UNKNOWN AFRICA. MYTH 1: Africa is a Single Entity

Writer, journalist, Ph.D., professor at the University of Cambridge, author of the bestselling book How Asia works

UNKNOWN AFRICA. MYTH 1: Africa is a Single Entity

Art design: huxley.media via Photoshop

The concept of a «stereotype» was introduced back in 1922 by American sociologist Walter Lippmann. Since then, humanity has repeatedly realized how difficult it is to step beyond the «picture in one’s head». Joe Studwell is one of the few who has managed to overcome the inertia of thought and build a bridge of understanding between cultures.

For more than 20 years, he served as the editor of China Economic Quarterly. His years of research resulted in the bestselling book The Asian Management Model (How Asia Works). Today, Studwell takes on an equally ambitious challenge: helping us understand how Africa works.

In an exclusive interview for Huxley, he debunks nine myths about Africa that persist in Western cultural consciousness. Let’s embark on an engaging and stereotype-free journey across the African continent with him.

frica is popularly thought of as monolithic because people know so little about it. The first point about Africa is that it is big. The whole of China, India, the United States, and Europe (including European Russia) fit comfortably within its more than 30 million square kilometers. Worldwide, only the Asian continent, at 44 million square kilometers, is larger.

Historically, Africa was also sparsely populated, which contributed to it having a vast number of different ethnic groups – the opposite of what Africa as a single entity would suggest. Unlike densely populated Europe, where the most aggressive ethnic groups conquered others and absorbed them, Africa had the space for hundreds of different ethnicities to co-exist.

In 1959, when the American anthropologist George Murdock published Africa: its peoples and their culture history, the first comprehensive ethnographic survey of the continent, he identified almost one thousand different ethnic groups.

When European powers colonized Africa, in the so-called Scramble for Africa between 1880 and 1905, they divided up 25 million of the 30 million square kilometers of territory and 110 million people. Geographical knowledge of the continent was so poor that forty-four percent of frontiers were drawn as straight lines. This created many countries that are ethnically and religiously mixed and have identical population groups in neighboring countries. Ten thousand small-scale polities were divided into 40 colonies and protectorates. Today, Africa has become 54 nations.

The artificial colonial carve-up of Africa means that many countries have been slow to develop national identities. Nigeria, as one example, had no national identity at independence in 1960. Britain merged different Christian, Muslim, and other religious groups and scores of different ethnicities into one nation in 1914. Even today, less than one-fifth of citizens identify themselves first and foremost as Nigerians.

What changed enormously in Africa in the past half-century is population growth and population density. In 1950, Africa’s population was only 220 million, lower than Asia’s in 1500. With new medicines, better sanitation, and eradication campaigns against endemic disease, child death rates fell precipitously after the Second World War. By the 1980s, Africa’s population growth rate was 2.9 percent per annum — higher than the Asian peak of 2.4 percent in the late 1960s.

At that rate, the African population started doubling every 25 years. It hit 500 million in 1982. In the 1990s, Africa added 100 million people to its population every five years; in the 2000s, every four years; and in the 2010s, every three years. Today, the continent’s population is 1.5 billion.

It is forecast to be 2.5 billion in 2050 and 4 billion in 2100, out of a global population of 10 billion. However, despite the population growth, Africa will not reach Asia’s 1960 population density of 55 persons per square kilometer until the end of this decade.

Africa is also politically very diverse. In the popular imagination, the continent is associated with autocracy. However, Africa actually features more democracy today than was present in Europe or Asia at similar levels of economic development. Part of the reason is that democracy is often necessary for managing Africa’s extreme ethnic diversity, allowing different ethnic groups to live together.

In the first post-independence decades, there was a great deal of autocracy as politicians reacted to ethnic division with dictatorship and military coups. In 1987, only Mauritius, Botswana, and Sudan were democratic. Today, the Bertelsmann Transformation Index – one of several attempts to compare systems of political rule — defines 14 of the 54 African states as fully democratic, while more than 20 others are anocratic – the political science term for a mix of democratic and autocratic rule.

There was a rash of anti-democratic coups across eight African countries between 2017 and 2024. However, six of the states were in the region that came to dominate African security concerns – the Sahel, with its vast, semi-arid spaces that are perfect terrain for insurgents. Military coups in the context of insurgencies in Guinea, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Chad, and Sudan created an unbroken line of overthrown governments across the region. The Sahel states that were constructed by colonists out of religiously separate populations, and on marginal terrain, are inherently politically unstable.

As Africa develops over the next few decades, its politically and economically fragmented nature will become clearer to the world. Regions like East Africa and coastal parts of West Africa – across Ivory Coast, Ghana, Benin, and Nigeria, plus Senegal in the north – will be hubs of growth with populations of hundreds of millions.

The landlocked countries of the Sahel, including northern zones of West African states, will struggle with political instability and poverty. Swathes of Central Africa will also experience slower growth. In the south, the economic prospects of South Africa, torn between black control of political power and white ownership of land and capital, are a soothsayer’s nightmare.

In North Africa, unpopular military regimes in Algeria and Egypt, mayhem in Libya, absolute monarchy in Morocco, and chaotic democracy in Tunisia make one of the wealthiest regions in Africa one of the most politically constrained. Going forward, the rich world will speak not of Africa as one place but of parts of it as troubled and parts of it as promising.

In short, Africa is in no sense monolithic. It is extremely diverse ethnically, religiously, politically, linguistically, and in terms of cultural output – whether music, film, literature, or art.