UNKNOWN AFRICA. MYTH 9: Africa Is a Lack of Self-Reliance

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

UNKNOWN AFRICA. MYTH 9: Africa Is a Lack of Self-Reliance

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.

here is a widespread belief that African states are passive recipients of aid rather than active agents of change. However, this claim is far from the truth. The peoples of Africa fought for their independence for forty years — from the 1950s until the first multiracial elections in South Africa in 1994. The new governments inherited artificially drawn borders and ethnic mixes shaped by colonial powers, as well as economies based on the extraction of minerals, hydrocarbons, and agricultural production designed to serve foreign investors rather than local development.

In addition, African countries had the least developed human capital in the world. Gaining control over these factors required — and continues to require — significant time. After independence, many African states faced dictatorship and civil conflict. Yet over the past 25 years, durable political settlements have been reached in many countries, and democracy has flourished — often to a greater extent than in Europe and Asia at comparable levels of economic development.

Countries rich in minerals and hydrocarbons have learned to manage their revenues more effectively and to mitigate the negative effects of the so-called «resource curse». Africa’s school education system has developed at the fastest pace in the world. Similar progress has been achieved in healthcare. Agriculture-driven development has accelerated, and the economies of some African states are now among the fastest-growing in the world.

In all these changes, African politics and its actors have played an active role. Demographic shifts have also contributed to these successes, as more normal population densities have made it possible to create cheap labor, markets, and urbanized environments where modern infrastructure is more accessible. Of course, African states remain weak in terms of governance.

This is partly due to the political legacy of the colonial period, when foreign authorities governed only the capitals and their immediate surroundings, while power in the rest of the continent was delegated to appointed «traditional» chiefs — effectively freezing Africa’s political development. Since independence, the process of political maturation has been slow and is still far from complete. However, today, a significant number of African states are governed more professionally than ever before.

The strongest examples of Africa’s self-reliance are countries that have achieved outstanding development results. Botswana recorded the highest per capita GDP growth rate in the world from 1966 to 1991 — 7.8% per year. Mauritius grew at an annual rate of 5.8% from 1970 to 2000, while social inequality declined significantly. Since the early 2000s, Ethiopia’s economy has grown steadily at 10% per year, and poverty has been reduced by more than half in a country that in 1990 was the poorest in the world.

The civil war of 2020–2022 interrupted this growth, but it subsequently resumed, showing one of the highest rates on the continent. Rwanda increased its GDP by 7.8% per year between 2000 and 2019 after the 1994 genocide that claimed the lives of nearly one million people. In all these cases, strong and competent state governance played a decisive role.

One sign of the continent’s growing political maturity has been the strengthening of the African Union (AU), a pan-African political organization. The AU has become more active and effective in conflict resolution and, in 2021, initiated the creation of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA). Full implementation of this zone is planned over a 15-year period.

The inclusion of all 54 African states in the AfCFTA agreement signals a new level of political will toward trade integration. The World Bank projects that, if the agreement is fully implemented, African exports will increase by USD 560 billion per year by 2035. The main growth will be driven by trade in manufactured goods.

One of the key factors behind the signing of the agreement was the fact that intra-African trade, although developing from a low base, already consists of 25% medium- and high-technology goods, whereas Africa’s exports to other regions of the world contain only 14% of such goods. Growth in intra-regional exports should stimulate further development of the manufacturing sector.

Despite the progress of AfCFTA, the global trading system continues to place Africa at a disadvantage, hindering development beyond the agricultural and raw-materials sectors. The world’s richest countries — the OECD states — impose tariffs on imports of processed agricultural products, metals, and hydrocarbons (for example, flour, copper wire, aluminum sheets, and fuel), while not taxing certain unprocessed agricultural products, ores, and crude oil.

As a result, African countries rich in natural resources are forced to rely on volatile export commodities and are unable to shift to the production of more price-stable processed goods, which limits job creation.

For a long time, African governments accepted this situation as a given, focusing their efforts on attracting foreign investment into the extractive sector while ignoring other areas of the economy. However, recent measures aimed at compelling global companies to process African raw materials locally — for example, materials for battery production — indicate that Africa’s autonomy is entering a new stage.