Abstract

This paper argued that, for the past fifty years, economic growth theories implemented as aid policy did not materialize into elevated GDPs, high per capita incomes and social progress for Africans as had been promised, but rather translated into underdevelopment through new discourses of dependency, power and ideology. Drawing insights from selected works of creative and film art, it maintains that the humanitarianism behind the theories was transformed into a new syndrome of dependency, a western donor power culture, that predisposed the west to ‘take’ instead of ‘giving’. The aid agenda became fungible as the moral rights of African peoples weakened. The African bureaucracy became a corruptible rather than a developmental apparatus. And all of these critical discourses of the growth theories are creating conditions for a new pan-African ideology of development.

Key words: Economic growth theories, Marcel Mauss’s gifts, foreign aid policy, underdevelopment, dependency, pan-Africanism.