Are There Successful African Nations?

A map of Africa, early 20th century — mostly European colonies

Nigerian-born novelist Chigozie Obioma recently published an article in Foreign Policy with the provocative headline “There Are No Successful Black Nations”. The article is trenchant, insightful, and makes a compelling argument about the need for a successful, First World African nation, which Obioma describes as essential for uplifting the dignity of African and African Diaspora peoples everywhere.

Obioma’s candor and passion are a welcome alternative to much of what is written and said about the nations of sub-Saharan Africa, at least in the West. The thing I find most impressive is that instead of merely blaming European colonialists (for all that they are easy and obvious historical targets), Obioma argues that the problems of poor governance, poverty, etc. must be solved by African and African Diaspora (he also refers to the Caribbean) peoples themselves:

“Nigeria, the most populous black nation on Earth, is on the brink of collapse. The machineries that make a nation exist, let alone succeed, have all eroded. One might argue that the nation’s creation by self-seeking white imperialists engendered its failure from the beginning, as I did in my recent novel. But this is only a part of the cause. A culture of incompetence, endemic corruption, dignified ineptitude, and, chief among all, destructive selfishness and greed has played a major role in its unravelling. The same, sadly, can be said for most other African nations. States like Zimbabwe, Cameroon, and Equatorial Guinea are farcical democracies ruled by men who exclusively cater to their interests and those of their clipped circles.”

While I don’t think I can improve on Obioma’s argument, I do feel compelled to point out that Africa today is far, far more advanced than it was prior to the disruptive, cataclysmic, but also civilization-altering encounters of European colonialism. Whatever else may be said about these often-tragic events, the fact remains that contact with the West has allowed for the diffusion of advanced technologies into Africa, with momentous consequences.

The origins of the disparities between the West and Africa long antedate even the first of the Portuguese mariners who arrived in the 15th century. Long before the Europeans showed up, sub-Saharan Africa tended to produce smaller, less technologically advanced, less urbanized, and less literate (usually but not always preliterate) societies.

As I’ve pointed out on Quora before, the regions of sub-Saharan Africa that were the most advanced were, virtually without exception, on or near the peripheries of major Eurasian societies. Ethiopia had Red Sea connections with Arabia and the Mediterranean since antiquity; the Sahel had connections with the Islamic world in the Middle Ages, and the East African city-states and even Great Zimbabwe had connections with the Islamic world and India thanks to the Indian Ocean trade.

Overall, sub-Saharan Africa suffered from some important geographical and climatic disadvantages. Much of it is far more arid than most Westerners think, and that has the effect of putting some rather significant limits on agriculture.

Other parts, of course, get plenty of water, but the wet tropics make for notoriously poor soils: the plants make short work of any spare nutrients that aren’t leached away by the rains. Additional geographical factors that held the continent back were a smooth coastline, with little in the way of deep-water harborage, and the poor navigability of most of its major rivers.

Today there is a burgeoning automobile market in the African continent. Plenty of people in many different African nations own cars. Cell phone usage has been skyrocketing in recent years, with countries like Tanzania, Uganda, Kenya, Nigeria, and Ghana largely leapfrogging the landline age and hurtling themselves into the age of mobile communications.

It’s also true that the continent has experienced a massive population boom, largely from the late 20th century on. Pre-colonial Africa was a sparsely-populated continent for the most part.

As explained by a Quora user, Peter Khaemba, Africa’s population grew from about 500 million in 1980 to 1.1 billion in 2016. Khaemba’s treatment of the subject is absolutely brilliant, but the short version is that modern medicine has massively reduced infant mortality, and the departure of the colonizers has opened up vast lands for cultivation that were previously used for cash cropping. However, this phenomenon is scarcely unique to Africa, and has been documented across the developing world.

So are there successful African nations? Obioma makes a compelling argument for the ways in which Africa, and to a significant degree the Caribbean as well, has become an exploitable object of pity in the West and much of the world.

On the other hand, taking a big-picture perspective, Africa has, broadly speaking, come a long way. History is full of unexpected twists and turns, and can sometimes deliver surprising outcomes.

Much of the African continent has been undergoing a leap from Iron Age conditions — broadly analogous, arguably and in some ways, to the Gauls and Germans of Caesar’s day — to the modern age, all within less than a century. This is, surely, something worth acknowledging.

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