I. Introduction

You’ve probably seen this cartoon:

Here we see an answer to a question that cries out for an explanation.

Africa is incredibly poor, more so even than most developing nations. Most of Africa makes India look rich. To get a picture of what this actually looks like, fewer modern writers do better than Matt Lakeman. Here he is talking about Nigeria, which is near the middle of the pack for Africa in terms of HDI:

“Nigeria is chaos. The cities are extremely crowded, dirty, noisy, and lively. Everyone seems to be talking all the time, often over each other. Outside the few modern sections of Lagos (and probably the capital, Abuja), Nigerian cities are made of endless winding roads and alleys periodically packed with open-air markets. Middle class and rich people all live behind walls topped with barbed wire or broken glass, and are protected by guards. Poor people live in slums that sprawl eternally in and around the cities, consisting of concrete, wood, or metal hovels stuffed into every square inch of space. A significant chunk of Lagos holds slums built on stilts on the water populated by fisherman and boat people.” “Notes on Nigeria” — Matt Lakeman

In terms of government, Africa has had problems with democracy and corruption that give it a nearly cursed bearing, that make it appear almost doomed even compared to other developing nations:

When I talked about this with my friends, they often mention colonialism — certainly understandable, as colonialism had many harms. But on further reflection, this explanation left me more confused than before. Wasn’t South America colonized longer, and it’s doing much better now? What about Singapore, which wouldn’t exist without the British, and its amazing economic success? What about the fact that countries that were colonized for longer in Africa, like Ghana, are doing better than countries that weren’t colonized at all, like Ethiopia? This couldn’t be the whole story.

The colonization explanation is the explanation that this cartoon takes. In the literature, this explanation is known as Dependency Theory (DT). This is the “Africa is poor because Europe and North America are rich” theory. According to this telling, Africa was just as rich and prosperous as other parts of the world before colonization, and would still be today if colonization had never happened. The future was “stolen” from Africa. This theory seemed to be especially popular in the 70s, especially after Walter Rodney published his 1972 classic How Europe Underdeveloped Africa.

While most people haven’t read Rodney, this idea has gained wide appeal: we often hear calls for reparations, questioning of the legitimacy of modern Western nation-states, and the blaming of the mistakes on African countries on current powers. But does DT hold up to scrutiny?

What does the economic data say about African development in the very long term, and on the effects of colonialism on it? What is the modern scholarly consensus on why Africa is poor today?

In this article, we’ll look at all these questions.

II. Our Plan

This article grew in the telling. Originally, I just wanted to provide you with some data analyzing Dependency Theory. However, given that econometric data for Africa in the far past is hard to come by (most of the popular websites don’t provide data from before 1950), this forced me to peek further into the economic history literature than I expected. Over the course of this adventure, I learned enough to write a brief economic history of Africa: this is what you are reading now.

Here, I’ll retell African economic history, passing along the way a few especially cool papers. Much of this material has never been popularized; although I must emphasize that none of this is my own research and I used no primary sources here. However, most of the charts are original, and I do draw a few regression lines on other folks’ data.

Citations will be represented with a shorthand in brackets like this: [0]. I recommend peeking at the bibliography at the end if you’re interested in this subject!

III. Premodern African Wealth

How wealthy was Africa before colonization?

I say “Africa” and not “African countries” because, before the 1940s, there was no such thing as an African country. For Africa, the modern nation-state is a foreign import. This is one of many historical realities that make accounting in precolonial Africa difficult.

Another difficult reality is the paucity of records in Subsaharan Africa. In North Africa, which was more heavily influenced by Islam, we often have fairly good Arabic records, but few Subsaharan countries have indigenous writing systems. Historians have a few explanations for this:

“However, in the data from Laitin and Ramachandran (2016), only six of forty-two countries in sub-Saharan Africa have a major linguistic group with a precolonial writing tradition. As a point of comparison, all forty seven North African and Asian countries contain such a group. This may, in part, be a consequence of geography: Scott (2017) argues that the introduction of cereals (unlike yams or cassava) enabled the development of tax systems, and such systems demanded record keeping. Vansina (1978), for example, observes that the lack of a writing tradition in the Kuba Kingdom (in today’s Democratic Republic of the Congo) inhibited the emergence of an expansive, modern state.” [3; Chapter 10]

Worse, many of the records we do possess haven’t been translated. Our understanding of Subsaharan economic life is therefore spotty [6].

