Editorial from ROAPE Volume 28 Number 88
Africa's Future: That Sinking Feeling

This issue of The Review revisits issues of governance, civil society and human rights in Africa. It does so just as the issue reappears on the agenda of international agencies and western governments. Indeed, this year's fashionable new ideological robes (as far as development and the South are concerned) is the idea that economic growth will be driven by greater political participation. This lies at the heart of the propositions being advanced by various donors about a 'multifaceted development challenge' aimed at creating a 'window of opportunity' to end 'the marginalisation of Africa's people'. Like all the other formulations articulated from this quarter over the last thirty years, it deserves analysis less for what it might do for Africans than for what it is likely to do to them; in other words, for what it tells us about its imperialist design.