mode of analysis. Conse-
quently, history writing and more broadly, knowledge production on the
continent has neither benefited much from, nor engaged substantially with
the expansive debate and rich literature on postcolonial studies, especially as
we see in the subaltern studies intellectual project in India, South Asia and
Latin America. It bears repeating that Ake was never directly identified with
the debate on postcoloniality, which only became common currency and
took the centre stage in major intellectual circles and political debates across
the world about a decade before his sudden and tragic death in a plane crash
in November 1996. While his publications are marked by an original brand
of Marxism, some of his contributions and insights can, nevertheless, be
linked to the discussions on postcoloniality. This article attempts to make
such a linkage explicit.
Data were obtained for this study from both primary and secondary
sources. Primary data took the form of extensive, unstructured in-depth
interviews conducted with a selected group of twenty strategic informants
purposively sampled, five each from the colleagues, contemporaries, old
friends and past students of the late Claude Ake. Secondary data were drawn
from Ake’s original texts; the published commentaries, critiques and tributes
written in his honour before and after his death by colleagues, friends and
various institutional bodies; the information available in his curriculum vitae

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 Arowosegbe: Claude E. Ake and the Praxis of Knowledge Production 3

as well as the texts which focus not only on the debates and issues on
which Ake worked and wrote, but also on the general context of scholarship
in Africa during his lifetime and beyond.
Following the introduction, this article is divided into three sections. The
first locates Ake within the academic formation of postcolonial studies. The
second discusses his contribution to endogenous knowledge production on
Africa and presents his corpus as a corrective intervention for challenging
historically entrenched and institutionalized paradigmatic domination of the
continent by European and other supremacist scholarships, and advocates
the decolonization of knowledge production on Africa – inter alia through
articulating the epistemological and referential bases of Afrocentrism;
asserting the African identity and the possibility of an African renaissance;
invoking the exclusivist and ontological connotations of Africanity as well as
reclaiming the humanity of Africans. The third section is the conclusion.

The Subject Matter of Postcolonial Studies

This section does not tackle the somewhat quixotic task of writing the history
of postcolonial studies, several eloquent examples of which are already in
print. Rather, it seeks briefly to describe its central tenets and locates Ake’s
works within them. Broadly, postcolonial studies represents an intellectual
engagement developed over the past three decades on a set of issues, debates
and articulations of points of intervention, performed as a tricontinental
project within the institutional sites of research centres and universities across
the world, particularly outside the metropolitan intellectual centres (Young
1990) on a range of disciplinary fields.
Characterized by its geographical capaciousness and multiple sites of
production, its lineage embraces Albert Memmi’s analysis in the 1950s of the
drama of North African decolonization; Frantz Fanon’s theorizations of anti-
colonialism and the complex psychology of racism articulated in the 1950s;
Edward Said’s elaboration of Fanon’s (1968:102) thesis that Europe is literally
the creation of the Third World in his (1978) Orientalism, which sparked
decades of scholarship on occidental representations of the East; the wide-
ranging Caribbean scholarship of writers such as C. L. R. James and Wilson
Harris, whose early lives in Trinidad and Guyana, respectively, shaped their
very different approaches to the history of colonialism after their migrations
to England; the works of theorists of the Hispanophone Americas, from
Gloria Anzaldua to Jose David Saldivar; and the contribution of the subaltern
studies group in South Asia initiated by Ranajit Guha, with Dipesh
Chakrabarty, Gayatri C. Spivak, Partha Chatterjee and Sumit Sarkar as
founding members. As an academic formation, its emergence was inspired

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by the realization by these scholars that post-Enlightenment traditions of