This points to the fact that Africa is not one continent but two: Northern Africa (the Maghreb) and Subsaharan Africa (Subsahara). They are divided by the great sea of sand known as the Sahara, where few can cross and even fewer live. The fiscal and political situation between these two parts of Africa has always been different. In particular, North Africa has always been richer — during the seventh century it even colonized much of Europe [6].

The Ancient Subsahara

However, it is the Subsahara that does the worst today, and that is the region we will focus on here. Its geography is not blessed for economic development. The Subsahara’s north–south axis is longer than its east–west axis. This means that goods, traders, people, and ideas must cross many bands of latitude, making such diffusion more difficult than in continents that are wider than they are long [10]. African population density has been low in most regions and at most times, making labor scarce. [1; Chapter 3]

The abundance of land was both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, European-style wars over tiny patches of land did not occur. On the other hand, there was no incentive to develop efficient farming methods, the notion of private property never emerged, and land rotation, in which farmers exhausted one patch of land and then moved to another, was common. Constant roaming made large-scale settlements hard to establish. Further, the scarcity of labor made slavery endemic.

Endemic diseases and parasites make Africa the most hostile continent on Earth. Sleeping sickness and rinderpest combined with the lack of easily-domesticated animals in the area made domestication difficult [1, 10]. The tsetse fly made development even more difficult in forested West African regions and prevented the widespread use and dissemination of livestock [11].

Prosperity and Development

Despite Africa’s challenges there were a few patches of prosperity. The highlands of northern Tanzania, central Kenya, and Ethiopia are well-irrigated. In many cases they are even comparable to the fertile clefts of the Indus River Valley or Mesopotamia. Ethiopia was particularly blessed: its topsoil was generally deeper, and so plow agriculture expanded there in the early modern age. This made agricultural surplus possible, leading to a centralized political system. Ethiopia ultimately became the most powerful precolonial political unit in Africa... and the only one able to successfully resist colonization.

That said, African prosperity rarely lasted long, as they were highly vulnerable to recurrent crises such as hunger, famine, and malaria. Generally speaking, precolonial Africa faced greater economic and ecological challenges than the rest of the world.

In the run-up to the Scramble for Africa, economic change became especially rapid. Even though Europeans had not yet penetrated into the continent’s interior, they still affected it. Missionaries from Latin America likely brought maize to West Africa in the 16th century, where it slowly spread and increased the productivity of African farmers. Asian yams and banana plantains were introduced even earlier, likely in the 16th century via the Indian Ocean trade.

Trade helped societies in West Africa become particularly wealthy and sophisticated. This includes the famous Mali Empire, home to Mansa Musa, who is widely considered one of the richest people in history. His wealth derived from gold, copper, and slaves that he provided to Muslim merchants on the other side of the Sahara.

In the 15th century the Portuguese came in. They kick-started the Atlantic slave trade, which enriched the wealthy Africans who provided the slaves but had devastating consequences on the population of the region. We’ll see the concrete effects of this as we inspect the numbers [3, 10].

Quantifying African Economic History

In order to do comparative economic history, we need to not just understand the general shape of history that is given to us by historical records, but we must also quantitatively compare precolonial African societies with other contemporary economies.

This is called econometrics and has become increasingly important in our data-based age. The Maddison Project is the preeminent contemporary dataset used to record GDP per capita (GDPpc) for historical societies [12]. GDPpc represents the total economic productivity divided by the population. While GDPpc isn’t a direct measure of well-being, its correlations with HDI and even gender equality are very well-established [14]. That being said, all these trends only track wealth divided by population. They tell us nothing about how this wealth is distributed.

We’ll get our GDPpc data for Europe from the Maddison Project. Unfortunately, for the reasons I’ve already mentioned it doesn’t have much data on Subsaharan Africa.

I found a solution to this in one of my favorite papers ever: “Rethinking Africa’s GDP, 1796–1950,” by Luke McLeary [6]. McLeary got around the very difficult issue of lack of records by using the well-established correlation between GDPpc and income terms of trade.

Income terms of trade (ITT) is a term for a country’s ability to import goods and services — basically how much import purchasing power a country earns from its exports.

It is equal to the ratio of export prices (measured by an index) over import prices, multiplied by the volume of export prices. It shows a country’s capacity to import.

