By Lamin Cham
Dr Baba Galleh Jallow, a visiting professor of African History at the University of The Gambia will on Thursday hold a public lecture at the UTG campus in Brikama at 10am. The lecture will centre on the topic The Copycat state: blind mimicry, neo-exectionalism and the politics of failure in Africa and will examine the peculiarities of the copycat state and highlights possible alternatives to what has effectively become an unimaginative politics of failure and dependence in post-colonial Africa.
According to Dr Jallow, African governments since independence have uncritically mimicked those practices of the nation-state system that suit their purposes and practiced a sort of African neo-exceptionalism that allows them to monopolise the political space and plunder or neglect their countries’ human and material resources. He said the result has been a failure of the nation-state system and a culture of chronic underdevelopment and poverty in Africa.
Brief bio
Dr Baba Galleh Jallow teaches African and World History at La Salle University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. He holds a PhD in History from the University of California at Davis (2011) and a Masters in Liberal Studies from Rutgers University, New Jersey (2005). His research interests include the history of colonial and postcolonial Africa, censorship and state formation in Africa, Vatican II, and Catholics and Social Justice in Africa. His publications include Leadership in ColonialAfrica (2014), Leadership in Postcolonial Africa (2014), The Kwame Nkrumah Cartoons (2014), The Catholic Voice in Ghana (2015) and Defying Dictatorship (2017).
