Panel 24: Glocalization and the Future of Africa

Glocalization is a reaction to the failure of globalization in Africa. From a relatively promising performance in the economic and political spheres in the early independence in the 1960s, Africa is indubitably now the world’s worst case of poverty. Glocalization is a proposal that locates the failure of African economy and contemporary plural-society politics in the unrealistic management of its post-contact indigenous knowledge systems. Proponents of glocalization concede that Africa has moved too far into global modernity to contemplate a reversion to pre-contact insularity as a serious option. Borrowing from Abercrombie and his friends (2000), glocalization is the “globalization of the local and localization of the global”. Glocalization is the effective adaptation of the inevitable in cross-cultural relations for effective competition in a changed world. It stands in contrast to cultural atavism or outright rejection of globalization, which are the other two alternatives that are canvassed for Africa. The relative better performance of Africa in the early independence days is attributable to a form of glocalization, without the name. It was abandoned as the impatience of the impetuous military dictators and sundry totalitarianisms replaced the pragmatic efforts at adaptation by the first-generation nationalists who succeeded the colonizer.