1.1 Introduction
The economic development narrative regarding Africa is one of the great concerns, especially when compared with the rest of the world. It is, however, important to note that Africa has not always been poor. The continent’s present marked poverty and great divergence from the West and other wealthy countries of the world can be traced back to game-changing events that began in the fifteenth century. That said, it must be noted that with the support of other countries in the world community, particularly the developed world over the past six decades, deliberate efforts have been made by the African countries themselves to develop their economies. For the first time, the countries in the developed world that hitherto considered African countries and polities as resource reservoirs to be exploited for the furtherance of their own developmental enterprises became engaged with the question of economic development in Africa. Indeed, Africa’s capacity to be fully engaged in the global marketplace of ideas for economic advancement on her own terms appears to have been highly compromised over the last four hundred years following years of enslavement and colonisation. This is an issue that I will explore much further in the subsequent chapters of this book.
Thus, from the fifteenth century, Africa was largely exploited to provide much-needed labour for the agricultural economies of the world, particularly the newly founded colonies of the Americas. The massive trade in Africans as commodities began at the end of the Middle Ages and led to the removal and transport of more than thirteen million people from the continent over a period of nearly four hundred years. 1 This trade was initially perpetrated by the Portuguese who had been given the monopoly rights to trade on the continent by papal order 2 but subsequently involved a number of other European countries. The major European countries that joined in the trade of African slaves included Spain, Britain, France, the Netherlands, Denmark and Sweden. The African slaves were put to work on sugar plantations and in mines and homes across the European dominions in South America, the Caribbean and North America.
Even though the Atlantic slave trade is believed to have accounted for the largest share of the total trade in Africans , it is known that much earlier, trade in Africans occurred across the Sahara Desert and the Indian Ocean. 3
Following the abolition of the trade in African slaves in the nineteenth century, the continent was again the subject of a new scramble by the powerful nations of the North during which the continent was carved out as colonies. At the infamous Berlin Conference in 1885, appropriately described as the “scramble for Africa”, national borders were redrawn and foisted upon the continent. Again, the leading countries of the slave trade, Britain, France, Spain and Portugal, led the colonisation effort. 4 Within this time, Africa’s participation in the global economy began to be marginalised. While massive amounts of precious minerals such as gold and other resources of the continent have always been exploited, Africa has often been undermined. The only period that Africa was in charge of her own affairs with very little outside interference was the period before the Middle Ages. It is also worthy to note that apart from the strip of land across North Africa, that is, the southern part of present-day North Africa that was under the domain of the Roman Empire, the rest of the continent was under a myriad of indigenous empires, similar to most of Europe.
By the end of the nineteenth century, Africa had largely been partitioned and placed under the firm grip of colonial powers. Indeed, very often, deliberate efforts were made to ensure that colonies not only served as sources of raw material for industries in the metropolitan country but also as markets for merchandise from the mother country. Consequently, industrialisation was strongly discouraged in the colonies. In a veiled paternalistic relationship, the continent’s economic development prospects were again made subservient to those of the leading global powers. The colonial policy of suppressing the colonies capacity to industrialise partly explains why so many years after the Industrial Revolution, Africa still does not possess the basic technologies that were discovered and used in Europe for centuries.
It was only after de-colonisation in the 1950s that Africa began to explore and examine the whole idea of economic development in a less constrained environment. Thus, for over four centuries, the continent lacked the space and freedom to adapt, emulate, renew and position its culture and institutions to drive sustained increases in per capita income. The weak position of Africa contributed in part to keeping the continent from meaningfully engaging in the discourse about economic thought regarding economic progress. While Western powers cannot be blamed wholly for Africa’s economic developmental challenges, it goes without saying that one cannot explain the continent’s continued backwardness without a good understanding of the historical antecedents that lay behind the present developmental outcomes. We can only proffer credible solutions to spur on economic development in Africa if we understand the nature and depth of her developmental backwardness and the factors that may have contributed to the situation.
The tremendous understanding of economic thought and theory over the years, especially in Western Europe, does not appear to have helped much in providing direction for economic development in Africa. This is because the ideas from economic theory and the policies that flow from them have not been seriously interrogated against the backdrop of Africa’s peculiar historical configuration vis-à-vis the changing dynamics of the world.
For example, while colonisation of any form is undesirable, the type of colonisation that Africa was subjected to after the slave trade in the nineteenth century was largely unconstructive as far as economic development was concerned. Now, if one compares the legacies that the Roman Empire left in its wake in the countries and polities under its dominion before its demise in AD 476, there is so much that can be learnt. The Romans left strong legacies of institutional and physical infrastructure that provided the basis for economic development in the countries in Europe that later became colonisers. For instance, the Romans’ principle of strict delineation of private property rights and public property rights later underscored and contributed to the dominance of the Western civilisation and capitalism in the world. Legacies from public works, architecture and jurisprudence from Ancient Rome still continue to influence lives, albeit positively, in many of the now developed Western countries.
Over the past fifty years, many resources have been poured into the continent in a bid to hasten economic development with very little to show in terms of tangible development outcomes. There is a significant amount of literature that examines the efficacy of foreign aid in Africa with mixed results. Interestingly, foreign development assistance has been provided for the continent for a myriad of reasons, and in most instances, the mot...