The Guardian view on Africa rising: the continent must develop in its own way

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” So opens Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities. Set in London and Paris during the late 1700s and the lead-up to the French Revolution, the novel was a warning about what happens when wealth funnels upwards while the masses stagnate. Nowhere do the best and worst of times collide with more geopolitical force than in Africa.

African writers swept the board for literature awards from the Nobel to the Booker, while seven out of eight children in the continent’s sub-Saharan region are unable to read by the age of 10. This year the continent was home to the slowest internet speeds on the planet, as African judges granted the world’s first patent given to a robot inventor. About 50 million Africans are expected to fall into extreme poverty in 2021, when the continent’s richest billionaires have seen their wealth increase by a fifth.

Globalisation has polarised societies, an effect that has been supercharged during the pandemic. This pattern is not unusual in other nations, but to apply it to Africa suggests that it possesses a unity beyond the mere geographic. African nations have huddled together in the face of climate and Covid storms – with good reason. Instead of rewarding African scientists for identifying the threat of Omicron, the west imposed travel bans on the continent. The suspicion is that had the Sars-CoV-2 virus been found in Africa, it would have been cut off.

The pandemic has made visible a world being shaped to Africa’s disadvantage. Low vaccination rates are a reason for the emergence of dangerous coronavirus variants, so why let just 8% of 1.3 billion Africans be fully vaccinated? The industrialised world won’t issue Africa a vaccine patent waiver, and foreign aid is just 2% of the continent’s GDP. So African nations can’t manufacture their own cheap medicines and lack the foreign exchange to cushion distribution costs.

Climate cost

Despite having played a negligible role in creating the climate crisis, African countries already find themselves paying a heavy price for it. The EU plans to introduce greenhouse gas taxes on imports that will pull a carbon curtain across the Mediterranean. Carlos Lopes of the University of Cape Town says African train projects built by Chinese companies are not using the lowcarbon technology rolled out at home.

The performance of Africa has been described as the worst economic tragedy of the 20th century. Commonplace explanations don’t bear much scrutiny. Statistics can show that the closer a country is to the equator, the poorer it is. Yet no one would argue that slow growth caused a country to get closer to the equator. Africa has been destabilised by conflict, but that has, says Prof Lopes, not stopped Thailand developing an export base. One controversial argument is that too few, not too many, colonisers were the problem. The theory goes that higher levels of European settlement led to more productive institutions. However, the historian Morten Jerven, in his book The Wealth and Poverty of African States, says that real wages stagnated in the settler economies of South Africa, Zimbabwe

and Kenya, whereas in the peasant economies of Uganda and Ghana, real wages rose.

Africa was not colonised because it was poor. European powers occupied and divided up the continent in the 19th century because it was rich. Africa was once a breadbasket; how did it earn a reputation for being a basket case? One reason is an extractive economic model that promotes African development via foreign direct investment, export-led growth and financial liberalisation. This web, according to Tunisian economist Fadhel Kaboub, drains nearly $2tn annually from the developing world.

Today, African economies export low-value-added goods relative to their imports. Instead of growing their own