Language and Neo-Colonialism: African Development Challenge

Kwesi Kwaa Prah writes "...Africa represents today the only major historical and cultural area of the world where despite their indigenous socio-cultural majorities, countries prefer to use the languages of their erstwhile masters in their attempts to develop and make social progress. The result of this neo-colonial approach to culture and democracy is that the scientific and technological culture of Africans is hardly advancing.Actually, Africa, by and large, is retrogressing or stagnating. Mass society and its culture is shut off, and condemned to cultural backwardness and alienation from the life of the elite. The elite in turn is bent on what many social critics regard as mindless imitation of the colonial and metropolitan cultures of the west. This is an orientation, which in effect integrates the elite more into the culture of the former colonial masters than the indigenous cultures from where this elite historically and socially derives..."