ABSTRACT
African development can be defined from Marcus Garvey’s perspective as constant and consistent African search for self-improvement. Indeed, prior to colonialism, African people, like all other human beings, constantly and consistently improved their lives and life chances. They were inventive and innovative in many ways. One can read Molefi Kete Asante and Abus S. Abarry’s African Intellectual Heritage: A Book of Sources (1996), which contains African works of imagination, invention, cultural dynamism, political engineering, religious and economic sophistication, and originality. In this work, Africans are captured as active and independent domesticators of plants and animals. They improved their technologies from stone to iron tools. They migrated in search of better environments that enhanced life chances. They formed sociopolitical systems: lineages, clans, chiefdoms, kingdoms, states, and nations of varying sizes and complexities. Just like other human beings, Africans even meditated on the meaning of life itself, on their origins, as well as on what being human meant. This is why Asante and Abarry’s (1996) work opens with a focus on African narratives of ‘the creation of the universe’. Myths of foundation and legends captured the meditative African practices, for example. Like all human beings, Africans developed complex religious ideas as they constantly and consistently made sense of their lives and their environment.
