Series
Volume 1
African Worlds: New Interdisciplinary Perspectives
Email Newsletters
Sign up for our email newsletters to get customized updates on new Berghahn publications.
Colonial Intervention and Destabilization of African Identities
Contours of Trusteeship and Organized Infantilism in Sub-Saharan Africa
Obed Mfum-Mensah
200 pages, bibliog., index
ISBN 978-1-80539-843-1 $120.00/£89.00 / Hb / Not Yet Published (February 2025)
eISBN 978-1-80539-844-8 eBook Not Yet Published
Reviews
“This book is one of the most interesting works I have read on Africa. It makes a significant contribution to its diverse literature.” • Martha Donkor, West Chester University
Description
External forces and African elites impose trusteeship practices on Africans to construct and consolidate hierarchical power relations in African societies that infantilize Africans. They employ “trusteeship” and “organized infantilism” as two-pronged colonial intervention tools to keep the masses of Africans in subordinated positions by accepting and internalizing those practices as part of the “normal order of things.” This book takes an interdisciplinary approach for examining these different forms of power relations that exploit and dispossess African societies of their resources to accumulate their own wealth.
Obed Mfum-Mensah is Professor of Sociology of Education at Messiah University, Pennsylvania, USA. He is currently researching on social activism and education policy reforms in southern Africa, postcolonial analysis of education policy and knowledge transfer in sub-Saharan Africa.