European historiography had led to a longstanding neglect of ‘history from
the South’ and that disciplinary practices had failed to address the full
complexity of historical change in the era that they studied. Hence the
determination to make the perspectives of other disciplines integral to the
historical enterprise (Holsinger 2002:1195).
Postcolonial studies is an intellectual-political discourse inspired mainly
by Marxist, structuralist, poststructuralist and postmodernist writings. It
critically engages the legacies of the European Enlightenment for postcolonial
societies generally and Africa, Asia and Latin America in particular. As an
anti-colonial project, it draws from many hybrid and indigenous sources of
representation, self-determination and self-writing with the aim of supplanting
the prodigious power of imperial cultural knowledge (Ashcroft 1995).
Understood in this vital sense, postcoloniality – notice the ontological-
nominalist form of the category – is thus a shorthand expression for an
intense, travelling human condition, a circumstantial experience taking place
within specific geopolitical boundaries, particularly the South (Ahmed 1992
and Radhakrishnan 1993). From yet another perspective, it is also best
understood as a problematic field where contentious and heated debates are
bound to take place for quite a while to come – a field where no single
historical perspective can have a monopoly over the elaboration of the
postcolonial condition – especially at such times like ours when grand
discourses and master narratives in general, like Marxism and nationalism,
are deservedly in disarray. Hence, the need for rigorous and situated
unpacking before they become canonized as universal constants by the
imperatives of metropolitan theory (Radhakrishnan 1993:750–62).
While some postcolonial theorists have been influenced by the cultural
and political critiques developed over time by structuralist and poststructuralist
theorists like Louis Althusser (1918–1990), Michel Foucault (1926–1984)
and Jacques Derrida (1930–2004), Ake was influenced mainly by the
intellectual legacies of Marxist scholarship, particularly the writings of Karl
Marx (1818–1883), Frederick Engels (1820–1895), Vladimir Ilich Lenin
(1870–1924), Rosa Luxemburg (1871–1919), Rudolf Hilferding (1877–
1941), Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin (1888–1938) and Antonio Gramsci
(1891–1937), especially as articulated in the Latin American contributions to
the theories of dependency and underdevelopment. As Ake’s writings reveal,
barring the historicist reading noted in his epistemological and methodological
formulations, Marx remains relevant not just as a critic of capitalism and
liberalism, but also to any postcolonial and postmodernist project of history
writing. And as Kelly Harris (2005:78) explains:

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Underdevelopment theorists clearly embrace much of the philosophy of Marx and

Engels and Ake was no different. The Marxist vision of development seems closer to
Ake’s notion of development.

Postcolonial scholars challenge the hermeneutic approach to the construction

of history and seek to replace it with competing constructions of the past.
Seen from this perspective, postcolonial studies is thus markedly distinguished
from orthodox Marxism by combining its critique of objective material
conditions with the analysis of their subjective effects. It popularizes a self-
reflective critique of the excesses of a history modelled on the Baconian
concept of science, which incorporates into historical consciousness crucial
components of the moral universe of the ahistorical. Its narrative does not
aspire to be a universal form, but rather draws lines, distributes peoples and
insists on a position of difference, unlike European rationalist discourses,
which attempt to unite all peoples and positions in an illusive universe of
ideal consensus. Its insistence on a position of difference, especially in relation
to ‘its other’ should be clear. As permanent features, colonialism and other
legacies of the Enlightenment left behind two contradictory heritages within
the character of postcolonial modernities. On the one hand, they established
and defined not just the character and context of the intellectual engagements
and theoretical thinking in the countries of the South (Kaviraj and Khilnani
2001:3), but also shaped and now dictate the very contents of the pedagogical
engagements in the disciplinary fields and institutional sites in these societies.
On the other hand, they are implicated in the dependence and
underdevelopment of Third World societies, especially through creating the
conditions sustaining their backwardness, marginalization and stagnation
under the present situations. These two realities define the mode of engagement
with the European world and thought generally in the post-Enlightenment
period. Consequently, while emphasizing the applicability of universal notions
of rights and the equality of humanity to all societies regardless of age, race
and sex, postcoloniality also seeks to establish alternative conceptions of
history and time by presenting dependency and underdevelopment not as
original states of being in these societies, but as products of the unequal
relations between the core capitalist countries and the peripheries. Struck by
the realization of the need to recover and develop an identity damaged by the
domineering imperial discourses, postcoloniality advocates the writing of a
new history, which rather than returning to atavistic, nativist histories, or
rejecting modernity outrightly in its entirety, invents a narrative that adequately
makes visible, within the very structure of its various narrative forms, its
own repressive strategies and practices (Chakrabarty 2000). Put differently,
postcoloniality sees nothing atavistic or regressive about a people revisiting

