Why Is Africa Still Paleolithic? - Culture, Said The Wise Man, Culture

Most African nations achieved independence int the early Sixties, and they have been in a downward spiral ever since.  They are sinkholes of poverty, misrule, corruption, and venality with no signs of development despite billions of dollars of Western foreign assistance.  

While China, South Korea, and India were all underdeveloped, poorly governed, and desperately poor countries only thirty years ago, they are now economic powerhouses, have raised millions out of poverty, and have become major players on the world stage. Indonesia, Malaysia, and Vietnam are not far behind. 

What are the reasons for such persistent African underdevelopment? Many liberal critics have blamed colonialism, a system they say which subjected millions, exploited the continent's wealth and resources, and created a culture of dependence and serfdom.  Yet the colonial powers left Africa over sixty years ago, more than enough time given the Asian example for significant development.  

 

China under Mao had been turned into a subsistence economy, beleaguered by pestilence and famine, and ruled by a brutal, uncompromising dictatorship.  It was little more than a Paleolithic society, cowed, penned, and beaten into forced labor camps, miserably inadequate communes, and deformed, socially engineered communities.  

Yet after the death of Mao and the rise of reformist, Western-oriented leaders, in a remarkably short time China has become arguable the most influential world power.  Its cities are models of engineering and architectural genius.  Its software and hardware industries dominate world trade.  Recently using a brilliant, unconventional model, has jumped to the forefront of Artificial Intelligence computing. 

India before the leadership of the reformists Rao and Vajpayee in the early 90s was a Soviet client state which adopted Communist economic ideologies which did nothing to improve the lot of a rapidly increasing population, kept individual private enterprise in irons, and guaranteed economic stagnation and popular dissatisfaction.  When Rao turned his back on Sovietism and embraced the liberal economic policies of the West, the pent up demand and classic entrepreneurial energies of the country were released, and in but a few decades joined the commonwealth of developed nations. 

So Africa, like China and India, threw off or was relieved of an archaic system of governance; but in the ensuing years did nothing with its newfound freedom.  The 'colonial excuse' is no more a legitimate excuse for decades of Africa poverty than is 'racism' for the perennial underperformance of black Americans.   India, China, Korea, and Vietnam have shown that countries can evolve quickly and well from a penitential past. 

'The forest', say other observers, the dense equatorial jungle which covers much of Africa is the principal factor of underdevelopment.  Africans because of circumstances of nature and evolution happen to live in a harsh, often impenetrable environment.  Development is virtually impossible under the conditions of an oppressive jungle. Europe and the Middle East, thanks to climate and geographic situation, have been far more able to develop the great civilizations of the Fertile Crescent, the Nile Valley, and Rome, and if Africans had been more favored, they would have progressed equally. 

However, much of Africa is veldt, savannah, and Sahel - dry, open regions watered by major rivers.  Societies which could have prospered on the banks of the Niger never did.  Timbuktu was once the center of Arab learning and its libraries the envy of Alexandria, but Niger, Mali, and Burkina went nowhere.  The few African empires - Gao and Ghana - flourished for a time in these potentially productive regions, but left nothing behind.  No architecture, infrastructure, or public works. 

India has overcome environmental impediments to development - extreme heat, drought, and irregular rains - and grown to control them.  China has developed every one of its climatic zones, mining the best for wealth and productivity, and leaving the deserts - at least for the time being - alone. 

Finally and after all liberal justifications have been exhausted, and racial sensitivities finally dismissed as thin-skinned idealism, culture has come to the fore.  There is something powerful and ineluctable about Confucianism and its pervasive incorporation and influence in Chinese life which gives China the moral center that other societies lack.  The image of the driven, ambitious, proud, and disciplined Chinese is not folly.  In both China and the diaspora, Chinese are among the most productive members of society.  India's combination of deep Hindu faith and boundless entrepreneurial energy - both cultural expressions - are at the heart of its renewal. 

 

Tribalism, however, the heart and soul of Africa, has no such developmental implications. It was and still is endemical parochial, insular, and narrowly focused.  Its worldview, encompassing the secular and the divine like other societies, never extended beyond its forest enclaves.  There are no Notre Dames in Africa and no Hinduism, perhaps the most complex, nuanced, intellectually philosophical of the world's religions

Chinese development was principally due to the reforms started by Deng Xiaoping and enthusiastically endorsed and expanded by his successors; but there is no doubt that the cultural infrastructure of the country was the foundation on which these more practical changes was built.  A culture built around Confucian principles of respect for elders and tradition, wisdom, loyalty, discipline, and trustworthiness more easily coalesced around newly-enunciated programs of national reform.  A culture which had millennia of ‘authoritarian’ Mandarin rule would not find the centralized programs of the Politburo intolerable, especially since the economic changes implemented promoted economic development.

The experience of Japan is no different.  The same rapid economic progress occurred when the Meiji leaders decided in 1868 to catch up with the modern world.

