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Notes -
The impression that people who spend a lot of time in dissident right circles (ie our corner of twitter), regardless of their own politics, have of Africa is indeed an unsalvageable shithole, The Camp of Saints, 7.5 tfr Nigeriens trapped between the desertification of the Sahara and ISIS, millions in desperate Libyan camps trying to make it to Europe with the belief they’ll be soccer stars, millions more in the Congo being raped and butchered by gangs fighting over diamond and rare earth metals mines, an orgy of violence and - even in comparatively peaceful parts of Africa - miserable, grinding, absolute poverty. Africa, Addio in other words.
And it is true, of course, that all those things exist to some extent in Africa. But it is also true that they provide, at best, an extremely incomplete picture. Since 2016 I’ve travelled regularly to Sub-Saharan Africa, everywhere from Nigeria to Namibia, from Sierra Leone to South Africa, from Zimbabwe to the DRC to Ethiopia. And the world I see, as someone in finance, is obviously as skewed as the world a UN volunteer in a refugee camp sees.
But I have to say, the progress in the last ten years alone has been incredible. Often it’s obscured on statistics because of the collapse of EM currencies since 2014 (and more generally since 2010), and because population growth, which is slowing down, has been so high. Sometimes the stats do show this, as in e.g. Rwanda. Kinshasa is a completely different city to the one it was a decade ago. So is Addis, which has hugely developed and is now often (airport aside) quite pleasant, with a neat monorail that’s mostly clean, some good public spaces, despite the fact that they’ve been fighting a civil for for a few years now. Both cities, by the way, are cleaner than Mumbai. The growth of the middle class in many of the places I work has been extraordinary, entire suburbs with air conditioned malls and movie theaters emerging wholesale from the earth, even in countries not blessed or cursed with great natural resources. Government is (slowly) getting more competent, things are moving beyond paper into digital, where they’re more easily tracked and the petty corruption that cripples all developing countries is slightly more easily detected. The living condition of the great majority of Africans, who do not live in war zones or even in grinding poverty (perhaps a third do, which obviously isn’t great, but it isn’t the majority), is improving.
Things are being built, sometimes to great (although underreported) success, some of which I have helped to fund. New hotels and restaurants and luxury apartment buildings line the main streets of nearly every major sub-Saharan capital, along with new parks and gardens, the emergence (at last) of actual public services, including street cleaners and so on. And there is, a few countries (like South Africa) excepted, an air of infectious, absolute optimism. Last time I was in Kinshasa our clients took us out to try interesting Chinese-African fusion food, we went to a warehouse gallery that could have been in LA, we even walked around which I’d never have done 5 years ago. Small things, of course, and limited to the country’s top 5% at most (and in any case, some will say, evidence of the American monoculture spreading far and wide), but still progress in some sense. Many Africans live lives that are now comparable to the ‘global middle’, including in large parts of Latin America, India, parts of the Middle East and so on.
Even if one accepts the DR position on various evopsych concepts, it is a fallacy to suggest this means there is some “maximum level of development” to which a people or nation can aspire. Does that mean charity is warranted? I wouldn’t say so, but then I think charity is never warranted beyond one’s immediate community, where judgment about impacts is easiest. But Africa is far from a lost cause, and I’m very optimistic about its future (although, of course, I have every incentive to be).
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