Asantehene and Africa's new development thinking

Kofi Akosah-Sarpong writes about efforts to engage African traditional rulers in the continent's development process. The Asantehene "...is fast projecting the thinking of Africa's development process, an act whereby traditional values and the colonial legacies are balanced out in Africa's development process. The the development inbalances have occured since independence from the European colonialists who, in their infinite ignorance of Africa's values, imposed their development paradigms on Africa as one of their several ways of civilising the "primitive" African.Over the years, such erroneous development thinking has created not only distortions, damages, confusion and unwarrented crises but also wrong notions, especially among the so-called African elites who are educated in Eurocentric values, that Africa's values in her development process are inferior to the European ones. Confused for long, and either unable to extricate themselves from the imposed European development values so as to let African values drive their development practices or intellectually weak in mixing their African values with the European ones, as other ex-colonies such as South Korea, Singapore, Japan or Brazil has done in their develoment process...",GhanaWeb.