UNKNOWN AFRICA. MYTH 3: Africa is a wild and exotic land

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

UNKNOWN AFRICA. MYTH 3: Africa is a wild and exotic land

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 was considered wild and exotic to the extent that it had long been sparsely populated and full of uncharted territories — such as the Sahara Desert or the regions south of it. (In reality, small groups of people had always crossed nearly every part of Africa and settled in various areas, including deserts.) At the beginning of the 20th century, the population density in tropical Africa was comparable to that of England just before the Norman conquest in 1066.

The scarcity of people left plenty of space for an incredible diversity of wildlife. As recently as 1800, Africa was home to 25 million elephants. They were one of the reasons for the low population density, as they were unafraid of unarmed humans and consumed their crops. An adult elephant eats 150 kilograms of vegetation per day. Elephants dominated regions with medium to high rainfall, the very areas most attractive to agricultural communities.

It wasn’t until the late 20th century that elephant populations began to be controlled and confined to reserves. In East Africa, elephants occupied 87% of the land in 1925, 63% in 1950, and just 27% in 1975.

Elephants and other wild animals roamed vast stretches of Africa because they were resistant to parasites transmitted by the tsetse fly, a species common to sub-Saharan Africa. Domestic livestock lacked such resistance and couldn’t survive in most of these areas.

Sleeping sickness, carried by the tsetse fly, decimated livestock populations and hindered human population growth even more than malaria. The fly’s preferred temperature range — tropical conditions — covers a third of the continent. Historically, sleeping sickness epidemics wiped out livestock, which led to the rewilding of farmland as wild animals returned to graze where domestic herds had died.

The vast expanse of the Sahara, which separated Europe from the rest of Africa, also contributed to the image of the continent as remote and exotic. This desert spans nearly 8.3 million square kilometers and has long been the subject of fantasy and myth.

As recently as 2004, U.S. Lieutenant General Wallace Gregson Jr., speaking on the threat of Islamic insurgency, referred to the Sahara as a «swamp of terror». In reality, the Sahara is not an «exotic wilderness» but a region with varied terrain — not only an uninhabitable desert but also home to millions of people, often in rapidly growing cities located along major historical trade routes. The Sahara has long been closely connected to both the Mediterranean and sub-Saharan regions.

The history of slavery also contributed to perceptions of Africa as «other». Slavery existed on the continent long before the arrival of outsiders. People were a scarce resource in Africa, and local groups captured slaves to gain additional labor. Estimates suggest that at various points in history, between 30% and 60% of Africa’s population was enslaved by other Africans.

However, African slavery — which often involved the integration of enslaved families into society over generations — was transformed by external slave trades. It began with the Arab trade, which sought slaves for another region with low population density. Between six and ten million enslaved Africans were taken to Arab countries, mostly after 1600 and before the onset of the brutal transatlantic slave trade.

The primary driver of the transatlantic trade was sugar, cultivated in four-fifths of the places to which slaves were sent. From the rise of sugar plantations in Brazil in the 1550s — soon followed by the importation of slaves — to the beginning of sugar exports from the Caribbean in the 1640s and the last shipments of slaves to Brazil in the 1860s, 12.5 million Africans were forcibly transported to the New World.

The overwhelming majority were sent to Latin America and the Caribbean; only about one in twenty slaves were brought directly to what is now the United States. The slave trade reached its peak in the 18th century, when 6.5 million Africans, mostly from West and Central Africa, were regularly shipped across the ocean in chains — between 70,000 and 100,000 in some years.

Thus, Africa came to be seen as a wild and exotic place in the popular imagination because it was vast and little known, sparsely populated with extraordinary flora and fauna, separated by the Sahara, and marked by the most extreme human experience of enslavement. This image was further entrenched in Europe and North America through popular cultural works, such as the Tarzan films and The African Queen (1951).

Today, Africa is no longer wild or exotic. With a continental population of 1.5 billion — set to grow to 2.5 billion by 2050 — human life and civilization are spreading across the continent. Wild areas still exist, but they now take the form of protected natural reserves managed by humans alongside great deserts such as the Kalahari and the Sahara.

A significant part of Africa’s modern story is the rise of cities. The continent is undergoing the fastest urbanization process in the world. In 1900, the largest cities in West Africa were still quite small: Lagos had 18,000 people, Accra 21,000, and Abidjan 10,000.

Today, Nigeria alone — now home to 230 million people — has 80 cities with populations over 100,000. Lagos, the largest metropolis, has 14 million residents. Across Africa, the number of cities with more than one million inhabitants reached 50 by 2010 and is projected to hit 93 by 2025.

Urban development in Africa is primarily represented by coastal and near-coastal cities. By 2020, half of the continent’s consumption was concentrated in the 75 largest African cities, most of which are located by the sea. In demographic and geographic terms, the most fitting comparison for Africa is another vast continent flanked by oceans — South America.

As in South America, Africa will likely continue to have a relatively underpopulated interior — large “flyover” regions, as Americans say — driven by agriculture and resource extraction. Population centers and industrial clusters will concentrate along the coasts.

However, Africa is a third larger than South America, and only 10% of its land lies within 100 kilometers of the coast or a navigable river, compared to more than a quarter of South America. This suggests that Africa may develop a ring of densely populated coastal zones around a vast, sparsely populated interior, punctuated by a few inland megacities such as Addis Ababa and Nairobi.