$\text{ITT} = \frac{p_{\epsilon}}{p_{\iota}} = \frac{[\text{Money From Exports}]}{[\text{Import Price Index}]}$

$p_{\epsilon} = \text{Price Index of Exports}$

$p_{\iota} = \text{Price Index of Imports}$

$V_{\epsilon} = \text{Volume of Exports}$

Why does ITT correlate with GDPpc? I think it’s because GDPpc represents how much of a country’s economic output goes to each person. The amount a country can afford to import is correlated with its economic output and thus with the consumption of each individual. The more a country can afford to import, the richer it is and the more each person can afford to consume.

In this way, despite having poor records about life in most parts of precolonial Africa, we can derive a strong proxy for GDPpc from the trade records we do have.

We can combine these with data from the Maddison dataset to get an understanding of the general fate of African countries relative to the rest of the world.

While McLeary’s raw dataset is theoretically available on his website, the Google Drive is not public (Luke A. McLeary — DATA). To get around this I had to transcribe his data by hand into a CSV. Once we do all that, we can compare precolonial GDPpc in Africa to growth in Europe during the same time frame:

Here’s the same chart on a log scale to better show the differences between African regions:

First note the green dashed line: this represents 1807, a vital date in the history of Africa. In 1807, the British Empire banned the transatlantic slave trade. That alone wasn’t too surprising, but what they did next was odd. They banned it not just for themselves, but for everybody: the Americans, the French, the Arabs, and everyone else. We can consider this a very early example of an international law. For the next forty-odd years, the British Navy embarked on a costly and enormous enforcement campaign [13], gradually bringing the slave trade to a halt.

We see this process reflected in the black line, which represents average African GDPpc. In the 17th and 18th century, regions along the coast of Africa profited immensely from selling slaves — not just to Europeans, but also to the Arab world via the Red Sea slave trade. As revenues from the slave trade ended, GDPpc gradually decreased until bottoming out at 1860. Note that Central Africa — which never benefited from slavery — hardly declined at all during this period. North and West Africa, centers of the slave trade, declined the most.

I will reiterate that GDPpc doesn’t represent how the wealth is distributed. Gold from slave traffic enriched African elites, but people lower on the social ladder saw this wealth only indirectly. For the subordinate kingdoms whose defeated peoples became the goods of trade, the impact was devastating.

In the long run, the slave trades hurt Africa’s economy. For its entire history Africa had struggled to build up a population: rough jungles and savannas, combined with little intensive agriculture, led to low population density in most regions. As population is required for specialization, the drain on Africa’s demographics stalled further development. [2, p. 137, ch. 7]

Between 1840 and 1860, African economies stalled. They had to adjust to higher population growth rates and specialize in new products, now that slave revenue had reduced to a trickle. We can think of this kind of like a reverse of the effect of the Black Death in Europe: suddenly the population spiked and wages fell. This likely facilitated the European conquest of Africa.

Conclusion to Section III

We can take away a few notes from precolonial Africa:

1. Africa is really two continents: the Maghreb and the Subsahara.
2. Even in the Subsahara, some regions, like West Africa and Ethiopia, are richer than others.
3. Africa was not very wealthy before colonization. It had difficulties with intensive agriculture, lack of population, lack of domesticable animals, and disease.
4. Much of African GDP increased due to the slave trade and then fell after its abolishment. This weakened the warmaking capacity of Africa, making it easier to colonize.

IV. Modern African Wealth

As we extend the time series further into the colonial period, the error bars shorten. We have much better data for this period thanks to more thorough trade records. Here are the trend lines between 1880 and 2000. Average Europe is in dark blue, average Africa is in black:

Once again, here’s the more helpful log scale:

On the log chart, the gray line marks the Berlin Conference and the Scramble for Africa. The red line marks the rapid independence wave of the early 60s. By the early 60s nearly all countries had achieved independence.

The data we see here shocks me. It seems to contradict every popular story we hear. Despite population growth during this period, wealth per person wasn’t extracted but increased. We see continuous growth during and after the colonial period, and this isn’t interrupted until the 1980s during Africa’s lost decades.

So far from the decrease we would expect from an explanation of sheer European underdevelopment of Africa, we see a continuous increase. McLeary doesn’t try to explain this besides noting that it doesn’t necessarily correspond to an increase in living standards — no doubt true. But why did the GDPpc increase so much during the colonial period?

While the colonial economies were extractive, this increase can’t be due to extraction alone, otherwise it would dip immediately after independence. Instead, the trendline continues up to the 1980s.

