Economic Growth and Development in Africa

Understanding trends and prospects

Horman Chitonge

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317575290
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Sustainable Development
• Index: Economics

In recent years, Africa has undergone the longest period of sustained economic growth in the continent's history, drawing the attention of the international media and academics alike. This book analyses the Africa Rising narrative from multidisciplinary perspectives, offering a critical assessment of the explanations given for the poor economic growth and development performance in Africa prior to the millennium and the dramatic shift towards the new Africa.

Bringing in perspectives from African intellectuals and scholars, many of whom have previously been overlooked in this debate, the book examines the construction of Africa's economic growth and development portraits over the years. It looks at two institutions that play a vital role in African development, providing a detailed explanation of how the World Bank and the IMF have interpreted and dealt with the African challenges and experiences. The insightful analysis reveals that if Africa is rising, only 20-30 per cent of Africans are aboard the rising ship, and the main challenge facing the continent today is to bring on board the majority of Africans who have been excluded from growth.

This book makes the complex, and sometimes confusing debates on Africa's economic growth experience more accessible to a wide range of readers interested in the Africa story. It is essential reading for students and researchers in African Studies, and will be of great interest to scholars in Development Studies, Political Economy, and Development Economics.

1 Introduction: in search of the ‘Africa dummy’

Introduction

In a book, compiled from a collection of Ohlin lecturers,¹ Paul Krugman (1996) starts with a story about how European knowledge of Africa has evolved over the last 500 years. Krugman cites a paper by Craig Murphy, entitled “The Evolution of Ignorance in European Mapping of Africa, 1500–1800”. The main point made by Krugman in telling this story is that as European knowledge of Africa advanced – as a result of progress in map-making technology and communications – the map of Africa, and primarily the stories about Africa, remained sensationally inaccurate, often distorted by design. For instance, even as late as the eighteenth century, there were popular myths about certain regions in Africa “inhabited by men with their mouths in their stomachs”. Adam Hochschild talks about a “Benedictine monk who mapped the world about 1350 [AD] and claimed that Africa contained one-eyed people who used their feet to cover their heads”. He also reports that a geographer, during the fifteenth century, “announced that the continent held people with one leg, three faces, and heads of lions” (cited in Fredland, 2001: 26).

Of course, prior to the map-making endeavours of the fifteenth century, Europeans had been making contact with coastal communities in West and North Africa over a long time (see Iliffe, 1983; Davidson, 1992) – but the interior remained largely unknown until the time of the European explorers towards the end of the eighteenth century. Seemingly, most of the stories and maps about Africa’s interior were based on third-hand reports of people visiting Africa’s coastline (see Coetzee, 1988). In most of these undertakings,

Cartographic vagueness had been the hallmark of Africa’s depiction from the first attempt – by Ptolemy – to map part of the continent in Anno Domini 150. Some 1,300 years later the seafarers of Portugal began to plot the coastline but [the] African interior remained a mystery to the rest of the world and a field for the imagination of map makers drawing upon hearsay, in the words of Dean Swift:

‘So geographers, in Afric-maps,
With savage-pictures fill their gaps,
And o’er unhabitable downs,
Place elephants for want of towns’

(Mackay, 2008: 243)

As Europeans penetrated the African interior, not only did they replace the flourishing African civilisations with their stories of ‘savages’, but also the “achievements of states that had manufactured in iron and gold and carried on lucrative international trade were expunged from memory … It does not require a very perceptive mind to appreciate the disastrous consequences [this] has had upon African development” (Nkrumah, 1963: 5).

Reading these eighteenth and nineteenth century stories about Africa today, makes them seem gawkily fictitious – though it is clear that the denigrated portraits of the African continent and its peoples have stoutly populated the ‘invented’ history, economy, politics and cultural representation of Africa and its inherent discourse of what has been referred to as the “ideology of ‘otherness’” (see Mazrui, 2005: 69).

