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Appel
Date limite de soumission : mercredi 15 juillet 2026
Ce numéro de la revue Daftari za Ngūgī (ex-Nouvelles Dynamiques Africaines) invite à une rupture épistémique avec les mesures occidentales du développement (IDH). Contre la vision d’une Afrique pathologisée par les classements internationaux, cet appel sollicite des enquêtes empiriques rigoureuses explorant le « développement par le bas » : économie informelle, solidarités villageoises et définitions endogènes du « vivre-mieux ».
« Sixty years after independence, and despite billions of dollars injected into development aid, the majority of African countries remain stagnant at the bottom of international rankings. The UNDP’s Human Development Index (HDI), a globalized thermometer measuring GDP per capita, life expectancy, and formal schooling, continues to project an image of a pathologized Africa : destitute, uneducated, and sick. Yet, this alarmist vision conceals a systemic invisibilization of social wealth. These indicators, blind by design, fail to measure community solidarity, the resilience of the informal sector, or the density of cultural capital. Thus, territories qualified as "poor" by UN metrics often prove rich in a social bond that Western modernity has eroded elsewhere.
It is urgent to cease conceiving development as the unilateral transfer of exogenous models. From theory to practice, this concept of "development" has revealed itself to be the semantic successor of European "progress"—that "great transformation" described by Polanyi (1983) which standardized the West at the cost of destroying village solidarities through the advent of the selfregulating market. In the aftermath of World War II, President Truman globalized this specific historical trajectory. Popularized by Walt W. Rostow, this teleology places Western modernity as the ultimate stage of a linear evolution that so-called traditional societies—meaning : poor—are summoned to achieve.
This Rostowian vision, institutionalized by the World Bank (1993, 1994), defines development as a marked path, an orthodoxy that States must follow under penalty of marginalization. However, decades of practice have demonstrated that this road is a dead end in Africa. Beyond the radical inadequacy between these Eurocentric models and local sociologies (Badie, 1992), rendering development "unfindable" (Ela, 1998), one must recall the violent genealogy of this model. Western progress was built on feudalism, enclosures, worker exploitation, and, above all, the slave trade and colonial predation. To grasp the continent’s "underdevelopment," one must therefore cross the "abyssal line" (De Sousa Santos, 2016) that separates the epistemological realities of the Global North from those of the South. The developmentalist model, far from bringing "Better Living," perpetuates structural dependency (Cardoso, 1971) and maintains unequal exchange (Amin, 1973).
If development is an "Afrodystopia," a mirage, or a colonizing discourse that forces Africans to perceive themselves as "backward" (Escobar, 1992), how can it be rethought ? Paulin Hountondji (1994) invites us to seek endogeneity, while Joseph Ki-Zerbo (1992) warns against sleeping on "someone else’s mat." AbdoulMaliq Simone (2004), meanwhile, shifts the gaze from physical infrastructures to "people as infrastructure" : where Western development fails, fluid, informal, and ingenious forms of social collaboration take over. Development must be reclaimed from the bottom up. It must cease to be a "somatic response" to the traumatic graft of modernity to become the expression of "Better Living" anchored in African togetherness (vivre-ensemble). It no longer relies on the State (Ikonicoff, 1983), but on the "capabilities" (Sen, 2003) of communities.
In a context of the Africanization of humanitarian aid, Walter Rodney’s (1986) observation becomes more complex : it is no longer just Europe that underdevelops Africa, but also a local "cannibal elite" (Táíwò, 2023). These development officials, urban and disconnected, produce knowledge oriented towards donors, ignoring village realities (Connell, 2024).
For this sixth issue of Daftari za Ngūgī, we exhort researchers to an epistemic rupture. We refuse theoretical generalities and demand a science of detail. We await contributions that explore bottomup development : agrarian practices, artisanal fishing, the informal economy as sociability, or the frictions between the development industry and local populations. How do "traveling theories" (Said, 2000) acclimatize ? How does the South respond to epistemic injustice ?
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Numéro dirigé par Adjimaël HALIDI, PhD, Sociologue et Expert en analyse et évaluation des politiques publiques, Chercheur associé à la Chaire sur la protection des personnes migrantes et le droit international (Université d’Ottawa) et Directeur de la revue Daftari za Ngūgī.
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