Identity and Historicity (Paperback)

Looking at the present situation of African marginality as the product of historical forces that will be overcome in history is the aim of this book. Marginality is one form of existence that history has built and will break. History is indeterminate and it does not transform any factual situation into destiny or fate. Everything happening in history is contingent and susceptible to change and open to indefinite interpretations. Africa can overcome its marginality and integrate the new global order if Africans themselves take the challenge of education into the Western rationality, one which dominates the world scene (capitalist economy, science and technology), and if they rationalize their societies by adopting laws obeying both principles of instrumental reason and principles of democracy and human rights. This option for the rationalization of social, economic and political life leads to a notion of development understood as the liberation from structures of "unfreedom" and promotion of human freedom, both anthropologically and economically.