Given that the dominant representation of Africa and its peoples was one of ‘negative difference’ – leading to the popular notion of a barbarous, inferior, backward people – it is not surprising that as knowledge about the continent and its people increased, the negative difference mode of representation persisted well beyond the European exploration of the African interior, serving as the foundation stone of the colonial project (Hill, 2005). Eighteenth and nineteenth century explorers such as James Bruce, Mungo Park, David Livingstone, Richard and John Lander, Richard Burton, John Hanning Speke, and the naturalised American journalist, Henry Stanley Morton – during the first half of the nineteenth century – added new layers to the ideology of otherness.² While these explorers played an important role in opening the African interior to European interests, it has been observed that apart from creating myths about ‘beastly savages’ and ‘barbaric splendours’, the explorer stories “speak about neither Africa nor Africans, but rather justify the process of inventing and conquering a continent and naming its ‘primitiveness’ or ‘disorder’ as well as the subsequent means of its exploitation and methods for its ‘regeneration’”(Mudimbe, 1988: 20). Radical critics have argued that the main drivers behind these adventures, including the colonial enterprise that followed, were

neither evangelization, nor a philanthropic enterprise, nor a desire to push back the frontiers of ignorance, disease, and tyranny, nor a project undertaken for the greater glory of God … the decisive actors here are the adventurers and the pirates, the wholesale grocer and the ship owner, the gold digger and the merchant … and behind them, the baleful projected shadow of a form of civilisation.

(Cesaire, 2000: 33)

Notably, the encounter between Africa, and mainly Western European culture(s), has produced exceptional forms of mystification which have served as the justification for several projects. Examples of this mystification include claims such as: Africans had no history prior to the encounter with the West; Africa is incomprehensible, irrational and disorderly by nature, with no ability for self-government; that African societies are inherently undemocratic; that Africans have not contributed to world progress (Leakey, 1961, cited in Nkrumah, 1963). Historical accounts by authors such as Basil Davidson about a rich tradition of democratic practices – obliterated by the imperial and colonial projects – have done little to sway popular beliefs, even among Africans (Brown, 1995).

In a way, the fourteenth century stories and maps – with their depictions of monster-like beings in Africa – are not just myths produced by angelic innocence or a sheer lack of knowledge about the continent; they are part of a strategic narrative upon which the conquering and domination of Africa and African peoples has been built, refined into ideologies that serve specific interests of the subsequent social, political and economic architects. This negative portrait of Africa, through stories and maps, fed and nurtured the colonial attitude of treating anything different as inferior, barbaric, uncultured, uncivilised, pagan, undeveloped, pre-capitalist, pre-industrial, and pre-modern; hence the self-appointed mission of evangelising, civilising and developing – Pax Romana, Pax Britanica, Pax Americana. To justify these grand missions it was necessary to depict Africa in vague and belittling terms right from the start.

This ideology of subordinating anything that is different (or other) was so profound that some European and American thinkers and commentators perceived themselves as not just superior beings, but as gods or deities in relation to Africans. Joseph Conrad, in his biographical novel about the Congo, reflects upon the dominance of such beliefs among senior staff at the Belgium Congo Company: “we whites, from the point of development we had arrived at, must necessarily appear to them [savages] in the nature of supernatural beings – we approach them with the might of a deity”. A similar view is expressed by an American senator, Albert Beveridge, who in 1903 is reported to have argued that God “has made us [‘English speaking and Teutonic peoples’] the master organisers of the world to establish systems where chaos reigns. He has made us adept in governance that we may administer government among savage and servile peoples” (cited in Alavi and Shanin, 1982: 74–6).

Subsequent hegemonic projects in the economic, social, political and cultural spheres have been justified not only through the creation of ‘paradigmatic opposites’ such as tradition versus modern, pagan versus Christian, ‘savage’ versus civilised, pre-capitalist versus capitalist, underdeveloped versus developed, rural versus urban, agrarian versus industrial, but also through open denial of the African humanness. A typical example of this is a description of indigenous South Africans by a Dutch publisher (apparently based on the traveller’s reports during the seventeenth century):

The local natives have everything in common with the dumb cattle, barring their human nature… [They] are handicapped in their speech, clucking like turkey-cocks or like the people of Alpine Germany who have developed goitre by drinking the hard snow-water.

(cited in Coetzee, 1988: 12)

Influential thinkers and writers – including Immanuel Kant, Georg F.W. Hegel, David Hume, the famous Historian Arnold Toynbee, and the renowned American statesman Thomas Jefferson – earlier cast doubt on the ability of Africans to think (see Asante n.d.; Mamdani, 1996: 4). This has often generated a tacit reluctance among non-Africans to accept Africans as equals. One example of this is evidently clear in John Cecil Rhodes’ 1898 submission to the Cape Parliament, where he argued that:

I have made up my mind … that we have got to treat natives in a different way to ourselves. We are to be lords over them. These are my politics on the native affair, and these are the politics of South Africa.