I think this mostly has to do with the increase in African participation in international trade. During the colonial period, Africa was thrust, kicking and screaming, into modernity. It became for the first time part of the globalized system of trade forged by the colonial empires. This increased its exports. As Federico Tadei writes:

“Since the mid-19th century, African countries increasingly participated in international trade by exporting commodities such as palm oil and kernels, cocoa, groundnuts, cotton, and coffee. As exports increased and the commercialization of the economy progressed, this boosted opportunities for earning income. Yet, not all social groups benefited in the same way, increasing inequality by stimulating capital accumulation processes.” 1, Federico Tadei, ch. 10

Colonial institutions fermented inequality by applying different systems to settlers and natives. Additionally, they increased inequality among the native Africans, as some were able to benefit from the colonies more than others.

Overall, the impact of colonies on the economic history of Africa can be summed up like this: “The rich became richer, and the poor stayed where they were.” The economic situations set up by the colonies persisted in the independent countries, since the independent countries of modern Africa are more the heirs of the provincial authorities than they are continuations of any ancient African government. The flags changed, but the systems didn’t change: they continued to produce growth until their collapse in the 1980s.

V. Colonial Length and HDI

We have observed the effect of the colonies on Africa across time. Now let’s look at it across space.

African countries were not colonized and then decolonized all at once. Both processes were gradual, leading to a wide range of time spent owned by Europe. Some countries, like Ghana and Angola, were colonies for centuries. Others, like Ethiopia and Liberia, never were.

This sets up an imperfect natural experiment. We can graph the time colonized along the x-axis, and the modern HDI across the y-axis (we can use HDI now because we’re only looking at the present day), to evaluate whether the “treatment” of colonization correlates with modern HDI. Under naïve DT, we expect countries who were colonized a longer period of time to be doing worse today.

I took pains to remove the African settler colonies of Kenya, Algeria, and South Africa from this dataset, since their colonization was different, improvements in their GDPpc largely reflect settler quality of life, and they would unfairly strengthen the correlation. I also colored island nations blue for reasons I will discuss.

We get our years colonized and HDI dataset from Our World in Data. We graph them on the scatterplots below:

Near the left of the chart there’s a hard-to-read cluster of countries that enter our tallying during the Scramble. Here’s the graph zoomed in on that cluster:

The first thing I’d like you to notice here is that, for almost all African countries, colonization was short. The median time an African country was colonized is only 71 years. Seventy-one years! That’s less than a single human lifetime, practically nothing in historical terms. In ten years we will be at the point where the average African country has been independent for longer than it was ever colonized. This is yet another reason to be suspicious of DT: why would effects from such a brief period not be erased or at least ameliorated by now?

The red line shows a second reason to be suspicious: the longer a country was colonized, the better it does. This is a very strong and significant correlation — p is near zero:

Correlation doesn’t imply causation, so this doesn’t necessarily mean that being a colony longer improved an African state. But it is further evidence against DT. I think this arises from a combination of two factors:

1. Europeans first colonized African countries on the coast with which they already had a trade relationship. These countries are more valuable for all the reasons coastal countries are usually more valuable than landlocked ones. So these countries were positioned for economic health, and this led to them both to being colonized longer and being wealthier today (reverse causation).
2. Modern countries are able to take advantage of colonial infrastructure and networks to improve their trade volume today. Countries with a longer colonial history have more infrastructure to use.

We should once again note the clear separation between Maghreb and Subsahara: Maghreb consistently does better than Subsahara, as you can see in for example Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, and Algeria. Once again this is due to precolonial institutions, as these countries spent a long time under the yoke of trade-rich Arab empires and, before that, were often strong powers of their own.

Finally, we should note that a lot of the outlier countries are islands, including the Seychelles, Sao Tome and Principe, and Cape Verde. These countries are likely to be colonized first, and for various reasons they shouldn’t be taken as representative for the majority of Africa.

VI. HDI by Empire

I often hear that some European powers were better at developing their empires than others. For example, a friend of mine who studies history told me that the British Empire was in some cases a benevolent force (remember its role in the eradication of slavery?), whereas the French empire was mostly harmful. I pointed out that French Guiana, the part of South America that is owned by France, is generally better and more prosperous than its independent neighbor Guyana.¹

But is this even the right question to be asking? In the context of Africa, do we see differences in development of countries today depending on which European country they originated from? The famed economist Acemoglu thinks so:

“... the colonizer and legal origin on current institutions, and show that the common-law countries and former British colonies have better property rights and more developed financial markets. Similarly, David Landes (1998 Chapters 19 and 20) and North et al. (1998) argue that former British colonies prospered relative to former French, Spanish, and Portuguese colonies because of the good economic and political institutions and culture they inherited from Britain. In contrast to this approach which focuses on the identity of the colonizer, we emphasize the conditions in the colonies.” [15, p. 5]

