Since the great wave of independence from European rule swept across Africa in 1960, no country on the continent has joined the exclusive club of the world’s richest nations.
Africa is not unique in this respect: Most of the countries that have risen to wealth since World War II have been European nations that benefited from the Marshall Plan, Western colonies such as Australia and New Zealand, and a handful of coastal Asian states, with a few exceptions, including those with vast oil and gas wealth.
And yet Africa dominates the list of the world’s poorest countries. If natural resource abundance alone predicted economic success, many African countries, including some of the world’s worst performers such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Guinea, would be ranked upper-middle-income or already among the rich. In reality, however, there are some modest successes, such as Botswana and Namibia, with dozens of lower-middle-income countries and a few upper-middle-income countries.
It is not just on the basis of economic performance that Africa is often ranked last. Having written about Africa for many years, it has always seemed to me to be the continent that receives the least attention from the world. This is true not only in terms of foreign investment, but also in terms of political engagement and diplomatic efforts in crisis management. It is also true in terms of reporting. For example, Sudan fell into a devastating civil war last year, creating famine, 10 million refugees, and countless casualties, yet it received almost no global attention.
No matter how much it is ignored, stimulating Africa’s economic development is one of the greatest challenges of the century. For the next few decades, Africa will be where most of the world’s population growth will occur. At a time when many rich societies are rapidly aging, Africa will generate the world’s largest pool of young labor. Whether the continent can build a strong middle class will have major implications in determining the size of the global consumer market. And if the middle class does not grow, Africa will become an ever-larger source of international migration and the attendant panic in the West. Moreover, to achieve global climate goals, we will need to figure out how to produce far more energy for our people in Africa without emitting as much carbon as the West, or, more recently, China and India. Today, in many parts of the continent, an individual consumes, on average, much less electricity per year than a typical U.S. refrigerator.
Africa’s economic difficulties can be traced in large part to the devastation caused by foreign influence, which dates back to a history of deep and brutal exploitation and domination, primarily by Europeans, during centuries of the slave trade, which targeted some 12 million people from Africa who were brought there to fuel the creation of wealth in the West. My latest book, Born Black: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to World War IIfocuses on this history, whose importance in the emergence of the West remains deeply misunderstood and underestimated.
Another source of tragedy runs through the complete European domination of Africa in the late 19th century and the relatively brief period of colonization that followed, which is the subject of my upcoming book. During that time, Europe’s focus was on mining. Besides natural resources like rubber, cocoa, and precious metals, Europe also extracted large amounts of labor from Africans. What is rarely understood in the West is that this meant working people in near-slave-like conditions even after World War II, with large numbers of Africans fighting in Europe’s wars or in supply roles like pack animals.
There are other factors that have prevented Africa from making great strides economically since the continent gained independence. One of these is the rise of China over the past 40 years. China initially achieved large-scale industrialization with very cheap labor, which meant that few so-called less developed countries were able to follow suit and grow rapidly. Africa is particularly hampered in this regard by being heavily fragmented into 54 small and landlocked countries, a legacy of colonization.
But what I want to focus on in the remainder of this column are the internally imposed obstacles facing Africa. (I say “internal” while fully recognizing that no country can be isolated from its history.) African countries must address these challenges if they are to find a path to greater prosperity. Perhaps paradoxically, the work of three scholars who have little or no exposure to the African continent offers insights into the uniqueness of Africa’s current domestic problems and ways in which the continent can transform its economic realities.
Wang Feng China’s Age of Abundance: Origins, Rise, and AftermathThe book “The Future of Africa,” which I recently reviewed, provides some interesting food for thought on African issues. In it, Wang, a sociologist at the University of California, Irvine, indirectly argues that China’s great success in generating prosperity between 1979 and 2019 was due to a high degree of political stability and consistency in its economic development planning, primarily because Deng Xiaoping, a globally savvy and experienced reformist, was followed closely by his two successors.
Lifting poverty is an intergenerational project, not the task of any one leader, even a long-tenured one. Africa, among many other problems, has lacked precisely this kind of intergenerational consistency. Most African countries have suffered from stagnant, long-tenured authoritarian regimes that have prevented stable rule-making and institution-building, or have been hit by instability, usually in the form of coups and subsequent military regimes.
in Towards Utopia: A History of the 20th Century EconomyJ. Bradford DeLong, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, has written eloquently about the costs of rotational government. Citing Niccolo Machiavelli, DeLong argues that the first priority of those who seize or maintain power in weak or developing states is to avoid food riots and other attacks on visible symbols of sovereignty in the capital. Weak governments often fall after taking over, for example, the national television station or the presidential palace. Their second priority, DeLong writes, is to keep the military happy, bribing it with regular pay, promotions, bonuses, new weapons systems, uniforms, and other equipment. The third is to keep the bureaucracy and politicians quiet, often through financial inducements, and to foment chaos in the opposition.
