The industrialisation of Africa
Why the future of Africa depends on industrialisation
Iwas born in China, grew up in the United States, and then went to live in another part of the world. After college, I taught eighth- and ninthgraders in a village in Namibia, in south-western Africa. As a volunteer teacher, I was responsible for five classes of maths and English in a public school in rural Africa.
Nothing is less controversial than the inherent goodness of teaching children and the notion that an educated citizenry is essential for a country’s development. But several months into my job, when I was brutally honest with myself, I could see no connection between my daily work and the chance that these bigger transformations would occur.
Most of my pupils were the children of subsistence farmers, and the vast majority of them would become subsistence farmers themselves. Some days, the absurdity of what I was doing would hit me: I was teaching irregular English verb conjugations to future subsistence farmers living in an arid plain where no one spoke English in everyday life.
I spent a year bearing witness to the things that are wrong and unfair in our world today – children dealing with the brunt of HIV/AIDS, environmental degradation, poverty – and I had nothing to offer. The idea that education was the key to my kids’ future seemed empty. That felt sacrilegious at the time, but I sensed that my teaching reinforced rather than expanded the ways in which Africa relates to the world.
Receiving wisdom from foreigners who supposedly know better: it’s an old trope, dating back at least to European colonial ideology in Africa, and it has never worked. What else would it take for African countries to pull off the transformation I had seen China make in my short lifetime?
Strangely, it was on a blind date that I began to encounter a new reality. A Chinese man from whom I regularly bought vegetables insisted that I come over for dinner one weekend to meet his “good friend”. I agreed, mostly to stay on good terms with my vegetable dealer. His friend turned out to be a self-made Chinese man who had come to Namibia at age 17 and founded a string of successful businesses…
The conversation revealed that he was like many other Chinese businessmen in Africa: a pure capitalist, with seemingly little regard for the welfare or rights of locals. And yet I was struck that this man might end up doing more to help the people in my village than my own well-intentioned efforts. I taught children skills that were theoretically useful for a way of life that no one here actually lived. He created real jobs with real pay cheques. In so doing, and probably without meaning to, he opened up new ways of relating to the world for thousands of Africans: as workers, as clients, as partners, even as worthy adversaries.
Which one of us was making a difference for Africa? The seed of a question stayed with me. It eventually led me to spend years studying Chinese investment in Africa, knocking on countless factory doors, sweet-talking reticent Chinese owners into letting me on to the premises, and cajoling them into trusting me with their stories. I’ve visited more than 50 Chinese factories in Africa and talked to numerous Chinese businesspeople involved in other African sectors, along with a hundred-odd African workers, entrepreneurs, government officials, journalists, and union organisers who are partnering with and responding to Chinese interest in their countries in a variety of ways.
Chinese factories in Africa: this is the future that will create broad-based prosperity for Africans and usher in the next phase of global growth for a large swath of the Chinese economy. This is what will make Africa rich and achieve a dramatic and lasting change in living standards. To be clear, Africa today is not defined by poverty: it is characterised by promise and optimism, with eight of the ten fastest-growing
Receiving wisdom from foreigners who supposedly know better... it has never worked
economies in the world over the next decade projected to be on the continent. But just as it is wrong to cast Africa in the tired stereotype of pitiful, hopeless destitution, it is problematic to ignore the fact that more than half a billion of the poorest people in the world still live in Africa.
Over the past half century, Africa has been the premier testing ground for multiple waves of Western ideas about poverty alleviation. To be sure, Western development programmes that help with things like educating children are important for other reasons, but they will not create 100 million jobs and lift half a billion people out of poverty. If we are serious about raising living standards across this vast region of the world, it is time to try something new. That something new has already started moving to Africa: factories.
Factories are the bridge that connects China, the current Factory of the World, to Africa, the next Factory of the World. Over the past 15 years, Chinese factories have been driven out of China by rising costs, and many have landed in Africa. Chinese companies made a mere two investments in Africa in 2000; they now make hundreds each year. Car makers, construction materials producers, and light manufacturers of consumer goods are all entering the market, hoping for their share of the opportunity. Other Chinese firms have a different business model: they take advantage of Africa’s comparatively low labour costs to produce goods for export to developed markets. In Lesotho, Chinese garment factories make yoga pants for Kohl’s, jeans for Levi’s, and athletic wear for Reebok. Almost all of Lesotho’s production is trucked out and packed on to container ships bound for American consumers.
This movement of factories matters, because when factories arrive en masse, prosperity soon follows. From Great Britain at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution in the 18th century, to North America in the 19th century, to Japan and other Asian countries in the 20th, factories have restructured entire economies toward a new, lasting level of wealth. That’s because manufacturing, unlike agriculture and services, engages mass labour in highly productive ways to participate in the global economy. It’s also because on an individual level, industrialisation allows subsistence farmers enmeshed in highly local systems of exchange to transform themselves into consumers and producers in the global economy. Industrialisation is how China reshaped itself from a poor, backward country into one of the largest economies in the world in less than three decades. By becoming the next Factory of the World, Africa can do the same.
To be clear, the rise of manufacturing is not an altogether happy story. Up close, it’s often ugly. Some of the Chinese factory bosses I’ve met in Africa are truly unsavoury. Many are racist, and many wouldn’t hesitate to pay a bribe. More than a few spit in public, drink to excess and frequent local prostitutes. And their actions have consequences: as the stories I recount in my new book (detailed right) show, their bribes affect the proper functioning of local governments, their factories’ environmental practices affect the quality of
If we are serious about raising living standards across this vast region, it is time to try something new
...Africa’s air and water, and their treatment of employees determines not only the wages of workers but in some cases whether they live or die on the job. China itself – with its corruption scandals and smog-ridden air – provides ominous examples of the social and environmental consequences of unbridled economic expansion. Industrialisation unleashes powerful new forces for harm as well as for good, and these are already evident in Africa today. Although industrialisation in Africa will certainly have a dark side, another certainty is that the continent will experience industrialisation differently than China did.
African countries and societies do not resemble China economically, politically, or socially. Although factories lead to predictable changes – from rising incomes to labour scandals – the form, sequence and flavour of these changes vary considerably. In Nigeria, industrialisation is shaped by reports from a free press; in Lesotho, by a strong union movement; in Kenya, by tribal and ethnic loyalties – all of which are largely absent in China.
In the encounter between Chinese investors and a host of local African actors – workers, suppliers, distributors, governments, media – new types of organisations, partnerships and power structures will be invented. Africa has the chance not only to repeat the sort of industrialisation that has come before, but to improve on it. If this can’t obliterate the trade-offs between development and democracy, economic growth and environmental health, then perhaps it can at least make them less stark.