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the past with the intention of reclaiming it. The problem, however, comes up
when revisionist identities are upheld as primordial and transcendentally
sanctioned rather than as historically produced.
Postcolonial studies is therefore committed almost by definition to engaging
the universals, which include abstract conceptions of the human and of
reason, forged in eighteenth century Enlightenment Europe, which inform
most of the human sciences (Chakrabarty 2000). And given the control and
domination of about nine-tenths of the world by the imperial powers since
the post-First World War period and the confirmation of Lenin’s (1968)
positions on the complete division and future re-division of the world,
postcoloniality makes clear the legacies and nature of inherited power
relations and their continuing effects on modern global culture and politics
(Ashcroft 1998). The spirit of this engagement is found inter alia in the
writings of Hichem Djait, the Tunisian historian who accused imperial Europe
of denying Africa its own vision of humanity. It is also found in Fanon’s
(1968) articulation of the African liberation struggle, which held on to the
Enlightenment idea of the equality of the human person. The engagement
with European thought is thus marked by the fact that the European intellectual
tradition is the most dominant in the social sciences departments of most, if
not all modern universities today. And as Samir Amin (1989) has observed,
although the idea of the European intellectual tradition stretching back to
ancient Greece is merely a fabrication of a relatively recent European history;
nevertheless, that is the genealogy of the thought in which social scientists
across the world find themselves inserted. The point at issue here is that,
given the contentious nature of the opposing claims to history around which
the genealogy of the social sciences is constructed; the critique of historicism
is therefore an integral part of the unended story of postcolonial studies. As
Chakrabarty (2000:6) submits:
… the very history of politicization of the population or the coming of political
modernity, in countries outside of the Western capitalist democracies of the world
produces a deep irony in the history of the political. This history challenges us to
rethink two conceptual gifts of nineteenth-century Europe, concepts integral to the
idea of modernity. One is historicism – the idea that to understand anything it has to
be seen both as a unity and in its historical development – the other is the very idea
of the political. What historically enables a project such as that is the experience of
political modernity… European thought has a contradictory relationship to such an
instance of political modernity. It is both indispensable and inadequate in helping us
think through the various life practices that constitute the political and the historical.
Exploring – on both theoretical and factual registers – this simultaneous
indispensability and inadequacy is the task of postcolonial scholarship.

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 Arowosegbe: Claude E. Ake and the Praxis of Knowledge Production 7

From our standpoint, it is mainly within this mode of thought that Ake makes
his contribution. As Sudipta Kaviraj (1992) observes, many issues
characterize the experiences of postcolonial societies generally. But, given
their connectible nature, postcolonial studies takes the form of an intellectual
discursive practice, which critiques all manifestations of imperial control,
language and representations. And, although the histories and legacies of the
capitalist penetration of Third World societies are not entirely a homogenous
narration, their central thesis has a potentially connectible character. Given
this connectible nature, the task of the postcolonial theorists is therefore to
engage what Kaviraj and Khilnani (2001) call the constraining contexts of
borrowed knowledge, language and paradigms within which the histories of
these societies are being written. For, as Kaviraj (1992:34) maintains, unless
an intellectual history of anti-colonialism is compiled, the history of
colonialism will remain permanently unfinished. As will be shown shortly,
Ake’s career and scholarship represent an engagement in this direction.
Having located him within the tricontinental project of postcolonial studies,
the next section discusses his contribution to the social sciences, and Africa’s
context of knowledge production in particular.

Claude Ake’s Contribution

This section discusses Ake’s contribution to the African context of knowledge
production. I argue that although obliquely so, Ake’s works speak eminently
in the multidisciplinary direction of postcolonial studies. In proving this
assertion, attention is drawn to those aspects of his works which further
postcolonial thought, particularly with respect to Africa.
The major issue, which Ake engages in this regard, is the question of
how knowledge as appropriated and developed by Africans on the basis of
their historical experiences can be valorized for empowering the state in the
pursuit of democracy and development (Ake n.d.). The pertinence of his
intervention in this regard is very timely, especially now when the continent’s
political leadership has declared itself in search of a suitable framework for
achieving an all-embracing continental renaissance. His (1979) magisterial
text, Social Science as Imperialism: The Theory of Political Development,
radically questions, from the perspective of the colonial and postcolonial
world, the profound epistemological transformations which the advent of
theory supposedly brought about. Dealing with the Western political science
scholarship on developing countries and the literature on political development
in particular, Ake engages creatively and critically with one of the most
pernicious and most subtle forms of imperialism – imperialism in the guise
of scientific knowledge – and establishes its practical significance for
development. According to Ake (1979:I):

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My thesis is that with the exception of Marxist tradition, Western social science
scholarship on developing countries amounts to imperialism. Western social science
scholarship on developing countries is imperialism in the sense that (a) it foists, or at
any rate attempts to foist on the developing countries, capitalist values, capitalist
institutions, and capitalist development; (b) it focuses social science analysis on the
question of how to make the developing countries more like the West; and (c) it
propagates mystifications, and modes of thought and action which serve the
interests of capitalism and imperialism.

