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Paper short abstract

Africans who embrace "development" as a universally sound means of measuring their place in the world have "developmental psychosis". They must reject development altogether and embrace an ontology of the undeveloped so as to craft a new “supraordinate telos”.

Paper long abstract

Development isn’t just a matter of politics and economics. It also has a distinctly cognitive, or develop-mental, component. This paper argues that Africans who embrace development as a universally sound means of measuring their status in the world have developmental psychosis. The paper begins by explaining how the coloniser-colonised dichotomy made it clear that the West alone would be sovereign and reap the benefits of extractionism, and that development discourse (and its correlative developed-undeveloped dichotomy) has obfuscated this dynamic. To this end, the paper shows that the coloniser-colonised dichotomy is functionally indistinguishable from the one found between the developed and undeveloped. Guided by the work of African psychologists, psychoanalysts, critical race theorists, Marxists and other critical scholars, it will argue that developmental psychosis is comprised of both false consciousness and 'Folie à Deux'. Having advanced these arguments, the paper will consider how African people can break free of developmental psychosis by rejecting development altogether and embracing an ontology of the underdeveloped. The paper will briefly explain what the ontology of the underdeveloped is and how its embodiment could herald the end of Western dominance.