Lawrence Harrison, one of the first outspoken advocates for considering culture as an important factor in economic development recently wrote the lead essay for a conference on Culture and Economic Development sponsored by the Cato Institute. In it he said:

The "Confucian" countries (more accurately the countries strongly influenced by Chinese culture, which also embraces, in addition to Confucianism, Taoism, Buddhism, and ancestor worship) all share substantially in the universal culture of progress: education, achievement, work ethic, merit, and frugality are all highly valued in the East Asian societies. Their economic success contradicts Weber's analysis in The Religion of China in which he asserts that rapid capitalist development is unlikely in China in large measure because of the absence of anything like the Calvinist "tension" caused by uncertainty about being of the "elect."

Many observers attributed the stagnation of the East Asian economies (Japan excepted) at mid-twentieth century to Confucianism, particularly to the influential role played by the Mandarin literati (Mao a prototype) and the low prestige that attached to economic activity in the Confucian scheme of things. But all that was necessary to release the powerful education/achievement/merit/frugality undercurrent to perform its economic magic was encouragement from the political leadership, in the cases of South Korea and Taiwan stimulated by security concerns. The trigger for the magic in China was Deng Xiaoping's 1978 pronouncement, "To get rich is glorious," effectively marking the end of Mao's Marxist revolution.

Harrison goes on to disaggregate ‘culture’ and suggests, based on his and others’ research that there are a number of characteristics which characterize successful cultures, whether as nations or communities living abroad:

Some economists have confronted culture and found it helpful in understanding economic development. Perhaps the broadest statement comes from the pen of [Harvard economist] David Landes: "Max Weber was right. If we learn anything from the history of economic development, it is that culture makes almost all the difference." Elaborating on Landes's theme, Japanese economist Yoshihara Kunio writes, "One reason Japan developed is that it had a culture suitable for it. The Japanese attached importance to (1) material pursuits; (2) hard work; (3) saving for the future; (4) investment in education; and (5) community values."

 

Perhaps the more interesting research was carried out by Harrison and his colleagues at the Fletcher School at Tufts University (Culture Matters Research Project) to see how these general categories correlated or were associated with certain cultural factors, such as religion:

The data roundly validated Max Weber’s thesis in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism: Protestant countries do better than Catholic countries in creating prosperity. To be sure, the averages for the Catholic countries are depressed by Latin America’s slow development, but even when one looks only at First World democratic-capitalist societies, Protestant countries do substantially better than Catholic countries with respect to prosperity, trust, and corruption.

More broadly, the analysis of religions suggests that Protestant, Jewish, and Confucian societies do better than Catholic, Islamic, and Orthodox Christian societies because they substantially share the progress-prone Economic Behavior values of the typology whereas the lagging religions tend toward the progress-resistant values.

Harrison cites the Nordic experience as an example of the importance of religion and culture to economic development:

All five Nordic countries—Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Iceland—have a Lutheran background, even though few today are churchgoers. Lutheranism is the source of much of the Nordic value system that has produced high educational levels, extensive welfare programs, and high quality entrepreneurship symbolized by Finland's Nokia and Sweden's Volvo, Saab, and Ikea. The compatibility of economic efficiency and social spending in the Nordic context is apparent form the 2006 World Economic Forum ratings.

The Economist recently observed, "High taxes and generous welfare safety nets need not undermine competitiveness…Scandinavian economies are ranked high in the league…" (Sweden was number two in the world.)

Timur Kuran and Anantdeep Singh of Duke and University of Southern California, respectively, studied the question of Islam and economic development in India  where Muslims are a significant minority, but lag far behind Hindus in per capita income. (Economic Modernization in Late British India: Hindu-Muslim Differences 2004).  Kuran and Singh cite two principle factors behind this lag –  the waqf inheritance system and Shari ’a Law.  

The traditional inheritance system which channeled money through inefficient family structures, inhibited the flow of financial resources to modern institutions; and while Hindus were investing in banks and other financial institutions and using their profits for further growth, Muslims did not, and their growth was stagnant.

Kuran and Singh also cite Muslim adherence to Shari ’a law which kept them out of the mainstream of British civil, contract, and criminal justice. Kuran identifies the absence in Islamic law of the concept of a corporation and two institutional bottlenecks that once seriously hampered economic growth in the Muslim world: the Islamic law of inheritance, which inhibits capital accumulation, and the waqf system, which locks vast resources into unproductive organizations designed to deliver social services. 

Thirdly Kuran and Singh cite Islamic education as an obstacle to development – i.e. a religion-based educational system cannot possibly expose students to the more general learning of the modern world.

For years, the discussion of culture as a determining factor was verboten, largely because of relativist, Marxist-influenced academicians who insisted that all society was a question of economics, institutions, demographics, and control of the means of production.  These theories were co-opted by Political Correctness advocates who said that to criticize a particular culture was to deny its inherent value.  Since all cultures are equal, there must be more secular answers to questions of economic and social progress than religion.

Wrong.  Perhaps now, in the death throes of woke and with the ascendency of political and social conservatism, phenomena will be looked at objectively and dispassionately.  Such observers can well start in Africa.