Needless to say that this thesis is not breaking new ground but merely supplementing
the effort which others have made. The capitalist and imperialist character of the
Western scholarship on economic development in the Third World has been indicated
by several progressive economists, particularly Samir Amin, Accumulation on a
World Scale: A Critique of the Theory of Underdevelopment, and Paul Baran, The
Political Economy of Growth. Unfortunately, the treatment of the imperialism of
social science in these writings is merely incidental. Paul Baran is mostly interested
in how the economic surplus is produced and used and how developed and
underdeveloped societies undergo economic transformation. The major task which
Samir Amin sets for himself in Accumulation on a World Scale is primarily to clarify
the phenomenon of underdevelopment. The idea that the bulk of Western social
science scholarship on developing countries amounts to imperialism does not come
out clearly and forcefully, and the significance of this imperialism does not stand out
in clear relief.

Ake takes a critical stance toward continental theoretical discourses from

Africa’s point of view and exposes the Eurocentric and European assumptions
undergirding the most avant-garde writings to emerge on the continent from
the developed world. He does this by advancing a critical rethinking of our
fields’ intellectual genealogies in ways that depart from the constricting
narratives of disciplinary origin and originality received from the West.
Focusing on the theory of political development, he opposes those Western
versions of history which claim for themselves a totality of knowledge on
Africa. Yet, in keeping with social scientific ideals, he also reveals his own
commitment to uncovering an apparently deeper level of truth. He
demonstrates with copious evidence, how the models earlier imported from
Europe – Marxism, a belief in modernity and progress, a commitment to
revolution as forward-looking, linear, developmentalist transformation – are
now in doubt. Ake engages these issues with instructive and telling effect.
Exposing the ideological character of the theory of political development,
Ake (1979:60–98) claims that its central position within the Western social
science scholarship is not fortuitous. He traces its emergence to the winning

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of formal political independence by the colonies in the atmosphere of the

Cold War, a development which, it was felt, would jeopardize vital interests
of the colonizing powers. In these circumstances, Ake argues, the interests
of the Western powers demanded the consolidation and preservation of the
fledgling-peripheral capitalist states which they had nurtured from the
penetrating influence of the now defunct Soviet Union. Corresponding to the
need to preserve the West’s hegemony across the world, the theory of
political development emerged as the ideological tool for maintaining the
existing world order under conditions that preserve liberal democratic values
as the political correlate of capitalism. Ake writes, given its historical context
and its class partisan character, the theory of political development and more
broadly, Western social science scholarship in its application to the
postcolonial world, is bourgeois ideology. It has no scientific status. It is
neither applicable to the world nor useful for understanding it. At best, he
says, it merely fosters capitalist institutions and values, and legitimizes the
consolidation of the dictatorship of the Third World bourgeoisie who are the
allies of international capitalism (Ake 1979: 60–1). And given its orientations
and value-assumptions, he states, it studies Africa after the images of the
North. It shows the persistent gaps and lacuna that the continent must
overcome finally to reach the promised land of democracy and development,
of economic prosperity and social peace. This way, Ake contends, it
constructs the continent’s history in terms of a lack through underlining
what more is needed to make democracy work – industrialization,
institutionalization, modernization and the development of civic community,
civil society, social capital and other recipes – which seek to replicate in the
political sphere Rostow’s Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist
Manifesto. According to Ake (1979:II):
Every prognostication indicates that Western social science continues to play a
major role in keeping us subordinate and underdeveloped; it continues to inhibit our
understanding of the problems of our world, to feed us noxious values and false
hopes, to make us pursue policies which undermine our competitive strength and
guarantee our permanent underdevelopment and dependence. It is becoming
increasingly clear that we cannot overcome our underdevelopment and dependence
unless we try to understand the imperialist character of Western social science and to
exorcise the attitudes of mind which it indicates.