And yet, when we look at the HDI of African countries by last colonizer² (from Our World in Data), Spain cactually comes out on top:

I don’t think we should read too much into this. All other things are not equal in this comparison. Some empires compose many more modern countries than others. Further, some empires were able to grab more valuable land than others. For example, Spain’s high number largely comes from its ownership of Morocco and Equatorial Guinea, which were prosperous even before colonization. These numbers track more the value of colonial holdings than the effects of the colonies on the countries today. As we’ll see, precolonial differences matter much more than colonial ones.

VII. The Effects of Precolonial Differences in Development

Africa is the most diverse continent on Earth. Across its 30 million square kilometers, almost every conceivable type of society developed. Before colonization, the continent included centralized governments like the Songhai Empire, very decentralized and nomadic pastoralists like the Hadza and the San, and everything in between.

Although little was known and recorded about these before the colonial era, near its end researchers saw renewed interest in these institutions, and very well-developed information about them appeared. These data were compiled in 1967 by G. P. Murdock in his Ethnographic Atlas, which provides us with excellent data on the institutional traits of various groups in Africa’s history.

There is a long body of work trying to understand how these ethnic institutions affect the differences in modern-day societies. We know that European colonization did not have a large effect on most of these societies: it was largely replacing the head of the Hydra, but did little to affect the body. As researchers Michalopoulos and Papaioannou (M&P) explain:

“The advent of the Europeans in Africa had limited impact on these pre-existing local political structures. This was because colonization was (with some exceptions) quite limited in both timing and location (Herbst (2000)). Mamdani (1996) argued that, in fact, the European colonizers in several occasions strengthened tribal chiefs and kings via their doctrine of indirect rule. In the eve of African independence, some countries attempted to limit the role of ethnic institutions; however, the inability of African states to provide public goods and broadcast power beyond the capitals led African citizens to continue relying on the local ethnic-specific structures rather than the national government (Englebert (2009)). Herbst (2000), for example, noted that new states initially marginalized local chiefs in Mauritania, Mozambique, Niger, Nigeria, and Chad, but invited them back when they realized the extraordinary difficulties in governing rural areas.” [7]

In 2013, M&P achieved an incredible feat. They established a correlation between precolonial ethnic institutions and the development of African regions today. Their dependent variable? Light pollution.

A good proxy for how developed a region is, even within a country, is how bright its lights appear at night. M&P establish a correlation between light density and household wealth in Africa.

M&P found that the centralization of precolonial ethnic institutions correlate with the development of a region today. This correlation remains robust controlling for geography, resources, ethnicity, and natural resource endowments.

While we shouldn’t confuse correlation and causation, the connection is strong enough to be suggestive. M&P propose multiple causal mechanisms:

“The African historiography has proposed various channels through which ethnic institutions shape contemporary economic activity.

1. First, Herbst (2000) and Boone (2003) argued that, in centralized societies, there is a high degree of accountability of local chiefs. For example, in ethnic groups that had a state structure, poorly performing local rulers could be replaced by the king or superior administrators. Some ethnic groups have still assemblies and supreme officials that make local chiefs accountable.
2. Second, Diamond (1997) and Acemoglu and Robinson (2012) described how ethnic groups that formed large states had organized bureaucracies providing policing and other public goods.
3. Third, in centralized ethnicities, there was access to some formal legal resolution mechanism and some form of property rights steadily emerged (Herbst (2000)).
4. Fourth, others have argued that centralized societies were quicker in adopting Western technologies, because the colonizers collaborated more strongly with politically complex ethnicities (Schapera (1967, 1970)).
5. Fifth, tribal societies with strong political institutions have been more successful in obtaining concessions both from colonial powers and from national governments after independence. For example, Acemoglu and Robinson (2012) described how, in the initial period of colonization, Tswana leaders travelled from Bechuanaland (current Botswana) to England and convinced the British government to allow for a greater degree of autonomy.”

[7, “Ethnic Institutions: Past and Present”]

Over the past twenty years, African historians are converging on a consensus that institutions are what matters most. Africa’s history did not start with colonization. The quality of each region’s ancient institutions matters more than the short colonial period. Zooming out, we can explain African poverty as an effect of its relatively underdeveloped state capacity since ancient times.

