What is it about?
There is corruption in Africa, no doubt; but then again, there is corruption everywhere. However, when it comes to Africa the corruption discourse appears to take a different tone with assertions like these. Corruption is a big problem. It permeates every section of society. It is a way of life. Everyone is corrupt. Then certain descriptive metaphors follow, most of them pathological: cancer, virus, cankerworm, parasite, epidemic, and so on. But why does corruption appear to be a particularly African problem in a way that it appears not to be, in other places? This paper examines the way in which the narrative on African corruption has been framed, and argues that the discourse on African corruption is a Western invention that emerged as a post-colonial construct. It is discourse that has distorted and ignored the true nature of the problem, which has made a solution even more elusive.
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Why is it important?
Africa is often portrayed as the part of the world where corruption is most endemic. If this assertion is true, the question therefore is how did corruption in Africa began and how and why did it become endemic? This paper examines the root cause of corruption in Africa and argues that African corruption is a post colonial construct.
Perspectives
African corruption has become a discourse that appears to capture a kind of activity that appears to be peculiar to Africa. This discourse functions as a form of sociology of knowledge in which a dominant narrative is established about practice, where that narrative begins to shape perspectives on the putative practice but whether that narrative is valid or not becomes irrelevant. This then is the way that discussions on African corruption is framed. So we have something now called 'African corruption' in a way that we do not have any equivalent descriptive term like corruption in Europe or corruption in Asia or the Americas. in this sense corruption appears to attach to Africans as though by nature or like some peculiar animal that is only found in Africa and nowhere else.
Dr. Gabriel O. Apata
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Corruption and the postocolonial state: how the west invented African corruption, Journal of Contemporary African Studies, July 2018, Taylor & Francis,
DOI: 10.1080/02589001.2018.1497292.
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