According to him, it is not only incorrect but also supercilious to claim that
some ideas need to be accepted and treated as universally worthy and that
their spread across the world is purely positive. In validating this position, he
illustrates several strategic moments where particular interests of popular

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politics, mobilized as community interests, expose the limits of political

universals that liberal theorists had posed as sacred. In doing this, he offers
an elaborate exposition on his transcontinental epistemological engagement
with the questions of democracy and development in Africa. For example, in
his critique of the Princeton series on political development, Ake
(1979:12–59) tackles the liberal claim that the nation-state as the most
legitimate form of political community has been instrumental in creating some
positive values – such as citizenship and the equality of rights – and making
them acceptable and applicable across cultural and historical boundaries.
According to him, while the modern nation-state recognizes the nation as the
only homogeneous and legitimate form of community, actual politics across
the world gives rise to various heterogeneous collectivities that do not
necessarily conform to the sovereign demands of the nation-state.
Ake not only questions the theory’s universalizing assumptions about
culture, identity, language and power, but also the institutional privileging of
theoretical knowledges as well as the very ontology of theory as a discrete
and knowable category of critical engagement. According to Ake (1979:IV):
… this critique is crucial for my argument about the imperialist character of social
science. It exposes the fraudulence of the theory of political development and reveals
the sharp contradiction between the raison d’etre of the theory and what it pretends
to be. If indeed the theory of political development had been sound scientifically, it
would have been more difficult to see it as imperialism. For instance, it would be
quite problematic to show that a work which merely explains the principles of
hydraulics or of heat is imperialism. In this case, the argument could be made that the
work only demonstrates the objective character of an aspect of phenomenal
experience, that the only questions one can properly ask of such a work are, is it
valid? Is it useful for my particular purposes? Well, I have asked these questions of
the theory of political development, and I have found that it fails on both counts. It
is by seeing how it fails in these respects that we are able to fully appreciate its
ideological character.

Ake (1981:68–87) presents the impact of the colonial presence as central for
understanding the continent’s history. Following Walter Rodney (1972), he
defines colonialism as an effective instance of intervention and takeover in
which local conceptions of time, spaces and modes of self-governance were
dismantled; in which a tradition was invented and presented to the colonized
as sacrosanct, so that, in their very act of self-understanding, they could
acquiesce in the epistemic and moral legitimacy of European sovereignty
and superiority. This way, he rehearses the familiar thesis of the postcolonial
predicament by arguing (i) that heterogeneity and hybridity are written into

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the fabric of the postcolonial experience, and (ii) that there is a relationship
of historical continuity, however oblique and problematic, between colonialism
and nationalism. He says, in spite of formal independence, the domineering
impulses of the West on Africa are still strong – through Western social
science – the ideological apparatus, which mediates the dependence and
underdevelopment of the Third World. Hence his advocacy for decolonizing
the social sciences in the global South through endogenizing the very strategies
of knowledge production. Describing Western social science scholarship on
Africa as ‘irrelevant’ and ‘passé’, Ake (1979:IV–V) writes:
It seems to me that the alternative to Western development studies is not a social
science with no ideological bias. That type of social science is neither possible nor
desirable. The alternative has to be a social science whose thrust and values are more
conducive to the eradication of underdevelopment, exploitation and dependence. A
social science which meets that requirement will necessarily have socialist values.

Advancing the case for endogeneity in knowledge production in Africa, Ake

(1986:III) argues that:
…unless we strive for endogenous development of science and knowledge we cannot
fully emancipate ourselves. Why this development must be endogenous should be
clear for it is not a question of parochialism or nationalism. The point is that even
though the principles of science are universal, its growth points and the particular
problems, which it solves, are contingent on the historical circumstances of the
society in which the science is produced.

Ake’s (1979) advocacy of endogeneity suggests transcending the erasures

and extroversions that constitute the hallmark of imperial pedagogy and
scholarship. He cautions that, failing to achieve this, we risk reimporting the
very hegemonies we are working hard to overthrow – a failure which he
says must be resisted as a matter of nationalism and professional
commitment. The way out of this epistemic failure, he says, is to develop a
form of scholarship which takes its local existential, intellectual and political
contexts seriously while also seeking to be globally reputable. He advances
this position through his pragmatic belief that all theories, paradigms, modes
of thought and models of social action should be contextualized in a manner
that they enable us transcend the temptations of wrongly generalizing from
one context to the others without critically considering the specificities of
individual case histories and cultures. He argues that, far from being
universal, the European invention of historical consciousness is only the
result of its own perspectival imaginings, just as other perspectives are also
implicated in the polemics of their own positionalities. His aim in this regard