VIII. Independence, Borders, and Counterfactuals

A ubiquitous theme I’ve seen when researching this subject, either in the conversations I’ve had or the books I’ve read, is the horrible modern borders.

The African borders today are entirely colonial inventions. They have nothing to do with the native precolonial situation. And this can quite easily be seen when we compare a map of the precolonial situation, to the map of colonial Africa, to the map of African countries today:

These borders cause two types of problems:

1. Each colonial territory enclosed hundreds of diverse and independent groups, with no common language, culture, religion, or history. Nigeria, for example, contained about 250 ethnolinguistic groups. [4]
2. Borders rent apart many African societies: for example, the Bakongo were partitioned between French Congo, Belgian Congo and Portuguese Angola. [4]

In the West, we often warn of the dangers of excessive nationalism. But Africa arguably has the opposite problem: they have too little nationalism. Africans generally feel more loyal toward their tribe and to their religion than to their country. Why wouldn’t they? The countries are just arbitrary names for arbitrary regions.

This history begs the question: what would African states look like if colonization had never happened?

We get a hint from this by looking at Europe, where the nation-state developed most organically. This is a map of the Holy Roman Empire (HRE) in the twelfth century. Seem familiar?

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The HRE was also a mess of tiny ethnic enclaves and petty manorial holdings! Now the analogy isn’t perfect for various reasons, but the HRE → Germany transition gives us an example of a state rising from chaos.

How did Germany develop, then? Through war. Certain ethnic enclaves, especially the Habsburgs and Prussia, clashed and vied for the land of the HRE. As these wars became more complex and violent, and the technology needed more ponderous, state capacity increased. Soon the manorial holdings became not just the private property of a single person but administrative states with some claim to power outside of a single ruler.

One time I was staying with a friend in Berkeley. Atul Singh, a friend of my host, came in to visit. He happened to be a visiting professor in historical economics at Berkeley. He said yes when I asked him if he thought Africa would also need to fight for centuries to forge strong nation-states.

It’s not hard to imagine the details of this alternate history. The Ethiopian empire would be busy subjugating the Somalis and perhaps trying to convert the Egyptians to Christianity. Slave empires might grow even greater along the coast of West Africa. In other words, if Africa had never been colonized, it would colonize itself. By now there would still be great violence in Africa — it may just be more productive violence.

Liberty Gained but not Retained

Let’s return from alternate history to our own timeline.

During the twentieth century, the British felt it was their duty to cut off their colonies at some point. The honor of Britain would shine even brighter with each benighted part of the world it forged into a modern-independent nation-state... in time.

During and after the Second World War, that idea didn’t change but the timeline shortened greatly. Africa was a major theater in the war. Europeans built new infrastructure and employed Africans in the war effort — in exchange for promises of independence. After the war, Europe was devastated. The superpowers that took their place — the US and the USSR — were both anti-colonial, each for their own reasons.

Through all my reading on the era immediately following decolonization in Africa, its burning optimism is palpable. It is difficult to overstate how well people thought this was going to go. Many believed that Africa was poor only due to colonization. Once the colonial yoke was lifted, food would flow freely, crime would plummet, and Dar es Salaam would soon resemble London and Tokyo.

At the dawn of independence, each country was governed by a charismatic leader, such as Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana. These were usually people integral to the precolonial independence movements. They often held the adoring love of their countrymen. Unlike the South American countries, which had many squabbles and wars among themselves when they were new, the African leaders chose negotiation through conferences.

Africa Colonizes Itself

The kingly body that reigned over these conferences was the Organization of African Unity (OAU).³ It was born in May 1963, when the Emperor of Ethiopia, Haile Selassie, convened thirty heads of state, where they decided the future of Africa. By this point, nearly all of Africa was independent.

Why didn’t the leaders at this conference make any attempt to improve their countries’ borders? It’s not like peaceful border swaps are unheard of — in 1970, West Germany voluntarily renounced claims to land beyond the Oder–Neisse line; in 1951, Poland and the Soviet Union exchanged around 480 kilometers; and in 2015, India and Bangladesh, two countries with a very difficult shared history, simplified their border through the exchange of 162 enclaves and counter-enclaves. The members of the OAU all had immense power over their brand-new countries, had solemnly sworn to cooperate with one another, and were so popular that they were seen as semi-divine figures by many Africans [8]. Surely they could at least try to correct the borders. They didn’t.

I call this the Second Berlin Conference of 1963, because it established a new era of exploitation for Africa. The elite, Western-educated members of the congress convened, spoke amongst one another, and decided to finally repudiate master–slave mentality and wash their hands completely of colonialism by... changing nothing.

