Abstract

This paper travels into what De Sardan calls the unexplored "social mechanisms of corruption" . One of the great contemporary assignments for ethics, sociology and ethnography scholarships is accounting for the enormous distance between judicial, political and donor condemnation of African "corruption" on one hand and their frequency, banalisation and outright cultural legitimacy by ordinary people on the other. To do this the paper is set within the unremitting colonialism that is the African tragedy. It depicts the current interventions by the West into African "corruption" as the third wave of colonialism, and anticipates two further waves. Using the outlooks of a post-colonial ethnography I explore the western takeover of the management of African corruption and consider the motives that drive this new colonialism