As we mark Africa Month to "promote African unity, deeper regional integration and recommit Africa to a common destiny and to engage in conversation within the broader theme of decolonisation", it is perhaps appropriate to consider how the main vehicle to achieve these lofty ideals, the African Union (AU), proposes to drive the continent’s development into the future.
At the heart of the AU’s vision for the future of what is undeniably the world’s most unevenly developed continent, sits the deeply ideological belief in a top-down "development" model that calls for the continued extraction and export of cheap raw materials alongside increased financial and trade liberalisation.
This vision is encapsulated in the AU’s African Mining Vision (AMV) document. While the AMV may appear to be a noble vision of creating shared prosperity, the entrenched ideological biases which underpin its core values, remain an area that requires a deeper process of decolonisation and introspection.
With the recognition that a process of decolonisation is a critical part of any African future, the ongoing efforts to develop and reclaim the rightful place of an African world view and identity within the global contestation of ideas and systems, has moved from the abstract production of knowledge to congeal into a fully fledged philosophical, political and economic movement by Africans to re-appropriate control over the right to "define for themselves who they are and who they should be" (Mbeki, 1998), but which right is still broadly defined by the former colonial powers of the West.
With the emergence of an apparent resolution to the last colonial conflict in Southern Africa in the 1990’s and the emergence of Nelson Mandela as a new icon of an "African Renaissance", the dialectical impetus was renewed and most famously elaborated by then deputy president of SA, Thabo Mbeki, through his "I am an African" speech.
The speech laid the conceptual framework for what was later articulated as the African Renaissance and even later as "Africa Rising". This intellectual and popular moment within the African psyche spurred African heads of state to adopt the AMV in 2009.
It was thus underpinned by a continent-wide conversation about how to frame the development of Africa, one which aimed to provide a renewed paradigm "away from a model of extractive resource exploitation based on a high dependency on international export markets".
The AMV should thus be seen as part of a broader effort by the people of Africa to emerge from the devastation of colonialism. The AMV, I will argue, is striking in its unquestioning acceptance and immersion in old colonial assumptions of political and economic thought and, instead of offering an alternative paradigm, only succeeds in domesticating old European universalising ideas of domination and control. Thus the AMV succeeds in replicating old colonial extractivist models which have historically and contemporaneously produced extreme inequality.
In the recent publication, Routledge Handbook of Ecological Economics: Nature and Society, Professor Patrick Bond of Wits University notes that "The removal of non-renewable minerals, oil and gas — and the failure to re-invest profits from these resources — leaves Africa far poorer in net terms than anywhere else on Earth. That bias towards non-renewable resource depletion without re-investment meant the continent’s net wealth fell rapidly after 2001. Even the World Bank admits that 88% of sub-Saharan African countries suffered net negative wealth accumulation in 2010".
This brutal reality of the past is underscored by research by feminist organisations, such as WoMin, that in the next half century "an estimated 90-million people could potentially be displaced in Africa, 30-million of which would be due to mineral-based development alone".
Mbeki in his "I am African" address to the UN, crucially affirmed that "The African Renaissance, in all its parts, can only succeed if its aims and objectives are defined by the Africans themselves, if its programmes are designed by ourselves [sic]".
With the vast majority of people on the continent who are likely to be affected by the extractives industry, either directly through mining activities or indirectly through environmental degradation, being structurally and systematically excluded from participating in developing documents such as the AMV, the question of whose interests are being considered becomes increasingly important and the challenge to Africans is to ensure that "African elites" are not left unhindered to continue the colonial subjugation of our people, natural resources and environment.
• Christopher Rutledge is the natural resources manager for ActionAid SA. He writes in his personal capacity.
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