Editorial: Africa, the African diaspora & development

Abstract

In 1995 Zack-Williams commented in this journal: 'development studies has maintained its ostrich-like detachment from issues of race and diasporan concerns ' (1995:351).Now, seven years later, we address this 'detachment' and the implications of bringing these two strands of study together in understanding the development of both Africa and its diaspora.In between, there has been a number of books and articles on the African diaspora (for example, Okpewho, Davies, and Mazrui, 1999; Byfield, 2000) but they have tended to be theoretical, cultural and historical as opposed to dealing with pressing questions of the political economy of Africa and its diaspora.Theorising and analysing the diaspora and development is increasingly important given that migration is becoming a key part of many household survival strategies.In other contexts the diaspora has been one of the pillars of development and industrialisation.For example, the Chinese diaspora numbers 50 million and in 1999 generated $700 billion which is equivalent to two-thirds of China's GDP (Devan and Tewari, 2001).While on a smaller scale, remittances from Ghanaians outstripped foreign direct investment for every year of the 1990s (Akyeampong, 2000).So, the financial power of the diaspora is clearly formidable.However, development is more than money and the diaspora contributes in a myriad of other ways.These include political lobbying, cultural exchange, religious networks, and institutional linkages.We can say that an increasingly confident diaspora yearns for Africa, wants to speak and work with Africa in its moment of crisis (Zack-Williams, Frost & Thomson, 2002).In the articles gathered here we address all of these issues although we have attempted to synthesise them in the article which immediately follows this editorial.Reacting to Zack-Williams' call for an overdue dialogue between the concerns of African diasporic cultural studies and those development studies in Africa itself, Hakim Adi (in this Volume) has warned that:Those concerned with the study of African political economy and 'development' in Africa have often neglected those ideas that emerged from the African diaspora.While those who study the African diaspora have often been more concerned with issues of 'identity' than with the political future of Africa.Hakim goes on to argue that many key anti-colonial ideas (such as Pan-Africanism, which is his own concern in this collection) were developed as much in the diaspora and in the capital cities of Europe, as they were within the African continent.For Adi, many of these diaspora-originated ideas soon formed the basis of 'a modern African political theory'.

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