Colonial Intervention and Destabilization of African Identities

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.