The new countries would have European style parliaments, anthems, heads of state, and flags. They would continue to conduct government in European languages. In most cases, elites from the colonial institutions became elites in the postcolonial institutions. Colonial borders were not just retained, but fiercely defended and reinforced with startling and almost perplexing zeal.

This served the interest of the elites who were given voice in the conferences, but not that of the African people. As Kal Raustiala writes,

“African states had inherited borders that made little sense. But rather than try to sort peoples into territories — thereby enabling a truer form of self-determination — nearly all of postcolonial Africa accepted the patchwork, overlapping status quo... In short, African states accepted peace over peoples. Self-determination, in practice, turned out to be less about self-rule and more about ending European rule.” “The Uncertain Role Of Nations In An Age Of Planetary Crises”

They chose peace over peoples, but got neither. Since independence, Africa has had more civil wars than any other continent in the same time period. Since the elites refused to correct the borders, it has been up to the African people to do it with bloodshed — as the Somalilanders demonstrated in 1991, and the South Sudanese in 2011.

Ultimately, during the conference era the African countries became vessels for Western-educated elites to colonize their own countries. Christensen and Laitin sum it up well:

“New leaders had to work with an Africanized civil service, whose new incumbents sought the same high salaries and benefits as their colonial predecessors. Their facility in the colonial language gave them special power; the promotion of national languages would have been a threat to that power, as exposure to European culture would no longer have such high value. In economic affairs, new leaders’ ideological commitments to reject the capitalist path of the countries that colonized them led them to socialist programs that they were ill-equipped to administer. Furthermore, their worry that urban riots could undermine their incumbencies led them to manipulate exchange rates in favor of imports, thereby impoverishing their own peasant populations. In foreign relations, fear of their own minority populations led them to support a charter protecting them from secessionist movements even if this pact compromised earlier ideals of self-determination and reduced incentives to build capable states.” [3]

In many cases, these new leaders would torch the democratic institutions set up by the Europeans and rule as autocrats. [8] This led to a collapse in African institutions and economies in the 1980s, leading to what has been known as the “lost decades” of Africa. This is when the previous optimism about Africa was replaced with its current dismal reputation. Nowadays, the most ambitious Africans don’t dream of building up their home countries. They dream of leaving.

IX. Conclusion: Why Africa is Poor

Africa is poor today because of its bad institutions today.

Since ancient times, a north–south continental axis, a wide array of difficult climate zones, and a lack of easy-to-domesticate plants and animals made African states lag in comparison to states elsewhere. A diverse array of societies developed, but overall the continent remained at a low state capacity compared to Asia or Europe. The few complex societies that did develop, like the Mali Empire or the Kingdom of Ethiopia, were near the coasts and depended on favorable geography and external trade, especially in slaves, for their wealth.

The transatlantic slave trade benefited many kingdoms in West Africa, and these states grew very rich and powerful. But it was still a fundamentally extractive system, and left little room for the emergence of a middle class as in Europe. After Britain abolished the slave trade, these societies collapsed, leaving a power vacuum to be filled by the European empires.

During the colonial period, European nations built infrastructure and established poorly-staffed governments for the sake of managing resource extraction. However, they mostly just interacted with African elites — most Africans hardly felt the European presence, and most African societies were unchanged. GDPpc rose during this period due to more efficient trading, but once again this mostly helped those at the top — European settlers and elite Westernized Africans.

After the Second World War, members of this latter group zealously agitated for independence. After much internal and external pressure, the European empires caved and released most of their African holdings in the early 60s. The anticolonial agitators became the new leaders of these states. Rather than try to reform the nonsensical borders or extractive infrastructures left over at the colonial era, these leaders chose to use both to enrich themselves. This started modern Africa on a cycle of corruption, underdevelopment, and civil war that continues to this day.

So what?

Why do we care that African poverty was not only caused by colonialism? Aren’t the colonies still partially to blame, and wouldn’t reparations help developing African economies?

It’s true that the colonial governments arguably did not do enough to set up African countries for independence. It’s also true that colonization did many terrible things to Africa. However, there is no evidence that they are the sole or even primary cause of Africa’s contemporary woes.

Further, blaming their misfortunes on others is a common tactic used by autocrats to excuse their poor choices today. Indeed, the examples of Vietnam, Singapore, India, and even Botswana show that postcolonial governments can achieve consistent growth... when they want to.