Almost naturally, most leaders are convinced that they are the best people for the job. Some may harbor a genuine desire to develop their countries and ensure greater prosperity for their people. But as DeLong writes, these are far down the list of priorities. “Only once a government’s position is stable can discussions of development policies take place. Yet the pursuit of stability in power almost always consumes all of a ruler’s time, energy, and resources. The lifespan of the average government is often too short for any reasonable historian or critic to expect a focus on long-term economic development.”
Though DeLong isn’t focused on Africa, these trends are now clearly visible in perhaps the continent’s most unstable region: the vast region below the Sahara Desert known as the Sahel, where eight coups have been successful since 2020.
in Global Inequality: New Approaches in an Era of GlobalizationAnother prominent economist, Branko Milanovic of the City University of New York, has been exploring the mystery of why Africa has failed to develop further. The continent had a reasonably good run in the 1960s and 1970s, but the 1990s saw a major economic downturn. Growth in many African countries virtually halted during that decade, and in some countries actually reversed. By 2000, the continent’s real GDP per capita had fallen devastatingly to 20 percent below its 1980 level, Milanovic writes.
Just 13 years later, Africa’s GDP per capita has risen to 1.9 times its 1970 level. This may sound impressive until you compare it with other continents: Asia’s GDP per capita, for example, has increased five-fold over the same period.
“Africa’s problems are more complex than these figures suggest,” Milanovic writes. “African countries have often experienced rapid growth followed by sharp declines, and their main problem seems to be their inability to sustain even modest growth rates over long periods of time. Growth fluctuations are caused by political conflicts, civil wars, and cyclical price trends that affect the natural resources that underpin much of Africa’s output and exports.”
All this comes back to us I was impressed by Wang and his analysis of China’s historical period of rapid growth. Many outsiders complain about corruption in Africa, but rarely consider that corruption abounds in China and many other economically successful countries. In fact, Beijing has long made a public spectacle of executing or imprisoning officials found guilty of illicit enrichment. Even many of its top officials have made personal fortunes.
But while Chinese officials are guilty of corruption, the projects they commission or oversee overwhelmingly tend to get built, rather than being forgotten about after the allocated funds are stolen. A black joke I’ve heard for years in various parts of Africa is that blatant corruption among civil servants isn’t so bad if big projects like bridges and highways get delivered.
But beyond physical infrastructure, Wang convincingly argues that China’s ability to grow so strongly in such a short space of time is due to sustained investment in what some economists call “human infrastructure.” Even before the end of the Mao era in 1976, China had made dramatic progress in improving the overall health of its population. This had led to significant declines in mortality from infectious diseases and other largely preventable causes of death, such as maternal and child mortality, and produced a more productive population.
The new era of wealth creation that began after Mao’s death has seen constant improvements in health care, which shows up in all kinds of statistics. For starters, life expectancy is now 78.99 years, on par with that of the much wealthier United States. Plagued by endemic tropical diseases such as malaria, Africa has the worst health indicators of any continent. Simple policies such as improving and expanding municipal and rural water systems, for example, could save and extend lives on a massive scale.
Wang’s book goes further in focusing on another aspect of the generational project that Deng Xiaoping began to transform China: education. “School enrollment at all levels above primary school has grown exponentially. The national annual enrollment of secondary students increased by more than 60 percent between 1990 and 2000, from 13.7 million to 22.6 million,” Wang writes. “The total number of students enrolled in higher education institutions has similarly increased, from 2.1 million in 1990 to 5.6 million in 2000, 22.3 million in 2010, and 32.9 million in 2020.” Through this monumental expansion of its education system, China has dramatically and continuously improved the quality of its workforce.
Africa today starts from an even lower educational level. Illiteracy remains widespread in some African countries, and in many countries girls are enrolled at a much lower rate than boys. If the continent is to change its economic situation in the coming decades, it has no choice but to invest much more heavily in its human infrastructure. Africans are as naturally gifted as people everywhere, but to participate more fruitfully in the global economy, increased intellectual production from the continent is essential, as is the discovery of African solutions to African problems, which can only be achieved through education.
Much of Africa’s educational underachievement today is a legacy of colonial rule. At the time, Europeans feared that Africa’s educated masses would jeopardize their control over the continent’s people and resources. The question today is whether Africa’s current leaders can understand that African people and their brains are the continent’s greatest resource. An education revolution will not solve all our problems, but without it, we will not be able to solve most of the other challenges facing Africa.