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is to establish the hegemony of ‘South-driven intellectual thought’ generally

through opposing perennially dominant historiographies which resist change
and ethico-political persuasion.
Ake advocates the building of an alternative global system of knowledge
production based on the appreciation of the different histories which produce
the diverse knowledge bases across the world. To him, this is a crucial
condition for transcending the limitations of the restrictive contexts of
knowledge production in the modern world. It was precisely in the struggle
to achieve this objective that Ake became a central figure in the movements
that gained momentum in the 1970s and 1980s among the progressive forces
within the social science community in Africa, movements which challenged
and exposed the epistemic shortfalls of Western liberal and Marxist social
sciences in their application to Africa. For Ake, therefore, the universality of
empirical and theoretical knowledge is only a ruse which should be carefully
broken down into distinctive cultural and historical components, to be
explored and pursued within the frameworks defined by one’s cultural milieu
and social experiences. In other words, searching for the universals, vaguely
defined as ‘knowledge’ or the ‘truth’, must proceed from the point of view
of an appreciation of one’s context, experience and history. By extension, an
understanding of Ake’s aversion from dogma and orthodoxy helps one in
appreciating his principled rejection of the pluralist, national integration and
his modification of the neo-Marxist theories of dependency and
underdevelopment in their application to Africa.
His emphasis is hinged on the development of a social science scholarship,
which, in epistemic terms is rooted in its culture and locale to create canons
in its own right, especially one that takes the African policy making nexus
seriously. From this, he critiques a major paradox and practice in the
continent’s universities, namely, the idea of deploying and teaching, especially
in African policymaking contexts, as ‘nomothetic’ what is rather
‘idiographic’ in other contexts. He argues that engaging a social science,
which derives the source-codes for its epistemologies from the life forms
and practices of its context and people is a requirement for taking the practice
of scholarship in Africa beyond its conception as translation or data-gathering
for others in the global division of intellectual labour. Ake (1979) exposes the
inclinations of Western social science for teleological analysis. He
demonstrates and encourages further acknowledgement of the idiographic
nature and particularities of Western social science and thought, rather than
blindly treating them as either nomothetic or universal. He therefore
recommends recourse to endogeneity, articulated inter alia through critical
distancing and a selective borrowing from other epistemic contexts, locales
and settings.

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 Arowosegbe: Claude E. Ake and the Praxis of Knowledge Production 13

Lastly, Ake addresses the question of agency in the struggle towards

bringing about the desired forms of change in the continent’s economic and
political transformation. He does this by identifying the intelligentsia as the
vanguard of the revolutionary struggle (see Ake 1978 and n. d.) and also by
locating the people, especially the toiling masses, as the means and end of
development (Ake 1996). Through this praxis, Ake presents his life and
works as examples of the kind of change which he advocates.
In illustrating aspects of the issues, which Ake painstakingly engages,
two examples are in order. These concern the presentation of what Hountonji
(1977) calls extroversion as the nomothetic and the unkind erasure of what
is uniquely African from the collective global memory. As Adesina (2006)
observes, Anthony Giddens (1996) defines sociology ‘as a generalizing
discipline that concerns itself above all with modernity, with the character
and dynamics of modern industrialized societies’. This is added to the attempt
by most texts in the field to trace the emergence of the discipline to Auguste
Comte (1798–1857), the nineteenth century French philosopher, and to identify
Karl Marx (1818–1883), Max Weber (1864–1920) and Emile Durkheim
(1858–1917) as its founding fathers. Such approaches deny uniquely African
contributions and other non-Western cultures a position, not only in sociology,
but also in other social science disciplines. They also deny the contributions
made to these disciplines by Africans and other non-European authorities
and societies. For example, Ibn Khaldun had written his three-volume magnum
opus, Kitab Al ‘Ibar, in 1378 AD. Among others, in the first volume,
Muqaddimah, Ibn Khaldun sets out the conceptual framework and
methodological bases for adjudicating between competing data sources, all
of which are self-consciously sociological. As Sayed Farid Alatas (2006)
and Mahmoud Dhaouadi (1990) have shown, Ibn Khaldun outlines his new
sciences of human organization and society ilm al-umran al-bashari and ilm
al ijtima al-insani, which were ignored by the extroversions of
Westernization. In Adesina’s (2006) estimation, this had occurred for about
452 years before the first volume of Auguste Comte’s six volumes on the
Course of Positive Philosophy was published. In the same work, Ibn Khaldun
rigorously articulates the concept of asabiyyah in explaining the normative
basis of group cohesion, its decomposition and reconstitution; the different
ways in which it manifests at different levels of social organization and among
different groups (Adesina 2006:6). Again, following Adesina’s (2006)
estimations, this had occurred for about 515 years before Emile Durkheim’s
(1893) The Division of Labour and its idea of social norms was published.
However, in spite of these instructive and pioneering efforts by Africans,
one hardly encounters any modern sociology book available to African

