Description
Building on the argument that development is deeply entangled with the colonial legacy, I contend that the development agenda functions as a vehicle of collective traumatisation for African local populations, who are ostensibly its intended beneficiaries. This collective traumatisation is largely unacknowledged and operates at a subconscious level. Drawing on Fanonian’s (Frantz Fanon) theory of colonial violence and the psychology of oppression, as well as Akeian’s (Claude Ake) abstraction of development as a form of unacknowledged collective trauma, I argue that because development remains tethered to its colonial roots, it has produced intergenerational, subconscious collective trauma that continues to shape the everyday experiences of African communities. I will show that development causes collective trauma which are unacknowledged because it is subconscious, and how that has affected Nigerian society with a particular focus on the way Nigerian people have ignored ‘what they have already known’ (indigenous epistemes such as the Ifá thought system) and continued to look to the West’s development paradigm. I imagine a future of decolonised development that will use ‘start from where we already are’ with our own existing cultural praxes and epistemes to build appropriate socio-economic policy frameworks to help heal the effects of this unacknowledged subconscious collective trauma that has gripped Nigerians.