Finally, there’s a growing consensus among economists that direct cash transfers and aid hurt developing African economies — it is merely another form of external reliance on others, and does nothing to build native infrastructure or strengthen institutions. Due to the extreme corruption of most African states, most of it just goes into private pockets [16]. So it’s unlikely that reparations would solve Africa’s problems.

Will Africa improve in the future? Not without significant institutional reform. But the examples of North Africa and, again, Botswana are illustrative that such growth is possible.⁴ Furthermore, many African countries have had HDI improvement in the past. Europe was also a basket case for many centuries. One should never say never, and there is no reason to believe that Africa’s situation is hopeless.

X. Bibliography and Further Reading

In this article I provide only a very surface-level analysis of all these topics. For more, I recommend the following resources. My notes on them are underlined. Sources are listed in recommended reading order.

1. Frankema, Ewout, Ellen Hillbom, Ushehwedu Kufakurinani, and Felix Meier zu Selhausen, eds. The History of African Development: A Textbook for a New Generation of African Students and Teachers. African Economic History Network, 2023.
   An incredible resource: a brand-new, open source, textbook collaboration among many authors. Not only is this book very thorough and up-to-date, the way it was published represents the future of academic publishing. My only complaint is that some chapters could be better sourced.
2. Iliffe, John. Africa: The History of a Continent. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
   An okay jumping-off point for African history.
3. Christensen, Darin, and David D. Laitin. African States since Independence: Order, Development, & Democracy. The Castle Lectures in Ethics, Politics, and Economics. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019.
   A great, thorough academic resource on African postcolonial history.
4. Meredith, Martin. The Fate of Africa: A History of the Continent since Independence. New York: PublicAffairs, 2011.
   A great popular resource on African postcolonial history.
5. Frankema, Ewout, and Marlous van Waijenburg. “Bridging the Gap with the ‘New’ Economic History of Africa.” The Journal of African History 64, no. 1 (2023): 38–61. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853722000792.
   This is a good introduction to the modern research paradigm of quantitative African development history. It also touches on the rise and fall of dependency theory. A great launching point into the papers I discuss in this work.
6. McLeary, Luke. Rethinking Africa’s GDP, 1796–1950. 2018.
   This is where I got the data for sections IV and V. Fantastic paper, I discuss it more in those sections. Huge and excellent paper, my favorite of the ones I read for this project.
7. Michalopoulos, Stelios, and Elias Papaioannou. “Pre-Colonial Ethnic Institutions and Contemporary African Development.” Econometrica 81, no. 1 (2013): 113–52. https://doi.org/10.3982/ECTA9613.
   I summarize this paper in section VII.
8. Lakeman, Matt. “Notes on Ghana.” Matt Lakeman, November 9, 2024. https://mattlakeman.org/2023/10/09/notes-on-ghana/.
9. Lakeman, Matt. “Notes on Nigeria.” Matt Lakeman, January 26, 2025. https://mattlakeman.org/2023/05/09/notes-on-nigeria/.
   Matt Lakeman is one of the best travel writers of our time. Much of the inspiration for this paper comes from him.
10. Diamond, Jared. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. New York: W. W. Norton, 1997.
    The most influential book of world history from a geographic deterministic perspective. I cite it a few times in the paper. A friend told me that this book has declined in popularity recently. Maybe look at some of the criticisms of it?
11. Alsan, Marcella. “The Effect of the Tsetse Fly on African Development.” The American Economic Review 105, no. 1 (2015): 382–410. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43497064.
12. Bolt, Jutta, and Jan Luiten van Zanden. “Maddison Style Estimates of the Evolution of the World Economy: A New 2020 Update.” Maddison Project Database, version 2020.
    The Maddison project is one of the most amazing datasets in history. It tells so many stories about the comparative economic development of world regions. You could probably write ten essays about this alone!
13. Grindal, Peter. Opposing the Slavers: The Royal Navy’s Campaign against the Atlantic Slave Trade. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2016.
14. Mandegar, David, and Max Olsson. “Examining the Relationships between GII, HDI, Gini, and GDP per Capita: A Comparative Analysis of Undeveloped and Developed Countries (1990–2021).” 2023.
15. Acemoglu, Daron, Simon Johnson, and James A. Robinson. “The Colonial Origins of Comparative Development: An Empirical Investigation.” American Economic Review 91, no. 5 (2001): 1369–1401.
16. Moyo, Dambisa. Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa. New York: Macmillan, 2009.