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 14 Africa Development, Vol. XXXVIII, Nos 3 & 4, 2013

students and universities mentioning Ibn Khaldun or even discussing his

works. Carefully, but of course deliberately, the value of Ibn Khaldun’s works
has been repudiated on the ground that they are ridden with excessively
religious thinking, which supposedly is contradictory to the modern context
of secularism; and that they do not conform with or focus on real modern
societies. Other examples certainly exist of African philosophers whose works
have been erased on similar grounds by the power-driven impulses of
modernity and the West, so that Ibn Khaldun is just one of the numerous
examples and illustrations of such instructive and pioneering efforts from
the continent which have been dispossessed of the value of their intellectual
contribution and labour to the global context of knowledge production.
As a second example, in addition to the erasure of uniquely African
contributions from the global system of knowledge production, there is also
the denial of systematic knowledge from the continent, especially following
Hegelian logic and traditions (Adesina 2006). While not substituting erasure
for uncritical adulation, the point at issue here is to highlight the immanently
ethnocentric and racist inclinations to create binary opposites between
ignorance and knowledge on the one hand as well as magic and science on
the other. In this sense, while the West is privileged as the source of scientific
knowledge, ignorance and dubious magic are presented as the signifiers of
‘the non-Western other’. These issues are taken on in Ake’s (1979)
engagement with the extroversions of Western social sciences. As he argues,
just as Africa has been reduced to raw material production and Europe
specializes in the production of capital goods and finished products, there is
also the ideological reduction of the continent to a source from which data
are generated and exported to Europe for advancing the frontiers of
knowledge, so that theories are perpetually imported into Africa in a global
system dominated by Europe and the West. He traces the origin of this
practice to the developments and period following the European conquest of
the continent, and says in spite of independence, extroversion is still
immanent in Africa’s experiences and relations with the West, especially
given its complicated positioning in the global system of knowledge
production. He draws a parallel between the extroversion of African
economies manifested inter alia in the export of cocoa or gold and the
import of chocolate and jewellery on the one hand, and the extroversion in
the global system of knowledge production manifested in the reduction of
African scholarship to the vain proselytization and regurgitation of received
paradigms and borrowed discourses, including those which do not speak to
the continent’s situation, but are nevertheless deployed by the West in
explaining social reality in the continent, on the other hand.

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 Arowosegbe: Claude E. Ake and the Praxis of Knowledge Production 15

Thus, pitching endogeneity and ontology against the contradictions of

Eurocentric extroversion and idiography, Ake challenges us to replace the
practice of scholarship in Africa as extroversion with its engagement as an
objective reflection of Africanity through a careful reformulation of the
African condition and self. In this way, while the practice of scholarship as
translation involves the articulation of the humanities and social sciences in
Africa according to Western academic terms, its rearticulation, redefinition
and reformulation, which Ake advocates are based on the reconstruction,
reconstitution and reframing of the various disciplinary fields and vocations
following uniquely African critiques and interpretations. This can be achieved
through an appreciation of endogeny and ontology as the objective bases of
epistemology and philosophy, rooted in a proper understanding of the
disciplinary and institutional histories of existing knowledge producing
frontiers and inspired by a corrective commitment to reclaim history and
rewrite the careless deployment of the ideas of neocolonialism by the alien
other in narrating the African past and future (Ake 1979 and Adesina 2006).
It should be noted that Ake is not alone in this advocacy. Rather, being an
instructive voice, he is complemented on the continent by others whose
works have been noted in this study. Put together, these efforts challenge
methodological and theoretical universalisms in the social science scholarship
on the continent. As Harris (2005:77) puts it, Ake’s legacy challenges us to
be clear why Western social science is inadequate, how to change it and
why; to clarify the idea of development; and to invent an appropriate model
of development based on the interests of the masses. Other areas exist within
the African context of knowledge production which have been positively
affected by Ake’s intellectual involvement. We have referred to them in a
larger study on which this article is based (see Arowosegbe 2010).

