Democracy and Development in Africa

Most works on Claude Ake have been limited to a celebration of his intellectual biography, pedigree and stature. This is partly because most scholarly commentaries on political and social theorists in Africa have been treated as either parts of the colonial liberation struggles or as parts of the neo-colonial historiographical narrations of African anthropology or metaphysics, with the veiled objective of denying the existence and reality of African political thought. The consequence of this oversight is that whereas within the disciplines in the arts and the humanities, accomplished African(ists) have been extensively studied; only very few social scientists have been studied. The contributions and profiles of social scientists in Africa and the diaspora have therefore remained a largely underdeveloped genre. This study interrogated the relevance of Ake's works with a view to examining the constituents and prospects for knowledge production in Africa.