Conclusion
This chapter sought to explain economic thought and knowledge in southern Africa, with special attention on South Africa, Botswana and Zambia. We argued that even though pre-colonial southern Africa was overwhelmingly a land-abundant region, characterised by simultaneous trade routes, indigenous capital and extensive indigenous market exchanges, colonial authorities developed African economies as primary-product exporters, consolidating power and exploiting Africans through large-scale land grabs to promote migrant labour flows in ‘settler’ economies.
Thus, colonial extraction in Africa could be seen most decisively in the appropriation of land for European settlers, a strategy used not only to provide settlers with cheap and secure control of land, but also to oblige Africans to sell their labour (power) to European owners (Palmer and Parsons, 1977).In summary, colonial economic impositions and interventions need to be critiqued as a phenomenon that has imprisoned the African ways of understanding commerce, utilising indigenous economic ideas, traditions, beliefs and ideologies. Caution must be exercised whenever there are suggestions of combining neo-liberal theories with indigenous knowledge systems; more so since sustainability and development potentials of these cultural systems are often overlooked and perceived as primitive, uneconomic, environmentally destructive and incompatible with ‘modernisation’. It is increasingly recognised in economic discourses that respect for indigenous economic knowledge stemming from African ways of relating to one another is an important aspect of addressing economic pressures. Thus, whilst IEKS are seen mainly as reactions to colonial economic impositions, they are also a solution to redress past economic injustices.