Conclusion
This article has discussed Ake’s contribution to the social sciences and
knowledge production on Africa. It locates him within the intellectual project
of postcolonial studies, which we define as a South-driven critique of
historicism. Historicism was defined as a revisionist Western conception of
history, which obfuscates rather than furthering the understanding of Africa.
We also defined postcolonial studies as a South-driven critique of political
modernity and the very idea of the political, a practice, which involves by
implication, an engagement with the practice of history writing from the
South. Lastly, we argued that the impact of the imperial presence and other
legacies of the Enlightenment are central tounderstanding the continent’s
present and future histories. The aim is to further research on aspects of the

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 16 Africa Development, Vol. XXXVIII, Nos 3 & 4, 2013

issues raised in Ake’s works. This was done by suggesting vital reasons
why Ake’s works are considered worth reading, at least in the limited
understanding of this researcher.
As we have tried to show, Ake’s engagement with the extroversions of
the Western social science in its application to Africa is only a case in point
on the ambiguity of the Enlightenment and more broadly European thought
in its reference to non-metropolitan histories. Similar efforts abound in the
works of other scholars within this mode across Africa, and also elsewhere
in Asia and Latin America. Put together, they represent bold initiatives in
asserting the identities of non-Western cultures inter alia through carefully
rewriting the intellectual and nationalist histories of these societies on their
own terms. Importantly, by establishing the centrality of race in the making
of the Enlightenment and all shades of imperial thought (Ghosh and
Chakrabarty 2002) as well as by exposing the ambiguity and dualism lying at
the heart of liberalism and other European philosophical traditions (Chatterjee
1994), postcoloniality decentres Europe and more broadly the West from
being the only source of all legitimate signification and makes room for other
ways of being (Argyrou 2001) through asserting the abstract possibility of
other universes of theoretical reflections (Kaviraj 1992). This school challenges
Europe’s absolutization of theoretical insights and fights hard to redress the
entrenched inequality of ignorance which characterizes the global system of
knowledge production (Chakrabarty 1992). Through its legitimate project of
narrative history writing, postcoloniality counters the misrepresentation of
the continent in terms of a lack, an absence and an incompleteness, which
translates into perpetual inadequacy and inferiority – by the imperial project
of transition narrative (Chakrabarty 1992). It asserts the originality of the
African voice as the authentic expression of the African condition and
advocates an end to African studies not just in Europe and North America,
but also in South Africa, the vortex of white racism (Mafeje 2000).
Viewed from the perspective of Ake’s works, postcoloniality thus offers
an instance as well as a vantage opportunity in which there is the possibility
of a levelling up by indigenous theory with high metropolitan theory. It is
therefore an arena wherein historically entrenched asymmetries of power
historicize themselves relationally – an arena where dominant historiographies
are made accountable to the ethico-political authority of emerging histories.
Such asymmetries are not only cultural, gender-based or political, but also
economic and sociological, as we see in Ake. His works therefore, feed
convincingly into the subject matter of postcolonial studies. Taken together,
they are parts of an intellectual repertoire of resistance which creates and
preserves spaces of agency and autonomy. They illustrate how hitherto

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 Arowosegbe: Claude E. Ake and the Praxis of Knowledge Production 17

suppressed humanities, in this case Africans, respond to the forces that

challenge and undermine their humanity. They therefore constitute the
essence of a cross-regional non-hierarchical dialogue in which neither of the
two regions is taken as the paradigm against which the other is measured
and pronounced inadequate. It should be underlined, perhaps with emphasis,
that cross-regional non-hierarchical dialogue for Ake, and also, in this
instance, is not the application of a concept, part and parcel, without
contextualization. Nor can it be framed in the assumption that one side of the
exchange has nothing to learn from the other (see Mallon 1994). To be sure,
Ake’s corpus constitutes the kind of non-coercive and justice-based
universalism envisioned by Samir Amin (1989:136–52), based on a
multivalent and versatile postcoloniality rooted differently in different cultures
and histories. This is no doubt a welcome corrective intervention to the
many instances in which European theories had been placed next to Third
World cases and the latter have been found wanting.

Acknowledgement
I would like to thank Harry Garuba, Jane Bennett and Lungisile Ntsebeza for
their insightful and painstaking engagement with earlier versions of this article.

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