Back to the Future: Returning Africa to the Technological Journey — Part 3
Africa and the Technology Transfer
Africa has a lot of history of different African nations and kingdoms coming into contact with European traders, missionaries and opportunists. For the sake of clarity, we will focus on the outcomes of the contact and the result of these interactions from 10,000 feet above.
If you have not read Part 1 and Part 2, please do so and then come back.
By the mid 20th Century, traditional iron production in Africa had almost completely disappeared due to the arrival of cheaper iron from Europe. The colonised lands became a new market especially within the settler communities who were already consumers of European products. The other reason was that the indigenous populations were actively discouraged due to the fear of weaponised resistance to colonial occupation.
Over the centuries, the indigenous inhabitants learnt of European countries and later European settler ways, worked for these settlers and learnt what products were marketable in Europe. However, indigenous produce beyond subsistence was discouraged by the settlers, who owned the marketing links to Europe especially where it offered competition to settler production.
As the indigenous inhabitants began agitating for equal treatment including access to markets, the effects of the systematic destruction and prohibition of the local technological industry in these colonised lands became clear. Through this process, a lot of African technological know-how was outrightly stolen and that which was not, due to its oral record and apprentice-driven process, effectively disappeared.
Due to the ravages of disease, slavery and colonialism, the Africans find that after they received political independence that they are not in control of their own natural resources nor do they have unfettered access to the European markets, unlike the nations in the Europe, who extract the African natural resources for low returns and effectively sell them back to the Africans at a premium.
The European based technology transfer was inadequate for meaningful change for the Africans. It did not suite the African environment and it was purposely menial so that the Africans do not offer any competition.
Borders
Africa struggles to fulfil its potential because of borders. This is the one major barrier that the USA, China and India do not have when accessing their respective populations. This allows one currency to be used in that territory, making commerce scalable, enjoying the benefits of the economies of scale.
African borders mimic those in Europe. Beyond that, many African countries are “multi-national states” like the European Union and even more insidiously, the cracks in some African countries are beginning to show, much like in the EU itself. But the violent breakup of Yugoslavia and the amicable one of Czechoslovakia reveal how fragile these “states” in the EU and Africa are. The EU is still experimenting one currency with in central Europe to take advantage of the commercial value of that.
Contact with the Europeans over the years divided Africa based on European interests that revolved around treaties and wars. It is through these events that Africa got borders that ensure that the Africans lack of complete control of their own natural resources. “Complete” here means the Africans do not have the control of the means of extraction, production and sale of the goods made from African natural resources.
Borders mean that Africa has unviable states that must rely on a colonial reason and relationship to exist. An example is that of the Gambia and Senegal.
Economics
In economics, the factors of production are land, labour and capital. However, in some quarters, capital is a transferable man-made product of labour from land. The debate whether capital is a core ingredient of the factors of production is another discussion.
One of the reasons certain communities advocate for large families is to create a labour force for their agrarian or pastoral economies. These large families are able to till large spaces of land and to graze over a large number of cattle, adequately protecting them.
Surplus harvests that went beyond subsistence and herds of cattle were the first forms of capital and readily needed an army to protect the increase. Labour is necessary to produce and to guard. Everything else is a complex form of these basics.
The resources in Africa’s control are the human based resources such as labour, agriculture and local consumer markets.
What can the Africans do to grow their own capital today using new innovative ways?
Collectivism
Collectivism is a basic human cultural element that exists from the notion of a family unit in society. It is also a social structure when it is clear a group of people must work together to achieve a shared goal. Over the years, these ideas have evolved in Africa with the focus on the community creating nations.
The African collective identity is relatively clear since it is based on the boundaries of the continent. Within the continent, identities were fluid and normally were attached to a place of residence of the ethnic community. The concept of race is an imported mental construct and quite foreign to many African communities.
Due to the historical nature of the partition of Africa, the nation-state has not materialised fully. In Europe, the nation-state developed from a tribal collective possessing land acquired through war or treaty. These nations stabilised with a language, a culture and a land. In some of the kingdoms, notably the United Kingdom and Spain, Scotland and Cataluña respectively are agitating for independence. Above these nation-state and kingdoms is the European Union, which is a continental multi-national state.
Interestingly then, almost every country in Africa is a multi-ethnic state, much like the EU, save for a few such as Swaziland and Cape Verde. Africans were not given the opportunity to negotiate with one another during the formation of these states. After independence, support to keep the states intact was covertly provided by the Western countries with past and present economic interests. The states that have had the communities in them redraw their borders have done it through war. Eritrea and the youngest country in the world, South Sudan has been birthed out of a conflict based on external interests and megalomaniac leaders.
The political state collective identity will be in flux until a new generation of Africans not afflicted by the colonial past comes along and takes control of these states. This generation would need to establish a unifying cultural and economic identity within each state. This generation will need to conjure and solidify an African identity in order to trade with external powers in the Globalization reality. That obviously will be resisted by entrenched local and foreign interests.
How will Africa innovate technologically and remove the barriers that hinder human resource exploitation, agri-business and robust market growth?
How can Africa use technology to build on the resources they control, ushering in social and economic development?
Africa and Virtual Land
From basic economic theory, Africans only have access to one of the three traditionally core factors of production. This leaves the Africans with one other possible new factor — virtual Land: The Web and the Internet
The Internet originated in the USA. The fact that it rides on American technology allowed the USA to “globalise” American culture and with that, American commerce. The initial default language on the Web was “American” (English). Initially American ideas spread everywhere on the Web, but as the population of web locations and people coming online grew, virtual manifestations of physical realities began to appear.
Previously language and alphabets were the natural barriers to the spread of American and Western “Civilisation” ideas. Countries with similar histories, experiences and problems such as Japan, India and the Americas could not be accessed easily due to lingual and cultural barriers. As more people became “global citizens” online, they needed to understand and converse in American.
Social platforms became the new “Land” on the Web. These new “countries” with populations of physical continents, produced the natural resource known as data, a by-product of the people on these platforms. But these “countries” complete with “walled gardens” exist on cloud infrastructure housed in geographically distributed data centres, completely ignoring the geographic borders on the ground.
American companies through their government are working at extending the American influence made possible by the Web, by asking real countries to accept American Intellectual Property law to operate in partner countries. That way, countries would have to agree not to challenge American technological dominance through their own innovation. China has done what was thought not to be possible. In the last 20 years, China has literally created their own virtual territory in “cyberspace” and mapped it to the territorial borders of the country. This has brought the same old “free trade” issues in a new virtual world.
However Africa collectively, has a larger and younger English speaking population than South America, USA’s backyard of influence. Africa has been immediately accessible to American ideas and companies. Microsoft is making inroads using their legacy in enterprise software while Facebook and Google are seeking to expand using social media and other Web services. The Europeans are not being left behind. Some of Africa’s largest investors in mobile services and Web platforms are European. China is not far behind either. With the visit of Jack Ma, their sights are set.
Africa is at a cross-road. As external companies create new virtual markets, breaking down the borders and allowing commerce to happen within their networks, will the Africans create a new collective African identity that goes across the same borders, trade with one another and finally build enough knowledge and capital to create their own economy?
The next 4th part explores identity and technology in Africa.