(cited in Alavi and Shanin, 1982: 72–3).

A renowned French historian and writer expressed a similar view, albeit in more explicit terms, when he argued that:

nature has made a race of workers … a race of tillers of the soil, the Negro … a race of masters and soldiers, the European race. Let each one do what he is made for, and all will be well.

(cited in Hill, 2005: 142)

Such views have not just been restricted to politics and international relations; they have permeated every sector of interaction between Africa and the West, including the intellectual sphere. In 1906 Mary H. Kingsley is reported to have complained that “the African has never made an even fourteenth-rate piece of cloth or pottery” (cited in Mudimbe, 1988: 10). Centuries of cultural, educational, political, architectural, musical and economic hegemony have had a deleterious impact on the perception of Africa and Africans, a situation that has been highlighted by critical African thinkers including Aime Cesaire, Franz Fanon, Leopold Senghor, Amical Cabra, Kwame Nkrumah, etc. This sneering about the African continent and its peoples has been carried out in many areas of life, including the way Africa is studied and knowledge produced on Africa and Africans. The study of Africa, even in many African universities (and there are few universities which offer African Studies as part of the curriculum), is consigned to ‘area studies’ that are largely reserved for emotional or sensational exploration rather than rational inquiry – which is the reserve of the ‘disciplines’. And the key distinction here is that the ‘disciplines’ teach Western experience – regarded as the “universal human experience” – whereas area studies are taught as “the experience of people of colour as an ethnic experience” (Mamdani, 1998: 104).

Those fourteenth century (and later) stories about Africa and its peoples have continued to evolve, giving rise to new layers of ‘otherness’, such that though more information is available today about the continent, there are still ways in which our understanding and image of Africa (and Africans) has been largely meditated through the negative mode of representation – the ideology of otherness. A particular way of writing and imagining Africa has been entrenched through physical interaction as well as through the production and dissemination of knowledge and popular culture. At both levels, Africa does not produce for its own consumption; African economies are set to produce primary commodities for export, leading to the extroversion of both knowledge and economic production structures (see Hountondji, 2002). In view of this, some analysts contend that because of this extroversion of “African knowledge production and economic activity, … Africa lost the independence to produce its own knowledge to serve its own economy”, resulting in a vicious circle that perpetuates the view of Africa as a continent that is less intelligible, less rational (Nabudere, 2006: 37).

Aware of the continued scheme of defining Africa from outside, some authors have attributed this phenomenon to the ironic role of education in Africa, arguing that education – which might have been expected to produce enlightened African citizens – has in fact been a means through which the extroversion of Africa has been perpetuated (see Armah, 2010; Brown, 1995). Scholars who see this as one of the biggest challenges facing Africa, have suggested that “African scholars will have to purge themselves of the infection of Eurocentricism (which has continued to claim the right to know Africa) if Africa is to be retrieved from the Curse of Ham” (Nabudere, 2006: 47). Delo Oluwe, a prominent Nigerian political science professor, makes a similar point – arguing that what will make Africa find itself is not copying organisational and production systems from others, but rather harnessing the organisational and problem-solving capacity of local communities (see Brown, 1995). It is in this context that the idea of an ‘African epistemology’ has been proposed as the only path towards an understanding of African challenges, as well as towards finding effective ways of responding to these challenges.

This book does not focus on the Eurocentric-Afrocentric debate (which has already been discussed extensively in the literature); instead the book seeks to draw attention to the apparent deficit in understanding economic growth and development experiences in Africa as part of the broader challenge of the constructive re-imagining and decolonising of Africa (Davidson, 1992). With particular reference to economic growth and development, there has been some kind of double deficit (with the exception of the last decade or so) – a deficit in economic growth performance (which is widely acknowledged from different perspectives), but, more fundamentally, a deficit in understanding the growth deficit itself. While the economic growth deficiencies have been popularly (and sometimes triumphantly) proclaimed...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• List of acronyms
• 1 Introduction: in search of the ‘Africa dummy’
• 2 The World Bank and the IMF in Africa: the project-lending era
• 3 The Bank and the IMF in Africa: the SAPs and beyond
• 4 Africa’s economic growth experience in empirical growth studies
• 5 The state and development in Africa
• 6 The political economy of Africa’s economic growth and development experience
• 7 Africa Rising: changing fortunes or another ‘false start’?
• 8 African intellectuals and the African growth and development challenges
• Appendices
• Index