Busting African Delusions: Human Capital, Institutions, and the Path to Progress
By Lipton Matthews
Independently published, 236 pages, $16
Lipton Matthews is an independent scholar, author of many notable essays and reviews. Born and first educated in Jamaica, Busting African Delusions is his most ambitious work. In it he argues that Africa is losing its chance to succeed China as the. workshop of the world. That is because it declines to pursue growth and wealth as it could and should.
Africa is attracting foreign investment from China and elsewhere because of its relatively low wages and the incentives it offers to investors. Kenya, for instance, has created a special economic zone in Tatu City, and industrial parks are sprouting across the continent.
To Matthews, however, African leaders and entrepreneurs seldom reach out as they could to appeal to foreign investors seeking new opportunities. Mostly, Africa looks backward, not ahead. It appeals for development aid from the U.S., other richer countries, and international agencies like the IMF. If Africa remans poor, its advocates say, that is only because the West remains racist toward non-white countries. And Africa still suffers from the exploitative legacy of colonialism. Its appeal is to Western guilt more than to common interest. Africans and foreign investors should be getting richer together, but typically they fail to connect.
In Africa, there is no culture of freedom as in the West. Most Africans, like most non-Westerners everywhere, still see existence as survival.
To Matthews, rational behavior must replace moralism. In a series of chapters, he refutes the arguments academics typically make to excuse African underdevelopment. He shows that Africa never was as backward as its defenders say, nor can development rely on the remittances that African immigrants send back to their families from abroad. He also argues that corruption in many countries need not be a barrier to development provided economic policies support growth. He also opposes advocates of an energy transition in Africa away from fossil fuels. Rather, the continent, like the West before it, cannot do without oil and gas while it industrializes.
His overall message is the need for self-reliance. African countries must generate wealth mostly internally, from their own initiative and resources, rather than looking outside. Africans need to build up the education and skills of their people, especially in technical subjects. Only then can they compete with other low-income countries for new investments from abroad. Matthews does not deny research showing that Africans rank below average on some measures of human capital development — but that need not block a substantial upskilling of the continent’s labor force.
Every chapter is flawlessly written and backed by extensive citations to the economics literature on development. Matthews’s case resembles that of earlier economists who favored a market-based approach to development, such as P.T. Bauer. Essentially, he updates that argument for the more service-based, more technical world economy we have today. In that world, he believes, Africa can compete.
In the background is the larger cultural contrast between the individualist culture of the West and the more collective-minded world view of the non-West. With the failure of socialism in Europe after World War II, Europeans learned the hard way that accepting the market economy was essential to growing wealth. Notions that government planning could replace it have failed. Individual buyers and sellers must bear the burdens of economizing. Any government attempt to take it over will fail. Asia became rich only when it accepted that lesson in recent decades. Africans must now do the same.
The great fact about Western culture is that those who live in freedom do not resist but actually seek out shouldering their challenges. They seek out goals that they can make their own and then pursue to realize in the real world. Accepting inner burdens spawns outward opportunities to improve things. Accepting obligation begets freedom. That is the source of the matchless dynamism of Western societies.
Africa, however, was originally the world’s most collective-minded culture. Few African societies seek out freedom. Typically they resist change. Ordinary people largely do what is customary, or what others tell them to do. They typically do not optimize to make money or achieve personal gain. Faster development requires that there be more change. Ordinary people must not evade but seek out the inner boundedness that generates power over one’s environment. Those who would be free must first be bound. That is the great truth that the West accepted centuries ago.
Matthews’s theme is all about how the “dark continent” must make that change. He says little, however, about the difficult politics involved. How to persuade ordinary Africans to seek out ways to improve things? How can African minds become impatient to promote change? How then to realize that vision, as only then is the world made new? Matthews himself is an archetype. How did he himself adopt the goal-oriented way of life that he espouses? Why is he not surrounded by Africans who believe as he does?
American history shows what the change means. Originally, Africans came to America in large numbers not by choice but as slaves. Yet after slavery was abolished, an important minority adopted the individualism of white society. They went to church and school, both institutions that promoted goal-oriented behavior. Their leaders became ministers, then lawyers, then politicians. They led the national movement to abolish Jim Crow and assure blacks the rights of citizens.
But they could do this only because they lived in a sea of freedom due to the surrounding white culture. Whites could not prevent many blacks adopting that same way of life, and thereby getting ahead. They knew that freedom was not free. One first had to accept its inner burdens. One first had to live a responsible life. And from that personal discipline freedom followed as the night the day.
Perhaps the first American black who personified freedom was Frederick Douglass. He dramatized, even under slavery, that blacks could be personally just as formidable as whites. Simply by temperament, he forced whites to treat him as an equal. Then many other blacks of a like mind did the same. And today perhaps a third of American blacks live individualist lives, realizing the American dream. But two-thirds of American blacks are still immersed in social problems, especially broken families, school failure, and crime. They are still oppressed by these conditions because many assume no responsibility for them. Antiracist advocates, such as Nikole Hannah Jones, still blame all these problems on white racism. In a sense, then, poor blacks are still living in Africa.
Matthews’s problem is that he is selling freedom, but he is worse off than Frederick Douglass was. In Africa, there is no culture of freedom as in the West. Most Africans, like most non-Westerners everywhere, still see existence as survival, as getting through life, not as seeking change to get ahead. Matthews badly needs disciples who can adopt and sell his message. Only then can Africa realize a new dawn.
READ MORE from Lawrence M. Mead:
READ MORE:
Leslie Corbly’s Progressive Prejudice Is a Book Every Christian Should Read
Reports of Woke’s Death Are Greatly Exaggerated
Lawrence Mead is Professor of Politics at New York University. His most recent book, with coauthors, is Poverty and Culture, forthcoming from Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
