Since the ramping up of the Transatlantic slave trade in the 17th century, Africa has experienced sustained economic stagnation and many adverse changes in its societies. But, like China, the continent can leverage its latent assets and turn around. Soeren J Henn and James A Robinson discuss three specific assets: success based on achievement, scepticism of authority and cosmopolitanism.

Since gaining independence in the 1950s and 1960s African societies have had a hard time economically, with many experiencing prolonged periods of economic contraction or stagnation. In fact, Africa hasn’t just had a bad 60 years, one could say it has had a bad 400 years. Since the ramping up of the Transatlantic slave trade in the 17th century, Africa has experienced sustained economic stagnation and many adverse changes in society. This was connected to slavery, colonialism, post-colonial realities of autocracy and the Cold War.

However, many other parts of the world experienced historical episodes like this. China, for example, prior to 1978, had had a very bad 200 years. By the second half of the 18th century the Qing state was collapsing fiscally and wracked by corruption. The granary system of social insurance withered away, the Grand Canal silted up, and China was convulsed by civil wars like the Taiping Rebellion which claimed perhaps 20 million lives. The Imperial state disintegrated, warlordism was rampant and other events took place, such as a communist revolution, the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. But despite all these calamities, it turned out that China had large latent advantages, or assets, on which economic prosperity could be built. A central asset was a social norm that, as Confucius put it, one should “promote those who are worthy and talented”. The norm of meritocracy turned out to be a powerful plinth on which to build an inclusive market economy.

In this research we pose the question: if China could have a bad 200 years but still maintain, or even develop, latent assets, could the same thing be true about Africa? None of these mattered for economic prosperity in China until some basic issues of governance were solved, as they were by Deng Xiaoping and successive Chinese political elites. Such governance challenges certainly exist in Africa. But could Africa possess, have sustained, or created such latent assets?

We argue that the answer to this question is yes, and we document three specific assets. The first asset is that, like China, the majority of African societies are built on achieved, not ascribed status. Unlike in India with its religiously enforced caste system, or Latin America with its ingrained “castas” and inequalities, in Africa anyone can get ahead. Like the type of meritocracy that has deep roots in China, the achievement basis of African society is also deep seated, if rarely institutionalised via an examination system. In historic Africa, even slaves who had the capacities got to the top.

We illustrate this fact with several sources of information. First, survey data on perceived and expected social mobility shows Africa to be the most socially mobile part of the world. Africans are also the most optimistic about future mobility. Perceptions are important because they determine people’s actions and effort and also their policy preferences. Nevertheless, we also show with data on observed educational mobility that Africa is more socially mobile than Latin America or South Asia and some countries in Africa are as mobile as Western Europe. What would be the basis for such optimism? Despite the cliché that Africa is a continent of corruption, where connections and social networks are critical to people’s opportunities, in fact Africans are more likely to say that the way to get ahead economically is via hard work. Their opinions about this are similar to those of people in the United States. These beliefs manifest themselves in the types of attitudes they transmit to their children.

Though there is a great deal of corruption in Africa, so is there in China, yet in the Chinese case the incentives and opportunities created by the norm of meritocracy seem more powerful quantitatively. Why not in Africa?

The second latent asset we call “scepticism of authority”. Unlike many societies in East Asia, Africa is much more like Western liberal democracies in its anticipation that political power will be abused. African oral history and political theory is full of the anticipation of miss-rule, and it generally lacks the notion of a “redeemer”, to use the phase of Mexican historian Enrique Krauze, or charismatic personal rule so central to the emergence of populism in Latin America and elsewhere. This scepticism has of course not stopped power being abused in post-colonial Africa, but we argue that, just as in the United States at the time of the Constitution, this scepticism can provide the basis for building inclusive and effective political institutions. We illuminate this by presenting data on attitudes in Africa towards one-man rule and we show how these are related to the history of political development in Africa.

The final asset we identify is “cosmopolitanism”. Because of the heterogeneous and small-scale nature of African political society historically, Africans endlessly have to deal with differences: different languages, different cultures, different histories. This history is reflected in African languages where the word for “stranger” is typically the same word as for “guest”. We argue that this makes Africans the most able culturally to cope with a modern globalised world; people who can deal with difference and adapt will succeed.

Though much social science attempts to portray this diversity as a burden, which may be true in some specific contexts, we argue that it is in fact an asset. One way we illustrate this asset is by showing that Africa is the most multi-lingual continent in the world. Though it may not be specifically advantageous to speak Lingala or Kikongo in New York, London or Paris, we argue that the ability and willingness of Africans to master so many languages is indicative of the great suppleness of cosmopolitan African society and in line with a recent literature in social psychology, it helps Africans to take and appreciate the perspectives of others.

The study of African economic development had been impaired by an obsessive search for negative factors which can help explain poverty. Though such factors exist, our point is that they co-exist with many other factors, previously neglected, that can be leveraged to generate prosperity in Africa.

We do not underestimate the challenges of overcoming weak institutions and poor governance in Africa in the difficult context that colonial powers bequeathed. Moreover, the analogy to China is made complicated by the fact that unlike Africa, China has a long history of consolidated state authority with a common system of writing and something approximating a common culture. These features almost certainly helped Deng Xiaoping move the country onto a path of reform. But it is also worth noting that Deng did not solve all or even most of China’s problems at once. That is still work in progress and there are many practical lessons to be learned from how China innovated “second-best” solutions, like township village enterprises, to exploit the latent advantages that it did have, such as untapped entrepreneurial talent. Africa certainly has such talent.

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Notes:

• This blog post is based on Africa’s Latent Assets, Journal of African Economies (2023).
• The post represents the views of its author(s), not the position of LSE Business Review or the London School of Economics.
• Featured image by Joshua Oluwagbemiga on Unsplash
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