Why does economic growth and development on the African continent continue to underperform growth and development across the globe? Ignore the twin presumptions that it is important for Africa to grow and develop at all and that the continent’s ruling elite are alive to this task, and the answers you get will depend. On how far your history reaches. In which case, both slavery and colonialism took considerable tolls on the continent’s resources, either by shipping manpower out, or by organising colonial economies to extract and export resources. And this set the continent back a lot. Or, on your ideological take. In this reading, capitalist solutions continued to subordinate post-independent states to the needs of their previous home countries. Or attempts at socialising production robbed young states of the animal spirits that drive innovation and increases in productivity, and that may only have been set free by relatively free, but properly regulated markets.
Whichever answer you prefer to the question with which this piece opens, one thread runs through these antipodean explanations. It is that before, and after independence, African societies were some of the most unequal anywhere in the world. The causes of this were numerous. Colonial rule was far from invested in questions of general economic efficiency. It not only created exclaves of the economy where participating natives were richer than excluded ones. It also created educational divides. The local elite bred from these processes inherited the new states. And from the collectivisation of rural agriculture, through the expropriation of smallholder farmers’ profits by state-controlled marketing boards, to the prioritisation of cash crops production over subsistence farms’ output, the policies of the newly independent states simply exacerbated their societies’ existing cleavages.
