The State, Democracy and Development in the Works of Claude Ake

Most works on Claude Ake have been limited to a celebration of his intellectual pedigree and stature. This is partly because most scholarly commentaries on political theorists in Africa have been treated as either parts of the colonial liberation struggles or as parts of the neocolonial 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 in disciplines in the humanities and the liberal arts, accomplished Africans (ists) have been extensively studied; only very few social scientists have been studied. The profiles of social scientists in Africa and the diaspora have therefore remained a largely underdeveloped genre. This study investigated the relevance of Ake's works with a view to examining the constituents and prospects for knowledge production in Africa. Data were obtained from both primary and secondary sources. Primary data took the form of extensive-unstructured in-depth interviews (1Dls) conducted with a purposively selected group of 20 key informants: five each from the contemporaries, old friends, colleagues and past students of the late Claude Ake. Secondary data were obtained from Ake's original texts, published commentaries, critiques and tributes written in his honour before and after his death by his colleagues and institutional bodies. Other sources included information drawn from Ake's curriculum vitae and the texts which focused not only on the debates and issues on which Ake worked, but also the general context of scholarship in Africa which was part of his concern during his life-time. The texts were subjected to content analysis. Theoretically, a major contribution made by Ake to the understanding of political thought in Africa is his redirection of attention to the salience of the state in Africa, as a major determinant of the political and wider development process. He emphasizes the need to understand the character of the state, its unique features and their implications, not just for conflict, peace-building and democratic development but also for socio-economic transformation in the continent. He advocated the autochthonous transformation of the state as a basis for transcending the domineering knowledge systems of post-Enlightenment Europe and their epistemic assertion over other non-metropolitan knowledge systems. On knowledge production, Ake engaged the question of how knowledge developed and appropriated by Africans on the basis of their historical experiences can be valorized for empowering the state in the pursuit of democracy and development. Ake did this through his advocacy of the need to replace the practice of scholarship in Africa as translation and extroversion with its engagement as an objective reflection of Africanity. He advocated the reconstruction of existing disciplinary fields following uniquely African critiques and interpretations. Ake's corpus is a corrective intervention to the extroversions of Eurocentrism and advocates the practice of cross-regional non-hierarchical dialogue, in which neither the North nor the South is taken as the paradigm against which the other is pronounced inadequate. It recommends the reinvention of the state _in Africa as a basis for sustainable democratic development in the continent.