African Decolonization: The Ongoing Pursuit for Total Freedom

The densities within the political, legal, and social constituents of globalization illustrate the complexity of the production and sustainability of two central issues that have consistently characterized the universal portrayal of Africa inadequately. Radical socio-legal issues and the contribution of non-African countries complicity fortifying human rights violations are two historically rooted tribulations that continue to fundamentally fashion African societies today as a result of gaining independence. Acquiring political autonomy as a feeble newly developing and contesting institution on a global playing field reinforces the importance and pressure of the state to expand and invest through policies and law to maximize interests. The hegemonic pressed evolution of law to be grounded in capitalist requirements of economic efficiency rather than in social justice and solidarity has administered, justified, and authorized the victimization of extracting resources from weaker political actors in the constructions of continuing Western based superiority. The nonexistent foundation of the rule of law and the combination of both internal and external factors fixed in the inability for Africa to fully democratize after independence illustrates the two issues of globalized plunder and tribalism that underline ongoing forms of corruption and predatory practices. Colonial rule under Western institutions marks the initial emergence of the ability and utilization of controlling an entire population through political power. Complete domination by physical force cannot itself be eternally sustained which produces a necessary reliance on the approval of individuals within the state to willingly accept the characteristics and attitudes of the more powerful. Supremacy thus exists as a combination of both force and consent and gives the Western presence in Africa a capacity to justify and utilize law in a selfish matter to maximize interests. Gaining consent of the people produces the under looked acknowledgment of citizens that they have become victims of legal inferiority by the more powerful and its alliances. The central organizing principle of colonial rule in Africa was mainly centered in gaining local consent through diffusing practices and economic developments to allow the taking of resources at expense of the more vulnerable weak. The Western pursuit of profit through utility maximization of victimizing political actors, or ‘Plundering”, does not take the consideration of the interests, rights, or needs of weaker people and is justified through what is known as the rule of law. The inevitable deficiency of necessary legal techniques and institutional arrangements to successful modernize after decolonization demonstrations the hegemonic reinforcement of ongoing legal inferiority, predatory practices, and corruption in Africa rooted that is rooted in the implementation of the Western rule of law. The intervention of international institutions in Africa preceding decolonization epitomizes the initial fabrication of law and policy as a technically rooted commodity whose legitimacy would be measured by “economic efficiency and capacity to attract foreign investment” (Plunder pg. 20) rather than a self-governing democratized foundation.

The sustainability of international hegemonic forces inaugurated in the rule of law inevitably renovate as an irrelevant commodity of politics to a mechanism of society that establishes the capability to take resources as a matter of rights, rather then compelling possessions from the poor. The imperial use of law to construct and legitimize the utilization of inequitable distribution of resources illustrates the foundation in which of predatory practices are taken in postcolonial Africa. The States incapacity to fully democratize and sustain its own rule of law after independence epitomizes the fatal consequences of having